The Soundtrack of Time
Music provides a unique insight to history. It is revealing to know what a particular culture or time sung or heard whether in sacred or secular music. This article lays the foundation for such an understanding.
Culture reflects the ideas that motivate history. Rarely does history, however, call upon artists to effect the change that charts its course. For the most part, the artist, as citizen of time and place, plays the role of a reactive agent, providing a specific synopsis of events recently or remotely past, cloaked in the brilliance of technique and beauty. Culture is also exclusively human, the artistic depiction of the struggle that exists in man between nature and supernature, the physical and spiritual realms.
We are hybrid creatures of body and soul, and this, combined with our fallen nature, presents difficulties unique to all creation–not least of which relates to the interplay between head and heart. Angelic intelligence far surpasses our own, and the angels have an infinitely superior intellectual grasp than we do of God’s Truth—but they don’t feel a thing. Man can never grasp the beatific in the material realm, but neither can a pure intelligence experience the beautiful in human terms in any realm, for such an appreciation of beauty requires sensory capacity.
It is unlikely that heaven contains art as we understand it, or angelic artists in the human sense, beautiful though fanciful depictions of cherubic fiddlers notwithstanding: what motivation could an angel possibly have to attempt to add beauty to the Beatific Vision? Scripture confirms that the Seraphim sing—and composers’ attempts to represent this have yielded some spectacular music—but assuredly, as St. Paul writes, “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him.”
Cultural beauty remains a specifically human consolation. Artists express what they know, in the mode reflective of their specific talents, as so many different creative gifts making up a collective artistic body. The preserved results of this expression—our cultural history—represents not only an academic record of stylistic variety and development, but an intimate community. Each artist waits outside of time for us to discover the specifically timely message left behind to console or inspire. Each specific genre adds something to our understanding of truth, and each of us, based on the specific set of variables we embody, will respond more or less positively to one art form or another. Regardless of inclination, however, all can come to appreciate how useful a role culture as a whole plays in helping to understand not only the facts, but the humanity of history.
Music in particular depicts the emotional essence of a given age, and allows the listener spontaneous, vital access to history not as an intellectually abstract exercise, but as something immediately pertinent. Time has a soundtrack, just as it has a visual and written record. But unlike images or literary accounts that depict past events impossible to recreate (or past descriptions of future events based on a perspective similarly lost), the music of the past still exists in potency as it did in the mind of the composer. The reader or viewer must commune with visual art or literature removed from the original sensory experience; a highly individual exercise, the author, painter, or poet works directly with the recipient, drawing on memory and imagination. While admittedly powerful, these images and cognitive connections can only exist within the limits of the recipient. The understanding and expertise of others can illuminate the experience, but in no case can the observer actually know the present that the artist knew. The composer, on the other hand, requires some mode of present animation in order to access the listener, who processes through hearing the very real and physically present thought of the composer in the form of created sound.
I have argued for the necessity of active engagement with culture in general and music in particular. In fact, I argue for the impossibility of passive ‘entertainment’ as a useful exercise. We access history and ideas through the literary record, and the collective body of literature anchors our understanding of the human condition as practically applied; beyond this, however, the music of a given age provides an invaluable means to comprehend history and ideas in an active and sympathetic manner, fully appreciating both intellectual and emotional motivations behind them—as well as the very human reactions to them.
In the Beginning…
“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”—Plato
The ancients developed a systematic understanding of music based on fundamental relationships existing between sounds in the context of harmonia, the interaction of multiple sounds, but also understood as an overarching concept of structural order. The mathematician Pythagoras and astronomer Ptolemy wrote extensively on the mathematics of music, the study of which was an essential intellectual pursuit for the educated man. Pythagoras generally receives credit for discovering the mathematical ratios of the so-called ‘perfect’ intervals that form the foundations of Western harmony—the octave (notes of the same letter name separated by 12 half-steps on a piano keyboard), the fifth, and the fourth—whose ratios he fixed at 2:1, 3:2, and 4:3 respectively. All of this mathematical exploration highlights not only the seriousness and relevance the Greeks attributed to music as necessary in the development of thought, but also the absolute foundations of music as a manifestation of the natural order.
Aristotle described the potential of music not only to reflect specific emotions, but to elicit them. “Music,” he writes in Book VII of the Politics, “has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young.” He goes on to distinguish, however, that not all music or parts of music has equal merit or causes identical effects, admonishing that young students work with music of distinct quality, “until they are able to feel delight [only] in noble melodies and rhythms, and not merely in that common part of music in which every slave or child or even some animals find pleasure.” The accepted correlations of melody to intellect, harmony to emotion, and rhythm (repeating patterns found in nature) to lower functions, have their roots in the ancient Greeks’ holistic consideration of music: as was the case in all pursuits, harmonia, or proper balance and ordering, remained the overriding principle.
One of the great mysteries of intellectual history surrounds Greek music: for all of the poetry, literature, and philosophy that undergirds Western thought, the Greeks—apart from theoretical writings, some pictures and descriptions of musical instruments, and the numerous references to music as a necessary element in Greek drama and poetry—left almost no sonic trace of their music. We have some fragments—fewer than 50 by the latest reckoning—but mostly silence.
Perhaps this is fitting, as the Greeks ultimately exist to show us the question answered by Revelation. They meticulously crafted structural theories of organized sounds, musical components, and their effects—and left to us the benefit of building music upon them.
Gregorian Chant: The “Case in Ancient Times”
Not only did the early Church develop music, she developed a system of music perfectly ordered and fully consonant with prayer and worship. Beyond this, she encouraged the further progress of music such that, for over a thousand years, nearly every significant formal advance in music either occurred in the Church or saw its ultimate expression there.
St. Gregory the Great, who reigned as Pope from 590 to 604, lends his name to Gregorian chant, the “sung prayer of the Church.” Inspired by the Holy Ghost, he undertook the collection and codification of existing ecclesiastical chant in addition to the composition of new chant. Sufficient chant existed to require this process, a useful point in opposing the theory that artists created chant as a purely decorative liturgical element relatively late in the formative stages of Christianity.
There is no more perfect music, and perhaps the ultimate expression of this perfection emerges by way of perfect analogy: as Christ chose to come into the world as a humble infant, the sung prayer of the Church—forebear of Western music—emerges as a small and quiet thing, the humble, nearly purely melodic expression of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication.
Joyful Noise: The Development of Sacred Music
“Do not think that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfill.”—Matt. 5:17
Theoretical writings of ancient Greek mathematicians and philosophers provide the technical framework for understanding musical components and their relationships not only to each other but to human nature. But what is known of the musical traditions of the Old Law gives strong indications of the intimate relationship that has always existed between music and liturgical worship. Just as in the case of ancient Greek music, however, almost nothing exists of ancient Jewish sacred music in terms of notation. It remained an almost entirely oral tradition, but one familiar to all pious Jews. From David’s harp, to the ‘psalms, hymns, and spiritual canticles’ referred to in the New Testament, worship of the One True God has clearly always included musical accompaniment.
Levite clerics in the pre-Christian era chanted Scripture as part of the liturgy, and sang psalms in the Temple. The sounds of the Old Law surely inspired those of the New, and yet what we know of the formal development of Jewish liturgical music is primarily post-Christian. No one will ever know with certainty to what extent various dialects of the emerging Christian chant tradition provide musical echoes of the Old Law, but the hauntingly distinct quality of Mozarabic and Eastern Rite chant remain simultaneously exotic and familiar, and imply a common source.
The perfection of chant lies in its humility. The modern ear—accustomed to mistaking quantity for quality, size for sublimity—cannot conceive of the relative silence of chant as kingly music, and yet no other music can bring us closer to the contemplation of eternity. Proportionately flawless, all the component parts of chant combine to create an accompaniment to the texts of liturgy and prayer both structurally sound, and—aesthetically—imperceptibly subtle. In chant, word glorifies the Word in the ultimate expression of artistic meekness, a system of music devised such that the music in the system dissolves completely in its service to sacred text.
Chant is a complete music in terms of elemental construction. It conforms to a highly organized rhythmic structure, composed on a framework of modes—the musical equivalent of poetic feet—chosen specifically to match the contour of the pattern of stress indicated by the text. Yet the rhythm acts in no way to excite a passionate response, instead, serving to highlight important syllables and musical climaxes. Recognizable harmony exists by way of implication in monophonic—one line—chant: single notes sung in melodic proximity form the equivalent of simultaneously sounded harmonic intervals based on the ear’s tonal memory capacity. This implied harmony accurately depicts the ethos of a given melodic mode without imposing an acute emotionalism.
Further exposing as erroneous the concept of chant as primitive in its simplicity, the system of melodic modes employed in chant surpasses the modern key-based tonal system (to be discussed later) both in terms of proper complexity and expressive capacity. The tonal composer ‘chooses’ to compose in one of twelve supposedly different keys, but has in fact only one scale pattern to choose from—that of the C-C “major” white-note pattern or its “minor” variant containing an E-flat—merely choosing the relative highness or lowness of the initial pitch in the pattern.
Variation in mood results from chordal progression, the linear motion of groups of multiple simultaneous sounding harmonic intervals. The chant composer chooses from among eight distinct scalar patterns—called ‘Church’ or ‘Greek’ modes—each designed to elicit a specific emotional character. Melody, as the dominant element, serves a dual purpose, evoking both intellectual breadth and emotional depth.
Chant represents not only perfection in form and function, but the metaphoric potential of a cultural genre, fully recognizable as the Christian type. It is one in properly ordered possession of intellect, emotion, and passion, exhibiting unmistakable intellectual dominance—enhanced rather than directed by emotional capacity, controlling rather than controlled by passionate impulse. Chant—and the figure of the Christian it represents—exists above all for knowledge, love, and service of God.
Polyphony
The term means ‘many sounds.’ Polyphony represents the next crucial phase in the formal development of music—the emergence of harmony from its total subservience to melody—and it reflects the struggle of the Christian type in an increasingly demanding and secularized society: citizens of any age, more and more absorbed with the bustle and industry of life, often find less and less time for the silence of God.
The medieval Christian inhabited a world of recognizable order, but the Church as divinely instituted head of society faced increasing competition for the hearts of men. Polyphony is the reverberation of open hearts, and vulnerable minds; the emergence of sound’s poetry, and of irresistible, gratuitous beauty in compositional form. Reflective of a society that had begun to shift its focus from God to man, composers of secular and sacred music alike, in employing innovative polyphonic techniques, began to exploit the depth of music’s emotional potential.
God could have insured that the Church, His corporation on earth, remain perpetually free from error had He placed angelic agents in control of its operation; He could have assured the purity of music by directing the Seraphs to dictate celestial harmonies to men. But this did not occur. That fallible men have charge over an infallible institution—one that God has declared shall exist until the end of time—is one of the greatest manifestations of one of His greatest mysteries: free will. Out of love, God created us, according to St. Augustine, without our permission: out of justice, He will not save us without our cooperation. We must freely choose. The awful responsibility of existence comes with the spectacular promise that, as brothers of Christ—the only creatures to share with Him a dual material and spiritual nature—we may attain the unfathomably disproportionate reward of eternity in heaven, if we only submit freely to carry our little cross for the moment we remain on earth. And yet we struggle, collectively suffering the lingering effects of a very bad fall.
By our intellect, we recognize these truths and submit to them, however imperfectly. Without the light of faith, however, free will and original sin seem cruel, capricious, unfair; these two great truths present such an obstacle to our emotionally clouded minds that many if not most simply choose to ignore them altogether. Yet God has willed these things—dual natures, human frailty and utter dependence, divine institution, free will and original sin—and He has allowed the fall, and the permanent disorder of sin. Our challenge lies in choosing to regain order and retain the fullness of our nature: a man without a brain is an animal; a man without a heart is a monstrous machine. Given our concupiscent nature, emotion and passion can easily—and in our flawed estimation, justifiably—obscure reason. St. Augustine in the Confessions summarized the dilemma, specifically relating it to music, writing, “Thus do I waver between the danger of sensual pleasure and wholesome experience.” Nothing could more aptly describe the musical history of the Middle Ages.
Christendom still thrived, and the development of polyphonic techniques accompanied the flourishing of thought in the Middle Ages, both secular scholarship and scholastic inquiry. Though the Church continued to add to the body of Gregorian chant, formal advances in music occurred almost exclusively in polyphony, both in and outside the Church. What began with a definitive break in formal procedure—the choice to work with multiple rather than single sounds—continued as an often compellingly organic approach to the establishment of a recognizable polyphonic technique. No one knows exactly when the first harmonic interval found its way into the Church, or by what means; secular influence, however, is undeniable, and for the latter third of the first millennium, Church and State engaged in a fascinating process of influence, definition, and experimentation, exploring new worlds of consonance, dissonance, and the limits of formal structure and elaboration.
One could not simply separate music into categories of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ at this point in musical history for the sake of distinguishing quality. Although Church music consisted exclusively of cultivated works, composers working outside the Church did not limit themselves to purely vernacular forms. Though plenty of the stuff of ‘wine, women, and satire’ flowed from the pens and lutes of traveling musicians—the English troubadours, Trouvères in France, and Minnesingers in Germany—many of the advances adopted by the Church had contemporary parallels in the secular realm, where composers developed a qualitative body of sophisticated vocal and instrumental repertoire, as well as musical plays.
A brilliant example of cultural cross-pollination, the defining work of music drama of the late medieval period was written by a Saint—Hildegard von Bingen, a German abbess who lived from 1098-1179. Her magnum opus, Ordo Virtutum, musically depicts the struggle of a soul against temptation by the Devil—the only male role in the work, and the only role spoken, not sung—her fall, her assistance by the individual Virtues, and ultimate salvation. It is a work of spectacular humanity, filled with acutely evocative harmonies, yet fully Catholic in conception; it does not continue in the Gregorian mode of Catholic prayer, but rather baptizes contemporary form with Catholic perspective.
Known as a musical mystic, St. Hildegard was certainly a musical visionary: her musical style, sui generis, anticipated many harmonic advances by centuries, and retains a sort of incorruptible freshness. God sends His prophets in every age and every age largely ignores them. Not only impressive, but agonizingly poignant in retrospect, this cultural prophet perfectly superimposed Truth on emerging secular form, with immortal results. None chose to follow her example.
Eventually, men began to sow in earnest the seeds of humanism. Though Church composers avoided adopting the errors of the humanist mindset, polyphonic Church musicians fell victim to the emerging spirit of the age in the development of styles and techniques which, though wondrous to the ear in their astonishing intricacy, cannot avoid straying into a mode of expression less reflective of the glory of God than the grandeur of man’s capabilities. The polyphonic organum written most famously by clerical composers Léonin and Pérotin at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris at the turn of the thirteenth-century, could on the one hand be seen as mirroring the exhaustive thoroughness of scholastic inquiry—and on the other, as the musical manifestation of the attempt to create a world of human complexity “superior” to the infinite simplicity of God. Perhaps the most famous known example of organum, the Gradual for the Mass of Christmas day, “Viderunt omnes,” contains nearly 12 hypnotic minutes of melodically acrobatic, harmonically kaleidoscopic music. It is as artistically spectacular as it is dramatically disproportionate: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass must wait. It is too much, and yet the Church, as a gentle mother waits, as her little children surpass their boundaries, straying not into sin, but rather into excess.
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