Eternal Consciousness

Words and Music

61 Words and Music Song is the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound. —Saint Thomas Aquinas “You must love the music, not master it,” a Chinese grandmother advised one of my students who was feeling frustrated , trying to play a difficult nocturne by Chopin on the piano. “Music must be treated as all things that are eternal, such as love and understanding,” she said, “because it is these things that will carry us through the darkness of our lives and the death of our bodies to the moon of everlasting peace.”1 To place music with “things that are eternal, such as love and understanding” is to say it belongs to the life of the spirit, the life of hope and peace and friends and intelligence. It is like speaking of “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Not all words are words of eternal life, and not all music is eternal, but only the words and the music that are expressive of the deeper life, the life of the spirit. There is a connection between words and music, though, when they are expressive of eternal 62 Eternal Consciousness life, as in the definition of song (canticum) that Saint Thomas Aquinas gives in his preface to the Psalms, “Song is the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.”2 There is a link then between words and music when they are together in song and the song is “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.” If words and music belong to different hemispheres of the brain, words to the left and music to the right, and the right hand goes with the left hemisphere and the left hand with the right hemisphere, then Kant’s problem of the right and left hand which cannot be made to neatly cover one another is also a problem of words and music.3 A right hand glove, however, can be put on the left hand if it is turned inside out. Similarly we might suppose words are music inside out and music is words inside out. Or at any rate there is a musical inside of words and a verbal inside of music. Does the inside have to do with the eternal, as the inner life becomes the afterlife? Let me propose that the theme is the verbal inside of music and the inscape is the musical inside of words. Let us examine these two insides and see if they can help us discover what I call “the music of words,” the original unity of words and music, something that will have existed in the beginning if Vico was right that the world’s first languages were in song.4 Theme: the Verbal Inside of Music A musical theme, what Wagner called a leitmotif, is the verbal inside of a piece of music, we can say, but does it have to do with the eternal? If we say with Plato that time is “a changing image of eternity,” then we can say musical themes, not only in sacred music but also in secular music, may have to do with the eternal. Time, and music likewise, can be opaque, can be translucent, can be transparent to eternity. Consider the theme Beethoven used, first in a round and then in the last movement of his last string quartet, with the words, Words and Music 63 Grave: Muss es sein? Must it be? Allegro: Es muss sein! It must be! Es muss sein! It must be! In the round the theme is opaque to eternity and has to do with a debt that must be paid, while in the string quartet the theme is translucent or even transparent to eternity and seems to be about going from the Grave of infinite resignation (“Must it be?”) to the Allegro of faith (“It must be! It must be!”).5 So the same melody and the same words can be opaque to eternity in one context and translucent or even transparent to eternity in another. “Must it be?” the Grave of infinite resignation is what we feel here and in the G minor themes of Mozart. That is Kierkegaard ’s term, “infinite resignation,” and he imagines his “knight of infinite resignation” to make the movements of a dancer, “the movements of infinity,” as he calls them. “Most people live dejectedly in worldly sorrow and joy...