A Beautiful Recording of Newly Rediscovered Classical Music

Sonatas Venezolanas - music for violin and piano performed by Marjory Serrano-Coyer and Hsin-Yi Chen. This music, composed by Venezuelans in the second half of the 20th century is a symbol of how a culture that is simultaneously national and Christian ought to develop. Sample and buy the recordings at marjorysc.hearnow.com.

Sonatas Venezolanas is a recently released recording of compostions for violin and piano by Ángel Sauce and Nelly Mele Lara, both of whom died in the 1990s. I was surprised to discover how recently they lived, given that the style of their music evokes a much early age. My personal impression is of 19th century or early 20th century romantic music of the highest quality, combined with some elements of more contemporary classical composition, and intermingled with a distinctive flavor that I couldn’t place, and presumed to be the individual mark of each composer. The musicians tell us in the video below that there are uniquely Venezuelan elements in these works too, so perhaps that is what I am picking up on. I do not claim any expertise in musicology so I encourage you to listen and decide for yourself!

The musicians, both of whom live in Virginia, are violinst Marjory Serrano-Coyer, who grew up Venezuela, and pianist Hsin-Yi Chen, who was born in Taiwan. Here they describe how the scores were discovered, and the project to record this music for the first time was realized.

The wonderful music and great artistry in the performances are, of course, the best reason to buy this record. But there are lessons to be learned about the nature of Christian culture here too. These pieces demonstrate how Christian culture simultaneously embodies universal principles of beauty and goodness, and bears the characteristics of a particular people, in this case the Venezuelans, and time. The basic structure is that of Western classical music, a form that developed uniquely in the Christian world and out of Christian sacred music. However, it also bears the mark of an organic development in style that has taken place since the Spanish first introduced these forms to Venezuela. 

I argue that the Christianization of local cultures, which has produced these particular works, is a good thing. Authentic Christian cultures always incarnate the universal principles of the Christian faith, which simultaneously and uniquely direct us to the common good. These principles encourage personal and societal flourishing and freedom by design, and from this there emerges also a pattern that characterizes a particular society or nation. And the mark of such a culture is its beauty. 

This view of culture is not a fashionable one. Marxist ideology, which dominates cultural commentary in the West today, says the precise opposite - that any culture is good as long as it isn’t Christian - and is therefore directed to the destruction of the beauty of all aspects of Christian culture, such as that found in music, visual art and architecture. Christian culture, so the Marxists claim, reflects and upholds the values of the oppressor class which is the white patrimony, and so all trace of this should be erased.

This highly stilted interpretation of Western history, which ignores the many moral contributions of the West, including human rights, rule of law, democratic governance and limited government, etc., nevertheless has a powerful hold over the intellectual classes, and especially those who dominate our universities, including the musical conservatories, art schools and literature departments. This is remarkable and disconcerting, to put it mildly.

Venezuela is no longer the country it once was, and is radically different even from the Venezuela of the 1990s. It has been all but destroyed by corrupt and evil Marxist forces. It is now barely a functioning state, and its people have been suffering to such a degree that the numbers of refugees from Venezuela that are flooding its neighbors are on a par with those that have fled Ukraine and Syria. Perhaps this music, which is emblematic in many ways of what used to be so good about that country, can play some small part in sparking the national memory of what was, so that it can become something even better in the future. Saving any nation from Marxism is as much a task of evangelization as it is political. And beauty is one of the most powerful tools that Christians have in their work to achieve that transformation.

Taking Music Seriously — Inside and Outside of Church

Our Western art-music is the loftiest of God’s gifts to us in the natural order, the greatest artistic treasure the world has ever known, and, in its specifically liturgical manifestations, a vital, indispensable bearer of the theology, spirituality, meaning, and identity of the Catholic religion. We cannot live well without it; we will not pray well without it either.

Music is the language of the soul, its most intimate and exalted expression. Music goes deeply into the soul, into its passions and emotions; it affects us at the intersection of spirit and flesh, it gets “under the skin,” it goes into the very sense-appetites and shapes them by motion, by repetition. Just as habits of virtue or vice are formed in the sense-appetites by repeated action, so too are certain habits formed in the same appetites by repeated sensual stimulation. What we listen to does not remain “outside” of us but enters into us and changes our way of feeling, reacting, perceiving. We cannot help being affected morally by long-term exposure to any kind of music.

The sound that is language comes from our unique mode of being in this world—as being in the world, due to our physicality, but not of it, due to our being rational creatures made in the image of God. The sound that is music, for its part, 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. Christians, inasmuch as we are “priests, prophets, and kings” by our baptism into Christ the High Priest, Word of God, and King of Kings, deserve and require a diet of the most artistically beautiful, most emotionally satisfying, most intellectually stimulating, and most spiritually beneficial music. In short: we need, for our human and Christian perfection, music that is both good and great. Surrounding it, sustaining it, we need prayer-saturated silence.

Such is the fundamental thesis of my new book Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life, which has just been released by TAN Books of Gastonia, North Carolina. Born of decades of experience, study, and reflection as a singer, choir director, composer, and teacher, and seasoned by countless conversations with college students in particular, this work urges readers to take the art of music as seriously as it ought to be taken.
 

The first part, “Music Fit for Kings: The Role of Good Music in the Christian’s Life,” deals with the corrosive cultural and psychological effects of a lot of modern popular music, contrasted with the numerous benefits of a lifelong apprenticeship to the great music of the Western tradition (including the many excellent composers working today). Here, I draw upon thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Pieper, and Ratzinger, and offer concrete strategies for acquiring or deepening a love of beautiful music.

The second part, “Music Fit for the King of Kings: The Role of Sacred Music in the Church’s Life,” provides a thorough philosophical and theological account of what is right about Gregorian chant, polyphony, and pipe organ, and what is wrong with, say, folksy guitar-and-piano or peppy Praise & Worship genres at Mass. I do not hesitate to name names and to pursue my argument to the nitty-gritty level.

In the last and (appropriately) shortest part, I speak of the ways in which silence is both the origin and the fulfillment of music. The book ends with a thorough defense of the more-than-thousand-year-old custom of the silent Canon in the Mass, the fittingness of which Cardinal Ratzinger praised, more recently joined by Cardinal Sarah.

Here’s the Table of Contents:
 

Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence was written for the benefit of pastors, seminarians, church musicians, homeschooling families, classical curriculum advocates, and everyone who is already in love with music or is seeking to develop a better knowledge of it. To musicians particularly, I would add: in my meandering journey from

• a childhood liberal parish and contemporary youth group (all the while listening to prog rock, heavy rock, rap, and other, dare I call them, genres), to
• a charismatic prayer group (when my listening incorporated some “Christian pop” artists), to
• a Latin Novus Ordo with a chant schola (by which time I had switched over entirely to “classical” music), to
• immersion in the Byzantine liturgy in Austria, to
• a mixed old-and-new-Mass chaplaincy in Wyoming, to
• life in parishes run by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter,

it is highly likely that I have been, for some portion of my life, in a situation similar to that in which any Catholic musician, music director, or music lover may ever find himself; so I believe my book will carry the force of conviction born of experience, and will be able to say something relevant and beneficial to readers from a wide range of backgrounds.

Nowadays I am singing in a fine men’s schola every Sunday and most holy days, and look forward — if anything, ever more as time goes on — to the joy of singing these incomparably wonderful ancient plainchant melodies, so perfectly suited for the rites to which they give musical utterance and shape. Their beauty elevates my mind to God; their tranquility comforts my heart. This is a joy in the beautiful that we should eagerly share with everyone, until they too can know it and benefit from it.

Nothing could be better than the flourishing, everywhere, and to the fullest extent, of great secular music and of the finest sacred music in the liturgy. That is why I have written my latest book, and I hope you’ll check it out.

Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life (hardcover, 344 pp., $29.95, ISBN 978-1505122282) is available from the publisher, from Amazon, and from the author if you would like a signed copy.

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Mary Harrell of TAN Books conducted a 26-minute interview with me about the book, for those who might be interested:
 

Is There Any Place for Classical Music In Our Culture Today?

I recently wrote a feature (on my blog) on some new classical music by the English composer Tony Banks. You can read it here. These are pieces of music written for performance by a conventional symphony orchestra.

I enjoyed listening to these compositions, and so my intention was simply to recommend them to others who might like them too. Banks’ work reminds me of a style of English romantic music from the turn of the last century, before the dissonant forms of the mid-twentieth century started to dominate. So we might think, maybe, of Vaughan Williams, Elgar or Delius, with the occasional sprinkling of Russian romanticism of say, Rimsky-Korsakov (I’m not sure where that came from).

I was prepared to give these a listen because Banks has not attempted to incorporate the ugly dissonance of modern music theory into his work. This is unusual today, even for those composers who acknowledge that modern classical music is generally, to coin a phrase, every bit as bad as it sounds to you or me, and feel that they must try to square the circle and somehow create accessible modernism. Although he has made a living as a composer for over 50 years, he was never formally trained in composition, and so I’m guessing he felt no pressure to conform to the opinions of the contemporary conservatory and the critics. Either that, or he has integrated modernism into his music so well that you don’t know he’s done it!

As I listened, I wondered whether this is the sort of music that might contribute to the evangelization of the culture that so many Catholics, including me, hope to see. To create a popular culture that is beautiful and Christian, we need beautiful contemporary music with mass appeal, which stimulates and nurtures a desire for Beauty itself in those who hear it.

On reflection, I would like to think that it might happen but I doubt if the compositions of Tony Banks will do this.

This is not a commentary of his musicality - he is not a Christian to my knowledge, and probably doesn’t care about evangelizing the culture anyway. Furthermore, he has several such collections published which are issued by Naxos records, so presumably, they are selling reasonably well. Rather, I am thinking here of the value and relevance of the whole genre today.

I am wondering if classical music itself is a dated form, and if consequently, any attempts to revive it by contemporary Christian classical composers who do share my goal are futile. Don’t misunderstand: I wish the best to all who try, and will happily publicize any who create music that I enjoy. But the goal here is to reach and appeal to a much broader audience than me with my eclectic tastes.

I use the word “classical” here in the broadest sense, thinking of music that is considered today to be highbrow, and is generally written for the instruments that Mozart or Beethoven would have written for. I would include everything from Bach and Beethoven to Birtwistle and Boulez. Those who compose such music today are generally trained in the conservatories attached to our university system.

Regardless, whether those contemporary classical composers opt to work in modern dissonant forms or buck the trend and risk the ire of the critics by attempting, as Banks has done, to work in the older, more accessible harmonies, virtually none have a wide appeal. It used to be the case that high-brow and popular culture were one. Mozart and Shakespeare were as interested in getting “bums on seats” at performances of their work as the elevation of the souls of those who listened or watched their work. The highly regarded classical composers of today, to the extent that they are well known, do not achieve renown because their works are popular or listened to by many people. It is simply because the musical establishment of educated elites approves of what they do, and can influence media coverage and patronage.

I wonder if the answer lies in taking musical training out of the conservatory as it is today, which seems, invariably, to direct its students to an ever narrower and less popular genre, and redirecting those who have the requisite talent first to the composition of new sacred liturgical music, and then building upon that foundation, up to new contemporary music styles.

A culture that is not rooted in a living culture of faith is like a tree with rotting roots. It has lost its sustenance and is destined to topple over, which is what modern classical music has all but done. The right response to this is not to try to revive a dead plant, but to plant new saplings.

Therefore, the first task in the evangelization of music culture is the development of modern forms of sacred music that spring from a culture of faith and contemplation of God. Whether newly composed chant, polyphony, or something else not yet imagined, we need this new music before we can look outwards to draw new people in with a beautiful and fresh contemporary culture. This is not an argument for guitars and drums - I am talking about music that conforms to the essential criteria outlined by St Pius X in his encyclical Tra Le Sollecitudini. Nor am I suggesting that this new music displace the canon of traditional sacred music. Rather, I foresee forms that slowly add to its treasures: that “the new work will form a new part in the musical heritage of the Church, not unworthy of its past.” (Musicam Sacram, no. 59). Only to the extent that we can create profane music that is derived from and points to these new sacred forms will we once again have healed the rift between popular and high culture.

How might such a formation occur? I am not a musician, so can only draw parallels with sacred art, and particularly the iconographic tradition which was re-established in the mid-20th century without any help from our universities, or art schools. It began with a small group of gifted artists with authentic faith, some who did have a modicum of formal training, but who very quickly rejected the mainstream, and working with theologians trained themselves. These are people of great insight, who not only have the artistic skill, but also the intelligence and insight to be able to teach and develop an artistic style themselves. Then these few taught students who came to them individually. Now, 70 years later, we are into the third and fourth generation of artists who are influenced or directly taught by these pioneers, and we begin to see schools being set up to teach iconography.

Christ Pantocrator painted by pioneer, Leonid Ouspensky, 1902-87

So this is a long term project that I do not expect to see developing in my lifetime, but nevertheless, I do believe that it will happen. In the meantime, give me Banks over Boulez every time.

Tony Banks

And for those who are curious, here is some Boulez. It’s bad; you have been warned.

Told you so!