Happy Feast Day

In a garden shady this holy lady
With reverent cadence and subtle psalm,
Like a black swan as death came on
Poured forth her song in perfect calm:
And by ocean's margin this innocent virgin
Constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer,
And notes tremendous from her great engine
Thundered out on the Roman air. . . .

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.

--W.H. Auden

What Passion Cannot Music Raise, and Quell?

What passion cannot music raise, and quell?
When Jubal struck the chorded shell,
His listening brethren stood 'round.
And wondering on their faces fell,
To worship that celestial sound!
Less than a god they thought there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that shell
That spoke so sweetly and so well.
What passion cannot Music raise and quell?

-- John Dryden, "Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day" (musical setting by G.F. Handel)

Feast of Saint Cecilia

Hymn to St. Cecilia

I.
In a garden shady this holy lady
With reverent cadence and subtle psalm,
Like a black swan as death came on
Poured forth her song in perfect calm:
And by ocean's margin this innocent virgin
Constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer,
And notes tremendous from her great engine
Thundered out on the Roman air.
Blonde Aphrodite rose up excited,
Moved to delight by the melody,
White as an orchid she rode quite naked
In an oyster shell on top of the sea;
At sounds so entrancing the angels dancing
Came out of their trance into time again,
And around the wicked in Hell's abysses
The huge flame flickered and eased their pain.
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.

II.
I cannot grow;
I have no shadow
To run away from,
I only play.
I cannot err;
There is no creature
Whom I belong to,
Whom I could wrong.
I am defeat
When it knows it
Can now do nothing
By suffering.
All you lived through,
Dancing because you
No longer need it
For any deed.
I shall never be Different. Love me.
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.

III.
O ear whose creatures cannot wish to fall,
O calm of spaces unafraid of weight,
Where Sorrow is herself, forgetting all
The gaucheness of her adolescent state,
Where Hope within the altogether strange
From every outworn image is released,
And Dread born whole and normal like a beast
Into a world of truths that never change:
Restore our fallen day; O re-arrange.
O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain,
Lost innocence who wished your lover dead,
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
O cry created as the bow of sin Is drawn across our trembling violin.
O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain.
O law drummed out by hearts against the still
Long winter of our intellectual will.
That what has been may never be again.
O flute that throbs with the thanksgiving breath
Of convalescents on the shores of death.
O bless the freedom that you never chose.
O trumpets that unguarded children blow
About the fortress of their inner foe.
O wear your tribulation like a rose.
Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.

-- W.H. Auden
(Benjamin Britten's setting of Auden's text can be heard here.)

Music and Morals, Part 6: Augustine of Hippo

Today is the birthday of Saint Augustine of Hippo, Doctor of the Church, who was born in 354 in what is now Algeria. Augustine's conversion from Manicheanism to Christianity was accomplished through the sense of hearing; as he wept in a garden in Milan, unable through the action of his will to free himself from his slavery to sexual sin, he heard the voice of a child repeating, "Pick up and read, pick up and read [tolle legge]." He picked up a Bible that was at hand, opened it, and read Saint Paul's instruction to the Romans:

Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in lusts (Romans 13:13-14)

and his conversion was complete.

Augustine, who had written the treatise De Musica before his conversion, struggled mightily afterward to define an appropriate Christian response to the sensual pleasures that music confers. In Book 10 of Confessions, he writes with palpable anxiety of the urge to

[have] the melody of all the sweet songs with which David's Psalter is commonly sung . . . banished not only from my own ears, but from the Church's as well.

He was ultimately able to reconcile his love of music with the hatred of the memory of sin that it evoked by rationalizing that it was not the singing that moved him, but rather the content of what was sung. Indeed, he frequently refers to his own conversion using the language of music, and, specifically, of singing. In Book 9 of Confessions, for instance, he writes of the desire to praise God for granting him the gift of faith by singing a song (invoking Psalm 26) from the very depths of his being:

[Converts wish] to sing from the marrow of our bones, "My heart has said to you, I have sought your face, your face [O Lord] I will require.

And in his Commentary on Psalm 32, Augustine glosses that Psalm's famous opening verse:

The old song belongs to our old selves, the new song is proper to persons made new . . . Brothers, sing well.

The liturgical music performed at his baptism seem to have entered as deepy into Augustine's physical body as into his soul, inpiring the cleansing tears that reflect the ritual water of baptism itself. Augustine describes it in Book 9:

I wept at your hymns and canticles, moved deeply by the sweetly-sounding voices of your church. The voices flooded into my ears, trut seeped into my heart, and . . . tears streamed down, and to me it seemed they were good.

In 1838, Franz Liszt wrote to his friend Joseph-Louis d'Ortigue about Raphael's painting of Saint Cecilia in ecstasy surrounded by SS. Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene (top; the second image is Botticelli's rendering of Augustine), which he had seen on a trip to Bologna. The painting impressed him deeply, and he interpreted it as an allegory of the artist's ability to perceive and propagate the divine truths revealed through the sort of heightened sense of hearing that had brought about Augustine's conversion itself. Liszt considered Cecilia, "that virgin, ecstatically transported above reality," to be the exemplar of the artist, who translates divine sounds in such a way that they can be understood by the masses, and he saw the three saints who flank her as representing varying degrees of comprehension of music. As he described Raphael's rendering of Augustine (second from right):

His face is serious and grieved . . . . Having waged a constant war against his senses, he is still fearful of the fleshly snares hidden in the appearance of a celestial vision . . . as one who had been seduced and transported far from God's way by the lure of paganism, he is asking himself . . . whether these harmonies that seeem to descend from heaven are not actually deceptive voices -- a contrivance of the devil, whose power he knows only too well.

May Saint Augustine intercede for us, that we may be given true hearing and be able to discern between the two.

Mourning Into Joy, Part 3: Is There a Doctor in the House?

Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven,
and whose sin is covered. Blessed is the one to whom
the Lord shall not impute sin.
-- Romans 4:7-8

I'm going back to New York in a couple of days to defend my doctoral dissertation, "Music, Sin, and Redemption in Victorian Visual Culture." It's an exploration of a mostly-forgotten aspect of the portrayal of salvation history in the visual arts -- a trope dating from the patristic era that equates music with sin, and its abandonment with redemption. This trope, or so I contend, for various reasons reapppeared in 1850s England, and can be seen in certain paintings (as well as literary treatments) of fallen women from that time. The preeminent example of the music-sin-redemption conflation, however, as I have discussed in previous posts, is no woman, but rather David, the great musician who became king, the egregious sinner who was nevertheless a man "after God's own heart" (Acts 13:22). David, after being awakened by Nathan from denial of his sinfulness (adultery with Bathsheba, resulting in a son who dies in infancy, and the contrived murder of her husband Uriah on the battlefield), casts down both harp and crown in mourning, or so he was commonly portrayed as doing in medieval illuminated incipits of Psalm 51 (the "Miserere"). David is shown above, in a sixteenth-century painting by Lucas Cranach, spying upon Bathsheba as she bathes; note that he has his harp with him; having not yet seduced Bathsheba, he has not yet discarded it in grief.

I am honored by the presence of Thomas H. Connolly, the authority on Cecilian iconography, on my dissertation committee, especially because his work has been a revelation to me both in my scholarship and in my journey towards God. His book Mourning Into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia is nothing less than a chronicle of salvation history, and his friendship has been a great gift. I was led to his work by various inexplicable events in my first week of graduate school, and to him personally seemingly by chance by a young woman who'd left the novitiate of the Sisters of Life to become a nurse, whom I met once and never saw again; she had been a member along with Connolly of a Catholic student-faculty consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, where Connolly taught until his retirement.

When I was confirmed, the bishop asked, upon hearing my confirmation name, if I were a musician. When I answered in the affirmative, he instructed me to "pray to Saint Cecilia often." I have often forgotten to do so; Cecilia is so far away from our own time and experience, and my main man these days is Fr. Hermann Cohen, like David a sinner, a Jew, and a musical penitent. But I would like to ask those readers so inclined to please speak to Cecilia about me, even if just one word, between now and October 31. I hope that my defense will not only earn me my degee, but will also afford glory to God, the true author and revealer of all beauty. Please also ask for help for my son, from whom I've never been away before, and his father, who'll be taking care of him solo.

Mourning Into Joy

A few years ago, in the first week of my doctoral studies, I came across a fleeting reference in a footnote to the book Mourning Into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia by Thomas H. Connolly. I immediately knew that I had to read it. I was preparing for Confirmation at the same time (although a cradle Catholic, that sacrament had gone missing during the time of my family's first heady, later sad and sodden, experiments with aggiornamento), and considered taking Saint Cecilia's name as my Confirmation name, for the obvious reason that she is the patroness of music and musicians. But that seemed a little corny to me, and I was unsure. When I read Connolly's book, however, my mind was made up: Cecilia would be my name -- not just because of her association with music, but also because of her much more ancient association with the profoundly Christian concept of mourning turned to joy, and, thus, with radical spiritual conversion. Connolly links the history of Saint Cecilia's portrayal with musical instruments to the history of the iconography of King David: the image of David-in-Penitence, with his crown and harp cast down in mourning for his adultery with Bathsheba and his de facto ordering of her husband Uriah's murder, was a popular one in the Middle Ages, and even Henry VIII had himself painted as David-in-Penitence to advertise his humility. David's life and words, through the Psalter, made up the meat of the early and medieval Church: seven times a day, monastics prayed (and still pray) the Psalms, thus identifying themselves and the Church with a man whose ethos was not only penitence, but even the paradox of complete reversal: David was a shepherd and a king, a "man after God's own heart" who was also a grievous sinner, an unarmed boy who slew a giant, the great musician and poet who sang and danced before the Lord, and the penitent who cast down his harp and crown in grief and recognition. That mysterious paradox of reversal, it seems to me, is essential to the Christian message: the words of Christ in John 16:20 -- "Amen, amen I say to you, that you shall lament and weep, but the world shall rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy" -- exemplify this paradox.

While searching for something else, as always seems to be the way, I came upon a lovely post about living the Psalms of David on a blog evocatively called Cloud by Day, Fire by Night, referring the guises under which God led Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt. The blog's author, Kirsten, beautifully emphasizes David's iconography of holy paradox as she writes:

I do not know whether we need to experience the infinity of grief in order to know its counterpart in joy, but I do know this: David’s heart held the breadth of it and did not seek to contain it, this heart that was said to be like God’s own.

And that is truth I can grab onto.

(P.S. Kirsten has images of some of the female Roman martyrs named in the canon of the Mass along the right side of her blog, including Saint Cecilia.)

The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia

Today is the Feast of Saint Cecilia, a Roman martyr who suddenly began appearing in hagiographies in the fourth century. Her association with music seems to derive from a line in the Golden Legend which describes how, on the day of her wedding (a wedding she did not want, having consecrated her virginity to God), while instruments played ("cantantibus organis"), Cecilia sang to God silently in her heart, asking Him to keep her pure so that "I might not fall into confusion." A misinterpretation of this line became the source of much of Cecilia's iconography, which has her playing the instruments, usually the organ. Raphael's 1514 painting of Cecilia with SS. Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene (above) -- all saints who underwent profound spiritual change -- shows Cecilia holding a portative organ upside-down and backwards, the pipes slipping out of their frame, at the moment she hears the singing of the angels: the moment, as it were, of her own conversion; broken instruments (the instruments of profane, earthly music) lie at her feet. Franz Liszt was entranced by Raphael's painting when he saw it in Bologna in 1838, writing in to a friend, "Isn't that virgin, ecstatically transported above reality, like the inspiration that . . . fills an artist's heart -- pure, true, full of insight?"

The definitive scholarly work about Saint Cecilia is Mourning Into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia by Thomas Connolly, with whose friendship in the past two years I have been particularly blessed. Connolly has postulated recently that Cecilia may have been a member of the Roman Jewish community of early Christians, which would explain a great deal about the ancient liturgy of her Station Day in Lent, which uses passages from the book of Esther. I took her name at my confirmation (a sacrament I received in adulthood) because of her association not only with music but also with profound spiritual change. May she bring blessings to all musicians today!

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions
To all musicians, appear and inspire:
Translated Daughter, come down and startle
Composing mortals with immortal fire.
-- W.H. Auden