Sunday, February 07, 2016

Silence, Music, and Deep Prayer 5


“The circle begins when a song is sung – newly created or recreated.

A composer makes up a song, writing it into being.
A reader takes up the page, transposing it back into mental sound.
The performer moves the mental sound into physical sound.
A listener hears the song and joins the circle.

The circle is complete when the creator, performer, and listener 
are made one through the song.

Can you complete the circle each time you sing?”

- a challenge from Alice Parker’s The Anatomy of Melody

Kathy with Alice Parker at Hymn Society in 2015

Introduction

We started the musical portion of the evening by considering the idea that, while  stirring hymn singing can inspire us in the moment and change us over time as a strong element of corporate worship, prayerful music has power to redirect our hearts.

As we repeatedly pass through the words and shapes of a work of prayerful music, we are drawn deeper and deeper into its message. In the process, we often find:

a sense of the Spirit’s “still small voice”
           
a change in our perspective
            
a reorientation to God’s love

At times, these experiences anchor us and help us to live better.


Throughout the night, we explored Alice Parker’s Glorious God and aspects of Christian community. Glorious God is a canonic work and consists of single lines of melody which, when sung in canon, create rich chords and tone-clusters that are highly expressive of community and transcendence. 


A brief theological basis for this emphasis on community

While the Trinity is a mystery, it seems reasonable to think that a world as interdependent as ours must be the creative work of “God in three persons” 

- a God who can and does model love within His own being 

- a being in whose image humanity is created

Thus, cooperation, community, and recognition of the elements of Creation’s interconnectedness could be fundamental to our existence.


Community with Alice

Alice Parker attained notoriety through her work with Robert Shaw and is universally respected for her musical genius and greatness of spirit. As a follow-up on our study, and as we enter the season of Lent, I recommend considering Aice Parker's words in this moving musical sermon. 

Kathy and I have had the privilege of being with Ms. Parker, first on her farm in Massachusetts where Kathy was studying song-leading, then on several occasions at various conferences. 

Musicians who travel to study on her farm sit around a table in her house and gain deeper knowledge of how to respond to musical lines and to each other. They gain this knowledge by making music together with Ms. Parker's guidance.

One night, I had the privilege of walking Ms. Parker back to her house on the mountain, and with just a few words - words I don't even remember - she changed my understanding of how to compose and freed me from some of the most significant things that had been blocking my work.  I am certain she has done the same for many, many others.


Glorious God

Not being Catholic, Ms. Parker sought a text for her Mass that would follow the essential shape of the Mass but would highlight certain facets of her own theology. Amy Jo Shoonover provided such a text.

The Kyrie is Trinitarian and addresses God as glorious, loving, and healing. The focus is on being brought together by a God like that as one enters worship with this text. 

We quickly learned the tune of this Kyrie by rote and that prompted some discussion about how many of us are bound to the page which can sometimes degrade the quality of our actual listening. Thus, we almost immediately saw the spiritual ramifications of working in the way that Ms. Parker usually does: learning to sing by listening to one another makes us very aware of how well we do or do not listen. A good practice of listening is something we need for developing healthy community.

After Dr. Cotton shared some teaching on silence and on how we might consider the thoughts that come to us as we are offering our silence to God as an offering, we sang the Kyrie again and discovered that, while we might have felt tentative as individuals, as a group, we knew it better than we thought we did. This speaks of the importance of community and also suggests something of the profundity of Ms. Parker’s work. The following passage from her book The Anatomy of Melody (p. 121) explains her aims in composing.   

“When rhythm, pitch, and word combine in just the right proportions, an organism like a living form results. This form is balanced within and cohesive without, pulsing with life. It is a whole with a beginning, middle, and end. It sets up an expectation and fulfills it . . . It seems inevitable. It lasts.

“Melodies that endure are like fundamental physical forms: cloud, stream, tree. They have a rightness in which each element is subordinate to the whole and everything works together for structural unity.”

Producing work like this is a lofty goal that requires humility on the part of the composer and the music. The composer’s hand should be discrete to the point that the music seems to have always existed as a part of Creation, and no moment in the music should draw undue attention to itself upsetting the sense of wholeness.

A series of excerpts from The Anatomy of Melody helps us think through the link between singing and community. On page 186, three paragraphs end with these wonderfully insightful sentences.

1. “The trick is to anticipate what the singers need in energy or beat or accent or mood.”

Here she is describing what has been shared by leaders of singing in various cultures and times. Leading singing is an act of community that involves great sensitivity and well-calibrated response on the part of the leader.

2. "We don’t progress further until the singers have realized that they must listen and allow their voices to join the sound of the whole group."

This is Ms. Parker’s modus operandi. She expects the level of engagement with one another through sound to be high. All will move together and do so well, or no forward movement will occur. Ms. Parker maintains this approach in a remarkably gentle but demanding way.

3. “If it’s well-taught, it is cradled in the singers’ inmost memory.”

Full participation in performance that is beautiful is the destination. The whole process moves incrementally and with liveliness toward that point of arrival.

As we discussed during our first night of our class, information can become deeply embedded in the human brain through musical means. Ms. Parker is modeling how to treat that process as a holy endeavor.

Next we turned our attention to the Sanctus and Benedictus.

This portion of Ms. Parker’s Mass begins “Holy, Holy, Holy unimaginable Pow’r.”

This power is unimaginable in magnitude. We simply cannot frame in our minds the power of the “Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

But it is also a power unimaginable in quality. We are unable to envision a power that cannot be corrupted or become oppressive but is willing to make itself vulnerable, instead.

Finally, the text does not say that God has this power. God is this power.

As we sang this portion in canon and seated in a circle, we discovered that the words “unimaginable power” form a continuous ring throughout the music that lifts the singers into worship of the eternal and transcendent God.

We briefly discussed the following line: “Earth and Heav’n sing your praise. Osanna.” “Earth and Heav’n” is clearly text-painted with an arpeggio ascending from “Earth” to “Heav’n,” and “Osanna” is a word of praise with overtones of deliverance.

Still seated in a circle, we concluded our evening by singing a portion of the Agnus Dei. The text begins, “Lamb, Lamb, Lamb of God who bears our burdens: Forgive our sin.”

I think this repetition of “Lamb” has potential for causing us to consider that this liberation is achieved by a means that is also unimaginable to us. The thought is extraordinary. This liberation is achieved not by a military force, not by a strong leader, not by a brilliant preacher, not even by a good liturgy – but by a lamb that was slain. One who did not defend himself bears our burdens and forgives our sins.

Some readers might enjoy this video which shows pictures of Ms. Parker's farm accompanied by the first movement ("Mountains") of my symphony named for her farm. Inspired by Ms. Parker's commitment to participatory music-making, this little symphony was written for an ensemble of amateur and beginner string players along with a clarinet and a horn. The sweet horn playing was done by Kathy Hulin.

1 comment:

Ike said...

Thank you for writing this wonderful piece about making music. I got to sing an Alice Parker setting of a Southern Harmony hymn while completing my undergraduate work in music therapy at Ohio University. I can only imagine what a powerful experience it must be to sing her music with her. I am thankful for your writings on music and faith. I like the idea of learning to listen deeply through the experience of singing together.

Best regards,

Isaac Zika