Lent IV | Requiem Dona Nobis
On Refreshment, or Mothering, Sunday.
I forgot to post this on here earlier. It’s the last of these that I’ll put on here, I think. All the others necessitate recordings of rarer music not available on e.g. YouTube. But I like to share such things as I am able.
We find ourselves at the zenith of Lent. The midway point, the local maximum; and at this height, this dizzying place, we’ve, appointed for us, a rest. Grant us rest, we cry, in the face of dwindling energies, faltering gaits, fragmented minds. And the Calendar concedes: Mothering Sunday. A day of Refreshment, of renewal, of, in a fractional way, resurrection. And just as last week centered upon God as Father, as Parent, so let us now dwell a little longer on His Care amidst this Mothering Sunday.
Why need we such rest? Why are we so bedraggled, so faint, so weary? I suppose that every school of philosophy was, in some way or another, birthed to answer this question. As ever, I leave the philosophers' questions to the philosophers; I am not one of them. I am writing these little missives, for Heaven’s sake, to a menagerie of souls so much more thoroughly drenched in beauty and goodness than mine. Even simply in education—while the classics were being read, or the music was studied (and made), or the art was learned (or created); while higher education, in so many of your midsts, was indeed Higher—Excelsior, catapulting your sensibilities ad astra—I was memorizing the reaction sequences of DNA polymerase. I was learning the periodic table by rote. I was scrawling out pages upon pages of absurd calculus to count electrons bouncing between various quantum levels. How and why does salt affect cells’ ability to metabolize sugars? Why do botulism and tetanus have almost identical pathological biochemistries but result in antonymic symptom clusters? What is ADP phosphorylation and why does it matter? Oh, yes, these are scintillating questions indeed: and I use such knowledge, nowadays, generally to make jokes about (in the case of ADP), say, banned diet drugs from the mid-twentieth century. I am, as ever, not a serious person: I delight in the Real is all. I have charted the dances of electrons about the various rings and chains of nucleotides and fatty acids, and it is all very lovely, but: no knowledge of pi electron orbitals will ever soothe the trembling, tear-stained face. No, no human anguish shall ever be comforted by a thermodynamically precise explanation of electron transport chains, of trans-membrane voltages; no dark night of any soul shall be illumined by a perfectly realized expression of how plants capture light and transform it into pineapples. These are Wonders, yes, to put it infinitely mildly; but they are the roots, the radices, of the props of the play. They are not even the props, much less the play itself. And the play—the Pageant—which is our dwelling place? It is the Real.
Why need we such rest? Because the only constant is change. Because everything is always coming undone. The physicists say, Entropy; I say, death. And so we strain, we reach out, we contract our muscles, the ligaments tug, the bones hum: we strive, we seek, we find. Do we yield? Well, we always do eventually. But on this day, in this week, of Refreshment, let us consider that instant which comes before yielding. Of striving and seeking. Of reaching beyond ourselves. And let us also consider what might the rebuttal of God be to watching us so strain, and injure, ourselves.
Musically, what might this look like? Well, there is a Shepard scale, I suppose; but surely there is a better answer than, well, an auditory parlor trick. There is simple ascent; say, beginning with a tonic, and then jumping up a fifth, and then sliding up to the sixth, and then the seventh, and then—and then hanging, prolonging this tension, dragging out this sensation of unfinished business, of unrealized consummation, and then eventually yielding, and completing the octave. This is not ineffective, certainly. But what if, instead, we went beyond? What if the striving were not seen (or rather, heard) in falling short of the octave? What if, instead, it were seen as an excess of energy, of life, poured out? My cup runneth over? What if the striving, the seeking, were so extraordinary, so super-natural (above/conquering-natural), that it pierced the octave?
What if, for the Christian, a need for Refreshment, for being mothered, comes from days, weeks, decades, of maintaining not a mere common interval—sixth, maybe a minor seventh, even an octave—but further still? A ninth? (By this time, perhaps some of you may guess where I am going.)
With appreciation to none other than ol’ Kierkegaard for the idea, let us live life in the reverse, briefly; for life may only be understood in reverse. There are two settings of this piece of music. We shall begin with the second I encountered (but which is itself, the original form thereof).
Geistliches Lied, by Johannes Brahms.
I chose the video above because it shows the musical score, which I think is necessary to truly apprehend the sheer genius of what Brahms accomplishes. [If you are wondering about what is being sung—if you don’t know German, as I certainly do not—be patient; we shall come to the poetry in time.] Half of Brahms’ scheme is easily parsed, conspicuous as soon as the sopranos and tenors are singing. The melody with which the sopranos enter, the tenors then begin to sing as well, interval for interval, rhythm for rhythm, in a canon—but they are singing it a ninth lower than the sopranos, and eight beats later. Not content with this degree of compositional restriction, constraint, complexity, density, Brahms goes yet further. A measure later, the altos enter, bearing an entirely new melody all for themselves—until, that is, the basses enter, eight beats later, singing the altos’ melody a ninth lower.
And so the piece proceeds along. I know there is bound to be much more to say, but I do not know it. I am but uneducated in such things as musicology, music theory, music anything (and most other things, too). The tapestry of sound, of chords, which Brahms spins out of these four vocal parts is of seeming boundlessness to me. Any element to which you pay more attention, you find more depth, more care, more meaning.
But then: the Amen. I insisted upon having some splendorous Amen within this Lenten series, and this tumbling, soaring majesty has no compare. Here, at the end—and perhaps it is not too unfair of me to say, The End—there is an inversion. Truly, the last are first. The basses, last to enter at the beginning, begin the Amen. If I am not incorrect, the basses begin on the minor seventh of the scale—a tenuous tone indeed. It is a slow, hard line of descent; and the altos, of course, follow it, displaced by a ninth (of course). But as the basses begin a second motif, beginning with a clean octave leap (an ascent is beginning!), and the altos dutifully follow, it is all washed away by the soaring soprano line, with tenors close behind, still yet offset by a ninth, and it is as though the violins sing out above the violas and the celli—soar we now where Christ has led—and everything slowly tumbles into place, all is well, all manner of things are made well—
And the last syllable is closed upon, -men, and—the chord is bent. In the upper three parts, a shimming E♭ I chord [I hope the music theory I learned decades ago is sound!]; but the basses, they had overshot their descent, landing on the major seventh, D, and then slipped even yet further, the D♭. As the choir abdicates, breaking off into a half rest, the organ accompaniment, as if to ensure that the hearer knows that all is not well, lingers again on the D—but this time, it is natural. Maybe there is yet hope? But there is no time to find out—
The choir returns, on a glorious IV chord, and, discontented with that, the tenors and basses trade notes. They remain discontent. The tenors, sitting on a sixth from E♭, settle down onto the major fifth; the basses continue their downward plunge towards the tonic, yet also bifurcating, with some splitting upward—soar we now…—to the tonic above. A glowing E♭ I chord, just as before; but one in which a desiccated D♭ has been torn clean in two, top to bottom, like a certain curtain of old, with two perfect tonics shimmering in the space where before was a bent and broken pitch. Would this end—this End—be as sweet a thing if not for the needling D♭ that is torn in two?
Did not God see the fall of Man as yet a means to only further show His Glory and Goodness?
Let us now briefly consider the German. What are these people singing about? O, Beauty of Beauties:
Let nought afflict thee with grief;
Be calm! As God ordains,
So may my will be contented.Why take thought for the morrow?
The one God who gives thee
What is thine, watches over all.In all thy doings be steadfast
And true. What God decrees
Is, and is acknowledged to be, Best.Amen.
Might this be such a deep and overflowing oasis unto parched lips and pierced hearts! Consider how these are the words being sung upon, over top of, these strained ninths in perfect double canon. The concert of the saints, compounding in mirrored melodies and harmonies, reminding that amidst such striving and seeking, there might yet be calm. That God, even He who clothes the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, has not forgotten you, even you. The morrow, a sophistry: it is not real, but rather, imagined. The grief, a battered memory: it is not real, fully, but rather, aired in the imagination. In all thy doings be steadfast and true: this, this, is the present tense. God’s decrees are: they are not subjunctive, imagined or of the imagination.
The German is, of course, the rebuttal of God of which I spoke earlier. For we are to love and serve each other and Him, and to love is to live in sacrifice—to be a living sacrifice—and that is not a ready state for depraved people. It is not what comes naturally. It depletes us. And besides, one may stumble into a place wherein one gives away much more than one is given in return. Life, dripping away, drop by drop; the blood loss, the exsanguination, of vive, of emotional energy, of willpower, call it what you like: it is a mathematical problem with only one resultant: 0. Nihil. Eventually, the clay jar is empty. There is no more water.
It is this equation which, of course, the Spirit, shatters apart. Der Geist Hilft, pouring clean, clear water into our sundered forms. For one may give away much more than one is given in return: it is true. But given in return may spring out, not from reciprocation, not from human hands, but from the largesse—from the Hands—of God Himself. All the arithmetic in the world is dumb, literally, before the condescensions of such a Giving God. Surely it is more blessed to give than to receive.
Earlier, I cited Kierkegaard, claiming to work in reverse. Let us now close with the fashion in which I first met this towering gem of compactness—the fashion of a dear, beloved friend playing me this recording years ago (the scotch and Cubans no doubt helped solidify, and sweeten, the memory). In speaking of the sopranos and tenors in the Amen, I mentioned violins. What, then, if the organ accompaniment were exploded out into a chorus of strings? In a transposition of form not unlike a cousin to that of Barber’s Adagio for Strings into Agnus Dei, here behold the unassuming choral work transformed into choral and orchestral:
It should be an unspeakably great joy to sing this someday. Perhaps, in Providence, it shall only be Someday, though. Although I hope it to come sooner than that.…
May all of you, scattered about this land as you are, find Rest in this week.
Blessings always,
Paul
