Unvain Repetition
Last year marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. Closure of concert halls because of Covid-19 caused the cancellation of many commemorative events that had been planned for years, though some performers scrambled to sell tickets to online performances.
Reading the prose that announced these festivities suggests that Beethoven is typically idolized for something other than his symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets. Christian Lorenz, artistic director of the Germany-based Beethoven Anniversary Society, offered his view that "as an individual, 'modern' artist, Beethoven targeted society, in fact humanity as a whole. His musical expression of a utopia where people live together in peace is appealing." For Lorenz, as for many others, Beethoven is a noble champion of radical freedom and glorious progress, a commanding prophet and high priest in the Kingdom of Man.
French-born pianist George Lepauw, founder of the International Beethoven Project, says that Beethoven deserves our attention and admiration because his "ambition was to shake the world, raise consciousness, and bring about a more just humanity." Such goals could be achieved by writing music with the power to "carry the audience to new spheres of emotional heights." Inspired initially by the French Revolution,
Beethoven also knew inside of him that music could be used as the equivalent and potential replacement of religious ritual for the modern world, with its own moral message laced through its harmonies and melodies, and that its power was even greater than religion because it was truly non-denominational.
Listening Attentively
This year, another significant anniversary in music history is worth noting: the 500th anniversary of the death of the Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez. It is not an occasion to rouse widespread enthusiasm: there are no ring-tone-sized musical signatures like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to excite the masses, no stirring anthems to universal brotherhood such as the choral movement of the Ninth, no angst-ridden flourishes as in some of the string quartets. Moreover, we know almost nothing about Josquin's personal life, not even the year (1450?) or place of his birth, let alone his inner existential struggles.
Josquin deserves to be celebrated because of the marvelous beauty of his music, most of which comprises settings of sacred texts. The joy and wonder conveyed by Josquin's music—especially his settings of the Mass—can only be realized if we take time to listen to the music attentively. Making the effort to do so reveals Josquin's stature not as a symbol of humanistic millennialism, but as an artist attuned to the deep patterns resident in Creation.
Listening attentively requires that we have some sense of what to listen for. It also requires that we eliminate the distractions that effectively push music into the margins of our awareness. Back in the 1950s, philosopher Susanne Langer warned of the losses suffered when people
read or study with music—sometimes beautiful and powerful music—going on in the background. As they cultivate inattention or divided attention, music as such becomes more and more a mere psychological stimulant or sedative which they enjoy even during conversation. In this way they cultivate passive hearing, which is the very contradiction of listening.
Habits of multitasking with music may be one reason why unvarying rhythmic pulses and garish acoustic effects have more attraction for many "listeners" than more subtle melodic or harmonic elements. Of course, rhythm is essential to music; after all, music is as much about organizing time as organizing sound. But when rhythm is reduced to a relentless beat, its possibilities for musical expression—for achieving a distinctively musical form of beauty—are effectively lost.
Variation & Rhythm
Josquin's genius for organizing the experience of time through aural perception takes several forms. The simplest is his ability to repeat a short sequence of notes with unpredictable and varying rhythms. Take, for example, his Missa La sol fa re mi, published in 1502. As the name indicates, all five sections of the Mass are organized around a five-note phrase, the modern equivalent of A-G-F-D-E. That five-note sequence is repeated literally hundreds of times: in the beginning, middle, or end of longer phrases, and in all four voices, sometimes overlapping with one another. In the middle section of the Agnus Dei, a duet for alto and tenor, the tenor part includes only those five notes, repeated sixteen times, each time with a different rhythm, while the alto part riffs around that theme.
Rhythm is at work here in two ways: there is the variation of rhythms present within the phrase as it is repeated, and there is the rhythm we feel between each iteration of the phrase, the rhythm of repetition, as the phrase echoes itself, each echo slightly different from the last.
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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