HERE’S SOMETHING that happens to teachers every autumn, and it has certainly been true of me this year. The academic term starts up with infinite promise, and all of a sudden we look up, emerging from the inevitable chaos that ensues, and see that it is October. I’m teaching a lot of new material this year (including lots of Baroque plainchant), and I have many new students, who are very inquisitive and very engaged. I’ve been so wrapped up in teaching that I’ve done precious little reading or writing. It would probably be better if we all were able to take a little time to do some musical reading and reflection that wasn’t pointed directly at the task at hand, whether teaching or putting music together for the parish schola.
Recently, when I had finally settled down to do some reading aimed more at the long term (Daniel Saulnier’s last book on the modes), I came across a quotation from Musica enchiriadis, (ME), that took my breath away and got me thinking about how much value there is in just poking around in old books about music, without trying to read with a specific agenda. ME, whose title means something like The Music Handbook is one of the ninth century treatises that is foundational in medieval music theory. Usually we learn about this book for its discussion of improvised polyphony (organum). But the last chapter is striking and is easy to gloss over. Here is the text of the first part of that chapter in Raymond Erickson’s very readable English translation, which is mostly available only in libraries now:
The ancients tell that Aristeus was in love with the nymph Eurydice, spouse of Orpheus. While fleeing her pursuer (Aristeus), she was killed by a snake. We perceive an Orpheus whose name signifies oreo phone—“the best voice”—in a skilled singer (cantor peritus) or in sweet-sounding melody. If any “good man,” as Aristeus may be translated, pursues Eurydice—that is, “profound understanding”—out of love, he is hindered by divine wisdom, lest she be entirely possessed, as if by the snake. But while she in turn is called forth from her hidden places and from the underworld by Orpheus, that is, by the most noble sound of song, she is seemingly led up into the atmosphere of this life and, as soon as she seems to be seen, is lost.
So, as in other things that we discern only partly and dimly, this discipline does not at all have a full, comprehensible explanation in this life. To be sure, we can judge whether the construction of a melody is proper and distinguish the qualities of tones and modes and the other things of this art. Likewise, we can adduce, on the basis of numbers, the musical intervals or the symphonies of pitches and give some explanations of consonance and dissonance. But in what way music has so great an affinity and union (commutatio et societas) with our souls—for we know that we are bound to it by a certain likeness—we cannot express easily in words.
What’s going on here? We’ve been reading about some technicalities of organization (in the organic organum sense!), and all of a sudden we are wrenched into this work of Greek mythology. You probably know the Orpheus myth from Ovid, or perhaps from the splendid operatic treatments by Monteverdi, Charpentier, or Gluck. The semi-divine Orpheus wins the love of the fair nymph Eurydice, but on their wedding day she is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus journeys to the underworld and uses his amazing musical prowess to win over the inhabitants to his cause, convincing Pluto, the god of the underworld, to release Eurydice, on the condition that Orpheus walk in front of her and that he not look back until he reaches the upper world again. But he is plagued by doubt and ends up looking back too soon, only to see her vanish forever.
The author of ME uses this story not to create an operatic spectacle but rather an exegetical one, for he reads the story allegorically. Here, Eurydice stands for understanding—in this context, we might say musical understanding. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to speak about the actual experience of music? This is the theme of a book (Music and the Ineffable) by a very different philosopher from the twentieth century, Vladimir Jankélévitch. The idea is simple and practically irrefutable: whenever we try to talk about music, we run up against something that defies being put into words, so we end up resorting to all kinds of metaphors that utterly fail to capture the experience of actually hearing music. Jankélévitch calls this our alibi. We might talk about the composer, the composer’s mood, the composer’s personal life, the social and historical of a particular piece and how it is reflected in the music. To take it a little bit closer to home for the theory teacher, we might talk about the formal structure, the melodic or harmonic design, the various spatial metaphors (high, low, deep, leaping, stepwise, running), all of which fail in some way. I believe the author of ME is saying much the same thing, and it’s a good lesson.
We can listen to music, or we can also read about music, in this case, chant and its modes and its melodic designs. But to try to use these things to bring about perfect understanding is to try to bring Eurydice (wisdom) up into the light of day, which the gods will not suffer us to do. “We discern only partly and dimly,” which is as true when we sing as when we read about music or try to work out how a piece of chant is put together, or even when we wade into the deep waters of modal ethos. We don’t hear the chant as God does, but He allows us to have just a fleeting glimpse (the “Best voice’s” backward glimpse at “perfect understanding” as she recedes into the bowels of the earth) when we sing, by way of the mysterious affinity that music has for our souls.
I was so touched to see that an author in the ninth century so perfectly captured this experience of those precious, rare mental/aural glimpses of true understanding we all have occasionally when we hear or sing Gregorian chant. To me, it is passages like that that make the ancients’ writings so worthwhile to read and teach. It’s also heartening for those of us who spend our time teaching to bear this in mind, especially as we do our best to impart some of our limited and imperfect understanding to our students.
