Robert R. Reilly (with Jens Laurson): Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016.

Arnold Schoenberg’s compositional method of “twelve-tone serialism” or dodecaphony, whereby all twelve notes on the chromatic scale are sounded equally in the musical equivalent of democratization, came to dominate twentieth-century symphonic practice. But even from its beginning in the 1920s, dodecaphony struck some composers as indeed too cacophonous. And while the avant-garde composers and concert hall directors eschewed beauty for what they took to be “the pain of truth” and the cult of ugliness, with a nod to Nietzsche, the world wars, and state-sponsored mass murder, registering the loss of the religious faith that inspired previous music, a few but slowly more numerous composers resisted. “I have long suspected,” Reilly testifies, “that there is a hidden history of classical music during this period that would one day surface,” and so it has, in this book. 

Much of it consists of an alphabetical listing of the dissidents, whose compositions and compositional ideas he describes with maestro verve and knowledge, in what amounts to an anti-Voltairean musical Encylopédie. (Anti-Voltairean it is, inasmuch as the “loss of faith” in Christianity, not human catastrophe, best explains much of artistic modernism; after all, as he remarks, the Black Death destroyed a greater portion of human life in Europe during the middle of the fourteenth century than did the violence of the twentieth.) But he begins by contrasting classical music generally with Schoenberg’s. 

Classical music theory began before Christianity, with Pythagoras in the fifth century B.C. He discovered that musical sounds register precise mathematic ratios. This in turn comported with his theory that number is “the key to the universe,” which is a true order, a cosmos, whose “ordering principle” was musical. Musical—that is, ‘of the muse,’ intelligible, with “a reasoning intelligence behind it,” an intelligence discernible by lesser human intelligence. The Pythagoreans “supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number,” Aristotle writes, the ‘music of the spheres.’ Man-made music imitates the cosmic music. More, this teaching could animate ethics, as “music could induce spiritual harmony in the soul,” itself a part of the natural order. In his Republic, Plato quotes Pericles’ adviser, Damon of Athens, who taught that “modes of music have a more decisive effect on the formation of the character of citizens” than even the laws. Accordingly, just as musical concord could harmonize souls, discord could distort them. These themes were taken up by Cicero in his own De republica, then by the Christian St. Clement of Alexandria who, in his Exhortation of the Greeks, averred that “the New Song is Christ, Logos Himself.” As late as the twentieth century, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius could insist, “There is music in the whole universe”; “I believe that there are musical notes and harmonies on all planets.” “That is what I call God,” and “the essence of man’s being is his striving after God,” with musical composition being “brought to life by means of the Logos, the divine in art.” When Reilly listened to Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, “I wept for joy.” The title, Surprised by Beauty recalls C. S. Lewis’s coming to Christian faith in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. As the distinguished late composer and music critic, Robert Simpson puts it in The Symphony, defending tonality against serialism, “the coterie of 12-notery,” “the human sense of tonality has been many times modified”—the choral music of medieval Europe is not Bach’s, nor is Bach’s Beethoven’s—but cannot be abolished.” It comprehends discord (“these poor notes we sing, discord needs for want to grace them,” a lyric poet wrote) but that is the point: it is more comprehensive than dissonance. If anything, Simpson’s music reflects, as he puts it, “with that part of our mind which coldly observes itself no matter what disturbances, mental or physical, occur”—a Stoical answer to the shattered nerves of the serialists. At his best (Reilly cites his Symphony No. 11), his music registers “spiritual calmness,” an “almost ruminative” tone. Rumination, thought: logos.

Reason thinks in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction, not egalitarian mush. “The hieratic role of music was lost for most of the 20th century because the belief on which it was based was lost,” the belief not only in the God of the Bible but in the character of the universe as cosmos. Reilly goes further, asserting that “the death of God is as much a problem for music as it is for philosophy”; “if you lose the Logos of St. Clement, you also lose the ration (or logos) of Pythagoras.” This is questionable, inasmuch as Pythagoras hadn’t the slightest idea of the Logos of St. Clement, but it much more arguable that when philosophers “began to try to deduce the first principles of man’s nature through rational analysis” alone (as the English conductor, Colin Davis, put it), it was only a matter of time before analysis devoured logic itself, beginning with all dimensions of logic that are not analytical. [1] Or, as Reilly himself puts it, “If external order does not exist, then music collapses in on itself and degenerates into an obsession with techniques”; “any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes purely arbitrary.” This was understood and embraced by Schoenberg in his emancipation of dissonance. While dissonance “had been used in music before…for the purpose of dramatizing disorder or conveying anxiety,” but “it was never a norm until Schoenberg,” who maintained that “tonality does not exist in Nature as the very property of sound itself, as Pythagoras claimed but was simply an arbitrary construct of man, a convention.” Following the lead of modern philosophers from Machiavelli on, but responding particularly to Nietzsche, that philosophic connoisseur of music, He intended “to demote the metaphysical status of Nature,” “prefer[ring] to command it” than to follow it. Schoenberg’s system replaces nature. In it, “all tones become ‘equal in the sense that they have no discernible relationship to one another.” As he described it, he had “cured” himself of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” This, for Reilly (and not only Reilly) is where the death of God comes in: “If beauty is gone, so too must be the presence behind it.” 

In terms of music alone, so what? The loss of tonality matters because “tonality is the key structure of music,” the effect that “allows music to express movement away from or toward a state of tension or relaxation, a sense of motion, through a series of crises and conflicts, which can then come to resolution.” Atonality is “the language of irresolution.” (No wonder it was popular in Weimar Germany.) “This is not a change in technique,” simply; “it is the replacement of art by an ideology of organized noise,” eliminating the capacity of music “to lift a person up into something larger than himself.” In its way, it is Montaignian, not Platonic or Aristotelian. And it still wasn’t sufficiently radical, sufficiently true to the logic of denying logos. As the Franco-American composer Edgard Varèse saw, why stop at twelve-tone themes? Get rid of pitch, too. And so, in the early 1920s, he composed Hyperprism, which one critic compared to “a catastrophe in a boiler factory.” And even that was not enough, since constructing a bomb and lighting the fuse suggests intentionality. Enter John Cage, who “created noise through chance operations by rolling dice” and similar randomizing moves. In “striving for the nonmental,” sometimes known as the mindless, he made a “metaphysically, if not musically, potent” point: “there is not fixed Nature to music,” or indeed to anything else. He was “methodically maniacal.” As Cage wrote, “Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos”—Yes to life, as Nietzsche had averred. Evidently, in practice this meant that the principle of noncontradiction could get tossed, inasmuch as the music of the nihilist avant-garde was quickly institutionalized, brought into the concert halls, where it ruled programs for the next several decades. Chaos could not prevail without an orderly framework; Nietzsche’s will to power, or some facsimile thereof, prevailed, in spite of Cage’s hopes for anarchism. [2] As Reilly observes, “Cage was fooling himself if he thought he was destroying power; he was destroying order,” which make it possible “for a certain type of power to ascend,” as seen in his “infatuation with Mao Tse-tung’s totalitarianism,” Maoism being (in Cage’s words) “our greatest reason for optimism,” if only “for the moment,” since chaos will grind on to something else, soon enough. [3]

As all of this was happening, doubts arose. Among “the first to turn against” the twelve-tone school of composition was its preeminent practitioner in the United States, George Rochberg, who “found that serialism ‘made it virtually impossible to express serenity, tranquility, wit, energy.” “I am turning away from what I consider the cultural pathology of my own time,” he wrote in 1964, “toward what can only be called a possibility: that music can be renewed by regaining contact with the tradition and means of the past, to re-emerge as a spiritual force with re-activated powers or structure; and, as I see it, these things are only possible with tonality.” Another American composer, perhaps appropriately named John Adams, also rejected both the death of God and the project of Schoenberg, writing that he “found that tonality was not just a stylistic phenomenon that came and went,” like a historical ‘stage,’ “but that it is really a natural acoustic phenomenon,” one that registers “harmony in the larger sense, in the sense of spiritual and psychological harmony.” Reilly comments that Cicero, Montaigne’s bête noir, “spoke of music as enabling us to ‘return’ to the divine region,” as the soul listening to traditional, Pythagorean music ascends from listening to art to listening to nature to listening to God, nature’s Creator.

In this sense, “Schoenberg is really asking for a reconstruction of reality,” the “loss of reality” being “one of the principal features of modern ideology.” “He is Pythagorean in his belief that number is the key to universe,” “not in the ancient classical sense” but in his claim that he “could manipulate reality and reconstitute it on a metaphysical level.” That is “a Gnostic enterprise,” not a musical one, since “anyone who says you shall hear dissonance as consonance because of my system is engaged in reconstituting reality,” as seen in Schoenberg’s dictum, “Tonality does not serve; it must be served.” [4] In a conversation with Igor Stravinsky’s musical assistant, Robert Craft, Reilly remarks that Schoenberg couldn’t finish his masterpiece, the opera Moses und Aron (composed in the early 1930s but never staged until several years after his death) because “he could not understand why Moses was punished for striking the rock a second time.” He refers to incidents related in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20. Moses’ rod was the rod of political authority. Earlier, he had struck the river and turned it to blood. At Exodus 17 he strikes the rock of Horeb, causing water to come out, saving his people, who were dying of thirst. As theologian Charles Henry Mackintosh interprets the passage, turning the river to blood foreshadows Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. The Rock symbolizes Christ himself, out of whose side water flowed, on the Cross, when pierced by a spear. Referring to Romans 6: 9-10, Hebrews 9:26, 28, and 1 Peter 3:18, theologian Charles Henry Mackintosh writes, “the smiting could only take place once; it was never to be repeated,” as “there can be no repetition of the death of Christ.” [5] Later, God tells Moses to take up not his rod of political authority but his son Aaron’s priestly rod not to strike the rock but to speak to it before the Israelites, who again are rebelling because they again lack water for themselves and their livestock. Moses disobeys, striking the rock twice. The water did come out of it; the Apostle Paul understands this as drinking “of that spiritual rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). Mackintosh explains God’s punishment of Moses, barring him from entering the Promised Land, as substituting an act, properly a political gesture, for a speech, properly a priestly gesture, a gesture God Himself had authorized. As Mackintosh observes, “A word would have sufficed in connection with the rod of priesthood—the rod of grace.” That is, in God’s response to Moses’ disobedient reversal of the roles God had assigned to him, He punished Moses politically, denying him entry into the land upon which God will establish the Israelites in His regime, while permitting him to see that land from the top of Mount Pisgah, an instance of His grace. [6] When Reilly cites the passages in the New Testament, Craft remarks, “Well, that certainly closes the door on [Schoenberg’s] Moses.” Reilly’s point is that Schoenberg’s atonality and seriality truncates music because the nihilist metaphysic underlying that atonality and seriality truncates reality. His music “was a reflection of the spiritual collapse of Europe.” 

By contrast, American symphonist David Diamond, who complains that audiences listening to many of the avant-garde works are “not really listening to the art of music” but to “the sensation of sound”; this has played out in popular music, too, inasmuch as rock music is very far from Rock music. “Only two great figures hold my spiritual, theological attention”: Moses and Jesus of Nazareth. “These two men are going to be always with us in that vast spiritual sense of what their particular contributions were. And once I bring that together with my musical spiritual force, I think that’s what the future will be in sustaining my own music.” Although Diamond never quite claims that “the great spiritual values in life” are necessarily “religious spiritual values,” he does insist, “Music that does not nourish you spiritually is not music, only aural sensations.” Reilly finds a similar sensibility in the Danish composer, Vagn Holmboe, whose compositional technique, which he called “metamorphosis,” resembles Schoenberg’s twelve-tonism, but with a difference: while Schoenberg is a historicist, a would-be conqueror of nature, Holmboe derives his technique from nature, as seen in the term “metamorphosis” itself, the natural process whereby an organism matures, becomes what it is ‘in full,’ without any human interference or imposition. “The argument from history leads to creation ex nihilo, not so much in imitation of God as a replacement for him—the Nietzschean will to power”; “the argument from nature leads to creation in cooperation with the Creator and to a larger harmony,” since (as Holmbue once said) “cosmos does not develop from chaos without a prior vision of cosmos.” This, Reilly comments, “could come straight from one of St. Thomas Aquinas’ proofs for the existence of God.”

Diamond and Holmbue were not alone. There has been an entire “cycle of practically unknown symphonies and other orchestral works and chamber music” that shows “the twentieth century to have been far more musically interesting and rich than many may have thought.” To be “surprised by beauty” in listening to this music might also lead to C. S. Lewis’s experience of being “surprised by joy.” [7] 

Edmund Burke distinguishes the beautiful, which he associates with the arts of classical antiquity, from the sublime, the supreme example of which is the Cross. To find beauty and joy in the sublime, or more accurately in association with it, is to acknowledge that the road to the rediscovery of beauty is no more pleasant and harmonious than the journey to the Promised Land. As the American composer Benjamin Britten testified, “I’ve discovered that being simple and considering things spiritual of importance produces violent reactions.” Rochberg’s path away from “organized atonality” “involved a great deal of thought, passion, and suffering.” Wounded in World War II, afflicted by the death of his son, Paul, after the war, he found that serial music “was bankrupted by its inability to express grief, love or hope.” “Without any explicitly religious basis for his own beliefs, Rochberg arrived at a hope for eternity in a Socratic way—from experience.” The Nazis sought to erase Jews and Judaism; cancer erased the body of his son. The nihilist dimension of the modern project seeks to erase, to forget, being itself. Against this (and with Plato’s playfully advanced theory of knowledge as recollection), Rochberg stood with “memorability, remembering, remembering, remembering, without which we know not ourselves or anyone, the past, the evanescent present, [and] face only a blank future.” He added, “Modernism has done little to satisfy the hunger for the experience of the marvelous, which is timeless and ahistorical.” In his music, he doesn’t even forget atonality, mixing it with the dominant tonal elements of his compositions, understanding nihilism as part of man’s spiritual experience. Like Plato’s Socrates, but unlike Schoenberg, he understands irony but never lets it take him over. Music “is a way of reaching the ineffable or exorcising the Devil,” someone whom the tyrants of his century, including Jew-hating, God-hating Hitler served even as he pursued the false Exodus, the quest for Juden Frei Lebensraum. [8]

Reilly affirms that “the central fact of history is the Nativity.” La Nativité is the French translation of the title of one of Adams’s operas, which he titled El Niño. “Nothing in his background would have led one to expect that he would turn to religious subject matter,” given what Adams himself calls his “somewhat checkered religious background.” As with many others, Adams approached religion through nature, through the experience of the birth of his daughter: “There were four people in the room, and then there were five.” “Telling the story of birth,” he went on to say, “not necessarily the birth of Jesus, but just the archetypical experience of a woman giving birth—through the words of women—became the generating idea behind El Niño.” The religious dimension of the opera is indeed checkered, as Adams draws not only from the New Testament but the Gnostic Gospels, “approach[ing] canonical Gospels and pseudo-Gospels alike, as if both were enriching myths” as per Joseph Campbell. “Ultimately, this does not work because, in the process, they lose the source” of Mary’s birth-giving, unique among all birth-givings. While Adams’s original title for his opera was How Could This Happen? “the real question is: What happened? Who is Christ?” In his later piece, Transmigration, “one can hear Adams’ spirit straining against the slavery of death, wishing to break its bonds through the exercise of memory and love,” but “wishing does not make it so.” Only the Resurrection does. [9]

Reilly classifies some agnostics and persons of vague but not decidedly anti-Christian belief to the circle of anti-nihilist composers. Among the latter, the Finn, Einojuhani Rautavaara has written “works that are almost embarrassingly beautiful.” “I am not very much for churches and denominations,” he told Reilly, “but I am for the infinite, absolutely,” recognizing that “Western culture, all of it, music and everything, is based on [the] dichotomy of two opposite forces, Greek philosophy and Christianity,” which were “united in the first millennium and became the core of Western culture.” Intuiting that “there are other kinds of realities” or “other kinds of consciousness, beyond rational concepts and words,” he finds in music “a language where we can tell about those other realities almost with exactness without words,” a “language of the angels.” He takes care not to suppose that such a reality, such a consciousness, is angelic in a sentimental way. He knows that Jacob wrestled with an angel, sustaining injury. Similarly, the British composer Gerald Finzi was a specimen of “that special breed of believing agnostic could write sublime, religiously inspired music.” That is, Reilly suspects, Finzi’s several early experiences with death—his father, three brothers, and his music teacher all died before he reached adulthood—may have left him with a grudge against God, blocking any receptivity to faith. “Finzi’s frequent encounters with death easily explain his attraction to the poetry and the pessimism of Thomas Hardy, another English agnostic, many of whose poems Finzi set to music.” Yet even as he “lived under the death sentence of Hodgkin’s disease,” which killed him in middle age, Finzi’s “profound appreciation for and immersion in the beauty of nature” saved him from nihilism. “Beauty was Finzi’s window onto God, his meeting place with him”—if not God in the self-consciously Christian sense, then God in Wordworth’s neo-Platonic sense, “a dim intimation of our immortality.” “The essence of art is order, completion and fulfillment,” Finzi wrote. “Something is created out of nothing, order out of chaos; and as we succeed in shaping our intractable material into coherence, and form, a relief comes to the mind (akin to the relief experienced at the remembrance of some forgotten thing).” [10]

The twentieth century saw the rivalry of the Soviet Union and the United States—a regime of theist socialism against a regime of increasingly secular commercialism. Dmitri Shostakovich, “the first significant Russian composer to have been completely educated under the Communist regime,” found himself “in a state of constant tension with it. The Soviet ruling class “alternately celebrating and suppressed his music, depending on how Joseph Stalin was feeling.” Shostakovich’s 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsenk District, was a “tragedy-satire” (as its composer called it), set in 1860s Russia. In it, a merchant’s wife murders her father-in-law, who blundered upon her in the midst of a tryst with her lover; for good measure, she murders her husband, too, before being arrested and shipped to Siberia, where “she commits suicide while drowning the mistress of her unfaithful lover in a lake.” (Reilly adds, “And Katerina is the one with whom we are supposed to sympathize.”) Stalin was unsympathetic, calling it “muddle instead of music” and likely suspecting in it a jab at Kremlin infighting or, as Reilly suggests, a pointed lament about Russia, symbolized in the figure of Katerina, “dying in the nightmarish atmosphere of the Soviet Union” in a “mordant morality tale of how unhinged passion becomes if it cannot anchor itself in love.” “This loveless society is drenched in alcohol, cupidity, and lasciviousness,” as “everything is coarsened; everything is false; everything is a lie.” The Soviet regime itself was founded upon an ignoble lie, a “total lie” about “who and what human beings are.” Such dehumanization leads to murder—many murders. And so, while Shostakovich prudently groveled in apology to the comrades, acting as “a good Soviet cultural apparatchik, which included being sent abroad as a musical emissary,” “all was not as it seemed.” “Shostakovich was engaged in secret writing—in the exact way in which political philosopher Leo Strauss defined it, although transposed to the world of music.” Reilly knows this because Shostakovich himself says so in his memoir, Testimony; “he had been speaking in musical code.” For example, he planned his Seventh Symphony, subtitled Leningrad, before the war began, and thus before Hitler’s attack on the city; Shostakovich writes, “It’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed, and that Hitler merely finished off.” When asked about this and other works, “I answer different people differently, because different people deserve different answers.” As indeed they do. But in Testimony he indeed could offer his final testament: “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones…. I’m willing to write a composition for each of the victims, but that’s impossible, and that’s why I dedicate my music to them all.”

“If Shostakovich’s symphonies are tombstones, the 15 quartets are the flowers he lays on the graves,” traces of the life of Russia, “a world that Lenin and Stalin attempted to destroy—the world of the human soul, from which emanate the most basic impulses to sing praise and to dance in delight, which is why we still listen.” However, Reilly describes Shostakovich’s mournful but not despairing last quartet, paralleling Haydn’s The Last Seven Words of Christ on the Cross, as a work of desolation, a “Cross without Christ, or Good Friday without the Resurrection,” Shostakovich having been no Christian. “The people who were responsible for these evil deeds,” the crimes of Soviet Communism, “will have to answer for them, if only before their descendants. If I didn’t believe in that completely, life wouldn’t be worth living.” If the Communists do not answer before God, they will need to answer before the ‘History’ that they invoked as the justification for their crimes. [11]

And the United States? “Despite Hollywood’s attempts to portray our lives as empty and ugly in movies like American Beauty, there is such a thing as beauty in America,” beautiful music that “runs through the nation’s entire history.” As with all American cultural styles, early American music was imported from Europe, but by the twentieth century “those European threads were woven into an American musical tapestry of unique design,” characterized by “strength, directness of expression”—no Hitlers, no Stalins here—an “openhearted yearning, and an element of naïveté.” Reilly considers Samuel Barber an “exemplar of American beauty,” who “gave romanticism a fresh start with his melodic and orchestral genius” as “the composer the avant-garde loved to hate” and the actual concertgoers loved to love. Among these, his Knoxville: Summer of 1915, one of his “Essays for Orchestra,” derives from a short prose poem by James Agee, a “lyric rhapsody” capturing a child’s memory of “the simple sights and sounds of an evening with his family on the lawn before going to bed,” a family for whom he prays, but from whom he will not learn “who I am.” “No, of course they will not, cannot,” Reilly answers, “because your identity is hidden in your Creator, who will show you to yourself when he meets you.” “From the beginning, America’s sense of realism immunized a number of American composers,” including Barber, “against Schoenberg’s ideology,” which “passed through America’s bloodstream without inflict permanent damage,” being “alien to our practical nature” and, perhaps, alien to a people founded on the conviction that their rights derive from nature.

Reilly concludes that “the attempted suicide of Western classical music has failed.” Schoenberg attempted to drive nature out of music with a pitchfork, but it returned. His “systematic fragmentation of music,” the “logical working of out the premise that music is not governed by mathematical relationships and laws that inhere in the structure of a hierarchical and ordered universe, but is wholly constructed by man and therefore essentially without limits or definition” proved quite simply unsustainable. The “spiritual sickness” of the twentieth century, seen in artistic avant-gardism and the political avant-gardism of ‘totalitarianism,’ has weakened. Schoenberg himself inadvertently forced the crisis in his failure to finish Moses und Aron. “What began to emerge from under the rubble”—Reilly alludes to the title of Solzhenitsyn’s book—of “12-tone music back in the 1960s” was a stripped-down form of tonality called “minimalism,” pioneered by John Adams and others, who “have spoken of the crisis through which they passed in explicitly spiritual terms,” the terms of Nietzsche’s assertion that God is dead. “When you make a dogmatic decision like that early in your life,” Adams said, “it takes some kind of powerful experience to undo it.” As the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt explained, “The sterile democracy between the notes” produced by Schoenberg’s method had “killed in us every lively feeling”; life revived in their souls by the exact opposite of what Nietzsche supposes, not by exclaiming “Yes to life” without God but “Yes to life” understood as given by God. As the Pole, Henryk Górecki understood, “God gave me a backbone—it’s twisted now, but still sturdy.” 

Notes

1. See Stanley Rosen: The Limits of Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1980), reviewed on this website under the title, “Delimiting Philosophy” in the section, “Philosophers.”
2. Reilly sees in this a playing-out of Rousseau’s “non-teleological view of nature”: “Cage did for music what Rousseau did for philosophy,” and more, inasmuch as he adopted a stance of “spiritual nihilism.” That spiritual nihilism is never far from Rousseau’s thought may be seen in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, discussed on this website under the title, “Rousseau’s Solitary Walker” in the section, “Philosophers.” And, as a thousand or more writers have observed, a certain form of tyranny, seen initially in the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, grows from some, if not all, of the seeds sown in The Social Contract.
3. Maoism, however, was a form of Marxism, which claims that ‘history’ or the course of events does indeed have an order, aiming at a telos, and ‘end of history,’ as the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat replaces capitalism, itself to be replaced, finally, by communism. Insofar as the musical avantgarde partakes of historicism, it assumes that “the history of art is a series of revolutionary stages, political or otherwise, that open onto an ever-expanding horizon of art’s autonomy and freedom.” So far, this is Marx, or even Hegel. But if one removes the historical telos from historicism, then one is left with historical relativism. In Reilly’s words, “if art serves a primarily temporal function, then after that function is served and history moves on, of what remaining interest is the art?” “The revolutionary view of art” under this form of historicism “turns out to be a form of temporal provincialism.”
4. In response, Rochberg recalls that Schoenberg’s friend, painter and fellow avant-gardist Wassily Kandinsky, was an anthroposophist; “all these guys were looking for some spiritual and metaphysical way out of their dilemma” but “they had diagnosed their problem in the wrong way,” attempting to repudiate artistic tradition and “trying to start over again from scratch.” The problem is that “the past refuses to be erased.” In music, “serialism is the denial of memory,” impossible to internalize or to vocalize. “It can’t live in you.” And so, “music remains what it has always been: a sign that man is capable of transcending the limits and constraints of his material existence” not as an act of conquest but as an act of listening to words and harmonies.
5. Charles Henry Mackintosh: Genesis to Deuteronomy: Notes on the Pentateuch (Neptune: Loizeaux Brothers, 1972 [1882]), p. 561.
6. Ibid., pp. 460-461.
7. “Music was sacred to him,” Craft says of Stravinsky; he was “the composer of joy.” And in his interview with the eminent opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti, Reilly cites the longed-for, “joyous meeting” with God longed for by Annina, the heroine of his opera, The Saint of Bleecker Street.
8. Another refugee from avant-gardism, the American composer George Antheil, the self-described Bad Boy of Music, had “stood shoulder to shoulder with his friends Ezra Pound, Picasso, James Joyce, Fernand Léger” in Paris of the 1920s, but after his Ballet mécanique had gone “as far as one can go in [that] direction,” he followed Stravinsky “into neoclassicism.” As a result, while Pound admired Mussolini’s Fascism, Picasso and Léger Stalin’s Communism, Antheil wrote The Shape of the War to Come, “in which he predicted the events of World War II with astonishing precision.” That is, Antheil reconnected himself with reality, in music and politics alike.
9. Redemption of human souls anticipates their resurrection. Redemption by the grace of God became the central theme of Francis Poulenc, “the witty playboy of French music,” who converted to Christianity in reaction to the sudden death of his best friend, the composer Pierre-Octave Perroud in 1936. Poulenc wrote Dialogues des Carmélites, “an opera for those who hate the French Revolution”—Reilly numbers himself among them—recalling the 1792 murder of priests by the Jacobins in a Carmelite convent they had turned into a prison, following Voltaire’s slogan, Ecrasez l’infame. “Two years later, the prayer police caught a group of Carmelite nuns from Compiègne still secretly practicing their vows,” a crime punishable by death. They were guillotined. Poulenc modeled his opera on a screenplay by George Bernanos. The Sisters “die singing the Salve Regina.” (For a careful discussion of Poulenc’s work, see Peter Kalkavage: Music and the Idea of a World (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024), reviewed on this website under the title, “Does Music Mean Anything?” in the category, “Manners and Morals.”
10. Agnosticism, not rare in modern England, also characterizes Ralph Vaughan Williams. A clergyman’s son but not a Christian himself, Williams “nevertheless imbued his works with a deep spirituality,” his music and indeed his soul having “absolutely nothing to do with the avant-garde. Like Finzi, he loves nature, but unlike Finzi, his music often mourns “the loss of nature” in modernity and registers his anger against that loss. “Anger gives his music sinews that the more meandering pastoral works, despite their charm, sometimes lack.”
11. Similarly, in Latvia, Pēteris Vasks wrote music that (as he said) “tell[s] in eight minutes how beautiful and harmonious the world is”—this, in contrast to the “aesthetic of ugliness” seen in the avant-garde art of his century, consistent with the totalitarian-tyrannical regime that imposed itself on his country from its capital in Moscow. His Cello Concerto, for example, depicts what Vasks calls “the persistence of a personality against crude, brutal power; what totalitarian power did to us, how we are to purge ourselves from this manipulation”—a witness to “the spiritual steadfastness of my people.” He titled first movement of his String Symphony—Voices “Voices of Silence,” the title of André Malraux’s best-known book on art, written in resistance to the historical determinism of Marxist ideology. In Vasks’s symphony, the “Voices of Silence” serves as the prelude to “Voices of Life” and, finally, “Voices of Conscience.” 

Peter Kalkavage: Music and the Idea of a World. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

Although our contemporaries associate music with meaning, with lyrics, they typically deny it any intrinsic meaning, relegating it to the realm of aesthetic pleasure when they do not regard it as an adjunct to rhetoric, a sort of energy boost to some ‘message.’ There must be something wrong about that, given the complexity of so much music, especially ‘classical’ music. Why would Bach bother?

Peter Kalkavage shows how composers have in fact set their music in accordance with their “idea of a world,” a world that might be the cosmos, the soul, the course of events, the world music itself makes, or some (or all) of those things. Reserving consideration of symphonic composition, “instrumental music,” for another time, he mostly discusses music accompanied by words, which unquestionably make the meaning of music clearer. Beginning with the music of classical antiquity as understood by Pythagoras and Plato, he moves from the Christian music of Bach, the Enlightenment music of Mozart, the Schopenhauerian music of Wagner, the Nietzschean music of Schoenberg, and finally to return to Christian music in Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites.

The contrast between Plato and Schopenhauer, between “cosmological optimism” and “cosmological pessimism,” frames his account. Socrates calls philosophy “the greatest music” in the Phaedo, initially bans the lesser sorts of music from his City in Speech in the Republic, then readmits them with stipulated stern conditions. For Socrates, Plato, and the Greeks generally, ‘music’ encompasses both tunes and poetry; it is both promising and “dangerous” because it wields “the power to shape the soul for good or ill, to make the psychic regime orderly or disorderly.” So great is this power to pervade and persuade the soul that it “verges on the supernatural,” causing “the listener to be held and spellbound,” thanks to its “intense personal inwardness,” which can “form our character, opinions, and way of life,” shaping “our whole being.” “In music, there is no safe distance, as there is in sight, between perceiver and perceived, subject and object”; moreover, like the voice of God, musical tones “come to us when they want to,” as “we must wait for a moment to sound.” Although music acts upon the emotions of the listener, it does so “through the order and precision of its tones and rhythms.” Even when it “overwhelm[s] our reason and self-control,” it does so in accordance with a measure, indeed a mathematical measure, arranged by its composer. This is the “paradox” of music. In the Timaeus, Critias of Athens, claims the capacity to “harmonize the particulars of Socrates’ city in speech with those of an ancient unsung Athens,” a myth he’s made up. This comports with Critias’ childhood initiation during “a festival in honor of Dionysus, the god of intoxication,” in which “impressionable youths are officially rooted in the tribe and by extension their city.” Intoxicated by song, by songs composed by the eminently sober Athenian lawgiver, Solon, Critias and his fellow youths assimilate the Solonian regime and its laws. But rival poet-rhetorician Timaeus of Italy upstages Critias with a much more philosophically ambitious speech, a “long speech about the cosmos”—the ‘regime’ of nature,’ so to speak. 

Timaeus’ speech opposes both Socrates’ critique of poetry in the Republic and the theory of the Ideas propounded in that dialogue. “It is an apologia or defense of Becoming and body in response” to the Socratic presentation of nature as fundamentally stable. Whereas Socrates argues that “genuine education turns the soul away from Becoming or flux and toward the changeless realm of Being,” from the Cave of conventional opinion to the realm of the eternal Ideas, Timaeus’ “likely story…takes us in the opposite direction, from Being down to Becoming,” telling “how an ingenious craftsman-god, who is without envy and who gazed on archetypal Being, brought order to the primordial chaos through a combination of forethought and the beautiful structures of mathematics.” Socrates calls this story or mythos not an account of nature but a nomos, “which in Greek means both law and song, as well as custom and convention”—the sort of thing philosophy ascends from. And because, as the Greek musicologist Damon taught (and as both Critias, Socrates, and Timaeus all evidently hold), any change in music eventually cause a change in the “greatest political laws”—those that instantiate the regime of the city—Timaeus’ beautifully crafted myth threatens any particular city because it “makes us law-abiding citizens of the world—good cosmopolitans—instead of good citizens of Athens or any other polis and, moreover, that the world we are to love, whose laws we abide by, consists of matter in flux. 

The laws of the ever-shifting, material world or cosmos derive from mathematics. Mathematics is a kind of music, albeit “not music that one can hear but an intellectual, hermetic music that is inscribed in the nature of things.” It is, however, closely related to the music we hear, with ‘physical’ music. “The greatest musical moment in the story is the construction of the musical scale out of ratios of whole numbers,” a construction “based on the momentous Pythagorean discovery that the intervals that make up melody—octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, whole tone—are produced by string-lengths that are in the smallest whole-number ratios: 2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the perfect fifth, 4:3 for the perfect fourth, and 9:8 for the whole tone.” Since music always moves, this means that mathematics animates the cosmic flux from the orbits of the planets to the human soul. “Musicality” in a human soul means “the adjustment and tuning of all our actions to the regular, periodic movements of the heavens”; to have achieved musicality is “to live a life that is in every respect well timed, symmetrical, and balanced—the life of a star.” The rhythmic cosmic flux causes souls that allow themselves to get out of tune, living “an acosmic, unmusical life,” “re-enter Becoming in an animal form suitable to their moral and intellectual degradation.” Even those who re-enter life as humans begin their material life as “mindless, inarticulate babies, incapable of controlling any of our movements.” This makes education necessary, “the most important part” of which is mathematical astronomy, a discipline that fixes our attention upon the stars, brings a soul back to the star from which it originated. Just as navigators steer a ship by looking up at the stars, so the study of mathematical astronomy can guide human beings in life, preventing them from devolution into lower animals after the death of their bodies. Music is “therapy.” As Timaeus puts it, music is “the means of “bringing the soul into arrangement and concord with herself.”

Socrates and Timaeus do agree on one thing, that music and poetry either are or should be rational. Not so, Schopenhauer, who asserts “the supremacy of will over intellect” in music and indeed in the cosmos. By “will” Schopenhauer means not the will of any person, including God (“for Schopenhauer there is no God”) but “the universal, cosmic force and infinite striving that underlies all things and rises to self-awareness in man.” Flux, to be sure, but not rational flux: genuine human self-awareness recognizes human beings as animated by “feeling and care.” “My living body reminds me that I am constantly in the condition of seeking to preserve my life and to stave off harm, pain, frustration, and death,” and “my being and life consist in striving to be and to live,” even when I sleep, since my dreams consist of “my hopes, fears, anxieties, and desires made into a private movie, often a surreal one.” As with moderns generally, this ineluctable self-focus supports individualism, seen (in different ways) in Machiavelli, Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. Unlike those philosophers, however, Schopenhauer is a pessimist, conceiving of human life as tragic, forever in conflict with brute reality. The world is will/force objectified, but it objectifies itself “in a fourfold way: as inorganic nature, plant life, animal life, and human life.” 

Music fits into this because “music is unique among the arts” in “depict[ing] the inner world of care—pure subjective meaning apart from all objectivity,” not a “rational world soul but the passionate world heart.” The claim that the cosmic condition is one of perpetual change, perpetual becoming, comports with the claim that passion is the heart of the cosmos; passions surge, moods alter, as time goes by. Politically, the passionate character of the world heart and the music it depicts implies a certain egalitarianism. Music for Schopenhauer “is not an elitist Pythagorean who speaks only to her learned inner circle but rather the ‘universal language’ that is ‘instantly understood by everyone,’ intuitively and without the aid of concepts.” Attending to music scarcely ‘tunes’ the soul to a cosmic harmony, since there is no such thing. Life consists of “infinite striving,” the “insatiable desire” of the “egocentric individual,” who, as Hobbes already puts it, seeks power after power without any purpose or ‘end,’ and only ceases to do so when he dies. Thus, “to live is to suffer”; life “is an outright curse.” Schopenhauer likens human life to Ixion, whom Zeus punished by Zeus for daring to desire Hera, thrusting him on a wing of fire in Tartarus. Ixion’s only, temporary relief from eternal torture occurred when Orpheus “descended into the Underworld and charmed its inhabitants with his song,” distracting them from their agonies. Music preeminently, the other fine arts to lesser degrees, representing the will “as thing-in-itself,” divorced from physicality and even from psychic striving, allows selves to lose themselves, to “detach us from the objects of our care.” “To behold the sufferings of Oedipus or Lear is precisely to be taken away from our own,” if only for a while. Not the artist but the saint, who has “neutralized the will to be and to live through the gnosis of nothingness,” who has adopted a stance of thoroughgoing resignation towards all that is, including himself, no longer suffers and is “free to feel compassion for the suffering of other human beings and even for that of animals.” But music is an important step in the saintly direction. Listening to music, Schopenhauer writes, is “an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing.” Thus, it turns out that individualism, the characteristically modern claim, “applies only to the world of phenomena,” which is illusory. While he resembles Timaeus in claiming that music enables us to connect us with “will as process rather than with a stable mode of soul and character,” he regards music not as “sensed ratio” but as “the embodiment of tension or force.” Music’s core is not consonance or harmony but dissonance, “the tonal analogue of desire,” best heard in the appoggiatura, the “leaning tone,” the “perfect musical analogue of longing,” of eros. 

“Music as force flourishes in the tradition of modern tonal harmony,” from Bach to Wagner and to this day. In it, “there is a play of forces: tonal dynamism,” a music “friendly to the language of will, since will is tension, and force is will that has not yet attained self-consciousness.” Schopenhauer regards Wagner’s music as the supreme expression of the force that is longing, “the tonal analogue of eros as infinite longing,” with no telos, no rest. In Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, “the universal, undying truth of the story is not in the death-bound characters but in the tones.” Music, Schopenhauer writes, is “a copy of the will itself.” Whereas the other arts can only “present universality through the medium of things,” music “makes no such appeal and represents, imitates the world’s pure subjectivity” through “tones all by themselves.” The other arts are visual, and Socrates’ theory of the Ideas, requiring the sunlight of the Good, outside the Cave of convention, rejects the world of hearing, of opinion, oral poetry, rhetoric. Schopenhauer rejects sight for hearing, hearing of “the melody to which the world is the text.” “Tones all by themselves represent the indwelling, immortal spirit of the world.” Melody is “the ultimate mythos and symbol of human life” inasmuch as it portrays, as Schopenhauer puts it, “every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling, and which cannot be further taken up into the abstractions of reason.” “Nothing in the natural world or in the inner and outer life of man” does not “find its counterpart in the all-embracing realm of tones.” Music symbolizes “the whole of things.” 

There is still another music, apart from the ‘ancient’ music discussed in the Platonic dialogues or the ‘modern’ music Schopenhauer loves. It is the music of the Bible, the music of polyphony, the music of the Creator-God, who is neither “a craftsman who leaves the world after having made it, nor Aristotle’s indifferent prime mover.” And contra Schopenhauer and the moderns, the God of the Bible exists and, moreover, is a person “to whom one can pray.” With the God of the Bible, “salvation comes not from dialectic, or astronomy, or art, or the death of care based on the gnosis of cosmic nothingness, but from faith in God.” We hear it in the “unperturbed disposition” of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Sicut cervus, where “the music is a continually graceful gesture that transmutes the pain of longing into a serene order of voices that seem always to know and love their place.” In this choral music, “the voice that follows seems to be inspired to enter by the one that leads,” with each part moving “in happy obedience to the rules of good voice leading.” “They seem to delight in each other’s company and to be naturally social,” members of “a musical community that captures the sound and being of friendship.” Individual, yes; individualistic, no. “The voices of Sicut cervus…may be said to enact the contrapuntal play and gracious reciprocity that we find among souls in Dante’s Paradiso.“

Following the argument of the Austrian musicologist Victor Zuckerkandl, who preceded him at St. John’s College, Kalkavage understands music as “heard motion,” motion both in the outer world and the inner world of the soul or the body. Zuckerkandl “comes very close to positing, with Schopenhauer, a cosmic will,” while departing from the philosopher in refraining from “regard[ing] the external world as an illusion” and music as “the symbology of emotion, although it certainly arouses emotions.” Nor does he share Schopenhauer’s view of music as a “private momentary refuge from the wheel of Ixion” but, on the contrary, as “the frequently communal flourishing of our innately musical nature and a celebratory mode of being-in-the-world.” In this, he comes much closer not only to the world but to the God of the Bible, and the gods of the Greek poets, all of them persons acting in time, rather than the god of the philosophers, which exist “beyond place, time, and motion and therefore beyond music.” An eternal and temporal God acts in a time conceived in contradiction to Schopenhauer and Van Gogh, who thought of time “as Kronos, the giant who devoured his children.” Music ‘keeps time’ by moving rhythmically: “We hear the waltz-wave that comes to us, and we move with it.” This is not Schopenhauer, it is Bergson.

It is also modern, in the sense that tonal music breaks with the ‘modal’ music, as it is called, the Church music of the Middle Ages. “In the music of earlier times,” Zuckerkangl writes, tones were not free; they were bound to words, as in song, or to actions that call for regular bodily movement, as in dance, work, ceremonial. Thus the world of things, the spatial world, forced itself into the tonal world, mingled with it, and was able to prevent an insight into the very essence of music.” That essence finds its expression not in voices but in musical instruments. As Kalkavage paraphrases him, “Time, through tonal music, becomes the new medium for image-formation, the medium in which human beings can now find a paradigmatic meaning that is more faithful to the dynamic, forward-moving world in which they live and to the ever-developing freedom of the human spirit.” It is to be noted that Kalkavage has written extensively on Hegel, and he observes that Zuckerkangl “seems to rely on a Hegelian supposition of historical progress.” Modal music, by contrast, features not so much motion and struggle but constancy and peace. The monks who sing it sing with relaxed throats. They sing slowly, leaving space for reverent contemplation, a glowing solemnity. Modal music was held to be healing. It does not strive for God because in a sense the monks are already with Him. Nothing about it is rushed, worried, busy.

This is not to say that modern music abandons space and rest entirely. How could the tones of modern music sound separately “if space did not keep them apart?” And “how could polyphony, many voices at once, be possible without a space in which the many voices pursued their distinguishable linear careers?” Music moves from outside me to inside me. I am the “destination and addressee” of musical tones. Unlike thoughts, tones “always come from me from without,” surrounding me. But unlike color, which also comes from outside of me, it is not delimited in one space. The eye highlights the externality of Being, its externality. In its movement, music mimics life, the life that surrounds us and permeates us. (Again, Bergson.) This makes music “a window to nature.” “In music, we experience space as not empty but full. It is space that is alive.” As such (and now quoting Zuckerkandl again), tones “encounter not only me but one another.” He compares it to a magnetic force-field. Music isn’t simply a matter of “aesthetic beauty” but of “cognition and truth.” “Like philosophy, it is a mode of openness to the whole of all things, a cognitive attunement to the way things are, not conceptual but intuitive.” The life, the nature of tonal music centers in its polyphony, as in Verdi’s opera, Otello, in which Othello and Desdemona, Iago and Emilia, sing at the same time without cacophony. “Tones can do this because, as directed tensions in auditory space, they encounter one another, relate to one another in determinate ways,” as “the words ride, as it were, on the coattails of tones.” And, with anti-Schopenhauerian optimism, they ride ‘upward,’ toward crescendo. This is not the utopian, “better world” of Romanticism but “rather a mode of access to the world in which we live.” “Nature is seen to have through music an inner life, a kind of soul that animates and enchants the external world”; it is integral to nature. It would be a mistake to say that music has “a particular meaning or meanings”; rather, it has “meaningfulness.” “The external world is revealed as the material host and home of immaterial tending.” Unlike Zuckerkangl, who inclines to reject the rational aspect of music, Kalkavage concurs with Timaeus and his esteem for “the Pythagorean ratios. “Number is a bond between music and nature, and a cause of the world’s beautiful order.” Like the world, music is measurable. It is no chaos. It can partake in logos, marry words. To consider this marriage, Kalkavage turns to a couple of arias, both on love: “divine love” in the aria, “Out of love is my Savior willing to die” in Bach’s St Matthew Passion and “This image is enchantingly beautiful” in Mozart’s Magic Flute.

In Matthew 26-27, Jesus tells his disciples to take and eat the bread, representing his body, then to take and drink from the cup of wine, representing his blood. The Last Supper is last, spiritually considered, because acceptance of Christ’s covenant, integrating His sacrificial love into oneself, is the last meal anyone will ever need on earth. Breaking the bread, the body of Jesus, drinking the wine, the life-blood of Jesus, evokes His Passion, the supreme pain inflicted by God the Father upon His Son, for the sake of the salvation of His followers. “The arias of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion are the most stunning evocations of passion in the work.” “What role do our passions,” evoked by mingling words and tones, “play in the Passion as depicted by Bach?” And “What does Bach’s music contribute to our understanding of Christ’s suffering and death?”

Given the agony of the Passion as the supreme expression of divine love, the music is, must be, “relentless in its surge and complexity,” the “sound of a depth that continually rises to the heavens.” While the first two choruses lament, the third, the voices of the boys’ choir “float on high, as if from the heavens, down upon the surging tide of all the adult complexity and confusion.” They invite the listeners to become as little children. “Bach combines dark and bright, complex and simple, exotic and familiar, somber and joyous, bitter and sweet”—all impassioned. Yet, “as musical meditations they are also a means by which the events in Matthew’s story become objects of thought.” The overarching thought is, “Out of love is my Savior willing to die”—an innocent who takes the worst punishment to save me from “eternal damnation,” the just judgment of God, inasmuch as sins against an eternal Person might be considered to deserve eternal punishment. Bach accompanies the song of the voices with the song of a flute, whose “wordless song establishes a mood of sublime desolation,” a mood of longing, of eros; the soprano’s song that follows is a song not of eros but of agape, of divine love. “Eros, we might say, is summoned in order to be purified, purged of his self-seeking carnality.” Pan’s pipes will now be cleansed of lust. God needs nothing; His love isn’t erotic, like the love of the Greek gods. His love exists only for the sake of His creation. Nor is the aria willful, not in the desiring sense or even in the sense of willingness, of consent. “The song is not about the subjective state, the resolve or willingness, of the singer”; it is rather “the direct statement of a fact, the most wondrous fact the world has ever known, that Jesus, as the incarnation of divine love, submitted to an grossly unjust sentence (he ‘stood in’ for man) so that the jut sentence of eternal damnation would not fall upon us.” “Bach deputizes the soprano to reveal the doctrinal core of Jesus’s sacrifice,” that “God loves man and desires to save him from the fate he deserves.” The aria is a ‘solo.’ Like Jesus on the Cross, the singer is alone, singing a “bare, lonely sound [that] captures the terrifying vulnerability of Jesus,” a “sound of love as self-divestment, love as sacrifice.” “Nothing less than an eternal love was necessary if we were to be saved from eternal damnation.”

The “power of song” consists in inducing the listener “not just [to] register meaning but experience it,” “do[ing] for words what words cannot do for themselves,” giving them “new life,” even as God’s love give man new life. “When words and tones are wedded, words strike us, come home to us, in a most intimate and powerful way,” in the most loving way. “Conceptual meaning” is one thing, the “weight and power” of what we think of is quite another. “To be fully awake to faith, we must be struck, perhaps even shocked, by the objects of faith”—pierced as surely as Jesus was pierced by the centurion’s spear. In no way does Kalkavage intend to minimize, let alone denigrate, the conceptual meaning of words, including God’s Word. “Bach’s music offers the listener food for thought” by means of “the listener’s faculty for delight” and of “wonder at the sacrifice that is at the center of Christian faith and at the power of music that can bring about a more intimate union with that faith.” 

The question that philosophers, ancient and modern, raise about any such intimate union is, has the love whose bonds have been tightened bound you to the truth? Mozart is a man of the Enlightenment, indeed a Freemason, and he takes us “from Bach’s musicalized world of divine love to the love between man and woman and the secular religion of [his] Magic Flute.” The aria in question is, “This image is enchantingly beautiful.” A man of the Enlightenment wants to know if the image really depicts a nature that is as beautiful, as really enchanting; the man of the Bible suspects idolatry in either enchantment. When Prince Tamino looks longingly at the picture of Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night, is he looking at, longing for, the real thing? The Magic Flute is “filled with Masonic ideals, symbols, terms, rituals, and numerology,” but do they indicate anything real? if “in responding to music we perceive feelingly and feel perceptively,” with perception as “primary,” and if musical tones enable us to “gain entrance” to the “musical universe,” how does the musical universe bring listeners to the core of the universe? 

In the opera, the Queen of the Night intends “to use Tamino’s love for Pamino to seduce the hero into saving Pamina from Sarastro, the supposed villain who has abducted Pamina”—a ‘secular’ salvation. In seeing the image, Tamino doesn’t merely stare. He questions his feeling, identifying it as love, then wondering not at what he feels but what he would do if his beloved were really there. That is, he looks, he feels; Montaigne-like, he “beholds his inner state and makes it an object of reflection,” engaging in “inner dialogue and questioning,” then finally thinks again, not of his beloved, simply, nor of his now-clarified condition of soul, but of what action fits the apparent character of his beloved and the love that has taken perceived form in his mind and heart. The music of the aria itself has a character, Besonnenheit or “rational awareness, sensibleness, being in one’s right mind.” The love of the Biblical God, agape, expresses God’s nature as Logos; the love of the Enlightenment man is no less rational, but perhaps rational in a different way. The love of the Biblical God commands his followers to be as innocent as doves but as prudent as serpents. The love of the Enlightenment man also brings him to prudent action (if perhaps not so much to innocence). Musically, Mozart’s tonal harmony, with its “structured movement,” guides the souls of listeners to reasoning love, reasoning life. The orchestral finale to Tamino’s aria “capture the two complementary sides of Tamino’s nature: the first heroic and forte, the second ender and piano,” ending “with a hush,” because “what Tamino ultimately desires is not continued arousal or heroism for his own sake, but rest—the blissful repose and heart’s ease that comes from lasting union with the beloved.”

So is the lover’s reasoning, measured, balanced soul, a soul that does not wreck itself in its erotic longing. As Tamino’s beloved, “Pamina is the focal point of the opera.” Their names are nearly identical twins, differing finally in sex; they are well matched, if their sexual difference can be reconciled. Pamina, as a woman, is the vulnerable one, the one who “endures the greatest and most prolonged sufferings: her mother’s absence, the stern tutelage of Sarastro, the violent advances and blackmail of Monostatos, the revelation of the mother she loves as a demon bent on a murder Pamina herself is ordered to commit.” In her despair, she sings what has been called Mozart’s greatest aria. The ‘magic’ flute is music, magical in the sense that it enchants and enlightens at once—precisely the marriage philosophy doubts, when contemplating poetry, most immediately the sung poetry, the winged words, of Homer. Mozart would redeem secular, Enlightenment, rationalism from its prosaicness while saving music and poetry from delusion. “It is Pamina who reveals that the magical vocation of music is not to gain power over others—the Machiavellian passion—”or to court”—the seductive passion at the core of Romanticism—”or merely to amuse oneself”—the trivial life of what Nietzsche would later deride as that of the Last Man—but “to ward off the fear of death,” the Hobbesian passion that may undergird all of the other modern passions. At the end of the opera, Tamino, by now well tested by a series of trials, finally sees his beloved face to face—as the Bible promises those redeemed by Christ will see one another in Paradise. The lovers “now see each other clearly for the first time,” see one another not as images or as ideas or as ideals, in what Kalkavage (that student of Hegel) calls “mutual recognition.” They sing in “two halves of a little musical circle in F major,” a “wedding ceremony in tones.” “Passion, now perceptive, finds its purpose.” Love is no “mere feeling” but an “act,” an act taking in knowledge of the beloved “not as an eternal possession but as a partner in the trials of life.” Even more than music, Pamina is “the true magic of Mozart’s Magic Flute.” The lovers are Adam and Eve, “Man and Woman,” perfected in this world. This intimate order can then form the foundation of a just political order, “the marriage of marriage and politics, private and public, love and rule” in a reconciliation of opposites in which neither one of the pair loses his, her, identity or unique soul. The names become a nature. 

The Christian music of Bach, the Enlightenment music of Mozart, both intended to heal wounded human nature, no longer prevail in the atonal music of Schoenberg. Behind that composer sit the philosopher, Schopenhauer and the composer, Richard Wagner. The “musical universe” of Tristan and Isolde “consecrates a love that combines the human and the divine—not in Christ as mediator or in marriage and a perfected social order, but in eros and its bond with death as a sacred consummation.” Wagner had indeed read The World as Will and Representation while he composed his Ring cycle; the philosopher’s “cosmic gloom” resonated with him. With Schopenhauer, he considered Eros as a dangerous god who leads lovers not to joy but sorrow. “What the force of cosmic Eros does to the lover-acolytes, Wagner does to his listeners through tones,” deployed “violently, tyrannically, like love itself,” expressing “the raw subjectivity of feeling.” Unlike Schopenhauer, however, Wagner attempts to elevate love beyond the status of “a ruse that the noumenal will employs to propagate the species,” a delusion that suckers us into propagating our kind. For him, as for the ancients, Eros binds souls, not only bodies in its Dionysian frenzy, making it all the more fatal. Tristan commits what is effectively suicide in a sword fight; Isolde follows him in death, each experiencing the “highest bliss,” the condition of “unconsciousness achieved when love as Eros is pushed to its extreme point.” as each foregoes “the trivial transitory pleasures of sex for the final rush of self-immolation and metaphysical union.” “Death is the ultimate union,” the “union of the lovers with one another through union with the World Spirit,” whereby they achieve “freedom from bodily, worldly taint and from the principle and prison of individuation.” [1] When they sing, Eros “sings through them.” “Love, for Wagner, seeks the total merging of the lovers’ separate selves,” not in “mere being-with or even an eternal intertwining,” but “the total merging of the lovers’ separate selves, a union that spells the obliteration of the lovers as individual beings” that they can achieve only in death. “Love is the ultimate nihilist.” And so they “hurl themselves into Love’s abyss,” throwing “Schopenhaurian calm to the winds.” No “detached contemplation” for Wagner; to truly know is not to think but to feel. 

Kalkavage soberly intervenes to remark that “Wagner, as a Romantic, in both his music and his theoretical writings tends to overdo the role of feeling in music to the detriment of aesthetic contemplation.” But “in music, passion and perception always work together.” If “in music we are hearing tonal analogues, symbols, of that of which we ourselves are made,” then music occasions “insight and self-knowledge.” Music illuminates, “affirm[ing] that goodness consists in beautiful order, in a well-ordered cosmos like the one depicted in the Timaeus, rather than an abyss of indeterminacy.” Not Tristan and Isolde but Dante and Beatrice are good. “Listening to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is a ravishing, if dangerous, human experience,” one that invites its audience to “die to music,” to imbibe his all-too-effective tone-potion,” transforming us into “the voluptuous music of death-bound eros,” into sailors who do not plug their ears at the songs of the Sirens. Better to respond by searching for an antidote to that potion, to resist “the lovers’ death wish and the gnostic nihilism it embodies, to pursue without illusion a love that preserves rather than destroys, celebrates rather than abolishes individuality, and seeks life rather than death, clarity rather than warmth alone, wakefulness rather than sleep, and reconciliation with the external world, in which great evil is mixed with great good.” 

The preference for madness over sanity leads to the demonic, as seen in Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann’s music-obsessed novel. Mann’s musical focus isn’t Wagner but Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone composition, which Mann considers a prelude to the madness of the Third Reich, in which the soul of Germans stood revealed. Schoenberg radicalized Wagner and the subsequent German composers (notably, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler), who had begun to distance themselves from tonal music. Schoenberg’s initial ‘atonal’ music “dispensed with the tonic but had no intrinsic principle of order.” It was a negation. His twelve-tone composition amounted an attempt to reconstitute music on a new foundation, namely, “tonal egalitarianism,” the rejection of the dissonances that bespeak hierarchy. Tones returned, but they were ‘democratized.’ The problem is that this democracy was not republican, not civic, self-governing, but a leveling that invites tyranny. After all, to achieve tonal egalitarianism, one needs a composer, a master who keeps all the tones equal beneath him. Twelve-tone music steps to the tune not of Tocqueville’s American democracy but to Tocqueville’s greatest fear, regimes of egalitarian despotism.

A music without cadences is a music that “no longer has a narrative structure but lives in the moment,” without a telos. It uses sounds to express moods, and that’s about it. In Mann’ s novel, the protagonist, the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, has been influenced decisively not only by Schoenberg but by Theodor Adorno and, behind both of them, Nietzsche. In a pact with a devil, Leverkühn exchanges his soul, specifically his “capacity for human love,” in exchange for “twenty-four years of inspired musical creativity.” The devil gives him “the Dionysian jolt” (commended, of course, by Nietzsche) to get him out of his uncreative rationalism. But in exchanging both love and reason for creativity, Leverkühn can only affirm self-interest as his animating motive. And like Nietzsche, who was said to have become infected with syphilis at a brothel, so too does Leverkühn. Like the death-fated lovers of Wagner, he will die, but without even the love that they had shared. His sin, like that of Faust in the Faust Book, is “not against God but against his own nature—his body, mind, and well-being, as the bacillus colonizes his brain. The devil assures him that he will become “an aesthetic Führer [who] will break through the age,” expressing “his will to power in the mystic realm of tones,” thereby “bring[ing] about a double barbarism, double because it comes after liberal humanitarianism,” Kantianism, the moral dimension of modern rationalism. Leverkühn has become the musical analogue to Hitler but, unlike Hitler, in the end he experiences remorse. “The Faustian cosmos…embodies mischief and monstrosity. Its intricate designs are demonic rather than divine.” As to Mann’s novel, “in its supremely ordered word-images of music [it] transcends devil, darkness, and despair.” Putting things in musical terms, if dissonance needs consonance to be dissonance and to be understood as dissonance, then consonance must come from the listener and his surroundings. But that means consonance exists. And if consonance exists, how can Being itself be nothing but dissonance, chaos? That is, atonal music and the philosophic nihilism behind it partake of the dilemma of modern philosophy itself, which inclines to dismiss nature as meaningless while asserting human rule over nature: Where, then, did man come from? 

With this, Kalkavage concludes three sets of paired chapters: two on musicology, two on the contrast between the tonal music of the Christian Bach and the tonal music of the Freemason Mozart, and two on the Schopenhauer-and-Nietzsche-driven ‘liberation’ from tonality, which amounts to a ‘liberation’ from both faith and reason, the prefiguration of what is usually called ‘postmodernism.’ In his seventh and final chapter, he considers Francis Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites, first produced in 1957. Born in Paris to a Roman Catholic family, Poulenc plunged into the avant-garde world of his city; he was ‘gay’ in both senses of the word, and his early music was light, witty, and popular. The sudden death of a fellow composer in 1936 turned him back to Catholicism; the Dialogues was one result of his newfound seriousness. The opera, based on a never-produced screen by the eminent French Catholic, Georges Bernanos, tells the story of sixteen Carmelite nuns who were guillotined by the atheist fanatics of Jacobinism in 1794. “Here we find no tale of romantic love or case of mistaken identity,” the staples of so much opera. The Dialogues “sweeps us up in a double terror: the French Reign of Terror in the external world and the internal error of Blanche de la Force,” a young aristocratic woman who recently joined the order, fearing of the increasing egalitarian chaos around her and her family. Initially anything but Blanche “of the Strength,” the opera show her on a “spiritual journey from crippling fear to liberating martyrdom.” As her story unfolds, we hear a musical world that is French-Catholic rather than German-nihilist, “a world in which grace triumphs over the satanic will to mock murder and desecrate,” a “tonic for the cosmic gloom and cold intellectualism of Mann’s Faustus novel.” And unlike Wagner’s Tristan, in which tones, “the incarnation of Schopenhauer’s cosmic will,” are “meant to engulf words and the illusory world to which words belong,” Poulenc orchestrates his work lightly, keeping his songs “close to real life and the free flow of dialogue,” doing “nothing to obscure Bernanos’s lucid text.” Among the words sung are those by the young and very aptly named Sister Constance: “We do not die each for ourselves, but each for another, or even each in place of another”—an imitatio Christi. Among Bernanos’s favorite saints was Joan of Arc. Bernanos and Poulenc nonetheless caution, in a song sung by the Prioress, “that martyrdom is a reward to be accepted,” like grace, and perhaps an instance of grace, “not an achievement to be sought out,” since “the striving for martyrdom remains a strong temptation for the heroic-minded,” who often lack the mesure of reason. “The vocation of music is to reveal, in tones and rhythms, the inner truth of all things,” a vocation reminiscent of Timaeus’ claim, but now Christian. It is by grace, Poulenc wrote, that “my Carmelites go to the scaffold with an extraordinary calm and faith,” which are “at the heart of all mystical experience.” Blanche sings her final song giving tribute to the execution, a tribute “not to human heroism but to the Triune God.” As Jesus tells his disciples, “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Music, then, has meaning, even when its authors reject meaning. Those musical authors who do not (self-contradictorily) reject meaning partake of reason—especially of number and ratio—and also of life, bringing live people to sing and to listen to song. “Music in its greatest moments—especially moments in which tones take their cue from sacred words—is a life-celebrating point of contact with things that do not come to be and pass away but are.”

Note

1. This “lays bare the gnostic underpinning of the worldviews of Schopenhauer and Wagner,” inasmuch as Gnosticism “posits a strict dualism between good and evil,” with evil seen in “the world of determinate things, the realm of body,” the “arena of selfishness, greed, envy, love of wealth and honor, competition, hatred, war, and lies,” the world of “suffering, in particular erotic suffering”—all of it caused by “the principle of individuation,” the principle that binds all of us, and all things, into bodies. Not the light which enables us to see limits, including bodily limits, but night is good, “cancel[ing] all determinateness, eras[ing] all boundaries, and drown[ing] all distinctions in the warm sea of undifferentiated feeling.” Death is the ultimate night, the ultimate darkness, and therefore the ultimate good, the purpose of eros.