The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit
176
The Spirit of This Place: How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit
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Overview
In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before.
As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself.
This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226095240 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2024 |
| Series: | The Rice University Campbell Lectures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 642 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Music as a Spiritual Force
Spirituality and music are such natural companions that the two words can often, especially for musicians, be interchangeable. Passion for either is infectious. The making of art and the search for life's meaning share common impulses and thus also the same human foibles: both are aspirational; both seek transcendence; both have human practitioners onto whom unrealistic expectations are projected. Both have outlier critics who espouse theories they may not themselves practice. Both provide access to profundity at life's most difficult moments, and both can also lighten us with humor and weightless joy. Both demarcate our days through their association with our most treasured memories.
Music is a spiritual force for one, perhaps too obvious, reason: music is a creation. The few pieces of Western music that are unattributed to a specific author are those that cross cultures, such as the children's taunt "nya-na-nana-na-nyay!," a little pentatonic musical cell that has existed all over the globe for many centuries, though no one has yet been able to prove precisely why or how. For the rest, the created music, those products of humanities disciplines, a higher human force is at work, the force of creativity and inspiration, and, thankfully, there appears to be no end to it.
We know and study the creators of the great works of Western music. There are endless discussions and disagreements about what any work of art means, but there is no dissent over the claim that Beethoven actually wrote his symphonies or that Mozart penned the operas attributed to him. All of the world's religions revolve, at least on the surface, around the impetus and origin of human consciousness, on why we are here and who created us. There is a humanist tendency to claim that all religions offer basically the same story in different ways, but this is patently untrue, and to suggest so is to insult the memory of the countless millions who have died defending their versions of their faiths, their own preferred origin stories. One chooses to believe one origin story over another, but one doesn't choose to believe that Mahler didn't write his symphonies or Shakespeare didn't write his plays — well, there is continued fringe contention about the latter, but it appears that despite all odds, the Bard did write his own masterpieces. Where belief comes into art is when considering art's meaning: was a higher being responsible for the work of art? Did Bach have to possess a deep religious faith in order to author the deepest works of musical art ever written in the Christian tradition, the St. Matthew and St. John Passions? Bach, by most accounts, considered himself a craftsman, not the conduit to the divine we now imagine. Yes, he was a Christian, but did his faith write the Passions?
Still, all artists know the feeling of handing their work over to a power greater than themselves. Indeed, that is ultimately what artistry is; it just needn't be handed over to a deity. It just exists, separate but inseparable from the person who created it. Verdi's Requiem and Wagner's Lohengrin are among the most powerful spiritual experiences in music, but we needn't know anything about either composer's beliefs. What they created exists regardless of what they believe. This is, to me, a powerful spiritual realization, applicable across every sphere of life: we are what we do, what we create; we are not simply what we believe or say.
CHAPTER 2Geist
Music is a Weltgeist, and we must be appreciative of the German language's unique gift of compounding words that feel like they belong together: Welt and Geist mean simply "world spirit," a force of spirituality available to all. Geist, often shallowly translated as "ghost," is at the heart of musical humanism. It appears a lot in the culture, as in the term zeitgeist, or the spirit of our particular time, or, more paranormally, in poltergeist. I prefer to think of music as Musikgeist, two words permanently together because they are inseparable. Geist has meanings of both mind and spirit and is the thus perfectly suited to describing music and the human spirit. Music is in continual dialogue with us, dispensing its silent and abstract aural wisdom to us; and to lifelong musicians, music always knows more about us than we can ever know about it. There is love of music, a refreshingly common feeling, but there is something rarer, a belief in music as a moral force. Great artists are able to emanate this force, and the emanation should ideally be effortless, though for most it is anything but: in the most extreme personalities, art demands an effort that sometimes ruins lives. If an artist is more at peace with the world, the spiritual force he or she emanates can bring them into closer alignment with nature and themselves, more in love with the wonders of what is around them. When one encounters these artists — and most of them aren't famous because fame isn't what has motivated them — one gravitates to them forever, and they change by perpetuating it spiritual force.
The creation of music is the journey of one soul through itself, and in opera this happens through the musical illumination of a character by a composer. Everything great in opera is, or should be, driven by a composer. Take, for example, just one of the hundreds of arias by George Frideric Handel, "Aure, deh, per pietà," sung by the title character of his opera Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar). The text, by Nicola Haym, is standard eighteenth-century fare, solidly poetic, in simply rhyming couplets and declamatory Italian: "Aure, deh, per pietà / spirate al petto mio, / per dar conforto, o Dio! / al mio dolor" (Ye breezes, in pity / blow upon my breast / to give comfort, O God / to my grief). But Handel turns this text into a Shakespearean-level moment, one of the most profoundly moving of the entire operatic repertoire, at least in the right hands. The idea, once taken as the reason to be a composer in the first place, that a composer actually crafts spirituality into a work is now, in our irony-laden world, considered a grandiose idea, though it carries a silent truth within it. We now depend on market forces and algorithms, which are themselves simply our obvious electronic past, to tell us what may fulfill that singular experience we seek in art.
Both the arts and spiritual practices are thought by their practitioners to have embedded within them a type of truth, a view espoused by the organizations formed to propound them. Both share a tendency to protect their truths, which manifest as "values" in the arts and "beliefs" in spiritual organizations. We are obsessed now with what something is worth as opposed to how much it is valued, which may well have nothing to do with what it is worth — and this is an important distinction in art. The greatest music, particularly opera, has spiritual force because all art shares a noble goal with spirituality: it gives voice. The human singing voice communicates in a mysterious and elemental way. Unadorned and unamplified, singing is simply vibrating air invisibly emanating from within one person and entering another, carrying variously inflected words and ideas with it. We think of great singing as something powerful, strong, and solid, but even without those qualities the human voice is a source of wonder: witness the tenderly moving rendition of the hymn "Blessed Assurance" as sung by Geraldine Page in the film The Trip to Bountiful, based on the play by Horton Foote. Page's character, the elderly Carrie Watts, loves hymns and unconsciously hums them. Circumstance has forced her to live in a small Houston apartment with her son and daughter-in-law. The plot of the film involves Watts trying to return to her childhood home — the mythical Bountiful, Texas — and one day she seizes the opportunity to escape. Liberated from the city and once again breathing the country air on her way to her destination, she joyously sings the hymn through the weakness of old age and exhaustion. It is one of the American cinema's most tender and powerful moments.
It is the creative voice of the composer to whom all musicians give their lesser recreative talents. For musicians, the composer is our constitution and scripture, and it is fascinating that in classical music we have parallels to the political originalists and fundamentalists. Just as debates about constitutional documents and religious texts continue to rage — are the exact words of these texts inviolable or are they living and evolving? — some classical musicians view the printed score as sacrosanct and inviolable, while others who see it as merely a rough guide to the content of the music itself, something lying in wait to be unlocked anew with each generation. There can be no full agreement without deep consideration, empathy, generosity, and a collective ability to think broadly and to accept doubt as a human condition. Also, don't expect anyone to get it fully right.
Musicians long for their musical performances to do their speaking for them, thinking, quite rightly, that music is enough. Musicians view the world through the prism of music and an artistic life, or they should, so there is an overwhelming temptation upon receiving any invitation to speak about the boundless complexity of artistic expression, something akin to Shakespeare's description of nature in Antony and Cleopatra as an "infinite book of mystery," to try to talk about everything. I'll attempt to avoid that, despite the fact that my creative mind wanders like a puppy — there is just so much! What does music express, and why is expression important? Can an artistic rendering of a feeling ever equal the feeling itself? Or is music so soaked with meaning that it provides a portal to our expressive natures, that which is beyond narrative? Why does music need to express anything? Can't it just be joyous on its own merits? Why do we have to justify arts education by what music can enhance in other disciplines? Isn't it great enough on its own to warrant acquiring knowledge about it? Music's link to nature is easy to see, since so much composed music is a response not simply to the sounds of nature but to the spiritual majesty one can feel in the presence of a mountain, or in hearing morning birdsong in a setting liberated from mechanized sound.
CHAPTER 3The Rothko Chapel
Visiting the Rothko Chapel near where I live in Houston, Texas, I unexpectedly found myself sitting in its cool, quiet darkness with a girl, perhaps twelve, and her grandparents. In short order, the grandfather said gruffly, "Where are the paintings? Where's the cross? What kind of chapel is this?" The attendant and his wife both politely shushed him, but he was still visibly frustrated because the place didn't meet his preconceptions. His granddaughter moved away toward the triptych farthest from the entrance, near where I was, and the light shifted onto the great translucent painting just as she approached it.
She gasped quietly, and I noticed her eyes filling with tears. I silently hoped this family wasn't coping with some tragedy, but the girl's crying seemed more joyous than cathartic. Her grandmother came up behind her and caressed her shoulders. "Well, it must mean something," the elder woman said. The little girl said, unforgettably for me, "It means everything." She got it.
Mark Rothko (1903–1970), who painted the fourteen huge canvases that line the octagonal walls of the chapel, said, "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them." They are all dark monochromes that lack a traditional artistic narrative. There is no destination in the chapel but your self, and that is simultaneously its gift and challenge — a quality it shares with great music.
The chapel is a liminal and beautiful place, one of my favorite spots in the world and one that I feel lucky to live near. Within its inspirations, over the course of several years, I came to formulate an idea that music is, for many, and certainly for me, a spiritual practice.
But as with our disappointed grandpa, the idea of any art as spirituality would make many immediately think of religious practice, which isn't quite the same thing. For the most gifted people who practice music as well as for those who deeply love it, to even ask the question "Is music a religion?" would be absurd. But if you ask them if it relates to spirituality, almost all, at least in my experience, would say yes, and certainly I would. With this book I hope to illuminate the relationship between art, particularly music, and spirituality.
Music is a spiritual practice for no other reason but that it organizes silence, and it shares many qualities with spiritual practice: for those who love music, it comes with a system of beliefs that they adhere to very strongly and devotedly. It gives meaning to life. It has objects of veneration. It is a cultural system. It has a sacred history. It is social, and its public social conventions differ from its private practice. It inspires solemnity, comedy, gravity, and purpose. Though it involves an absolute science (yes, music is a science), it cannot be understood solely in scientific terms. For it to be practiced at the highest level, knowledge of it must be put aside. Historically it has, like spirituality, been dependent on charismatic practitioners, but its truth doesn't even remotely depend upon charisma.
A moment for what this book is not: it isn't about spiritual or liturgical music. This isn't a book about the history of religious music, nor does it claim expert knowledge of religious practice. Rather, it is a set of abstract ideas, inspired by Rothko's chapel and the diverse reactions to it, about how music illuminates our spirit and how humanity portrays itself most tellingly in its music. Much, but not all, of the music discussed will be operatic because opera is the most complex of the arts, and because opera is narrative drama, with music playing the major role in its ability to bring human beings to spiritual life. Opera is, for its greatest fans, nearly a religion unto itself.
A true musician is not simply someone gifted at making music, but rather someone whose very concept of engaging with the world is sonic. Gustav Mahler, facing Niagara Falls, purportedly said, "At last ... fortissimo!" This might be viewed as the musical correlation to the young girl in the Rothko Chapel. She just "got it." But no less potent is someone who gets it differently, who musically might be more inclined to agree with the composer Harlan Howard (1927–2002), who wrote country songs such as "The Key's in the Mailbox," "Your Heart Turned Left and I Went Right," and "Pick Me Up on Your Way Down." It was he who defended country music from its detractors by saying, famously, that country music was "three chords and the truth." Even if a composer like Mahler or Wagner is more like two thousand chords and the truth, the spiritual thrill is the same. Musicians love all of it and spend their lives learning about it.
CHAPTER 4Wondering and Thinking Music
The joyously incongruous and perplexingly inexplicable are regular visitors to daily life in Texas, so they naturally play a role in this book. In 2013, as part of Rice University's Campbell Lectures for the School of Humanities, I delivered a series of lectures on three evenings titled "Thinking Music." This book follows a few of the main themes of those evenings. A lecture, of course, is performance art, so in book form I wanted to isolate what I considered to be its most important ideas, those of arts education and a quick unlocking of music's basic elements — but it was apparent to me during and after the lectures that the main topic was music's spiritual qualities, and that became the focus of this book.
The lectures were designed for that rarity on college campuses now, the humanities student, and thus have a distinctive "first-world" feel. I spoke broadly about culture, as viewed through my own prism, that of a pianist and conductor. The lectures didn't pretend to solve any of the world's problems, nor even the considerable problems microcosmically hidden inside our shrinking art form.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Music as a Spiritual ForceGeist
The Rothko Chapel
Wondering and Thinking Music
Privacy
The Touchy Spirit
What Is Music?
Music’s Basic Elements
The Thin Line
Not Making a Profit
Unexpected Houston
Practice
Music and Spirituality
The Ineffable
The Expertrap
Why?
Our Stuff
Iniquities of Inequity
Dead White Guys
Righting the Unwritable
The Journey
The World of the Imagination
Is One Person’s Noise Worth More than Another’s Silence?
The Biz
Indefinable Malaise
The Grand One
The Artist Apollo and Company
The Gravity of the Decline of Arts Education
The Elusive Art
From Heavenly Harmony
Conducting a Life
Our Contribution to the Human Spirit
It Goes On
Hoffnung
Beliefs
New Harmony Acknowledgments
Index