Eyeless in Paris

One of the periodic delights of living in Paris is the experience of showing visitors around this sometimes infuriating but undoubtedly stunning city. As with any great metropolis, it is all too easy to be made oblivious to Paris’s exceptional cultural richness by the daily routine of what is classically termed métro-boulot-dodo. Until, that is, you find yourself sharing the sights with those who are not so blasé about this incredible location for lovers of history and art. So it was with a properly renewed sense of wonder that we returned home after visiting two of Paris’s most astounding locations with family guests from the other side of the Eurotunnel .

The first was the renovated Musée d’Orsay, perhaps the world’s most concentrated collection of epoch-making visual art from the period 1848-1914; for anyone who knows even a little about the history of painting there is a sense of sheer overload in being in an enclosed space with so many masterpieces of figures such as Corot, Manet, Monet, Dégas, Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh …, any one of which would be the pièce de résistance in a lesser museum. It is not merely that the Orsay’s canvases are supremely beautiful in purely aesthetic terms, but also that each one carries rich human associations as a chronicle of the lived historical experience of an era. As the philosopher John D. Caputo (perhaps the foremost living Anglophone interpreter of what he terms the philosophical ‘witch-doctors’ of the Parisian rive gauche) likes to remark, something is ‘getting itself said’ through this art which goes beyond the purely personal vision of the artist.

To use another philosophical parallel, there is a sense when standing in front of the paintings in the Musée d’Orsay of what Jean-Luc Marion has famously called a ‘saturated phenomenon’, something which overwhelms our cognitive capacities by its excess, its sheer weight of what might be termed ‘radiance’ or ‘splendour’, to give a rough translation of the word Herrlichkeit which was so central to the thought of Jean-Luc Marion’s theological mentor Hans Urs von Balthasar.

For me perhaps the best exemplification of this in the Orsay is Van Gogh’s unforgettable Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône, painted in Arles in 1888, which makes an impact when seen in the museum which is quite different from anything that can be conveyed by a reproduction of the picture. The sheer intensity of what one might call Van Gogh’s ‘meta-colours’ and the unbelievable thickness of the paint create the impression of what the Welsh 17th century poet Henry Vaughan famously described in his Night as a ‘deep and dazzling darkness’ which is more than simply physical and which evokes something akin to a state of mystical consciousness.

Vincent van Gogh ‘Nuit Etoilée sur le Rhône’, 1888

Our appreciation of a sense of the numinous within Van Gogh’s Provençal night sky is obviously bolstered by our biographical knowledge of the painter’s profound spirituality (which I already discussed in relation to Makoto Fujimura’s provocative reading of his other ‘Starry Night’ picture in my post ‘Fujimura’s Refracted Light’ ). Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of the ‘saturated phenomenon’ can however also be powerfully felt in wholly ‘secular’ pictures such as Monet’s light-drenched series of views of the Japanese bridge in the garden at Giverny. Interestingly, Marion himself, in his highly thought-provoking reflections on visual art published as La Croisée du visible, interprets Monet’s form of saturation in anti-metaphysical terms, as a reduction of painting to the data of immediate consciousness, excluding  any other ‘object’, i.e. subject-matter. This is most apparent in his reading of Monet’s studies of the façade of Rouen Cathedral, in which the object is evidently not the cathedral but the play of light itself as experienced by the painter:

‘The portal of Rouen Cathedral does not appear differently lit during the course of the same day; on the contrary, even at high noon, it never stops disappearing; and less so by dazzlement (éblouissement) than by virtue of being all too perfectly recorded. To talk of dazzlement implies that one is constantly aiming at an object and therefore regrets that the excess of light prohibits a clear view, but here it is not a matter of seeing, through the excess of light, the intended object of a cathedral. It is about receiving this light itself, as perceived, in the place of and instead of any illuminated objective.'[1]

I can certainly understand Marion’s take on Monet’s Rouen series, in which it is additionally evident (a point so obvious that Marion does not even comment on it directly, although it reinforces his general interpretive line) that the whole spiritual significance of the Cathedral and the sculptures on its facade is of no interest to the painter whatsoever. Here the contrast between Monet and the symbolist school of French 19th century art is very striking in terms of the way in which the relationship between the visible and the invisible is approached; Marion defines impressionism’s fascination with light and shade as making the invisible (i.e. the medium of vision) visible at the expense of the object itself, which is effectively collapsed into the perception of the artist who is no longer trying to see anything ‘behind’ what is perceived by immediate consciousness. In other words, Marion claims that such painting does not point to anything beyond itself – Monet therefore both epitomizes and to some extent triggers modern art’s tendency to demolish any reference to a transcendent depth other than what is immediately perceptible. To this Marion opposes the Biblical and early Christian tradition of the icon, whose essence is to turn the viewer’s attention away from itself to its invisible prototype, the paradigmatic case being Christ as the eikon of God, the suffering servant of Isaiah 52-53 who allows himself to be disfigured in order to draw us to the Father.[2]

However, returning to Monet’s Japanese bridge, it could be argued that a somewhat different interpretation is also possible. In contrast to what are to my mind the predominantly technical, if impressive, explorations of the pointillists such as Seurat and Signac, Monet’s paintings should surely not be regarded as devoid of depth. I for one (albeit bringing my own world-view and prior experience with me to the Musée d’Orsay) would be more inclined to say that regardless of Monet’s own atheism, the saturation with light emanating from his canvases can strike the spectator as a powerful form of this-worldly transcendence endowed with its own sense of mystery and depth even if there is no reference to anything beyond an ‘immanent frame’, to use Charles Taylor’s useful term when discussing the historical process of secularization in Western culture. I can agree with Marion that the ‘medium of vision’ does take precedence over subject-matter, and symbolic reference is nowhere to be found, but there is still ‘dazzlement’ – as Marion himself admits – to the extent that light itself has been elevated to transcendent status. This is not a simple case of ‘disenchantment’, not a full-blown attack on transcendence per se such as can be found, say, in Manet’s coldly lit Olympia (as I discussed in relation to Jacques Ellul’s insightful interpretation of Manet in The Empire of Non-Sense ).[3]

Claude Monet, ‘Le Bassin aux Nymphéas’ (Princeton University Art Museum)

__________________

This concept of dazzlement/éblouissement , explored theologically in a manner very similar to that of Marion, also appears in the writings of the composer Olivier Messiaen. In a lecture given in Notre-Dame de Paris in December 1977 he uses it to convey his intuition of a link between colour and religious experience, referring to the second mythical location which we visited last weekend, the Sainte Chapelle built by Louis IX in the 13th century, of which I highly recommend taking a virtual tour that you can access by clicking here . Messiaen first encountered its iridescent windows when he was 10 years old, an experience which he describes as foundational –

‘What is going on in the stained glass of Bourges [Cathedral], the great windows of Chartres, in the rose windows of Notre-Dame de Paris and in the marvelous, incomparable stained-glass of the Sainte Chapelle? Firstly there is a host of figures, large and small, telling us the life of Christ, of the Blessed Virgin, the Prophets and the Saints: a sort of catechism in images. This catechism is enclosed in circles, heraldic shields, trefois; it obeys colour symbolism, it contrasts, superimposes, decorates, teaches, with a thousand intentions and a thousand details. Well, from far away, without binoculars, without ladders, without anything to aid our weak eyes, we see nothing: just a totally blue, green or purple stained-glass window. We don’t understand, we are dazzled.

‘God dazzles us with an excess of Truth’, says St Thomas Aquinas.'[4]

Stained-glass, Sainte-Chapelle

Messiaen goes so far as to describe his experience of dazzlement, which he closely links to the phenomenon of synaesthesia (the simultaneous perception of sound and colour), as a ‘breakthrough towards the beyond’ (‘percée vers l’au-delà’). The humbling of our senses and our understanding that we feel in the presence of overwhelming sensory beauty opens us, Messiaen contends, to the transcendent reality of God:

‘All these forms of dazzlement are a great lesson. They show us that God is above words, thoughts, concepts, above our earth and our sun, above the thousands of stars around us, above and outside time and space, all these things which are as it were attached to Him. […] And when musical painting, coloured music, sound-colour [le son-couleur] magnify him through dazzlement, they participate in the beautiful praise of the Gloria, saying to God and Christ: “You alone are Holy, You alone are the Most High!” On inaccessible heights. In so doing, they help us to live better, better to prepare our death, better to prepare our resurrection from the dead and the new life which awaits us. They are an excellent “passage-way”, an excellent “prelude” to the unsayable and the invisible.'[5]

Messiaen’s lecture concludes by an affirmation of hope in the Beatific Vision in the risen life, which will be ‘a perpetual dazzlement, an eternal music of colours, an eternal colour of musics’.[6]

_______________

Eight years after Messiaen made his remarks, an art professor named Howard Storm was visiting Paris with a group of his students from Northern Kentucky University. An atheist for whom the only contact with spirituality was his own artistic experience of the mysterious variability of ‘inspiration’ from one day to the next, he would later recall finding himself strangely overcome with emotion on seeing both the Sainte Chapelle and the Monet water-lilies in the Orangerie of the Tuileries gardens. However, on that 1985 trip Howard Storm would unexpectedly find himself undergoing a life-changing liminal experience (recounted in his book My Descent into Death: a Second Chance at Life) which, as we will see in the next portion of this post, would not only provide him with a stunning personal confirmation of Messiaen’s words in Notre-Dame de Paris concerning the ‘eternal music of colours’, but which is now regarded by many as one of the most dramatic near-death experiences in modern times …

NOTES

[1] Jean-Luc Marion, La Croisée du Visible (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 32. Translation mine.

[2] ‘The question can be formulated as follows: where, originally, can an image be found which divests itself of its own visibility in order to let another gaze break through it? The answer is clear: the Servant of Yahweh allows himself literally to be disfigured (to lose the visible splendour of his own face) in order to do the will of God (which only appears in his actions). The Servant sacrifices his face – he allows his ‘image’ to be unmade: ‘there were many who were appalled at him – his appearance was so disfigured … his form marred beyond human likeness’ (Isaiah 52:14; cf. Psalm 22:7). By effacing all glory from his own face to the point of obscuring his very humanity, the Servant allows nothing to be seen of him other than his acts, the latter resulting from obedience to the will of God and thus allowing it to be made manifest’ (ibid., 109. Translation mine).le

[3] The closest musical parallel to Monet in this respect is perhaps not Debussy, whose frequent association with ‘impressionism’ is misleading to the extent that it obscures his alignment with symbolist currents (particularly evident in Pelléas et Mélisande), but Frederick Delius, who lived in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau from 1897 to 1934 together with his German painter wife Jelka. Notoriously opposed to Christianity and an avowed disciple of Nietzsche, Delius’s music is provocatively anti-theistic but remains ‘spiritual’ in a similar fashion to the ‘transcendentalism’ of figures such as Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass provided the text for Delius’s haunting Sea Drift (1903-4).

[4] Olivier Messiaen, Conférence de Notre-Dame (Paris: Leduc, 1978), 12.  Translation mine.

[5] Ibid., 13.

[5] Ibid., 15.

Monet La Cathédrale de Rouen Le Portail et la tour Saint-Romain plein soleil

‘Fighting a losing battle’? Composers as angels of history

A couple of days ago a composer friend of mine Galina Grigorjeva (a Ukrainian living in Estonia whose work is highly respected in contemporary music circles and deserves exposure with a broader public) flagged an interesting article on Facebook in The Independent by the prominent music journalist and novelist Jessica Duchen. In this piece, written in conjunction with the November 11th commemorations of the armistice of 1918 and provocatively entitled ‘Requiem for an art form: Why modern composers are fighting a losing battle’, the author puts forward the idea that, whereas in the past music and poetry played a key role in helping society deal with the aftermath of the horror of armed conflict, 24-hour news coverage has now effectively pushed such artistic responses out of the picture. This for Jessica Duchen constitutes an impoverishment: ‘Where are the war requiems for the early 21st century?’, she asks (well, we  at SDG commissioned a heavyweight 90-minute Requiem from Pulitzer prize-winner Christopher Rouse a few years ago, which anyone interested is more than welcome to consider programming), noting that contemporary ‘art-music’ composers have been backward in coming forward in response to present-day warfare.

Although this thought-provoking article seems to have occasioned a fair number of undeservedly negative comments, it seems to me that Ms Duchen’s assertion is not unfounded and therefore merits a little probing. Are contemporary composers afraid of tackling ‘big questions’? Or is it unrealistic to expect a steady flow of new counterparts to Britten’s War Requiem (which, as some readers pointed out, was not written until 1962, over 40 years after the poetry of Wilfred Owen which it sets)? Are such works completely lacking in the current classical musical landscape, or are they perhaps present in less obvious guises – after all, as she herself hints, would it not be plausible to argue that the negative musical dialectics that became the language of the post-World War II avant-garde were in some way a ‘War Requiem’ raised to the level of artistic form itself?

A few immediate points come to mind by way of a sketch response to these questions. It is certainly true that today’s composers who have stuck with what is sometimes referred to as ‘serious music'(!) – or at least the more lucid among them – are by and large intensely suspicious both of facile lament and propaganda. Their reticence towards the former may have a number of causes – a fear of lapsing into sentimentality, or the false consciousness engendered by pretending that a work of art can actually catalyze genuine change in a socio-economic climate where classical music has become an industry, or sensitivity to accusations of voyeurism in the ethically dubious act of making human suffering into an aesthetic object. Especially if this involves appropriating the narrative of non-Westerners within a Western art-form. Equally prevalent is a distrust of agitprop, the instrumentalization and reduction of art to the communication of a simplistic ‘message’ (here Jessica Duchen’s example of Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony – famously if also somewhat unfairly lampooned by Bartok in his Concerto for Orchestra – is maybe a little unfortunate because of its obvious though understandable use for propaganda purposes: his Eighth might have served Ms Duchen’s case better).

If what is required is immediacy of reaction to world events, it might be argued that popular song, because of its concision and directness, is inherently more suited than art-music as a medium for anti-war protest. Is it mere coincidence that the most recent track on Simon Keenlyside’s ‘classical’ Songs of War dates from 1969, by which time rock had made the protest song a genre all of its own? Here it is worth pointing out the difference between these two musical streams. I am not arguing that ‘classical’ music is by nature reactionary, but its traditionally lofty aesthetic ideals mean that musical responses to war in the classical tradition inevitably ring hollow if not accompanied by a painstaking (and time-consuming) working-through of artistic questions on a technical level: a lack of unity between form and content reveals the art-work as false, mere ideology. The stance of ‘all I have is a red guitar, three chords and the truth’, which works very effectively in U2’s cover version of All Along the Watchtower, can’t really wash in a classically-oriented Requiem (unless of course an ‘anti-aesthetic’ is a deliberate part of the compositional strategy). Simply tacking on a title or sung text related to current affairs to a banal musical discourse is a superficial solution lacking in the striving for depth which is classical music’s greatest asset – which is why Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory is an embarrassment whereas the unexpected and form-shattering intrusion of the sounds of war into the final movement of the Missa Solemnis is a master-stroke.

Attaining this depth furthermore requires a certain distancing from the event under consideration (by the time of the Missa Solemnis, the Napoleonic wars were over by nearly a decade), a distance which is in distinctly short supply in the contemporary industrialized nations due to the rise of round-the-clock news media. Indeed, whether it will return at some juncture is debatable: the clear division between war-time and peace has effectively ceased to exist now that we are instantly aware of conflicts the moment they erupt anywhere in the globe – there is simply no reflective vantage-point from which to contemplate what is effectively a moto perpetuo of constantly-morphing combat whose focus merely shifts from one hotspot to another, perpetually distracting our attention. Unless we are intentional about behaving otherwise, this pace of change makes it difficult for us to retain what was headline news even as recently as last year, let alone a decade ago. This evidently renders the psychologically indispensable work of collective mourning on the part of the victims – or soul-searching on that of perpetrators or guilty bystanders – highly problematic. Walter Benjamin seems to have grasped this 70 years ago in his famous interpretation of Paul Klee’s picture entitled Angelus Novus:

‘It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm'[1]

Paul Klee, ‘Angelus Novus’

It can be contended that contemporary artists seeking to respond substantively to the wreckage hurled in front of their feet are caught in precisely the same trap as Klee’s/Benjamin’s angel. The difference is  that the storm with which they now have to contend is not so much blowing from a cruel Hegelian paradise of the ‘end of history’ that cares nothing about the collateral damage of the dialectic of progress, as from the exponential rate of change both exemplified and propelled by the evolution of information technology. In such a situation, classical music’s apparent refusal to provide soundbites to measure in the face of contemporary tragedies may actually have more wisdom to it than it might appear. The organization of charity concerts for humanitarian relief or the organization of musical performances as rallying-points for community reconstruction in war zones are perhaps better forms of immediate reaction to human tragedy than the hasty composition of works attempting to deal with emotions which, as Jessica Duchen rightly points out, ‘can require time to process’. Indeed, it is perhaps the insistence on this need to take time more generally that can constitute one of art-music’s most valuable contributions in our frenetic cultural climate; one might say that the task of artists as ‘angels of history’ is to keep their gaze fixed and wings folded in spite of the storm that would turn their – and all our faces away from contemplating an unreconciled past whose pain remains long after the media spotlight has directed itself elsewhere. Composers, unlike protest singers, are not primarily activists; the chronicler working patiently to preserve collective memory for future generations and the despatch journalist trying to raise immediate awareness may have a common theme and certainly both have their place, but their timeframe and methods are different.

In this context it is wholly understandable that thoughtful composers such as Steve Reich should therefore continue to deal with World War II as a piece of tragically ‘unfinished business’ whose sheer enormity as a kind of ‘anti-Revelation’ of the depths to which humanity can sink defies rational analysis. Indeed, thinking specifically of the 1918 Armistice commemorations, the same might be said of World War I, not so much in spite of the fact that so few survivors of its butchery are still alive but because of it. I was reminded of this when listening outside our local Mairie here in Paris on Friday November 11th to a highly cogent and sobering speech by the mayor of the 14th arrondissement, Pascal Cherki (former secretary of SOS Racisme), who underscored the bewildering complexity of factors involved in the outbreak of the Grande Guerre in 1914 and the sheer absurdity of the pointless bloodshed of the years of trench warfare that ensued. In one sense our reflection on 1914-1918 can never be ‘finished’; to use the categories of the eminent French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, it is a ‘saturated phenomenon’ whose ‘meaning’ eludes us however much we may apply the tools of critical inquiry to it. As Marion remarks,

’In effect, in the case in hand, we have an overabundance of available causes, all of which are sufficient: expansionist rivalries in Europe, imperialist confrontations in the colonies, economic competition for basic resources and access to waterways, demographic pressures, territorial claims linked to the principle of nationalities, bellicose and revolutionary ideologies, finally all the forms of development or all the forms of crisis, including the anecdotal psychology of the players, even the least among them (Princip or Villain) etc. All these causes, in one way or another, competed; all are widely documented for us. The event therefore accepts all the causalities one would assign to it. But it is precisely this overabundance that forbids assigning it a cause, and even forbids understanding it through a combination of causes.

“This is the very secret of the event”- this is the interaction and unanalyzable intrigue of infinitely converging causes.’[2]

In other words, the catastrophes of history ‘saturate’, overpower our cognitive capacity and leaves us ultimately speechless, however well-informed we may be about them. Art in general – and music in particular given its inherent irreducibility to verbal analysis – can arguably come into its own at this very point of the breakdown of discursive reason, in that it has the power to evoke in a way that is clearly meaningful without necessarily seeking to explain. Here the stirring of the sub-conscious is maybe even more important than conscious reflection; this is perhaps one reason why musicians such as myself remain both troubled and fascinated by the strangeness of Viennese expressionism of the years immediately prior to 1914. The atmosphere of nameless existential dread evoked by Webern’s Six Pieces Op. 10 or the haunting and haunted premonitions of warfare in the poetry of Georg Trakl (1887-1914) may seem opaque, but its visceral power suggests the disclosure of a deep if disturbing truth in this art of decay and imminent collapse. To paraphrase some words of pastor and author Larry Kalajainen,  to face the darkness of our world is to face the darkness in ourselves.

Art has always done its work through symbol and allegory, and so if we are looking for contemporary compositional responses to the horror of conflict, we maybe need to look to pieces in which this response is handled at a deeper level through the retrieval of ancient material whose present-day resonance is all the more powerful for being left implicit. I have already hinted in this blog that Arvo Pärt’s recent work is a particularly good example in this respect, and I was provided with further evidence of this at the French first performance on November 4th of his Adam’s Lament, given by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris under Olari Elts, at which I had the great joy of talking with the composer for the first time since our last meeting in November 2010. As I wrote some months ago in the post Adam’s continued lament – a point of conversion?, the stimulus for the composition of this sombre but powerful and ultimately uplifting setting of a text by Saint Silouan of Mount Athos was a commission from the 2010 Istanbul Music Festival, which Pärt used as an opportunity to pursue his vision of East-West reconciliation (embodied by the joint Christian-Muslim performing forces involved in the première) by taking as his subject-matter the concept of Adam as the father of a universal humanity beyond religious divisions. Francophone readers can download the French translation of the complete Russian text here, and the first few pages of the score can be perused on the Universal Edition website, but I would especially like to highlight the section of the work in which Saint Silouan’s poem turns from the sin of Adam to the crime of Cain:

‘Adam knew great grief when he was banished from paradise,
but when he saw his son Abel slain by Cain his brother,
Adam’s grief was even heavier.
His soul was heavy, and he lamented and thought:
‘Peoples and nations will descend from me, and multiply,
and suffering will be their lot, and they will live in enmity
and seek to slay one another’[3]

If what we are seeking is a constructive engagement on the part of contemporary classical music with what has transpired not only in Iraq, Afghanistan, but also Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland or indeed any kind of inter-necine conflict, then we need look no further. Because no conflict is named explicitly, all wars are implied within this universalizing poetic narrative (and here Pärt’s work to my mind resembles René Girard’s account of violence in going back to a primal story of mimetic rivalry lying at the roots of human culture). If we are looking for a ‘message’, it surely only takes a little deciphering – all war is inherently and senselessly fratricidal, in that it relies on the logic of the dehumanization of the ‘enemy’ which is made possible by the forgetting of a truth which is deeper and more ultimate than conflict: that of our common humanity as created beings. Yet to acknowledge this commonality as more primordial than violence is already to identify a source of profound hope – for, to put it in the words of a celebrated and luminous statement by Paul Ricoeur, ‘however radical evil may be, it can never be as primary as goodness.'[4]

Paul Ricoeur

NOTES

[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings vol.4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College, 2003), 392.

[2] Being given: toward a phenomenology of givenness, translated Jeffrey L Kosky, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 165.

[3] Archimandrite Sophrony, St Silouan the Athonite, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Crestwood, NY; St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991), 449.

[4] ‘On comprendra que le mal n’est pas le symétrique du bien, la méchanceté le substitut de la bonté de l’homme, mais la flétrissure, l’obscurcissement, l’enlaidissement d’une innocence, d’une lumière et d’une beauté qui demeurent. Aussi radical que soit le mal, il ne saurait être aussi originaire que la bonté’ (Paul Ricoeur, Finitude et Culpabilité, vol. 2 (Paris: Aubier, 1950), 150).

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Naming the unnameable

American Cathedral, Paris

Today is Ash Wednesday.

A couple of weeks ago my friend Bill Tompson, Chair of Christian Education at the American Cathedral in Paris and general polymath, asked me to make a presentation at the end of this month on musical treatments of Christ’s Passion as part of a multi-disciplinary series of Lenten reflections entitled Expressing the Inexpressible. I don’t want to give the game away by writing too much about what I plan to say, but it strikes me as obvious that music by its very nature is particularly well-suited to the expression of what cannot be expressed in words because of its immediacy, its capacity to speak on a level that eludes discursive rational explanation. Music leaves us with the impression of something that is deeply meaningful but which cannot be tied down to any unequivocal semantic interpretation. This is obvious as regards purely instrumental music, but I would argue that it is even the case when there is a text, as our reception of words is never left unaffected by the music to which they are set as it unfolds in time. The view (often held in church circles) that music is a ‘neutral’ vehicle for sacred texts is naïve in the extreme, as it fails to take into account the profound ways in which sound impacts us psychoacoustically.

I would assert that it is crucially important when talking about music to consider its existence as an aural phenomenon, even when discussing composers whose scores demonstrably employ elaborate symbolic systems whereby words and concepts have close notational correlates (think of Bach’s symbolic use of the number 3 – as exemplified by the key of Eb major with its three flats – associated with the Trinity, or Olivier Messiaen’s invented musical ‘alphabet’, langage communicable, by means of which he transcribed whole passages from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae in his monumental organ cycle Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité). It is very easy for over-enthusiastic musicologists fixated by musical notation to think that by ‘decoding’ such symbolism they have fully unlocked the meaning of the music in such a way that it can be defined verbally with no remainder. In so doing they frequently forget to ask themselves the question of the extent to which this verbal meaning is reinforced, submerged or maybe even contradicted by aural experience. Put crudely, the composer may well think that the written score conveys one thing, whereas what is actually transmitted to the listener (even leaving aside considerations of the latter’s irreducible subjectivity) is quite another.

But how can we talk about meaning without using words? An obvious answer might seem to be to discuss ’emotional’ meanings. Tonal music from Monteverdi to Mahler certainly provide some fairly intelligible guidelines as to the emotions communicated by musical works. This is partly a question of historical associations (such as the equation of F major with ‘pastoral’ music, for example, as with Bach’s organ Pastorella BWV 590 or Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony), but I would argue that there is a deeper basis to the workings of tonality. Tonal works are largely organized around tensions and resolutions which are grounded objectively in the harmonic series and is not merely the result of the acceptance of socially-received traditions, as important as those are. To test this, try playing a few innocuous I-IV-V progressions at the piano and then suddenly throw in the opening chord of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; unless you are particularly de-sensitized, the dissonance will almost certainly jump out at you because of the contrast with what has preceded it. You do not need to know anything about Wagner or the story of Tristan to feel the shock. A tonal composer who has experienced this kind of psychoacoustic effect and knows how to generate it therefore has a powerful set of tools for communicating with the public without the need for words or programmatic explanations, because tonality creates a interpretative framework common to composer, performer and listener. In the absence of such a framework works of ‘pure’ music such as, say, a Dvorak Serenade, would be incomprehensible; even it is can be said that part of their intelligibility can be attributed to presentation within received forms, those forms work in synergy with the sounding properties of tonal harmony rather than being imposed on it arbitrarily.

However, move into the twentieth century and the waters become considerably more muddied; the increasing fragmentation of musical language in the Western ‘classical’ tradition over the last hundred years and or so has led to a situation in which the audience, hearing a piece for the first time in an idiom which may be completely unfamiliar, often has no clue as to how a given piece should be ‘deciphered’ – or indeed whether it is meant to be deciphered at all either ‘rationally’ or ’emotionally’. Listen to Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and it is pretty obvious ‘how’ the music is to be listened to, but try applying the same mode of listening to Webern’s Symphony Op. 21 and you will probably find yourself bewildered. In the case of music where the framework of tonal or modal tension has been jettisoned, and particularly where there is no text, the listener can often be left with the unsettling feeling of being unsure as to whether her cognitive or emotional experience corresponds in any way to the composer’s intention. What would sound like an strident dissonance in a tonal work may for example play a completely different rôle within the notated compositional structure of an atonal one: a phenomenon such as the appearance of a note which completes a twelve-tone row may for example correspond functionally to a V-I cadence in tonal music, despitely sounding totally unlike it.

This feeling of losing one’s bearings when hearing a piece of music (which I frequently have when listening to certain works of say, Birtwistle, Ferneyhough or Elliott Carter) might seem indicative of a major communication problem between composer and listener. However, I would contend that there are certain musico-dramatic situations in which contemporary music can justifiably take advantage of this state of affairs.  For conveying psychological states of confusion, metaphysical dread and nameless anguish, expressionist atonal music (which was of course born historically in Freud’s Vienna) can have overwhelming power, as long as it is somehow communicated to the listener that the music is intended to create such an emotional climate. I am thinking here of pieces such as Berg’s Wozzeck or the agonized orchestral prelude to the 7th tableau of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise prior to St Francis’s bodily reception of the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion, where Messiaen briefly conjures up an atmosphere of existential terror by using the technique of ‘integral serialism’ (extending twelve-tone technique to musical parameters other than pitch).

It is extremely telling that Messiaen employs this dislocating and radically disturbing idiom at a mystically-charged moment in his opera, one associated with the Passion narrative. His point seems to be that we are dealing here with a depth of experience that our rational minds cannot plumb, before which all our theories and interpretative strategies fall mute. The essential mystery of Easter, the Mysterium Paschale, as Hans Urs von Balthasar (Messiaen’s favourite theologian) reminds us in his unforgettable book of the same name, concerns the very suffering of God and therefore cannot be domesticated or fully ‘understood’ by the human mind. The event of Cross and Resurrection is, to use a term of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, a saturated phenomenon whose significance can never be exhausted by human ‘explanation’ and which shatters our pretensions to understanding. [1] Which is perhaps why modern Christian composers working with ideas of aural ‘saturation’ (a particular feature of the ‘Polish school’, good examples being Penderecki’s Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima or the first movement of Gorecki’s ‘Copernican’ Symphony) seem particularly in phase with a theology of the Cross.

One conductor who seems to have understood this better than most is Helmuth Rilling – a member of SDG’s advisory board -, one of the greatest names in sacred choral music of recent decades.  Maestro Rilling has done more than perhaps any other European conductor to foster the creation of substantial new sacred works by contemporary composers of international stature. Pieces commissioned by him have included Arvo Pärt’s Litany, the multi-authored Requiem der Versöhnung (1995), Penderecki’s Credo (with Rilling’s Oregon Bach Festival recording winning a Grammy in 2001),  and Sven-David Sandström’s new full-length setting of the text to Handel’s Messiah in 2009. Steeped in Lutheran tradition both musically and theologically (being awarded an honorary doctorate in theology by the University of Tübingen in 1985), it is perhaps not surprising that Rilling’s most ambitious commissioning venture should have centered around the Passion. For the year 2000 he and the International Bach-Academy in Stuttgart commissioned no fewer than four new Passions from Sofia Gubaidulina, Wolfgang Rihm, Tan Dun and Osvaldo Golijov.

Although Rilling clearly had Bach’s Passions uppermost in his mind on the 250th anniversary of the Thomaskantor’s death, the Passion 2000 project had no liturgical ambitions. Indeed, of the four composers commissioned only Sofia Gubaidulina was writing from a straightforwardly Christian (Russian Orthodox) perspective, and even she was working outside her tradition to the extent that musical instruments are not used in Russian churches. Dun and Golijov (the latter even having to buy a New Testament specially in order to write his St Mark Passion!) were primarily interested engaging with the Biblical text from a broader human standpoint in dialogue with their own ethnicity – Chinese and Latin American/Jewish respectively -, with fascinating results. It is however Wolfgang Rihm, author of Deus Passus, who constituted perhaps the most ambivalent and therefore intriguing member of this quartet; coming from a Catholic background, he describes himself cryptically as one who does not pray, but speaks with God [‘Ich bin kein Beter, aber ich rede mit Gott‘] [2]

Rihm (b.1952) is certainly one of Europe’s most remarkable composers both for the sheer scope of his output (his page at Universal-Edition lists no fewer than 328 pieces!) and his mastery of a panoply of styles ranging from the visceral avant-garde exploration of his early works to the unashamedly post-Romantic lyrical beauty of more recent pieces such as his Lichtes Spiel for violin and orchestra (recently premièred by Anne-Sophie Mutter and the New York Philharmonic).  Amazingly for the author of a catalogue whose volume might suggest a latter-day Telemann privileging quantity over depth, Rihm’s music is consistently substantial, and Deus Passus is no exception. The work is clearly marked by the composer’s struggle to deal with the difficult issue of German and specifically Christian anti-Semitism in the light of the Holocaust. Hesitating for a long time before accepting the commission, Rihm eventually chose to work with the Lukan text on the grounds that ‘it would have been impossible for a German composer such as myself to use … one of the other Gospels’ [3] on account of the misuse of texts from the Gospels of Matthew and John in order to justify anti-Judaism on the part of the Church.

Paul Celan

There are two particularly striking illustrations of the way in which Rihm consistently tries to distance himself from the sinister legacy of Christian vilification of the Jews. Firstly, his treatment of Christ’s trial before Pilate follows the philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s controversial assertion that in calling upon the Roman Governor to free Barabbas the crowd were actually appealing for the release of Jesus (‘Bar-abbas’ meaning ‘Son of the Father’ in Aramaic), and that the idea of Barabbas as a separate figure is an editorial invention on the part of later Christians seeking accommodation with Rome by transferring guilt for Jesus’s crucifixion away from the Roman authority. Secondly, Rihm concludes Deus Passus with the poem Tenebrae by the Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), creating a thought-provoking and disturbing symmetry with the work’s opening words, taken from Luke 22, 19-20 (‘This is my body which is given for you’). In using Celan’s poem, Rihm equates the shed blood of Christ with that of the victims of the Shoah, commenting that ‘the blood in the formula of institution (with which the work begins) thus ‘meets’ the blood of slaughtered humanity’.

Celan and Rihm are both painfully aware of the deep ambiguity of such a parallel in the light of two thousand years of mainly tragic Christian-Jewish relations. They seem to affirm the intuition of theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann in The Crucified God that there is an intimate, if chilling connection between Golgotha and Auschwitz, yet they also sense how problematic making such a statement given the suffering so often inflicted by Christ’s supposed followers on the world:

‘In my opinion, the suffering God, the God who suffered, is the central figure of Christian thought. This is where Christianity differs from other religions. The Passion is the space in which this suffering occurs. However, the suffering that has been and still is being thrust into the world in the name of the Christian faith  must also be held to account from the vantage point of this space.’ [4]

After the last words of Celan’s Tenebrae Rihm’s work breaks off, a logical conclusion to the composer’s ‘attempt to give form to something […] unspeakable’. Rihm’s remarks on the limits of human understanding when confronted with the ultimate mystery of human as well as divine suffering (and the relationship between the two) are a perfect illustration of a felt link between the cutting edge of the contemporary arts and the ‘apophatic’ tradition of negative theology, which Rihm references directly:

‘Beyond detailed knowledge there ought to be a productive unknowing. That does not mean that one can dispense with detailed knowledge. One can only truly not know, when one has at least considered everything within reach that can be known. The person who simply does not know does not even know this. But I am in this case in favour of educated unknowing, ‘docta ignorantia’, as Nicholas of Cusa speaks of an educated ignorance. Through ever-increasing knowledge an insight can arise that applies precisely to music – that this knowledge only makes it all the more plain to the senses that what is happening is impossible to name.’ [5]

Trying to untangle this dense statement (which sounds clearer in German than I am able to render in English), Rihm seems to be advocating a ‘second naïveté’ which can only be attained by the person who has gone through the hard work of trying everything humanly possible to wrap one’s head around something, only to come to the realization that there are some things which pass creaturely understanding. There is no anti-intellectualism here – indeed, Deus Passus may well come across as cerebral to some listeners. According to Rihm, the work of rational analysis when getting to grips with difficult issues is indispensable for dispelling the suspicion that appeals to ‘mystery’ are merely a smokescreen for intellectual laziness; only after every effort at comprehension has been made can we speak of irresoluble paradox. Abandoning reason prior to this stage is tantamount to a failure to think things through properly.

Helmuth Rilling with Wolfgang Rihm, 2003. Photo: Norbert Bolin

Intellectual indolence is certainly not a charge that can be levelled at any of the four composers involved in Passion 2000, despite their huge stylistic disparities. Helmuth Rilling’s choice of collaborators may appear strange to those who assume that the principal criterion for participation in such a project ought to be theological conformity with a classical Christian understanding of the Gospels, but it seems obvious that the primary aim of Passion 2000 was not to provide new ‘settings’ of the text in the sense of doctrinal illustration, but to set up a creative confrontation between the scriptures and artists free of the interpretative baggage of Rilling’s own Protestant heritage, without script-writing the results. Seen in this light Passion 2000 can be said to have succeeded brilliantly; not only did the project generate music ranging from the directly and exhilaratingly populist (Golijov) to the intellectually rigourous (Rihm) and provocatively experimental (Tan Dun), but it also served to stimulate contemporary debate as to the relevance of the Passion for our own times. Rilling’s approach can be viewed as an act of faith stemming from a certain confidence in the Passion narrative, whose universal significance is such as not to require the imposition of a theological straightjacket upon serious artists who see it as their business to write challenging music and to ask sometimes uncomfortable philosophical questions while never being less than respectful of the great musical Passion tradition.

If the Gospel texts allow for and indeed invite a multiplicity of approaches from contemporary composers (to whom of course we could add other examples such as Arvo Pärt, James MacMillan and David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion) it is because the material of the Passion narratives is itself inexhaustible, a ‘saturated phenomenon’. It is surely true both artistically and theologically that the Easter event is ‘resistant to its interpretations’, to quote a salient point of Moltmann’s; dealing with the infinite mystery of suffering love, no finite interpretation or even combination of interpretative theories can exhaust its meaning. Even adding together the views of Anselm and Abelard, Luther and Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Gustav Aulen’s Christus Victor or René Girard’s pioneering work on ‘scapegoating’, there is still a residue beyond our human comprehension that will remain so this side of eternity; the hermeneutical gap is not quantitative but qualitative. Rihm is surely right to speak of ‘docta ignorantia’, a principle that we forget at our peril (and a point that supposedly Christian bloggers hurling mutual anathemas at one another over their pet theories of the atonement would do well to remember [2]). This unknowing may of course lead in one of two directions – either honest skepticism (Rihm) or worship (Gubaidulina). Perhaps the dividing-line between the two is thinner than some people would have us believe. What is certain is that the side of the line on which one finds oneself depends on something other, more basic and deeper than intellectual understanding:

‘For who would want to understand the love of God in its folly and weakness? Or who […] would wish to lay claim to any other course of action than hanging on the lips of God, whose word remains inseparably connected with his historic Cross and Resurrection, and keeping silence before the ‘love … which surpasses knowledge’ (Ephesians 3, 19)[7]

Maestro Helmuth Rilling will lead the Chicago Symphony and Chorus in Mendelssohn’s Elijah this Friday March 11 at 8 p.m. in Symphony Hall, with SDG board member Johann Buis giving the pre-concert presentation at 7 p.m. in Grainger Ballroom.

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[1] See Jean-Luc Marion, In excess: studies of saturated phenomena, translated Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), passim.. Balthasar makes the same point succinctly when discussing the inadequacy of human language in relation to the Resurrection:

‘Words, like (scenic) images remain of necessity ‘limit-expressions’ for a reality which – since it has absorbed in itself in a transcendent way the entire reality of the old aeon – overflows on all sides the latter’s receptive capacities‘ (Mysterium Paschale (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 246).

[2] Programme note to the Internationale Bachakademie performances on March 15 and 16, 2008, available online at http://media.bachakademie.de/media/pdf/2008032_abo4_rihm.pdf ).

[3] Interview with Jürgen Kanold, quoted in booklet accompanying Deus Passus (Hänssler Classic 98397).

[4] Ibid. Moltmann’s inclusion in The Crucified God of Elie Wiesel’s famous concept of God in the bodies of young Jews hanging on the gallows in Buna concentration camp during the Holocaust is a case in point of the difficulty of such a recuperation on the part of (German) Christian theology. Moltmann certainly makes a powerful point when he says, following François Mauriac, that ‘it is true in a real, transferred sense, that God himself hung on the gallows, as E. Wiesel was able to say. If that is taken seriously, it must also be said that, like the cross of Christ, even Auschwitz is in God himself. Even Auschwitz is taken up into the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son and the power of the Spirit.’ (The Crucified God (London: SCM Press, 2001). However, it is understandable that this interpretation should have been  sharply criticized in various quarters both as a mis-interpretation of Wiesel’s own conclusion – namely that God is dead – and as an illegitimate annexation of Jewish history (see Alice and Roy Eckardt, Long night’s journey into day: a revised retrospective on the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 112-114). Given Moltmann’s important long-term commitment to Christian-Jewish reconciliation this is unfortunate, but the episode is indicative of the problems faced by post-Holocaust theology.

[5] ‘Am Ende des Detailwissens sollte ein produktives Nichtwissen stehen. Das heisst aber nicht, dass man das Detailwissen umgehen kann. Man kann erst dann richtig nichtwisse, wenn man vorher alles Erreichbare, das wissbar ist, zumindest erwogen hat. Der schlicht Nichtwissende weiss nicht einmal das. Aber ich bin in dem Fall für gelehrtes Nichtwissen, um mit Nikolaus von Kues zu sprechen: ‘docta ignorantia’, für eine belehrte Nichtwissenheit. Durch immer weiteres Wissen kann die gerade auf Musik bezogene Erkenntnis entstehen, dass dieses Wissen nur dazu beiträgt, die Nichtbennenbarkeit dessen, was da geschieht, um so krasser vor die Sinne zu stellen’ (2008 Internationale Bachakademie programme note).

[6] Here again Balthasar’s remarks on the Resurrection (quoting Gerhard Koch) are an object lesson in theological method:

‘In the event of the Resurrection all previous schemata come to their fulfilment and suffer their breakdown at one and the same time. They have to be used in preaching, but the very fact of their cumulative employment shows that each is powerless to contribute more than a fragment to a totality of a transcendent kind.  ‘What the disciples proclaimed goes beyond the limits of the thinkable’ (Mysterium Paschale, 198).

[7] Ibid., 82-83.