Anam Cara

Music as Presence

Art has no interest in generalities. Art wants to create individuals. Music is perhaps the most divine of all the art forms in that it creates an active, living, and moving form that takes us for a while into another world. There is no doubt that music strikes a deep and eternal echo within the human heart. Music resonates in and with us. It is only when you become enraptured in great music that you begin to understand how deeply we are reached and nourished by sound. The rush of our daily lives is dominated by the eye. It is what we see that concerns and calls us. “You wish to see? Listen,” advised St. Bernard. Generally, we neglect almost completely the nourishment of listening to good and true sounds. The sound quality of contemporary life is utter dissonance and cacophony. We live in a world of mechanical noise which allows no spaces for silence to come through to enfold us. So much modern music is but a distraught echo of our hollow and mechanical times.

A human life is lived through a physical body. It is no wonder that we are so often tight with stress. We are forever being stoned by dead sounds. It is interesting in terms of architecture that one of the key building materials now is mass concrete. When you strike mass concrete with a hammer, the sound is muffled and dead and swallows itself. When you strike a stone, an echo leaps from it; the stone is like an anvil; the music of the stone sings out. The sounds of our times have little inner music; all you hear is muffled hunger. When great music quickens your heart, brings tears to your eyes, or takes you away, then you know that in its deepest hearth the soul is musical. The soul is sonorous, echoing the eternal music of the spheres.

It would be a lovely gift to yourself to expose your soul to great music. Have a critical look at your music habits. Do you actually listen to any music at all? What do you listen to? Is the music that you hear too small for your growing soul? It is sad that classical music does not have a larger audience. We all need the wonder and magic of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms. I remember a cartoon in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It was a simple, vacant sketch of a desert. Overhead was the caption “Eine Landschaft ohne Mozart,” i.e., a landscape without Mozart. Even if you never prayed or visited a temple or church, you could come into vast presences of the Divine through the simple, mindful activity of bathing your soul in the wonderful tides of classical music. The friendship with this music is slow at the beginning. Like any great friendship, the more you let yourself into it, the deeper you belong. It calms the soul, awakens the heart, and enriches your sensibility in a delightful way. It somehow manages to harbour in a simplicity of surface the greatest complexity of feeling and thought. Great music opens doorways into eternal presence. It educates and refines your listening; you begin to sense your own eternity in the echoes of your soul. Music is the perfect sister of silence. Georg Solti, the great conductor, said shortly before his death that he was becoming ever more fascinated with the silence at the heart of music and the depth structure it had. Music excavates the kingdom of silence until the eternal sound echoes in us; it is one of the most beautiful presences that humans have brought to the earth. It is one of the most powerful presences in which the ancient and the eternal human longing comes to voice. Nietzsche said, “The relationship between music and life is not only that of one language to another; it is also the relationship of the perfect world of listening to the whole world of seeing.”