Schopenhauer writes somewhere in The World as Will
and Representation that music ought not to represent. It is many years ago that
I read this and I do not intend looking it up even if I had the text readily to
hand. Schopenhauer is on the wrong side of the great dilemma that faces
philosophy, which in the end can be understood as a simple choice, either
Kierkegaard or Hegel. You can choose the Hegelian path, which ultimately
resolves itself into the idea that everything is one thing, or you can choose
the Kierkegaardian path that everything is indeed individual. There isn’t a
third option. For Kierkegaard the individual is the base unit, which is not to
say that there are not relations with others. There are. But it is as an
individual that I relate to the other. With Hegel, on the other hand, in the
end, I will be subsumed in the other, and in that way all contradictions will be
resolved.
The choice can be explained in another way. Either
you think the path is to lose the sense of self through chanting a mantra and
through meditation (this, too, will take you on the Hegelian path to Nirvana), or
you think that the self is retained, in which case you will avoid meditation as
tending towards losing what is most precious.
Schopenhauer likewise thought in the end there is
only one thing. He called it Will. He could just as well have called it
Nirvana, or some other such word. But even if I disagreed with him on this, for
a long time I agreed with him on the idea that music ought not to represent.
Many years ago in school there was a music teacher
who I liked to plague. I worked hard in other subjects, so thought it
reasonable to play the fool in subjects that were not examined, like music and
RE. This music teacher played a piece of music and asked the class what it
represented. Even then I thought this was absurd, and so said I thought the
music represented a rabbit with Myxomatosis in a field of prunes. For this I
was belted. But I was right. Or at least that is how I understood matters for
many years. Music ought not to represent and when it does so, it is bad music. I
hated when in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony there is a thunderstorm. It always
struck me as ludicrous to try to emulate natural phenomena with music. Music
ought to be completely abstract and express nothing, or at least nothing that
can be spoken about.
But I have been on
a musical journey these past few years and I have come to refine my view.
Two of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century,
produced some of their most important works in similarly difficult conditions. Olivier
Messiaen wrote his Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps while a prisoner of war. He
wrote it for the only four instruments to hand in the camp. Likewise, Ludwig
Wittgenstein while a prisoner of war wrote his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Both end up with the attempt to express the inexpressible. But Messiaen didn’t
finish there. He went further, much further.
In the 1940s Messiaen produced a number of works
with religious titles such as Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus and Visions de
l'Amen. But if you played someone a CD of either of these pieces without giving
them the cover, I doubt anyone could guess what they represent. In that sense
they remain completely abstract, though they express something about theology
which cannot be thought.
But Messiaen in the 1950s goes beyond this
completely. He goes all around France and eventually all around the world
collecting birdsong. He notates it and then transforms this into music. Is he
then representing birds in his music? In one sense he is, but once more if you
played someone Messiaen’s Catalogue d'Oiseaux, I’m not at all sure that he
would guess that it is about birds. Perhaps, he might guess, but really it has
been transformed so, that it doesn’t sound much like birds at all, or rather it
goes beyond birdsong.
He continues in this way in the 1970s with his Des Canyons aux Étoiles which purports to represent a canyon in Utah and perhaps, it
does, but no-one could guess where the canyon was and really the music goes so
far beyond canyons that it even goes beyond the stars. And this is the point.
This is what Messiaen is doing with his representing. He is transforming what
he represents in such a way that he gives us a glimpse of what cannot be
expressed.
Finally, with his greatest work Saint François d'Assise Messiaen does something quite extraordinary. This I believe is the
greatest opera of the 20th century, perhaps, the greatest piece of music. This
incredible composer does something that ought quite literally to be impossible.
He shows us Heaven.
Saint Francis meets an angel who plays music that
gives a foretaste of the beyond. The music is so beautiful that Francis
reflects that if he had heard just one more note, he would have died. The angel
before playing the music sings to Francis the following:
God dazzles us with an excess
of truth. The music brings us to God when the truth overwhelms us. If you speak
to God through music, He will answer through music. Learn the joy of the
blessed through the sweetness of sound and colour. And may the secrets of bliss
be revealed to you. Hear this music that hangs life to the scales of heaven.
Hear the music of the invisible (Act 2 tableau 5).
What does this mean? What is an excess of truth? It
is the truth that is beyond our understanding. It is the truth that Christ is
God and Man. These are two truths that are incompatible with each other, God
and not God, Man and not Man. Likewise, the resurrected Christ is dead and not
dead. It is the combination of truth that expresses opposites that is the
excess of truth that dazzles us. It is contradiction. When we are sitting
perplexed having failed to understand the deepest truths of theology, then we
can by all means reject it as all lies and nonsense. That is the rational thing
to do. That in one sense is the correct thing to do. Alternatively, we can allow
the music to bring us to God. If you are open to the music that Messiaen is
playing, you may just get an answer. It is only when the intellect is crushed,
when doubt overwhelms us, that if we are open to it, there is the chance of
glimpsing what is beyond when we climb above the ladder and throw it away. Messiaen
represents birds but uses them to represent heaven. They are the rungs on the
ladder that carry him higher, so that finally he reaches where they cannot even
fly. So Schopenhauer is wrong, but he is also right. Music represents and does
not represent.
Messiaen’s opera Saint François d'Assise has more
truth in it than whole libraries of theological speculation that amount to so
much very dull argument about nothing at all. It is an opera that is rarely
performed, but you can see it on DVD. The experience if you are open to it is
the nearest thing to heaven that can be found here on earth. Even if you are
not religious, you will find expressed the inexpressible. The deepest things
cannot be expressed through reason. The attempt to do so simply brings them
down to a level that is human all too human. As Francis says near the end:
Music and poetry have
brought me to You, in images in symbols because the truth escaped us. Lord, light me with Your presence, free me, stupefy me, blind me forever with Your
excess of truth.
Music and poetry can express what is beyond the
ability of reason to depict. It is in this sense that music both represents and
does not represent. It represents what is beyond our words, that about which we
must remain silent. Messiaen created a new language of music in order to go
beyond what had hitherto been possible. This new language is difficult. Like
every language it requires time and effort to learn. But to dismiss it without
having taken the time to learn is like someone who has not learned Russian going
up to a Russian and saying you are talking gibberish.
If it were up to me, if only I had the courage and
the ability to sacrifice self-interest, I would take my students and
give them a course in Messiaen. I would tell them to learn Russian, so they
could read Dostoevsky, German so that they could read Wittgenstein, and Danish
so they could read Kierkegaard. When they had made some progress in this, I
would play them Saint François d'Assise and tell them to go home and do
something useful with their lives, above all, be kind and try as far as they are
able to follow the example of people like Francis. I would then say I have
nothing more to teach, for there is nothing more to be taught.
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