Music that elevates faith and worship of God

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev

Contents - Apr 2011 - Buy a copy now Homily: Pope Benedict XVI's Holy Thursday homily - Pope Benedict XVI Climate expert refutes alarmist attack on Cardinal Pell - William Kininmonth Homosexual rights trump the rest, especially Christians' - Fr John Flynn LC News: The Church Around the World Catholic Church's pivotal role in South Korea's pro-life revival - Babette Francis Music that elevates faith and worship of God - Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev Literature: The 'impossible dream' of Don Quixote (1 Corinthians 1:21) - Andrew Kania Marian Valley and Penrose Park: spiritual powerhouses - Br Barry Coldrey Letters: Conscience? - Thomas & Patricia Watkin Letters: Same-sex 'marriage' - Robert Prinzen-Wood Letters: Easter shopping - Arnold Jago Letters: God's presence - Noel Nugent Events: Holy Week 2011 - St Aloysius, Caulfield North Books: THE RIDDLE OF FATHER HACKETT: A Life in Ireland and Australia, by Brenda Niall - Colin Jory (reviewer) Books: THE LOSER LETTERS, by Mary Eberstadt - Terri Kelleher (reviewer) Books: EUROPE AND THE FAITH, by Hilaire Belloc - Michael Daniel (reviewer) Books: HANDBOOK OF CATHOLIC APOLOGETICS: Reasoned Answers to Questions of Faith - Br Barry Coldrey Books: TOWARDS A THEOLOGY OF THE ENVIRONMENT, by Paul Haffner - Barry Coldrey (reviewer) Books: Order books from www.freedompublishing.com.au Reflection: Benedict XVI: Palm Sunday means following Jesus Christ - Pope Benedict XVI

The following is an extract from an address delivered at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., on 9 February 2011 by Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate. Metropolitan Alfeyev is an accomplished composer of sacred music and his address was titled "Music and Faith in My Life and Vision." With acknowledgement to Zenit News Agency.

Which composers wrote works that exhibit a combination of organic, creative inspiration with deep religious faith? I find the most obvious illustration of this mutuality in the creative work and indeed the destiny of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach is a colossus as his music contains a universal element that is all-embracing. In his monumental works he manages to unite magnificent and unsurpassed compositional skill with rare diversity, melodic beauty and a truly profound spirituality. Even Bach's secular music is permeated by a sense of love for God, of standing in God's presence, of awe before Him.

Universal

Bach is a universal Christian phenomenon. His music transcends confessional boundaries: it is ecumenical in the original sense of the word, for it belongs to the world as a whole and to each citizen separately. We may call Bach an "orthodox" composer in the original, literal sense of the Greek word orthodoxos for throughout his life he learnt how to glorify God rightly.

Invariably he adorned his musical manuscripts with the words Soli Deo Gloria ("Glory to the One God") or Jesu, juva ("Help, O Jesus"). These expressions were for him not merely verbal formulae but a confession of faith that ran through all of his compositions. For Bach, music was worship of God. He was truly "catholic," again in the original understanding of the Greek word katholikos, meaning "universal," or "all-embracing," for he perceived the Church as a universal organism, as a common doxology directed towards God.

Furthermore, he believed his music to be but a single voice in the cosmic choir that praises God's glory. And of course, throughout his life Bach remained a true son of his native Lutheran Church. Albeit, as Albert Schweitzer noted, Bach's true religion was not even orthodox Lutheranism but mysticism.

His music is deeply mystical because it is based on an experience of prayer and ministry to God which transcends confessional boundaries and is the heritage of all humanity.

Bach's personal religious experience was embodied in all of his works which, like holy icons, reflect the reality of human life but reveal it in an illuminated and transfigured form.

Bach may have lived during the Baroque era, but his music did not succumb to the stylistic peculiarities of the time. As a composer, moreover, Bach developed in an antithetical direction to that taken by art in his day.

His was an epoch characterised by culture's headlong progression towards worldliness and humanism. Centre stage became ever more occupied by the human person with his passions and vices, while less artistic space was reserved for God. Bach's art was not "art" in the conventional meaning of the word as it was not art for art's sake.

The cardinal difference between the art of antiquity and the Middle Ages on the one hand and modern art on the other is in the direction it takes: pre-Renaissance art was directed towards God, while modern art is orientated towards the human person. Bach stood at the frontier of these two inclinations, two world-views, two opposing concepts of art. And, of course, he remained a part of that culture which was rooted in tradition, in cult, in worship, in religion.

In Bach's time the world had already begun to move towards the abyss of revolutionary chaos. This tendency swept over all of Europe from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th. Forty years after his death, the French Revolution broke out. It was the first of a series of bloody coups which, conducted in the name of "human rights", stole millions of human lives. And all of this was done for the sake of the human person who, once again, proclaimed himself to be, as in pagan antiquity, the "measure of all things."

People began to forget God the Creator and Lord of the universe. In an age of revolutions people repeated the errors of their ancestors and began to construct, one after another, towers of Babel. And they fell - one after another -burying their architects under the ruins.

Bach remained unaffected by this process because his life flowed within a different perspective. While the culture of his age became more and more removed from cult, he entered ever more deeply into the depths of cult: the depths of prayerful contemplation. As the world was rapidly becoming humanised and de-Christianised and as philosophers achieved further refinement in formulating theories designed to bring happiness to the human race, Bach sang a hymn to God from the depths of his heart.

After Bach

Some opine that Bach was the last of the great religious composers and that sacred music in general, a legacy of antiquity, belongs exclusively to the past. Bach's artistry indeed marked the threshold beyond which Western music distanced itself from its religious roots and took the path of secular development. Chronologically, the divorce between music and religion coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, and, having taken this radical step, musicians did not turn back until recently.

This does not mean that church compositions were abandoned in the Classical and Romantic periods. Far from it. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, to name but a few, wrote, for example, masterly settings of the Mass and the Requiem. After Bach, Brahms occupies second place in my list of favourite composers, and the third place is Beethoven's.

I am very fond of the music of the Romantic period - of Schubert, Schumann, and others. Their works, however, bear a secular spirit even when the texts are religious. Undoubtedly their compositions are outstanding, highly emotive, and compelling: nevertheless they are fortified by a worldly air and by styles and forms foreign to associations of sanctity.

During the epochs of Impressionism and the Avant-garde, interest in anything to do with religion seems to have faded altogether. Avant-garde composers renounced the final elements that linked music to faith - the elements of harmony and of beauty as fundamental for musical creativity. Cacophony and disharmony became the constructive fabric with which musical works were built.

The mid-20th century saw music styles that turned from atonality and dissonance to aleatoric ["chance"] music and random sonorities, as heard in the works of Stockhausen and Ligeti or in those of John Cage who combined noise with silence. Important and groundbreaking was Cage's piece entitled 4.33, which is nothing more than four minutes and thirty-three seconds of complete silence, accompanied only by natural sounds (for example, the coughing of the audience in the auditorium).

The appearance of this work in 1952 bore witness to the fact that the musical Avant-garde had completely exhausted itself - as if it had nothing more to say. Cage's silence has little in common with the spiritual silence that burgeons from the depths of religious experience: his was simply a soundlessness which testified to the complete spiritual collapse of the musical Avant-garde.

Shostakovich

It is my personal view that, in the history of 20th-century music, there is only one composer who, in terms of talent and depth of inspired searching, comes close to Bach, and that is Shostakovich.

Bach's music is dedicated to God and permeated by an ecclesiastical spirit. Shostakovich, on the other hand, lived at a different time and in a country where God and the Church were never spoken about openly. Yet at the same time all of his creative work reveals him to have been a believer.

While he did not write church music and apparently did not attend church services, his music nonetheless confirms that he felt deeply the disastrous nature of human existence without God and that he experienced profoundly the tragedy of modern society - a godless society - which had renounced its roots. This yearning for the Absolute, this longing for God, this thirst for truth prevails in all of his works - in his symphonies, quartets, preludes and fugues.

Shostakovich was someone who could not be broken by repression or condemnation by the powers that be. He always served the Truth. I believe that, like Dostoevsky, he was a great spiritual and moral example, whose voice, like that of a prophet, cried out in the wilderness. This voice, however, evoked and continues to evoke a response in the hearts of millions of people.

In the 20th century, the art of music was wrenched from any religious association. Of course, throughout that century spiritual works were written, even in atheist Soviet Russia. Recently, music manuscripts of Nikolai Golovanov, chief conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre and a major figure in Soviet music, were discovered hidden in a drawer. We now know that throughout his entire life he composed sacred music which he knew he would never hear performed. Only today, half a century after his death, are we able to appreciate his works.

Many modern Western composers have written music to religious texts. It suffices to recall Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, and the church music of Honneger, Hindemith and Messiaen.

The real return of composers to the sphere of faith, however, came only at the end of the 20th century when, in place of discord, formless noise, aleatoric music and content-free silence, there appeared a newly devised harmony for the absolute spiritual silence of musical minimalism. What was least expected in musical art was a religious renaissance, but it was precisely this that surprised and satisfied the hopes of composers and the public.

Sacred music upsurge

Following the possible and impossible innovations of the Avant-garde, characterised by abundant external effects within a glaring inner emptiness, audiences yearned for a music that united simplicity and profundity - a music simple in language and style but deep in content a music which would stir people not so much by its strident themes and stark originality, not even one that would necessarily touch the soul, but a music that could transport one beyond the boundaries of earthly existence into communication with the world above.

By the end of the 20th century the West was experiencing an upsurge of interest in church music, in particular Gregorian chant. The Canto Gregoriano CD, recorded in 1993 by Spanish monks from the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, became an international bestseller: by the beginning of the 21st century more than seven million copies had been sold. The producers could only guess as to what drove people to buy this disc and how the unison, monophonic tone of monastic plainchant surpassed in popularity the hits of the stars on the world stage.

Among living composers there are three in the West who enjoy considerable popularity - the Estonian Arvo Pärt, the Pole Henryk Mikolaj Górecki and the Englishman John Tavener. These composers vary in importance but each writes in an original style, each has his own signature, his own characteristic, his uniquely recognisable modality. Nevertheless, much unites them both on the musical and the spiritual planes.

They have all experienced the profound influence of faith and are practising Christians: Pärt and Tavener are Orthodox while Górecki is Catholic. Their remarkable productivity is permeated by the motif of religion, replete with deep spiritual content and inextricably linked to the liturgical tradition.

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 24 No 3 (April 2011), p. 10