Music As Prophecy
Josh Rodriguez
The connection between composition and performance is part of what music is. In English the word ‘music’ can mean both the musical score and the sound product, but as states the Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff in his Works and World of Arts book[i], “to be composed” and “to be performed” are complimentary predicaments of the ontology of music. However, even if a same piece can receive different performances, cases as du Pré connection with Elgar’s Concerto make us thinking whether could be a final performance – the consummation of the expressive potential of a piece of music.
An article written by former Oxford Professor and viol player Laurence Dreyfus is insightful in offering distinct definitions for the term ‘performance’, concluding with some propositions of his own[ii]. In an interesting part of the paper, Dreyfus traces the origins of the word back to the Middle English when it was adapted from the Old French to mean the fulfillment of a promise or a prophecy, way before it entered musical uses. To perform was synonym of accomplishing a prediction previously done.
This makes me think that most of times my attitude with musical texts written by others was much more as a law that I should obey than as something I should responsively fulfill. Obviously laws can be good, but in the context of music they tend more to reduce our spontaneity and expressivity and in their best, make us “fundamentalist” performers, but not so musical ones. Dreyfus retrieval brought to my mind that maybe thinking of music not as law, but as a prophecy can point some more fruitful standpoints for those who perform and listen to it. I would like to share three of them here:
1) Prophecies must not a have a single fulfillment
Biblical Theology calls “prophetic perspective”[iii] a kind of tunnel vision that prophets sustain in their prophetic utterances. A common image is that of a person looking into a landscape and seeing a great mountain; the description of the mountain can be very accurate, but the point of view of the observer do not allows to see what there is behind the mountain. In the perspective biblical prophets is common to read prophecies with short term fulfillments, that made more sense to the prophet himself; but what astounds us is that same prophecies can have multiple fulfillments. Many prophecies in the Book of Isaiah have been fulfilled in the Advent of Christ and still will have further fulfillments in his second coming. Some of them had even a prior fulfillment in the born of Hezekiah, the faithful king of Judah.
Isaiah the Jewish Prophet
With this hermeneutical principle we learn that a same prophecy can have multiple “performances”, all of them fundamental for the meaning of the prophecy. Even a direct and striking event like the siege of Jerusalem in the year 70CE, when the walls of the temple were destroyed do not null necessarily the perspective of a forthcoming fulfillment of this prophecy of Jesus.
What performers could learn from that is there always opportunity for a new rendition of any piece, no matter how well know and much played it is. Every performance is unique and necessary for the life of a piece of music. Every performance has the chance of presenting that music to new publics; to make the music “new” for many people. As a cellist, I lost the number of times I have already played Bach Cello Suites. Not only each performance is different, but, living in a remote area of Brazil, I have had the opportunity to play them in small cities where that recital was the only artistic event in the city in years. For most of people, it was the first time ever they watched a live performance of Classical Music.
For listeners, this enlighten that even if we have a favorite recording or a favorite performer, every chance to know a new performance is a chance to know a new life of that music; a new fulfillment of an expressive endeavor. Today we have access to a great amount of recordings and videos and I am always surprised because constantly new performance come to me and just blow my mind, in most of cases performances of unknown musicians whose I have never heard before. And constantly they become my new favorite recordings, much more than the previous ones by famous musicians. For every mind-blowing Elgar recording by du Pré, it is possible to find jaw dropping ones by Steven Isserlis, Jean-Guihen Queyras, or even by names we do not even know – yet!
2) Prophecies foresee an action
It is also interesting to think that when a prophet received a vision, he saw a dramatic scene, a sequence of actions happening in time, and so he should describe everything he saw and heard afterwards. In the same way, composers write a number of instructions intending the proper action of performers – at least the good ones in both cases! The musical score is not the finished work of art until it reaches performance. This is what Stravinsky meant in referring to the “potential music” of the composers and the “actual music” of performers.[iv] Composition presupposes performance, since they do not “actually” exists without it. In their turn, performers may look for these instructions not just for obeying them, but mostly for imagining the action that the composer foresaw and for seeing him or herself inside that scene, enjoying in being part of that realization.
Igor Stravinsky, composer
This perspective certainly would make publics to value more every chance to see a live performance, a new fulfillment in front of their eyes. The age of the record and now the age of YouTube and streaming platforms easily make us to forget that live music is actual music. It is music happening in the same space that you, dialoguing with those people in that very environment and acoustics. Therefore, to experience a performance is not so much a matter of looking for a right or a good performance, but of looking for a performance that brings a new life for music in that very moment you are living.
3) Prophecies demand a response
Finally, it is important to remember that a prophecy is not a foretelling only. Prophecies could point to some future event, but the main part of them was the call to repentance, as the Prophet Jonah feared that the Ninevites could understand. Prophecies should transform the lives of those who listened to them. In the same way, musical composition counts with the performer decisions. It needs an active participation of the musicians responsible to actualize it in front of a public in order to make sense for them. It is not enough just to look for the answers in the score, because in many case all the score gives are the questions the performer should respond to.
Jonah and the fish, illustration
For listeners, this could modify our disposition in front of art and especially in musical events. Art and music are conceived not so much with the goal of entertaining, but mostly of proposing a new way to see and to feel the world. Every music concert is an opportunity to be transformed, to have an encounter with a new way of felling, of experimenting life. And for Christians, this could mean most all a wider and brighter way to imagine the life with Christ here and later – now and not-yet as every good prophecy!
Those three reflections can make us to think of our attitudes as performers and listeners with very known music, but also with music in general. Maybe someone could argue that they fit religious music and musicians, but that composers with no spiritual vocation have nothing to do with prophecy, since they just create music out of nothing and do not have any compromise with some kind of prior revelation.
Well, firstly this could be a sort of misunderstanding of what a prophecy is, at least in the Christian tradition. The prophet is not a passive receiver; he has an active part as well, a human contribution in the formulation of the prophecy. This is a principle which most interpreters agree, something called in biblical hermeneutics as the “concursive operation”[v], where the divine counterpart acts along with the human agent in some kind of “double agency”[vi]. But the point is that the image of the prophet does not have to be only the long beard man with a staff from the Old Testament; maybe it could be the clean-shaven preacher with a tie.
Theologian Karl Barth
The theologian Karl Barth states that the contemporary ministry of preaching does not differ qualitatively from that of the old prophets. What defines both are not so much the revelation of coming events, but a new embodiment of the Word of God concerning that specific community of listeners[vii]. In that sense, when I said in point 2 that “the composer ‘foresees’ the action”, we could easily understand as “the composer ‘imagines’ the action”. Of course composers are not receivers of a divine inspiration (even if they would like to). But at the same time, every blank page is already full of centuries of tradition, instrumental techniques, specific commissions, that is, previous data that “inspire” composition with information that precedes the writing itself. The point is what to do with this given? As the role of a preacher is to help the church to imagine a new pattern of action in their lives, so can be the role of a composer that really wants to engage with his or her community of performers and listeners: to help they in conveying a new way of using notes, sounds and movements, in order to experiment a new way of listening and living after that music.
William Teixeira, cellist & scholar
For other articles, click this link. https://ufms.academia.edu/WilliamTeixeira
[i] Nicholas Wolterstorff. 1980. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[ii] Laurence Dreyfus. 2007. “Beyond the Interpretation of Music”. Dutch Journal of Music Theory, 12(3).
[iii] Louis Berkhof. 1950. Principles of Biblical Interpretation. Grand Rapids: Baker.
[iv] Igor Stravinsky. 1947. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[v] B. B. Warfield. 1980. The Inspiration and Authority of Bible. Phillipsburg: P & R Publishing.
[vi] Nicholas Wolterstorff. 1995. Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[vii] Karl Barth. 1991. Homiletics. Westminster: John Knox Press.