Why Music Matters
An Addendum
My recent piece on the album For Emma, Forever Ago focused exclusively on lyrics. In hindsight, I’d like to offer an addendum, somewhat in the form of a correction to that approach.
As a musician, words and their meaning are rarely what I notice first about a song. Instead, my ears pick out instrumentation, melody, harmony, and the song’s overall ‘vibe’. I like a song first for what it sounds like and only second for what it says. When I set out to write my reflection on Bon Iver’s debut album, however, a textual approach seemed right. There was a mysterious, nearly sacramental character, to his words that invited meditation. I perceived a veiled-ness to the lyrics that enticed me to reach out and pull back.
Truth be told, my approach was also conditioned by my environment. A week in a spacious but still finite lake house with my closest priest friends did not leave me in a position to listen to the album. Instead, I worked off a print-out sheet of lyrics and tried to hammer out a couple hundred words at a time while enjoying their company. I stand by what I wrote. But looking back, I approached For Emma not as an album but as a collection of poems. And that meant I had lost something in my interpretation, to wit, the music.
Instead of writing a follow-up piece on Emma’s music, I’d like to write more generally about why music matters. As we at Ecclesia Christi Baltimore expand more into cultural engagement at a theological level, I hope these observations will remind us why we should take music – both words and notes – seriously.
What pinged my conscience was remembering an observation I had once read by the late British philosopher Roger Scruton in his book on Wagner’s Ring. Scruton identifies Schopenhauer as the key intellectual influence upon Wagner’s approach to operatic composition. In line with Kant, Schopenhauer thought there was an insurmountable gap between things as they appear and things as they actually are. Going beyond Kant, however, he thought that the arts—and music, chief among them—provided the surest way to bridge that divide. Scruton writes:
Schopenhauer was the only post-Kantian who regarded music as a test-case for his philosophy, and his theories confirmed Wagner’s conception of a drama that would unfold entirely through the inner feelings of the characters. These feelings, hinted at in words, would acquire full reality and elaboration in music. Developing under its own intrinsic momentum, the music would guide the listener through subjective regions that were otherwise inaccessible to the outside observer creating a drama of inner emotion framed only by the sparse gestures on the stage—gestures, which, for this very reason, would become so saturated with meaning as to reach the limits of their expressive power.1
On Scruton’s view, if Schopenhauer is right, then the words of The Ring cycle are less important than the notes that surround them: “The poem, brilliant though it is as a piece of storytelling, is conceived in another way from traditional opera libretti. The words are not set to music: they are the foam on the musical surface, the bursting into light of the dark movements beneath them.”2 According to Scruton, you don’t need to follow every word of the opera to get the point. The music itself conveys the story’s meaning. And it does so with the firm confidence that music alone builds the only straight bridge across the chasm from what we perceive to what really is.
Whether or not we agree with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and epistemology, we know at the level of our subjectivity that what he says is true. That’s why we listen to music at all. There is a lot buried within us that we don’t understand and struggle to investigate. Our reactions to things outside of us are at the same time reactions to things within us. But those things always escape our scrutiny. Music, however, appears to possess an unrivaled capacity to draw us into ourselves: to bring us into contact with the darker movements beneath and allow them to burst upward into the light.
Schopenhauer’s and Scruton’s point is that music doesn’t need words to speak to us. Of course, when music does use words, those words are often important and carry great meaning. But few of us read as much poetry as we listen to music. So music must mean carry more meaning than the collective weight of its words. Consider the famous and memorable scenes of a movie—the stupendous first sight of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the heartening lighting of Gondor’s distress beacons in The Return of the King—and imagine them without the orchestra beneath. How would we know how to feel without Williams’ or Shore’s scores to convey the full meaning of those moments?
All that is what I neglected in my analysis of For Emma. Justin Vernon, on the other hand, didn’t. In speaking of his own approach to the album, he describes the production of the album in Schopenhauerian overtones:
With these songs, I was creating sounds first. I would create a space for the vocals, then transcribe vocal sounds and listen to what it sounded like. I would get lyric ideas from the sound of the voice. And I was actually able to pull out more meaningful stuff, personally speaking, because of it. I would surprise myself by what I was singing about, just all these weird, subconscious melodies and sounds.3
While I would not presume to compare myself with Vernon as a musician, I’m not unfamiliar with the process of music making he describes. In seminary, I would occasionally head down to the chapel later in the evening to play the organ while (usually) no one was in there to pray. Possessing a rare and useful talent in such a community, I played organ for Mass and Vespers at least twice a week. I spent plenty of time on the bench preparing hymns and learning repertoire. But these evenings were not practice sessions. They were, in retrospect, closer in character to Vernon’s secluded time in the cabin that produced For Emma. Alone in the dark chapel, I put no music on the rack. I would only improvise, and my improvisations would follow a fairly regular form.
First, I’d assemble a warm slush of flutes, strings, and their celestes (pipes slightly off-pitch that produce a wavering vibrato when played with their in-tune counterparts). Above that I’d tease out an airy melody with a softer stop in the upper register while slightly varying the supporting chords beneath. In this headspace, there are no wrong notes. Dissonance, intended or not, provokes only curiosity about what will come next. From there, I’d add more foundation and delicately open the swell boxes to let the sound quieted within them gradually emerge. Surveying the options before me, the stop names—flauto a camino, viola da gamba, tuba mirabilis—would appear like paints on a palette waiting to be applied at the right moment and in the proper measure. When all the stops were pulled, I’d finally be lost within the music, now in full crescendo, that had come from somewhere within me. And when all was concluded, and I returned to my senses, it would be impossible for me to recreate or even remember the music my hands and feet—or rather, my heart—had made. I don’t know if the great works of Bach or Vierne (or Vernon) came from such moments of ekstasis.4 But if they did, their true genius—God’s true grace—was their ability to write it down.
I’ve said all that because of what it taught me about why music matters. At some point after the first few times, I told my spiritual director that my prayer life had shriveled up. Instead of taking my frustrations to prayer, I told him, I would take them out on the organ. He isn’t a musician (although he is a great devotee of the Little River Band), but he was surprised he could see what I couldn’t: I was praying. And my prayer didn’t need words. After all, the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words (Rom. 8:26). Perhaps the Spirit’s sighs were the wind blowing through the organ’s pipes. In any case, my spiritual director encouraged me to keep praying, even if he could hear me playing/praying across the courtyard through his open window.
People of any religious faith and none hold music as a form of prayer. But that's also divinely revealed. Ratzinger notes that ‘to sing’ and its derivatives are among the most common in the Bible.5 Music in Scripture is an instinctive response to God. As Ratzinger puts it, "When man comes into contact with God, mere speech is not enough. Areas of his existence are awakened that spontaneously turn into song."6 Scripture is thus replete with music: Israel sings the might of God's victory over the Egyptians (cf. Ex. 15:1-12). Mary and Zechariah sing the marvels of the Incarnation (cf. Lk. 1:47-55 and 68-79). Paul's epistles include preexisting hymns already sung by the Church in her first decades (cf. Phil. 2:6-11 and Col. 1:15-20). And across the glassy sea, John sees God's victorious with harps in hand singing Moses's song, now fully revealed as the eternal victory song of the Lamb (cf. Rev. 15:2-4).
The biblical citations just given will take you to the words of those songs but not their music. Yet in no case were those words ever merely recited. How they were first sung is lost to history, but the Church has sung them through the centuries to this day. With other notes and different instruments, the liturgy retains them and folds them into the eternal chorus of praise rendered by all creation to the blessed Trinity. In truth, the liturgy can be said and not sung, but that is hardly the ideal. Is not something added when the words of the Mass and the Office are accompanied with notes? Would the Alleluia at the Easter Vigil as triumphantly announce the Lord’s Resurrection? I think not. The liturgy allows us to sing with the unified voice of the Church the songs that God has taught his people to draw us into our experience of reality (which we hardly understand) to find the really real, God himself (by whom alone we can rightly understand anything).
Other music, including what we make in wintry cabins and vacant chapels, can be authentic prayer insofar as it stays united with the revealed music by which we encounter God par excellence. Most music admittedly strays far and wide. But we should not overlook the fact that humanity has never ceased to sing and make music. Music matters to people because it helps them understand who they are and why they exist. In the final analysis, those who make and love music seek God. I listen to artists like Bon Iver not because I think they are closeted Christians. I listen to their music because those who seek God find him. They may not know who they seek or who they find. But I do. Schopenhauer considered music the noblest and greatest art form for how it connects us with reality. Revelation tells us that God favors that art form too. And what truth humanity finds in its natural reach for meaning, we will also find in the truth God has revealed to us. Music matters, in short, because it leads us to God.
Roger Scruton, The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017). 50.
Scruton, The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring, 53.
Steven Hyden, “Justin Vernon of Bon Iver,” AV Club (February 21, 2008).
Literally, ‘to stand outside oneself’.
Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 136.
Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 136.