Column
From heavenly Harmony
Trinitarian Love & Music
The experience of music offers countless opportunities for marveling. When we hear a performance that abounds in technical skill and expressiveness, we admire the performer's native abilities and the commitment, discipline, and sacrifice required to cultivate such gifts. Acknowledging that they are beautiful gifts (and not simply adaptive capacities that evolved for the sake of sheer survival) presents another layer of wonder: how good God is to be such an extravagant Giver!
Unless the performance is entirely improvised, behind it is a process of composition that requires quiet craftsmanship and thoughtful construction, animated by imagination and personality. In the simple pleasure of a well-shaped melodic line, or the dramatic sense of anticipation and fulfillment in an extended harmonic progression, or the interplay of contrasting textures (solo, then chorus; high voices, then low voices), or the overarching symmetry and confident architectural quality of an extended musical structure—when we hear something truly well-composed, we rightly respond with wonder at the intellectual and emotional capacities of the person who composed it. How marvelous: giftedness and a Giver, gratuity issuing in gratitude.
A Dynamic Chorus of Harmony
There is yet another layer of wonder in the experience of music, for behind the performer and the composer is the shape of Creation itself, the vessel of such wonders as music enables. Creation includes certain characteristics of sound (and of the material things that make sounds: wood and metal and space and time) as well as the more mysterious qualities of mind that enable us to perceive sound as music, that is, as something intelligible and not just audible.
In the shapes that music takes, as in geometry, we can perceive patterns that convey a pleasing sense of order. And in that order, we can come to understand a profound metaphysical and theological premise: that reality is fundamentally relational, that the pure sound of the universe is not a single note, but a dynamic chorus of harmony. The mystery of music is tied to the mystery of the ineffable one-in-three-in-one of the Trinity.
Jeremy Begbie has argued that the experience of harmony in music—specifically the experience of multiple tones that form a unified musical sound—has the capacity to convey a sense of "trinitarian space," a space that we are invited to enter. Jesus prayed for the whole Church to enter that space: "that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us. . . . I in them and you in me" (John 17:21–23). Begbie explains how this complex unity is expressed in music:
What could be more apt than to speak of the Trinity as a three-note chord, a resonance of life; Father, Son, and Spirit mutually indwelling, without mutual exclusion, and yet without merger, each occupying the same space, "sounding through" one another, yet irreducibly distinct, reciprocally enhancing and establishing one another as other?
In the pre-Christian West, from at least the time of Pythagoras on, music was understood as an expression of cosmic order. By contrast, early Christian philosophers—believers in a personal and three-personed God—perceived that love was identifiable with music. Leo Spitzer, in Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, notes that Augustine, in his use of the term ordo amoris, appropriates the motif of cosmic order but in a Christian key. As David Bentley Hart comments, "Such a change in emphasis was natural: for Christian dogma all beauty and order belong eminently to the order of the trinitarian relations, and so have no basis profounder than love."
A Song Adorned by Many Voices
While the earliest Christian liturgical music was sung with a single vocal line (as in unison Gregorian chant), in the eighth or ninth century, the Church's musicians began to be more trinitarian in their forms of musical expression. The emergence of polyphony—two or more melodies sounded together—was one of the most dramatic stylistic developments in the history of music. For centuries, church singers and their masters explored how such melodic interweaving (which necessarily made the music more complex) might be accomplished without abandoning the primary commitment to the texts being conveyed by the singers. Some of these experiments were pedantic and scholarly, more successful at fulfilling the demands of music theory than in conveying liturgical meaning beautifully. But by the time of the Renaissance, the craft of liturgical polyphony had been developed to such a point that numerous sixteenth-century composers are regarded by today's musicians as masters from whom we can still learn.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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