Faith in Music, anyone?

[ardcarp]

Radio 4 has a James MacMillan series on the subject. Some of his guests are quite lucid. I'm afraid 'talking over music' isn't a format I find agreeable. For instance, today I turned the programme off and gave my favourite LP of John Shirley Quirk and VW's Mystical Songs a spin.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Radio 4 has a James MacMillan series on the subject. Some of his guests are quite lucid. I'm afraid 'talking over music' isn't a format I find agreeable. For instance, today I turned the programme off and gave my favourite LP of John Shirley Quirk and VW's Mystical Songs a spin.

JSQ singing over RVW is greatly to be preferred to others talking over it…

[Serial_Apologist]

I have more faith in music than I do in James MacMillan!

[gurnemanz]

[Bryn]

I have more faith in music than I do in James MacMillan !

I share your implied disdain.

[ardcarp]

Not especially 'implied'.

[Mandryka]

I'd be very interested to know if anyone's explored Jonathan Harvey's music. I have a bit, with mixed feelings, I must say. However this sticks in my mind as being a bit special, and I guess may be relevant to the topic at hand

The composer's note may help make it clear what's happening

The Goethe poem Wanderers Nachtlied is familiar to musicians in Schubert's sublime 1822 setting. Goethe wrote it sitting under an oak or, in another account, in a hut on a hill outside Weimar which was subsequently to become the site of Buchenwald. The designers of the concentration camp reverently preserved the site. It Is one of the most eerie places I have ever visited. From many years before that visit I could not disassociate the Schubert evocation of peace - written at the beginning of the nineteenth century - with a meditation on death. Only the visit seemed to explain what had unaccountably haunted my mind for so many years. The mystical poems of Steiner are answers to the fear and negativity of death, touching as they do on the light-filled colours of the 'next' world. According to Steiner we visit the luminous life-giving region nightly in deep sleep. The first meditation picks up the theme of rest from the Goethe poem and describes the soul’s night-journey to a light-filled cosmic ocean. The second meditation describes the journey back at dawn.

I also have a question for the Stockhausen heads, something which has puzzled me for a while about him. Gesang der Jünglinge is a "setting" (in some sense) of words from the Bible. Did he think of it as a spiritual, even a Christian, piece? I just saw the wiki on it says he was thinking of writing a mass at the time. Is there a way into the music (you know what I mean, a hermeneutical approach) from that religious point of view.

[RichardB]

I knew Jonathan Harvey, though not well, and his music a bit better. For me his music divides into those pieces where the "spiritual" dimension is uppermost, which tend to be somewhat weaker musically, and those where the sound seems more likely to have come first, which are the ones I prefer. I don't know Mythic Figures though.

I also have a question for the Stockhausen heads, something which has puzzled me for a while about him. Gesang der Jünglinge is a "setting" (in some sense) of words from the Bible. Did he think of it as a spiritual, even a Christian, piece? I just saw the wiki on it says he was thinking of writing a mass at the time. Is there a way into the music (you know what I mean, a hermeneutical approach) from that religious point of view.

Stockhausen was a practising Catholic at the time he composed Gesang, and he certainly did think of it in those terms. The score of Gruppen ends with the words "DEO GRATIAS" - I amuse myself with the thought that he meant "thank god that's finished!" but I'm sure it was more seriously meant than that. During the 1960s Stockhausen immersed himself in other spiritual traditions, like many others of course, but the Catholic influence emerges in many places, like the use of texts by St Francis of Assisi in Luzifers Abschied and especially in some of the very late works like Freude and Himmelfahrt. As you may know, Jonathan Harvey wrote an interesting book about Stockhausen's music, which has been out of print for many years but is worth reading.

[Joseph K]

I have a few CDs of Harvey's - Bhakti, the string quartets and my favourite which is this album:

I recall listening to it fairly frequently in my last year of uni, when I smoked a lot of weed.

[cloughie]

You know I always think of a certain Friday just before Easter when I hear that - Kempe or Jochum!

[DracoM]

I have more faith in music than I do in James MacMillan!

Yes, yes yes!

[ardcarp]

Jonathan Harvey I Love the Lord

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pQXchUxkC8

Also known in the biz as 'I Love This Chord'.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'd be very interested to know if anyone's explored Jonathan Harvey's music. I have a bit, with mixed feelings, I must say. However this sticks in my mind as being a bit special, and I guess may be relevant to the topic at hand

The composer's note may help make it clear what's happening



I also have a question for the Stockhausen heads, something which has puzzled me for a while about him. Gesang der Jünglinge is a "setting" (in some sense) of words from the Bible. Did he think of it as a spiritual, even a Christian, piece? I just saw the wiki on it says he was thinking of writing a mass at the time. Is there a way into the music (you know what I mean, a hermeneutical approach) from that religious point of view.

In a radio lecture I taped Stockhausen said somewhat lightheartedly to audience amusement that he had identified with the characters trapped in the fiery furnace, considering himself to be one of them through the critical reputation he had been getting at the time of composition!

[RichardB]

In a radio lecture I taped Stockhausen said somewhat lightheartedly to audience amusement that he had identified with the characters trapped in the fiery furnace, considering himself to be one of them through the critical reputation he had been getting at the time of composition!

It's pretty well documented (for example in an essay Stockhausen wrote for Die Reihe in 1964) that at one level the three youths in the furnace represented himself, Boulez and Nono - "an atheist, an idealist communist and a metaphysicist... these three composers are personifications of three essential tendencies in present day intellectual life" - all of whom of course were running the gauntlet of misunderstanding of their radical musical ideas.