Beauty and Power

by Charles J. Hulin IV, October 2008

The moment of performance is a moment of autonomy. The performer is free and powerful. The performer cannot be silenced or contradicted in that moment. The performer is in control and knows his or her talents can change the world.

That moment of autonomy can amplify the voice of the otherwise powerless. It can provide real leverage against the oppressive powers that be. Thus, freedom of expression is of utmost importance in any society that truly values the individual.

The concept of the individual triumphs in the moment of performance.

But the individual is not alone in performance. Present in that moment of autonomy are mentors, tradition, human needs, and a captive audience. An ever-expanding community is linked to the moment of performance making it an act of faith.

Two artistic paths diverge at the moment of performance. One path seems to be the expression of power. Critiques of those whose work amounts to playing the loudest and fastest abound. Those with more depth or less physical ability might seek to bind their audiences as with a spell through manufactured emotion and drama. (I condemn myself here.) Either way, we give the audience an experience of power, but not necessarily a powerful experience. The freedom of the audience is compromised. The listeners are commanded to merge with the event, to cede their autonomy to the power of another. The performer has asked to be worshiped, not respected.

The other path is the path of beauty.

Beauty cooperates. Power competes.

Beauty invites participation. Power demands submission.

Beauty seeks to measure up to the laws of nature. Power asserts the self.

Beauty is absolute. Power is relative.

Beauty relates to the musicality of others.

Power tempts us to ignore musical principles.

Beauty exists in the community of composer, performer, and audience.

Power expresses the dominance of the performer.

Those calling for beauty speak to all sides in a conflict.

Those in power hear opposition in voices other than their own.

This litany makes it clear that what I mean by “beauty” includes the usual ideals of aesthetics and also converges with a paradigm that reaches far beyond the realm of art.

Traditionally, beauty has been considered a matter of proportion, of harmonious relation. On a much grander scale than my piano recital, proportion and harmonious relation exist as justice – the justice of all being cared for.

The word “shalom” used by Jews of the past and present, including Jesus, is the ultimate expression of this beauty. Shalom connotes completeness, safety, welfare, peace, and friendship with humanity and God.

We know that when the justice of all-being-cared-for falls by the wayside, war develops. Likewise, our power-focused performances might be indicative of the spirit of hostility that imbalances human endeavor at every level.

Shalom speaks to the meaning and use of power from the highest ranks of world government to our personal day-to-day ethical choices about the use of our own talents in performing and teaching.

Having power can tempt us to be unreasonable and to forget what it was like to serve or to have no power. Beauty, on the other hand, connects us with all the best parts of reality.

Perhaps my description of these two paths has been a little jarring. The path of power might seem integral to certain ways of pursuing music that are important to you. Maybe this definition of justice seems politically out-of-sync. Or, if you are like me, you have a long-term intermittent conflict with yourself about how to live and how to perform.

While my conflict resurfaces over the years, my belief in the importance of freedom, balance, and service remains the same. I have already addressed issues of freedom and balance. I believe service is the way to travel the better path.

Servants are really the ones who bring beauty into the world. Servants keep our surroundings clean and orderly, build warm homes, prepare good food, ease the woes of the infirm and their loved ones, and help us to see beauty in the world.

We are called to be servants, but we secretly worship leaders.

We overlook the indispensable function of service in society.

We seldom celebrate servants as the most important models that they are.

When we do serve, we do so as a tricky way of becoming leaders.

Truly seeking to serve moves the focus from our power to God’s power. Perhaps this is why it is of utmost importance that we learn to serve.

Focusing on God’s power should remind us that while we are each individuals, we stand side-by-side.

In his book In the Name of Jesus, Henri Nouwen writes, “Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead. Medicine, psychiatry, and social work all offer us models in which ‘service’ takes place in a one-way direction. Someone serves, someone else is being served, and be sure not to mix up the roles! But how can we lay down our lives for those with whom we are not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship? Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of Life.”

Service described in this way is not a decision of an individual but a process much bigger than ourselves that draws us into community. Service is mutual. Forgetting this gives rise to resentment. Then much forgiveness is required to preserve the community.

Service that is a mutual, honest, side-by-side process bigger than ourselves illuminates love and obscures relationships built on power. In Nouwen’s final book, Adam, he explains what he learned from a handicapped young man named Adam who became Christ to him: “Adam clearly challenged us to trust that compassion, not competition, is the way to fulfill our human vocation.”

The Kingdom of God transforms the world at every level by those who lovingly create beauty through service. Our world is so power-focused that to be part of that transformation we need to be intentional in our search for beauty and vigilant in our commitment to service.

I invite you and myself to regularly ask “What was beautiful in this day?” That mindset will clarify our path. We will be blessed with the return of genuine musical feelings and we will find ourselves freed to focus on authentic musical values.

Then we must untiringly examine and reexamine the way we see our lives and work, the way we organize ourselves, and the way we achieve our goals so as to express ever truer ways of serving.

 

Early Morning in Lasker

 

by Anna Cotton, August 2014

 

 

The clouds came

on the moon’s breath.

 

Then they rested, sleeping

low on fields and farms.

 

Now in prayerful quiet

they rise toward the morning sun.

 

 

 

 

4′ 33″

Mini-lecture from An American Concert, July 12, 2014
by Charles Hulin

John Cage’s 4’33” is a cornerstone of 20th century music and a provocative statement about the nature of music and the roles of composers, performers, and audience members. 4’33” revolutionized music in ways that, when all is said and done, might very well surpass the impact of even the greatest musical innovators such as Beethoven and Stravinsky. In brief, with this piece, Cage freed music from the preferences and the will of the composer. In so doing, he re-instated the wonders of sound and silence for many jaded listeners.

Essentially, Cage designed a piece using no particular sounds or silences of his own choosing. Instead, the music consists of whatever is heard during its 4 minute and 33 second span.

That approach to composition might sound a little abstract and a lot eccentric. But it has been suggested by experts on the subject that, beyond those philosophical issues, Cage was doing something very American with this piece.

It turns out that the first performance of 4’33” took place in a venue a little like this one. It was a small building in a wooded setting, far from the noises of the big city. And in the stillness of the performance, the sounds of nature were easily heard. In other words, on its first hearing, 4’33” was an American landscape painted with sounds, and from the earliest days of American music, a primary way of constructing an American identity has been to express something of the American landscape through sounds.

And so we are opening the doors and windows to invite you to hear the sounds and silences of our setting during these 4 minutes and 33 seconds as music.

So you’ll know what to expect, I’m going to describe how the performance will unfold. When I come back into the sanctuary, I’ll walk to the piano, bow, and seat myself, just like I would if I were sitting down to play a work by Chopin or Bach, but instead of placing a score on the music rack, I’ll place a timer so I can keep track of the passage of those 4 minutes and 33 seconds during which I won’t be playing any notes. When it is time for the piece to begin, I’ll raise the fall-board, and when the piece is over, I’ll lower it. Then, I’ll stand up and take a bow. And if you like the experience, or if you’re just polite, you’ll applaud.

The purpose of going through those motions, of enacting the standard ritual of a concert, is to draw us all into the mode of listening we normally apply to the live performance of a piece of music. It was Cage’s hope that listening in that way would help us to notice the rich layers of sound our minds usually filter out and that we would realize through the process that, as long as we’re alive, we will be surrounded by sound that can become music to us.

Lasker by Night

Moonlit Church

Moon over the Church

Moon over the Bridge

Crossing the Bridge

St. Francis by Moonlight

Reflections

Moonlight Vigil

Reflections 2014

by Charles Hulin

 

In recognition of the significant contribution of literary friends to this year’s time in Lasker,

I share my reflections on the festival in the form of a poetic remembrance of our opening concert,

Sound and Silence.

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve stopped the old clock’s ticking

And I sit at the grand in the warmth of the sanctuary.

Mozart’s Fantasy is on my mind and in the air.

Trying on his hands, I enter and exit silence in Wolfgang’s subtle ways.

 

With a composer’s mood, Jim skates his bow across the strings.

The cello tones glide into a cove of calm Vaughan Williams charted in his folk music suite.

 

In the reverberant worship space, Anna’s voice is heard in three full dimensions.

Its mother-earth richness lifts the ink from the page

and the words of the Charter live for those present.

 

Jeremy’s flute-breathed sounds are compact, brilliant, tense, and clever.

 

Paula reveals Beethoven: expressive, methodical, and unyielding.

 

I return to the piano with more Mozart.

Across the room, Kathy and Jeremy listen and play beyond thought or planning.

Aloft on tremolos and scales from the keyboard, my partners’ instincts do the surfing.

They find true ensemble and discover the chamber music of the moment.

 

Rickey declaims the syllable “be” at the end of his passionate preaching.

The word persists and I realize it is bigger than any sentence.

It is older than the Law

And the way Rickey says it is more personal than a command.

It is an utterance from the God who desires us to be

And who desires us.

 

Finally we sing the festival hymn.

The organ’s dense sound undergirds the tune

And we all pivot on a prayer word –

“Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silence

 

Peterson Park – Lakeland, FL: A local “thin place”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silence

by Charles Hulin

Our Need
We lead hectic lives. We scramble to assemble portfolio careers. We stress our systems with good and bad busy-ness. We wear ourselves down with the sounds of our own practicing: the visceral thrill of the sonorities of Liszt’s “Dante Sonata” becomes a frightening assault as one seeks to assimilate the composition day after day. We become so full of our work or so engrossed with some idea of our inner lives that we lose more and more of our abilities to hear and to see.

We need something more than disciplined Bible study, or purifying prayer, or cathartic outpourings before the Lord.

We need silence.

When the events of life or our brain chemistry flip our depression switch and we realize what tender beings we really are, we need to take time to be quiet, to breathe, and to see that the world goes on as before. Then we can engage our faith in Christ afresh.

A Continuum of Silence
It seems to me that the experience of silence is a continuum.

Silence might become manifest as a little hush we happen upon as we go about our daily work.

It might appear in our devotions as we purpose our hearts for the day: quiet time.

For me, it often begins with a slowing of the pace of my thoughts as I sit in some “thin place” in nature or a thin place created by friends who share a time of silence on a regular basis. Both outside and inside provide ample opportunity for observation that can make us calmer and more conscious.

Sometimes, after a period of prayer, perhaps in Holy Week, one is blessed to have the silent sense of being with God.

There is also the apophatic questing of the mystics which, while it might seem abstract, may turn out to be the true leveling of ground at the foot of the cross for every believer.

Sometimes we need to “sit strong” and steady to focus on fatigues, pains, even joys, so as to develop a good self-consciousness. Such centering allows for reflection, reflection that we share with Christ. With such a consciousness, we can learn how to sing a song of praise in a strange land, in a land where love has been rejected. We can learn to lead life as a meditation – being within it while also knowing the temporality of each of its parts.

Qualities of Silence
A consideration of silence in music demonstrates that silence takes on varied meanings according to its context. For example, the rests with fermatas in Mozart’s “Fantasy in D Minor” introduce an air of improvisation to the flow of the music. The pregnant pauses at the beginning of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde clear the way to the infinite longing of the work. And the breaths in Copland’s “The Cat and the Mouse” contribute to its cartoonish melodrama.

Kyle Gann’s fine book No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” reveals a multitude of layers in Cage’s ultimate musical essay in silence.

Cage’s works invite us to recognize that, as long as we live, there will be sound. Even in the moments of the greatest physical silence, our internal systems continue to churn. Cage reminds us that there is wonder in sound, whether or not it conforms to any human ideal of beauty. His compositional process is a model for moving beyond lives that are narrowly determined by our likes and dislikes.

Silence in Our Lives
It occurs to me that the practice of performing music from memory is a discipline of silence. Far from improvising or composing, when we play from memory, we quiet a great deal of short-term mental chatter (and we strive to quiet even more) so as to align with the longer-ranged curve of another’s musical plan. That work of another is bigger than our moment with it, and as we seek to “follow the score” (which might be interpreted “Don’t insert extraneous aspects of your chatter.”) we discover, little by little, our real response to the music.

Across religious traditions, there is a consistent witness that God speaks in silence. It is a truth that connects our simple devotional experiences to the esoteric practices of the mystics. And it wells up at times when we come together to worship. We are refreshed when those who structure worship allow for un-programmed moments during which we are free to think our own thoughts and to hear some word from God’s heart, unmediated by the human voice. And we can hear from God in spaces in congregational singing, in the rests or in room between verses, spaces consecrated by the words that surround them. Sometimes, the very existence of a silence can be a sign of God. I think of one of the musical miracles of my life, a spontaneous silence inserted into the hymn “To God Be the Glory” that occurred as the result of a simultaneous inspiration my mother and I experienced while playing piano and organ for the funeral of our dear friend, Bill Farless.

As I consider that funeral and making music with my mother, I remember one of my earliest musical experiences – sitting quietly on a little chair next to a church organ as my mother played for a funeral. Her sweet spirit came through her playing and ministered to those listening.

When we are silent, we can be ministered to. Soothing phrases can calm us and we can follow them deeper into our own beings to more rooted places, to less temporal moments. When we are silent, others can speak the word of God to us, and we can hear from them that we are not alone on the journey. Our silence makes room for them to be present to us. Simply being present – that is, according to my mother, the key to ministering to those that mourn.

The experience of music can invite the listener into a receptive silence, a silence in which some presence might be discovered. The ritual of music prepares us to receive a spiritual message. As Dr. Falby put it during a 2012 festival session on “Stirring the Worship Senses,” “Multi-layered experience wakens the whole self. It pulls the ‘you’ out of yourself. It is an act of worship.” And, as Jeremy McEntire added a little later, “‘The Heavens are telling the glory of God. Worship is what’s already happening. We’re just joining in.’”

As we move closer to the base of all this silence, all this listening, we might find that presence sometimes feels more like absence and that our attempts at worship and community are thwarted by too much presence of our own selves, our own disturbances. As frustrating and disappointing as that might seem, we might be getting closer to the truth at those times. While we initially feel our efforts at relationship with God have failed and that we have lost something, what we have left is very good.

We are left with the possibility that God’s presence is not limited to a few feelings that we had previously associated with being in God’s presence. We start to realize that to have an existence is to be in God’s presence. As our selves and our issues interfere with our worship, we begin to wonder if we were not as prepared to worship as we thought we were and we recognize that the continuing surrender of all that is without and within might be the real work of dwelling in the Lord’s house. In faith alone we come to God, and in so doing, we learn to be with God’s image in ourselves and others.