Music and Spirituality: Reflections in the Aftermath of a Recital

For the last month—amidst vacationing and writing book proposals and attending funerals—I’ve been practicing my violin up to three hours a day in preparation for a chamber music concert here in Stillwater. The concert, which took place this weekend, featured two important works in the history of chamber music. Both pieces speak to me powerfully in different ways—and I cannot help but believe, especially when I immerse myself in music the way I get to do only for short periods each summer—that music does more than just appeal to our biological affinities and cultural conditioning; that, in fact, it helps to put us in touch with some truth that defies human language.


The first piece of music we performed the other night was Mozart’s Divertimento—a trio for violin, viola, and cello that has the distinction of being called by Albert Einstein the most perfect trio ever written—as well as the distinction of serving as the model for Beethoven’s first efforts at string composition. Apparently Beethoven didn’t feel ready to compete with Mozart and Haydn in the string quartet genre, and so he cut his teeth on the trio form, using Mozart’s Divertimento as a template for producing a series of wonderful trios of his own (two of which I performed last summer with the same “Cimmeron String Trio” that reassembled this year for the Divertimento). Only later did Beethoven feel confident enough to turn to the quartet, of which he ultimately proved himself the master. (Back in college I wrote a paper on Beethoven’s string quartets because I was so taken with them—especially the late quartets, which I am convinced remain the pinnacle of achievement in the form).

The second piece we performed, with the addition of three more instrumentalists, was the Brahms Sextet. Interestingly, Brahms didn’t feel ready to compete the Beethoven in the string quartet genre. But instead of doing what Beethoven did—write for a small ensemble—Brahms wrote for a larger one (a move more suited to Brahms’ lush style). The resulting sextet is an unapologetically romantic piece of music that is wonderfully inventive and, for that reason among others, devilishly difficult to play well.

As with Mozart in general, the Divertimento possesses a kind of purity and clarity that makes one wonder whether the entire work might not be somehow explicable in terms of a single, elegant mathematical formula. This is not to say it’s formulaic. There is much to surprise the listener (and performer), as well as much to delight. While Mozart followed (and invented) distinct musical forms, he was also willing to stretch them and play with them in novel ways. But when Mozart has the violin play these madly rushing sixteenth note runs, it takes me relatively little practice time to master them. It’s as if every note is exactly the one that is supposed to come next, even when it modulates into a different key partway through the run--and so my fingers just seem to fall into the flow of the notes.

By contrast, a substantially slower triplet run in Brahms takes weeks of practice to master—and even then my fingers are likely to betray me in performance. In part this is because the sequences are less predictable, in part because there are leaps calling for abrupt shifts from one violin position to another. But even so, once one grasps and internalizes what Brahms is doing in one of these triplet runs, it makes sense somehow—it couldn’t be any different than it is and still achieve what Brahms achieved with that particular combination of notes and rhythm.

It’s as if both composers are describing something about reality—but what they have chosen to focus on, the “stories” they have chosen to tell, are different in important ways.

There are those who will say, of course, that the story they are telling has to do entirely with how our brains are wired. Our responsiveness to music, our wonder and delight and anguish as we hear or play a soaring passage on the violin or a resonant, crying melody on the cello—this speaks to discoveries about our brains, discoveries made on an intuitive level by musicians and composers. They have discovered, in effect, that this harmonious combination of notes will resonate in some special way with hard-wired features of human psychology, whereas that dissonance and resolution will trigger a different kind of response—corresponding, perhaps, to what occurs in our brain when we are thirsty and then get something to drink. This, they will say, is what music amounts to: human beings stumbling into the discovery that certain combinations of sounds and rhythms interact with certain features of human brain wiring in predictable and repeatable ways, so as to enable composers and musicians to influence mood and emotion and so communicate feelings without words.

In fact, I think that on a certain level all of this is right—that, in effect, the greatest composers have found ways to express with sounds certain truths about the human brain. The question is whether this is all that is going on. And when I am confronted with this reductionistic thesis, the musician in me cannot help but rebel. In fact, I wonder if my attraction to the notion of transcendence, as well as my affinity for religion in its more mystical and experiential forms, has part of its roots in my lifetime love affair with music. Before I ever dreamed of becoming a philosopher I was a violinist—not exactly a child prodigy, but a talented young musician who seriously considered a career in music, choosing to attend the University of Rochester primarily because of the Eastman School of Music (where I took lessons throughout my college career).

In music I experience something that doesn’t fit readily into the categories permitted by reductive materialism. Or perhaps it is better to say that materialism would force me to explain away something that seems in the moment to be an encounter with a profound truth that defies words. And the musician in me says no--the musician who, this past weekend, exhausted himself in a joint creative effort with several other talented amateurs (and two brilliant composers long dead), muscling through a sore back and heartburn and aching finger joints, entering into the last movements of the Brahms with almost nothing left to give—lifted out of body aches and trembling limbs by a moment of lush unison playing with the cello, or by an exquisite passage in the final movement of the sextet, when the melody is recapitulated in two-note fragments passed around among different instruments.

That musician cannot but believe that, in the words of the great 19th Century German philosopher Hermann Lotze, “what is so fair and full of significance cannot be an accidental product of that which is without significance, but must be either the very Principle of the world or closely related to its creative principle.”

Of course, many will point out that my longing for music to be something “more” doesn’t amount to evidence. Brain chemistry might not only explain the effect music has on people, but also my subjective sense that music puts me in touch with some feature of reality I cannot access in empirical ways. Some critics are even likely to say that there is something pretentious about believing music to be the language of the transcendent: I want something to be the case because it makes my efforts as a musician more significant.

But this last criticism gets things backwards, I think. It’s not that I'm trying to invest my efforts with greater significance by believing that music puts us in contact with some ineffable truth. Rather, I am inspired to engage in these efforts—to practice until my fingers are raw, to put everything I have into an unpaid performance with other amateurs—because I sense in a deep way the significance of what the music has to say.

If I didn’t believe in my bones that music touched on something profound, I wouldn’t bother with it. Every summer a part of me thinks I’m crazy to work that hard for one evening in front of a hundred people. And every year I return to the effort—drawn by something beyond myself, something that seems real and true, something that, through music, I can touch in a mystical way. When I hear about the transcendent experiences of Simone Weil and other mystics, I have a glimmering of what they’ve been through because of music—because, in moments of intense engagement with music, I come close to touching what they have touched.

Believing in the transcendent significance of music is in this sense pragmatically fruitful. It motivates me to do what I otherwise would not do, to work for what I otherwise wouldn’t work for. And when I do that work, I feel moments of connection with something greater than myself. And so my belief is deepened, and its pragmatic power enhanced.

The question is what that means. Does the pragmatic value of a conviction, along with the ineffable sense of its confirmation in human activity, speak to the conviction’s truth? Or are such pragmatic considerations irrelevant when it comes to the matter of truth? Do the deep longings of our souls suggest the tug of something beyond us, the way that the pull on an iron rod speaks to the presence of a magnet?  Does our sense of music’s significance us give any reason to suppose that it is anything more than a by-product of that which is meaningless and dead?

I’ve articulated my own answers to these questions a bit more formally elsewhere on this blog—for example here. For now, I simply want to raise the questions in a way that, I hope, reveals why I don’t think the answers are obvious—and in a way that I hope invites reflection and debate among readers of this blog.

Let me close with the words of one of my favorite authors, who found in music something very close to what I discover there. So here they are, the words of Kurt Vonnegut:

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED

FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

WAS MUSIC"

I haven't checked to find out if that became his epitaph in truth.