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Views from the Choir Loft

Music Never Lies

Dr. Peter Kwasniewski · October 30, 2014

0319_Kwasni-94-LG ECENTLY I WAS WATCHING a Christopher Nupen documentary on the great cellist Jacqueline du Pré. One of her close friends said: “Music never lies.” How true this is! People can lie, the lyrics of songs can lie, but the music itself can never lie. It contains and conveys, perfectly and purely, the spirit that its rhythms, melodies, and harmonies embody. We cannot translate this spirit into a sequence of descriptive words; could we do so, music would cease to be music, would be a vaguer form of poetry. But that indefinable message of the soul contained in every piece of music, great or small, is still present, penetrating, communicative, formative.

Jacqueline du Pré herself demonstrated the specific and irreducible truth proper to music in the remarkable depth and intensity of her performances. Listening to her play in Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio or a Brahms cello sonata is a revelation of intuitions, feelings, memories, discernments, opportunities, interventions, choices, fates—of all that is distinctively human, yearning for empathy and straining towards immortality. She is described at one point as a person “always striving for beauty, for the most distant horizon.” This, indeed, is the noblest measure of man, the animal that can see and hear beauty, and not merely see colors and hear noises; the animal that, perceiving the ground, the expanse ahead, and the vault of heaven, knows what a horizon is and then transforms these perceptions into metaphors of its own intentionality.

“Nature and music have the same grandeur,” says another person interviewed. They do—because they both speak of the eternal and the infinite to the human heart, which is the capacity for grandeur. The human heart is also the capacity for giving and for suffering. As Schopenhauer says, “music speaks of weal and woe”: of giving in love, of trials and pains, of a grandeur once beheld but now past, nostalgia for what has been, hope against hope for what might still be, and a grandeur not of this world, more real than this world, glimpsed like a sliver of sun through the clouds, drawing us on and defusing our despair. Is it not a miracle that music speaks of all this? Music means almost nothing to plants and animals, and nature is no more than their immediate self and surroundings. But man is finely attuned to the message contained in both nature and music, and resonates with it when he encounters it nakedly, without distraction.

In the same documentary another person remarked: “Sound comes from our being.” What is this mysterious thing called sound? Aristotle analyzed well its physical and psychical aspects in his treatise On the Soul, but he did not attempt to explain the mystery of meaningful sound, which only the higher animals produce, nor the far greater mystery of rational language and the suprarational discourse of the fine arts. The sound that is properly language comes from our unique mode of being in this world, as in the world, due to our physicality, but not of it, due to our being made in the image and likeness of God. The sound that is music is the finest flowering of language; no wonder it is the province of worship, loss and lamentation, exultation and joy. For it is a wonder past all other wonders that proceed from the heart of man.

Please visit THIS PAGE to learn more about Dr. Kwasniewski’s Sacred Choral Works and the audio CDs that contain recordings of the pieces.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles Last Updated: January 1, 2020

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About Dr. Peter Kwasniewski

A graduate of Thomas Aquinas College (B.A. in Liberal Arts) and The Catholic University of America (M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy), Dr. Peter Kwasniewski is currently Professor at Wyoming Catholic College. He is also a published and performed composer, especially of sacred music.

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Corpus Christi Watershed

President’s Corner

    “Yahweh” in church songs?
    My pastor asked me to write a weekly column for our parish bulletin. The one scheduled to run on 22 June 2025 is called “Three Words in a Psalm” and speaks of translating the TETRAGRAMMATON. You can read the article at this column repository. All of them are quite brief because I was asked to keep within a certain word limit.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
    Some have expressed interest in perusing the ORDER OF MUSIC I prepared for Pentecost Sunday (8 June 2025). If such a thing interests you, feel free to download it as a PDF file. Because our choir is on break this week, the music is relatively simple.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)
    I stumbled upon this live recording of a PROCESSIONAL I played on the pipe organ in 2002. It’s an excerpt from a much longer composition by Sebastian Bach. In those days, there weren’t sophisticated recording devices allowing one “fix” wrong notes. (Perhaps they existed, but we didn’t have machines like that.) So it was necessary to play the entire piece from beginning to end. If you’re a church organist, feel free to download the PDF score. I suppose it’s only a matter of time until some joker uses “artificial intelligence” to play music at church … but there’s something so satisfying about playing an organ in real life.
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Quick Thoughts

    Antiphons Don’t Match?
    A reader wants to know why the Entrance and Communion antiphons in certain publications deviate from what’s prescribed by the GRADUALE ROMANUM published after Vatican II. Click here to read our answer. The short answer is: the Adalbert Propers were never intended to be sung. They were intended for private Masses only (or Masses without music). The “Graduale Parvum,” published by the John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music in 2023, mostly uses the Adalbert Propers—but sometimes uses the GRADUALE text: e.g. Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June).
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    When to Sit, Stand and Kneel like it’s 1962
    There are lots of different guides to postures for Mass, but I couldn’t find one which matched our local Latin Mass, so I made this one: sit-stand-kneel-crop
    —Veronica Brandt
    The Funeral Rites of the Graduale Romanum
    Lately I have been paging through the 1974 Graduale Romanum (see p. 678 ff.) and have been fascinated by the funeral rites found therein, especially the simply-beautiful Psalmody that is appointed for all the different occasions before and after the funeral Mass: at the vigil/wake, at the house of the deceased, processing to the church, at the church, processing to the cemetery, and at the cemetery. Would that this “stational Psalmody” of the Novus Ordo funeral rites saw wider usage! If you or anyone you know have ever used it, please do let me know.
    —Daniel Tucker

Random Quote

“In 1848, Franz Liszt attended a performance of Schumann’s 1st Piano Trio, held in his honor in the Schumanns’ home. Liszt arrived two hours late with Wagner (who hadn’t been invited), derided the piece, and spoke ill of the recently deceased Mendelssohn. This upset the Schumanns, and Robert physically assaulted Liszt.”

— Janita Hall-Swadley

Recent Posts

  • “Yahweh” in church songs?
  • “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
  • “Participation” • Recovering its Receptive Dimension
  • “Breathtaking Photographs” • First Mass of Father Michael Caughey, FSSP (Muskegon, MI)
  • “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)

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