Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate

Creation’s Music

John Dickson (Studio)

What do you hear? Something beautiful, or something not so much? For some, this atonal music of the Japanese shamisen is harsh and grating; for others, it’s a source of wonder and harmony. Of course, it’s how director Mark spends his weekends (probably surrounded by incense). I can see the attraction … even if I tend to prefer more of a beat – and, frankly, more notes – in my music … but it raises some of our key questions today. What is music and what is it about music that stirs the human soul. Is it just a series of sound waves producing neurological responses … Or does it point ‘soul’ in everything … ? Is music – as so many ancients believed – a signal from God? I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

 

Jeremy Begbie:
Music is organized sound. And usually that means organized pitches of sound arranged in time. A lot. There’s a lot of debate about what’s actually comes into the category of music, but that’s a pretty good working definition, I think.

John Dickson (Studio)

Jeremy Begbie – though an Englishman – is Distinguished Professor at Duke University in North Carolina. He’s a world authority on music and its intersection with theology and the human soul. He studied philosophy and music at the University of Edinburgh, theology at the University of Aberdeen, where he also completed his doctorate. He is a senior member of Wolfson College and an affiliated lecturer in the faculty of music at the University of Cambridge. He holds professional qualifications from both the Royal College of Music and The Royal Academy of Music, and he is a professionally trained musician performing extensively as a pianist, oboist, and conductor. I’m talking to him about the enduring love affair between music and the human heart.

John Dickson:
Are there any cultures you’re aware of that don’t have music?

Jeremy Begbie:
No, I don’t think there are any, um, I think there plenty of cultures that don’t have a word for music, which is interesting. A lot of cultures have a word that means something like a bodily movement with sound because it’s music is so intimately connected with dance, but no, in every culture, every culture will have something like what we would call music today. Yes, definitely. It’s ubiquitous. And why, why do you place it? Because it’s a unique form of communication. That unique form of human communion, I think is the word I would use that it’s, that it can do things and make things possible between human beings that nothing else can. That’s why.

John Dickson:
I want to ask why does music work? Um, is it more than physics and physiology? You know, sound waves, exciting neurons? Is it something beyond the material going on?

Jeremy Begbie:
That’s a big question. It’s certainly is material. Most definitely. It is neurons and it is vibrating strings and it is physical things and all the rest of it. Um, but no, I think it is more than that. I mean, for, for, uh, for a theologian, you have to say as a theologian, as a Christian theologian, I have to believe that the Holy spirit is active in and through music and makes ultimately its the Holy spirit who makes communion between people possible. Um, what you can’t do though, you can’t sort of isolate a non-material bit of music and put it up for examination. Um, just as, um, well, let’s take another example, take, um, the existence of consciousness or mind, you probably knows a lot of debate. This is such a thing as mind or consciousness. It was a pretty widespread opinion, even among scientists that yes, you can point to firing neurons and brain cells and all the rest of it. But, but that won’t ultimately explain this extraordinary phenomenon of consciousness. And I think the same goes for music as well. There’s the things you can explain in music and physical terms, but there’s an awful lot that you can’t ultimately, there’s huge mystery there.

John Dickson (Studio)

In his book, Theology, Music and Time, Jeremy points out that music reflects the rhythms of human life. Our own stories find a kind of feedback loop in music. And so music is both objective and subjective. It’s objective in the way it represents real human experience and embodies mathematical realities, and yet it’s obviously also subjective, inasmuch as different music moves us in different ways. 

Jeremy Begbie:
So music has an objectivity about it. Yes, indeed. But it’s also deeply subjective because it involves human beings shaping sound. And it also music varies hugely with regard to culture with the goddess society as with, um, the concerns or the politics or the ideologies of the moment. So it’s both objective and subjective. We do have a live in a culture which wants to say the whole thing must be evaluated purely subjectively, that there are no grounds for any kind of judgements about music beyond our own, either personal or cultural, social preferences. Um, that that’s a very modern view really only It’s been around in the last few hundred years. Um, and it’s, and it’s distinctively European as well. Uh, but it’s pervasive and that’s, that’s the world we live in, of course, not just with music that applies to many other things as well in the culture that we’re in.

John Dickson:
Even the most hardened subjectivist, if that’s not to mix pictures, uh, would agree that Johanne Sebastian Bach produced something unusually beautiful and spiritual. Are there technical reasons for that or did he just happen to stumble across a few pretty tunes,

Jeremy Begbie:
How beautifully put, um, well I have a soft spot for Bach because he has the same initials as I do. So that makes him very distinguished. Um, but uh, not the most serious note. Uh, even the hardened atheist has to be in awe of Bach because something quite exceptional is going on there. Um, largely self-taught within a musical family. And so we didn’t go to a conservatory or ever get composition lessons or anything like that. It came from a very, very musical family and was well trained in the practice of music, but there’s no one that comes close to him in his time. And actually I think very few come close to him later on. Why is that because of his inventiveness, his virtuosity, because of the intellectual intricacy of what he’s doing and all of that combined with huge emotional power. In other words, it can speak very directly. Another thing that’s very characteristic of Bach is that his music speaks across cultures. It does not that it speaks to every culture necessarily, but it’s his, it has always had the extraordinary ability to leap across cultural boundaries. Um, one of the interesting things about Bach is, is in Japan, which is not a culture that’s really brought up in that kind of music at all is that Bach’s music is fabulously popular, uh, particularly the Matthew passion and it’s, it’s that ability of Bach as it were to jump across the kind of walls and barriers that we kind of, uh, put up between people that makes you think, well, maybe something exceptional is going on here. I also think he’s exceptional because he’s managing to at least, I believe he’s managing to work with the, um, to a built in characteristics of sound that has particularly something called the harmonic series, kind of acoustic properties of physical sound. And he’s working with those. So it’s grounded in a physical Christian, we would say created order and yet, and yet he does extraordinary things with those given materials. So it’s both as it were grounded objectively, but it’s also extraordinary inventive. I like to think of it as, as exemplifying an amazing convergence of discovery and invention. And we tend to think those two, uh, pitted against each other. I think Bach shows us no, you can be incredibly inventive, but yeah, as you’re inventoring you venting, you are discovering more and more about the world. I think it’s a pretty good pattern for a lot of the arts, not just music .

John Dickson:
When we eventually send you the final product, you’ll, you’ll hear that the theme tune for Undeceptions is a modern band. Forgive me … 

Jeremy Begbie:
You used to play in a modern band. A very famous rock star right here?

John Dickson:
Indeed. But playing Bach yeah, prelude to the cello suites…

John Dickson (Studio)

Of course, translating something as sublime as Bach’s cello suites is no simple matter, and it took more than a few musical brains to accomplish it for Undeceptions. You listen to it every week at the beginning and end of every episode, but maybe it’s worth taking a moment to see how the Undeceptions Band pulled it together… It begins, of course, with the incomparable cello piece … played here by our friend Kenichi Mizushima … “Keni” … Bach created a stunning mathematical sequence designed to create tension as the tune wanders away from Gmaj home base … out to the key of Dmaj where we feel tension and disorder, and then he crawls wonderfully, circuitously, back “home” to G …  Then brought in a rhythm section – Santino Dimarco on drums and Jonathan Byrne on bass and Andrew Valentine just strumming the quick changing chords – all without trying to overtake the basic feel of the Prelude … There’s also a bit of synth – played by Santino …The trickiest bit – but I think the thing that makes it – is the electric guitar part. Colin Benvenuto (who’s played on several of my previous projects) came up with a stunning guitar part that isn’t really playing what Bach wrote; he’s having a conversation with it. I called him to ask him about it… And here’s how it finished up … 

Jeremy Begbie:
Actually, if I may say so that’s very interesting. Because Bach has been arranged by practically everybody and you’ll find many rock musicians, certainly many jazz musicians because of its improvisatory character, uh, fascinated by Bach. And he seems to be one of these few composers that you can sort of translate into almost any idiom of music, indeed, almost any culture without spoiling. It. It’s very hard to play Bach well, as someone once said to me, but it’s, it’s very easy, relatively easy just to play him, just to get the notes and understand something. And I think that’s, I think that’s particularly interesting. It’s very hard to spoil Bach very hard.

John Dickson (Studio)

Well, I hope he doesn’t think differently when he hears this episode! We’ll come back to Bach and Begbie later. Some musical journeys take us down very different roads – but, uncannily, end up at the same metaphysical destination! 

Kirsty:
I studied performance and composition at university, and that was my, uh, undergraduate degree. I finally specialized in composition and creativity. It was actually sometime later that I went back to Europe, to France to study electronic music and computer music and using generative techniques, algorithmic techniques to compose music for computers modeled on natural forms of generativity and creativity. 

John Dickson (Studio)

That statement may raise more questions than answers for some, but bear with us. It’s about to get super-geeky. I’m talking to Dr. Kirsty Beilharz, who began her academic career specialising in the science of music. 

 

She was Professor of Music and Interaction Design at the University of Technology in Sydney … until quite a bit of life change … She’s now Professor of Integrative Studies at Excelsior College.

Kirsty: 
I first worked in a music department then in a design computing department with students, uh, exploring more digital mechanisms of being creative, um, and then moved on to be professor of interaction design in music. So music that responds in real time live music that responds to performers and players and audience, and, uh, the kinds of music you might encounter in an exhibition or an installation public artworks. So utilizing the abilities of sensing and live responsive music to people and, uh, creating experiences, immersive experiences.

John Dickson (Studio)

You’re in one of those immersive experiences right now. And that’s music composed by Kirsty. We’ll put a link to more of her work in the show notes.

John Dickson: 
Can you give me a definition of music?

Kirsty:
Huh? Well, you know, there’s one floating around which is quite functional, I believe. And I think it might’ve been Lee Landy who said that music is organized sound. Um, that I do, I might not be right about the source of the, the very first person to say that, but that is quite functional. Now why I like that definition is music can be something very constructive, but one person’s noise is another person’s music. One person’s music might be another person’s noise is a great deal of subjectivity, but there’s an aspect to the organizing and arranging of it. That transforms mere happenstance of sounds into something that we might perceive as beautiful or as meaningful. So it’s something about constructing the melodies, constructing the harmonies, organizing the tone colors, starts to work in, uh, a meaning underlying those sounds in that music.

John Dickson: 
In some ways it’s a bit like writing, isn’t it in that, um, you organize, uh, lines into something that has greater meaning, but it’s the organization of the thing that turns it from a scratch on the ground to the letter Zed, you know. And if you use that analogy along the continuum, there are composers or writers at each different point. There’ll be those who look at the granularity of the sounds and the materials themselves. At the other pole you might have the people who are concerned with the narrative in the story it tells and the materials that do it, aren’t incredibly important, but it’s the message. But there are also those who are concerned as I say with the materials themselves and the noise they make, or which instruments you should choose and others more with the meaning and the interpretation that’s conveyed. And then of course, um, that brings me to the fact that because music’s so abstract, unlike words, where it’s easier to reach some consensus about interpretation. Abstract media, like music have a really active role for the listener. The listener brings to the listening experience, all their worldly experiences and colors and construct in a way what they hear. And they add to the meaning. It’s not merely the composer, ascribing, meaning it’s the recipient as well. You’re kind of in a joint participation in the experience. So it’s quite different to maybe a word based text, I think.

John Dickson (Studio)

And it’s that ‘joint participation’ with the listener that has led to some amazing developments in our understanding of music and medicine, in particular, aged care. 

John Dickson: 
What is going on when a tune can animate someone with profound dementia who can’t recognize their own family members, but they know the song like a best friend and can often even sing it.

Kirsty: 
Yes, absolutely. Singing and participation is definitely something.

John Dickson: 
How is music doing that when the face or voice of the human being can’t?

Kirsty: 
Yeah, I think, well, you’ve touched on a complex question. I don’t think there’s just one right answer. 

John Dickson (Studio)

By the way, I should explain that Kirsty worked for a couple of years on a musical program among people with dementia …

Kirsty:
Yeah, I think, well, you’ve touched on a complex question. I don’t think there’s just one right answer. Um, we know that people with dementia, for example, are more likely to remember memories they laid down when they were young or at a formative age. Um, those more than utilitarian, recent memories are more likely to be accessible. I think music, you can see by the fact that it might come drop some of that nostalgia or some of those memories. And I really do mean memories because people will, as you hinted, remember words and remember tunes and be able to join in opportunities and participate with their loved ones or in choirs and so on. Um, so it does reach very deeply into their subconscious and perhaps it is an emotional trigger, perhaps there’s that cognitive depth that music is able to plumb. Uh, I’ve seen it work spiritually too. I believe I’ve certainly seen people for whom words were gone, but hymns singing, the Psalter could bring back that experience or a prayerful type of content contemplation and, uh, subsequently to the work with people with dementia. That was, um, something that I did in hospitals and palliative care and working last year at St. Vincent’s as well. Um, talking to people about how spirituality is a part of their health journey, particularly if they’re experiencing a serious illness, how their actual psychology affects their spirituality and vice-a-versa, and, and music can be akin to some of those things sometimes. It’s, it’s an interesting fusion because it is metaphysical, but it’s also the cognitive sciences go right down into this path as well. And, uh, they kind of intersect, and I’m not sure everyone has the explanation, but it’s almost magical the responses that you see sometimes. 

John Dickson (Studio)

Magic, she says. It’s weird. Music isn’t just a material thing – like good food. It somehow sits at the crossroads between the material and the psycho-social. Jeremy Begbie goes further – actually so does Kirsty – in suggesting that music points us not just to each other and our own inner self, but to the divine. That’s coming up … after the break.

Break 1

John Dickson: 
Do you place much stock in the philosophical arguments going right back to Plato, but then through Augustine and even Emmanuel Kant, that music is an audible manifestation of the rational elegance of the universe and therefore a pointer to the mind of God.

Jeremy Begbie: 
The tradition you’re talking about is very, very ancient and in one form or another has been the dominant way of thinking about music worldwide. Now it’s fallen out of favor in the modern age, modern European age, but for centuries. And certainly for a thousand years of the Christian year, 1500 years of the Christian year, that was the commonest way. If you are going to think about music and theorize and philosophize about music, you did it with reference to the created order as a whole. And that goes, goes back to Pythagoras and yes, and lead plays though to the harmony of the spheres, all that all that cost providers, which says that musical sound is or ought to be, uh, a way of tapping into and giving voice to giving sound to the order of the cosmos. That you’ll find a wonderful elaboration of that at the beginning of Silmarillion, Tolkien’s Silmarillion, but, but it, it goes right through many, many cultures and, and is still very much around in many cultures.

John Dickson (Studio)

The Silmarillion Professor Begbie is referring to is a not terribly well known book by J.R.R. Tolkien. Most people have heard of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, thanks to director Peter Jackson. But director Mark tells me that Tolkien’s Silmarillion is a book of the myths and pre-history that sit behind the land of Middle-Earth, and its creation story involves quite a bit of music. 

Reading

There was Eru, who in Arda is called Iluvatar. And he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought. And they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened … for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly.Yet ever as they listened, they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony.

John Dickson (Studio)

Anyway, we’ll leave Mark in his happy place … The point is: Professor Begby reckons – like many other philosophers before him – that music points to the mind of God. 

Jeremy Begbie: 
So yes, I give a lot of credence to that. I have hesitations about some forms of it. Um, especially if, I mean in the more let’s just generalize from in the more platonic, um, versions of that, the danger is that you will leave the materiality of music behind that. You will tend to see music as simply giving voice to an ‘Idea’ with a capital I form, something that is always beyond the material. I think as Christians, we want to say that it’s the material world is very real and very good and has its own kind of order, which we should celebrate. So it’s not as if we’re constantly trying to escape it. Sure. The material world is not all that there is. But if we really, if we look at the material world in the way that wants us to, we can celebrate its beauty, its order its possibilities. Um, and I think that’s one of the things that music does. So I’ve always been a little bit wary of some versions of the cosmological tradition. If it, if they suggest that we have to somehow move beyond or escape or, um, how can I put it? It’s like, like getting on the roof of a house, you use the ladder, but then, Oh, you can kick the ladder away once you’re on the roof. No, there’s never a point at which we kick the material away. God has taken takes creation his creation… Well, very, very seriously.

John Dickson: 
Yeah. So it’s not just mathematics, which is how often that ancient predictions or it it’s mathematics embodied in well sound waves and you know, the biology of our ear

Jeremy Begbie: 
That’s a very good way to put it, but it’s not just, we’re trying to move into the eternal realm of number as it were. Um, it’s, it’s mathematics and number embedded in real physical things, vibrating strings, vibrating, vocal chords, uh, patterns of sound in the air and so forth. We ought to, we should celebrate its materiality, even as we recognize its beautiful form.

John Dickson (Studio)

Philosophers have been reflecting on this multilevel nature of music for as long as… well … ever since there have been philosophers. Begbie mentioned Plato from 4th century BC Athens. He believed that music was a kind of incarnation of the mathematical truths of the universe. He wasn’t exactly interested in the performance of music – which was a bit beneath him – but he was intrigued by the way the rational elegance of the universe also appeared in the rational elegance of melody and harmony. In the fifth century AD, Augustine (perhaps the greatest western thinker for a thousand years) followed Plato’s lead in seeing music as an audible representation of the rationality built into nature (and therefore a pointer to God). He confessed that he loved music a little too much. It would bring him to tears. He thought that was a bad thing. Being a good rationalist, he reckoned only ideas should move us, so he was suspicious of the way music had a hold on his senses. Nevertheless, he wrote a giant book on the philosophy of music, which set out to analyse rhythm, melody, harmony, and what it says about the harmony of creation itself. In the modern world, the 18th century philosopher Emmanuel Kant – one of the greatest Enlightenment philosophers – also believed that music reveals to us the genuine orderliness and rationality built into the fabric of material creation. He wasn’t exactly a fan of music. He thought it was the lowest of the arts (fool), but he nonetheless believed that the organised unity of a musical piece (which is how we distinguish music from random sounds) is recognised as an organised unity because our rational minds themselves are attuned to detecting organisation, intention, and purpose. And when we sense the harmony between a musical piece and our rational faculties, we are wowed by the intelligibility or purposefulness of everything around us. And that’s the experience of beauty. And it’s a pointer to the Divine (Kant said). Put simply, there’s a long tradition of thought – among ancient pagans, Christians, and Enlightenment figures – that sees music as a kind of “proof of God”. The strongest argument for God’s existence has always been the way natural objects are governed by elegant rational laws, from the tiniest particle to the outer reaches of the cosmos, and those laws have produced minds that recognise and delight in that elegance and rationality. The whole thing is an obvious set up! Well, music is an audible embodiment of that same idea. Music has its rational elegance in a way simple sounds don’t, and when we detect that elegance we are proving and participating in the Mind that stands behind the order of everything. A.N. Wilson, the british atheist and sceptical biographer of CS Lewis, Charles Darwin, and even Jesus, lost his atheism and returned to a hesitant Christian faith precisely because he thought atheism couldn’t make sense of language, love, and music. When he announced his departure from atheism in the New Statesman, he described music as one of the “strongest phenomena” indicating “that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true.”

John Dickson: 
So there’s a social dimension to music, for sure. You know, when we all get together, we feel great. We feel bonded and all cultures have done this. Yes, there is an emotional or aesthetic dimension. Alone, hearing a beautiful piece of music, you can just be moved and you don’t why, you can be brought to tears. But there’s also an intellectual, a logos dimension to music. Music is actually highly mathematical. And so, yeah, I’m thinking of the skeptic, listening to our conversation who thinks, “Uh, yeah, sure. People, you know, people think music takes them to God, cause it, you know, interacts with our neurons and it fires us and creates this, you know, chemical, it’s a chemical thing going on.” But actually there is something external objective about the mathematics of music. Can you, can you speak to that purely intellectual dimension of the reality of music? Well, you know, one of the great falsehoods is that cliche people say music is a universal language. Now, if that were so we would all understand all musics and we’d all like all music. So clearly that’s actually not quite right. And ethnomusicologists have understood this for a long time because when you learn about the music from a different culture, for example, you need to have some understanding of its grammars of its language of its construction to really appreciate it well. And most people have a working knowledge if you like, of, of the most common or popular kinds of music, but even quite, um, shall we say studied or art music needs a degree of appreciation to, to really grasp its message. But then what’s, I find really remarkable things like Mozart, who was one of the composers who Karl Barth really, really admired. Mozart’s interesting because he, um, was a little bit sacrilegious, if anything, he’s, he was living in an age of patronage and he was often sponsored by the church and he wrote music with liturgical texts and so on, but it’s thought that he might not have been particularly religious or particularly serious about many things. Uh, and yet when musicologists analyze his music, you will find the Fibonacci series or the golden sequence and the perfect ratios that are found in the mathematics of fractals, of nature, of shells, of those wonderful cauliflowers that grow in spirals of the architecture of Palladio of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. You’ll find that same mathematical sequence, which we call the golden sequence, cause it’s pleasing to the eye. And it’s meant to be the, uh, the series of perfection in so much of the ratios, the bar lengths the note lengths of his music, the phrases lengths… I’m suspecting he did not do that consciously, but somehow that mathematical principle snuck in there and the perfection of, you know, just an acidic, um, intuition in his case, bark is probably a different story in so far as he might’ve been much more conscious about this when he wrote things like preludes and fugues a fugue often has a repetition of a melody and an interval, and you start to hear these kinds of echoes and you hear inversions things going back to front, the retrograde, you can see all the shapes. In fact, if you graph the music on a piece of paper, you see the geometry and you can very easily make a visual connection with the mathematical symmetry, the perfections, the relationships. And there again, you’ll find these particular mathematical series that are meant to be quite ubiquitous in things that are elegant to the human eye. And so I’m sort of suggesting there must be an innate connection between the perfection of the mathematics, the perfection of these art forms, whether they’re visual three-dimensional or in this case, audible, whether that was consciously constructed into it. And you’ll see people break up the picture of the Mona Lisa for instance, and talk about the ratios in that image and why it’s so satisfying. It’s the same golden secrets. Isn’t it curious that pervades always aesthetic things on to stick things. And yet it’s a mathematical principle and perhaps Bach and Leonardo da Vinci. And certainly the architect Pilate were conscious of it, but I’m suspecting people like Mozart might not have been, it’s just found its way in as an explanation of what is perfection.

John Dickson (Studio)

And that’s where Kirsty and Jeremy harmonise with each other. Music might not be a universal language, but it draws on realities we can all understand, tells stories we can all relate to.

John Dickson: 
In your view, music itself speaks even without lyrics. Music can narrate story. Tell me how that works.

Jeremy Begbie:
Well built into the way a lot of music operates. Um, yeah, are certain possibilities. It has potential to tell, to tell stories. I mean, music doesn’t assert things or tell stories in the obvious sense, but it has forms or shapes that resonate with stories and can be used therefore to embody stories. And one of the most basic in in Western music is, is a story as I call it a home away and home again, when you start in a key, a particular chord or whatever, or perhaps it’s a little motif or something, and then you go into a section where you move away from that, you go into another key or you develop the motif or whatever. And then you come back at the end in some kind of recap, your return, that movement of starting somewhere, going away and returning is built into particularly Western music, but not only Western music, you go from a center you depart and you return to the center. That’s that’s pervasive and virtually all jazz all popular music, the majority of classical music. And certainly up until 1900-1910 film music, uh, the most of the music that’s around us operates according to that pattern. And it, doesn’t not just with harmony, but also with melody and rhythm meter, virtually every parameter of music can be bought into that. I got particularly interested in that pattern of course, because it’s, it resonates with the Christian story with creation fall redemption with, uh, with, from Eden through fall to exile and then a return that comes through Jesus. And then of course the final homecoming home with a capital H uh, in the new creation. So that pageant of HomeAway and home, again, it’s just built into the, to the Jewish and the Christian faith. The parable of the prodigal son is the most obvious exemplification of that. And that’s interesting, not just because there’s a resonance between the two, but then when you have, when you have music that can do that, that can take you into that dynamic. That’s what it’s doing, it’s pulling you into it. So you feel that movement. It’s not surprising if it’s so often being used in music associated with the Christian faith or the Jewish faith, because it’s pulling you into a dynamic, which you feel.

John Dickson (Studio)

Let’s press pause… I’ve got a five minute Jesus for you… The Prodigal Son is the ultimate homecoming story in the Christian tradition. Jesus told the parable to two audiences … and it has resonance for both … Jesus’ story has two sons … one represents the sinners, the other the religious …Young son ask for inheritance, takes off, spends it all on himself …Pretty modern picture of the “sinner” … wanting everything the creation has to offer and nothing to do with the Creator himself …Anyway, Jesus says the son “came to his senses” … returned home. The father’s response is a picture of God, according to Jesus: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” He comes back from the field hears the “music and dancing”, we’re told, and he is outraged … He refuses to go inside and join the celebration … He says, “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’ 31 “ ‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ It’s a powerful critique of religion: religion turns you into a slave … it robs you of any sense of God’s generosity …And here’s the striking thing: the older son might be living in the home, but he might as well be in a foreign land … He is estranged from the father …Thinking musically for a second, it’s interesting that Jesus ends the parable like this. There is a beautiful home-away-home-again resolution in the story of the younger son … But the end of the parable isn’t a resolution … It ends in discord, or at least without resolution … We want to get back home to Gmaj but we’re stuck out Dmaj – the older son is complaining … the father is begging him to join in … but we don’t know what happens. We’re just left with the knowledge that the Father wants the religious and the irreligious to join the celebration … He wants everyone to come “home”. You can press play now.

Jeremy Begbie: 
So yes, I can read the parable of the prodigal son, but set to music or at least heard through that pattern. You begin to feel what it’s like to return again, after a long time away, what it feels like to come back home when you weren’t expecting it. And also of course, music tells you a great deal about delay about when you’re away from home, it can seem a long time how long the Lord and really great music often is, is great because it keeps you away while giving you enough sense of home to keep you in the story.

John Dickson: 
I know, I’m thinking of that final 12 bars of the prelude to the cello suites, which takes you away from where you want to go.

Jeremy Begbie: 
I know I’ve said it now. You’re right.

John Dickson: 
You’re longing to get back to the, is it G whatever it is?

Jeremy Begbie:
Oh, that’s right. Yeah. I know it’s one or a Bach is adept, absolutely adept at that. Um, so it’s not like he’s telling you the story and in the obvious sense, he’s making you feel the shape of that story. And of course, because music is so involved with a body, it’s not just with your mind, you’re feeling it with your whole, with your whole self, that pattern of Home Away and Home again is built into a great deal of bodily activity. Uh, you know, you’re at rest, there’s tension of some sort, you have a pain or you’re not sitting quite right, whatever. And then you resolve, Oh yes, we’ve sorted that out. That pattern of, of, of kind of equilibrium followed by tension. A resolution is built into so much bodily activity and, uh, music has re is resonating with that. It’s reminding you what it feels like. And that’s, I think is, is a large part of why music is so emotionally gripping and so powerful.

John Dickson (Studio)

Music is ‘gripping and powerful’, but this isn’t just about pleasure and beauty. Next week, Jeremy and Kirsty are back with us next episode to explore “bad” music … dissonance … and why that can be as important a signal to reality as the more apparently beautiful music.  They also have one or two things to say about how the Church has taken a few wrong turns in its approach to music … and how some of our secular composers capture reality in ways contemporary believers overlook. The discussion almost brought me to tears.

John Dickson:
I often feel close to tears when I just think about my former career in music. But when I, when music is all that I did, when I think of it now it’s 25 years ago. I, I can almost be brought to tears. It’s just such an interesting thing.

Jeremy Begbie: 
Do you mean with joy or regret or of?

John Dickson:
Um, an ache an ache? It’s like the best friend in my life that I haven’t seen for 20 years.

John Dickson (Studio)

Friend and heartbreaker – that’s the spectrum of music for you. However you’re feeling about music at the moment, I hope you can join us!

Undeceptions theme