My Discovery of Music

Second Thursday of Easter

Relatively few faith journey narratives, or the longer version--spiritual biographies--deal with music. St. Augustine wrote a whole treatise De Musica (On Music), which is strikingly brilliant, even though he wrote at a time before musical notation and before there were many instruments. He did not include anything on music in his Confessions, which was the first spiritual autobiography. 

I grew up listening to the popular music of the day. There was some classical and semi-classical music around, and at school we got a little of it in music classes. In a high school assembly program, when I was in the eighth grade we heard a classical pianist. Among other things he played Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune (Moonlight). I was totally enraptured. I began to learn a little on my own. I had never taken any music lessons, played no instrument, and could not read music. I found that my musical talent was listening. The A&P grocery store was selling a kind of "musical masterpieces" album series. You bought one LP a week for 99 cents. When you got five, you got an album to put them in. I must have bought at least 30 and listened to them constantly. I should note that I also never stopped listening to popular music, rock and roll, etc. I also began to pay a little more attention to Mrs. Spivey's preludes and postludes on Sunday mornings.

A very few times in my many years of schooling, I had a teacher who mistakenly thought I was smart. One was a history teacher, Mr. Mitchell, my senior in high school. One day he invited me to dinner and listening to music at his house. We went from the dining room to a room that had an elaborate Hi-fi system (stereo was just coming in at that time), and shelves and shelves of LP albums. He told me he had over 3,000 classical records. We listened to parts of a few, and he gave me little lessons about the music and the composers. I wanted to be as knowledgeable as he was.

In summer school before my sophomore year at Duke, I discovered that Flowers Lounge, where I often studied, had a music room.  It had about 600 classical LPs and about eight comfortable chairs. People who were there could take turns playing records they wanted to hear.  Over the course of the summer I heard them all. I found that I was quite good at recognizing a composer and work by just a few notes. When fall semester sophomore year came I signed up for Music 51, which was an intro to classical music. I took Music 52 spring semester. My junior year I took Music 125, a more advanced listening course. I've never stopped listening. 

Going to Duke Chapel on Sunday mornings gave me a much deeper understanding of organ and choral music. The 160 voice choir sang things that my church choir would never have attempted. It was during that time that I heard a concert Bach's Mass in B-Minor, for the first time. The final chorus Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant Us Peace),  was the most beautiful piece of music I had ever heard. 

I have heard many performances of other masses by other composers, sometimes in concert halls, sometimes in churches, but always performed start to finish as concerts. One day in the spring of 1979 I went to what was billed as a performance of the Vaughn Williams Mass at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill. I had always loved the music of Ralph Vaughn Williams but had never heard his mass. You probably know him best from his hymn "For All the Saints." 

When I went that night to the performance, I had an experience that for me was totally mind-blowing and unexpected. It was not a concert, not a performance. They had the choir and an orchestra and they played and sung the whole work. But they played it as a mass, as a communion service. The standard parts of the mass--Kyrie, Gloria, etc--were all there and played in order, but played with scripture readings, congregational responsive reading, sermon, the Nicene Creed, the liturgy of communion, at their appropriate places in the music. Or perhaps I should say that the other way around. The parts of the music were played at the appropriate places in the liturgy. Or perhaps I should say it a third way around. The music and the liturgy were totally enmeshed with one another. That's the way the it's supposed to be but hardly ever is. It was one of the deepest spiritual experiences of my life. It changed the way I understood both church and music. I've never been the same.

Faithfully,

Christian