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What do you hear? Something beautiful? Or not so much? For some, this atonal music of the Japanese shamisen is harsh and perhaps even grating. For others, it's a source of wonder and beauty. Of course, it's how director Mark spends most of his weekends, surrounded by incense.
I can almost see the attraction, minus the incense, even if I tend to prefer a little more beat and frankly a few more notes. 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 to the soul in everything?
Is music, as so many ancients believed, a signal from God? I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' wonderful volume, Evangelical Theology, by Michael Byrd. Every week, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
Music is organized sound, and usually that means organized pitches of sound arranged in time. There's a lot of debate about what actually comes into the category of music, but that's a pretty good working definition, I think. 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 a doctorate. He is a senior member of Walfson 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 the human heart and music. Are there any cultures you're aware of that don't have music? No, I don't think there are any. I think there are 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 bodily movement with sound because 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 pervasive because it's a unique form of communication, a unique form of human communion, I think is the word I would use, that it can do things and make things possible between human beings that nothing else can. That's why.
I want to ask why does music work? Is it more than physics and physiology, you know, sound waves, exciting neurons? Is it something beyond the material going on? That's a big question. It certainly is material, most definitely. It is neurons and it is vibrating strings and it is physical things and all the rest of it. But no, I think it is more than that. I mean, for a
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, it's the Holy Spirit who makes communion between people possible. What you can't do, though, you can't sort of isolate a non-material bit of music and put it up for examination.
Just as, well, take another example. Take the existence of consciousness or mind. You probably know there's a lot of debate. Is there such a thing as mind or consciousness? And there's 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 that won't ultimately explain this extraordinary phenomenon of consciousness. And I think the same goes for music as well. There's things you can explain in music and physical terms, but there's an awful lot that you can't.
Ultimately, there's a huge mystery there.
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 also obviously subjective in a
in as much as different music moves us in different ways. 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 regard to societies, with
the concerns or the politics or the ideologies of the moment. So it's both objective and subject. 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 judgments about music beyond our own either personal or cultural, social preferences. That's a very modern view, really only it's been around in the last few hundred years,
And it's distinctively European as well, but it's pervasive and 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. Even the most hardened subjectivist, if that's not to mix pictures, would agree that Johann 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? Beautifully put. Well, I have a soft spot for Bach because he has the same initials as I do, so that makes him very distinguished. But on a more serious note, even the hardened atheist has to be in awe of Bach because something quite exceptional is going on there.
largely self-taught within a musical family and so he didn't go to conservatory or ever get compositional lessons or anything like that. He came from a very, very musical family, 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 directly.
across cultures, not that it speaks to every culture necessarily, but it has always had the extraordinary ability to leap across cultural boundaries. One of the interesting things about Bach is in Japan, which is not a culture that's really brought up in that kind of music at all, that Bach's music is fabulously popular, particularly the Matthew Passion. And it's that ability of Bach as it were to jump across the kind of walls and barriers that we kind of characteristically
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 built-in characteristics of sound. That is particularly something called the harmonic series, kind of acoustic properties of physical sound. He's working with those. So it's grounded in a physical sound.
A Christian, we would say, created order. And yet, and yet, he does extraordinary things with those given materials. So it's both grounded objectively, but it's also extraordinarily inventive. I like to think of it as exemplifying an amazing creation.
convergence of discovery and invention. And we tend to think those two are pitted against each other. I think Bach shows us, no, you can be incredibly inventive, but as you're inventing, 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. When we eventually send you the final product, you'll hear that the theme tune for Undeceptions is...
a modern band, forgive me, playing... You used to play in a modern band, didn't you? Indeed, indeed. You're a very famous rock star, aren't you? Well, but playing Bach's Prelude to the cello suites. Oh, right, oh, good. So that's something either to dread...
Translating something as sublime as Bach's cello suites is no simple matter, and it took more than a few musical brains to accomplish that 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 all together. MUSIC PLAYS
It begins, of course, with the incomparable cello piece, played here by our friend Kenichi Mizushima. Kenny. MUSIC
Bach created a stunning mathematical sequence designed to create tension as the tune wanders away from the G major home base out to the key of D major, where we feel tension and disorder. And then he crawls wonderfully, securitously back home to G. MUSIC PLAYS
We then brought in the rhythm section. Santino DiMarco on drums, Jonathan Byrne on bass and Andrew Valentine just strumming along 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 for our rendition is the electric guitar part.
Colin Benvenuto, who's played on several of my previous musical projects, came up with a stunning guitar part that isn't really trying to play what Bach wrote. He's actually having a conversation with it. It was so sort of complex, I decided to call him and ask him about it. Colin speaking. Hey, buddy. John here.
Hey, John, how are you going? I'm doing well, mate. Now, I know you've been playing with numbers all day, not your first love. I just want to talk to you about your first love, if that's okay. Yes, you're always happy to talk about it. So, mate, I've just told Undeceptions audience how brilliantly you did with the guitar piece. I just want to ask you, how did you feel when I said to you, we're going to be playing some Bach together?
Well, my first thought, you know, really was, yeah, Dixon's gone all posh, you know, because it wasn't exactly Bach that we used to, you know, do covers of or, you know, anything to do with that style of music. No. That I recall. No. But how did you feel? Well, I thought, well, fine, it'll be interesting. But, you know, when I actually listened to it and then realised the extent of
of the chordal movements. I just thought, oh, wow. Thanks very much. Because it's an incredible piece of music. I mean, it just moves to places that you don't expect. And until you actually try and play to it, you don't understand how amazing those movements are. Yeah. Well, I think you did an awesome job. Just tell me, like...
What was your sort of solution in the end? What were you trying to do? Well, it was sort of a process, really. Like, it was, you know, it actually took me three nights to write that guitar part for it, you know. And it was, to be honest, like the first night, I actually, I remember thinking, I've got nothing. I just don't know how I can fit electric guitar into this, you know, at first. And then I just sort of gave up in the second night.
I thought, oh, hang on a moment. As it was really sort of getting into my head and understanding where it was moving and what it was doing, I thought, oh, hang on a moment.
there was sort of a connection between, you know, Bach. He was, you know, in his world and he was kind of really going for it in that piece. He was kind of rocking out. And I was sort of hearing that side of his, you know, passion and really just doing an amazing thing with a piece of music. And I tried to think, well, how would you do that if you were doing that in a sort of more of a modern or, you know, rock context? Mate, thanks so much for your time. Cheers, mate. Thanks so much. Bye.
And here's how it finished up as Bach drags us back to G major. Well, 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, are 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, almost any culture, without spoiling it. It's very hard to play Bach well, as someone once said to me.
But it's very easy, relatively easy just to play him, just to get the notes and understand something. And I think that's particularly interesting. It's very hard to spoil Bach. Very hard. Oh, well, you can tell me whether I've done so when you hear the final product. 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. MUSIC
I studied performance and composition at university and that was my undergraduate degree, finally specialised in composition and creativity. It was actually some time 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 modelled on natural forms of generativity and creativity.
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 Bilehartz, 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. Now she's Professor of Integrative Studies at Excelsior College.
I first worked in a music department, then in a design computing department with students exploring more digital mechanisms of being creative, and then moved on to be professor of interaction design and music, so music that responds in real time, live music that responds to performers and players and audience and the kinds of music you might encounter in an exhibition or an installation, public artworks.
So utilising the abilities of sensing and live responsive music to people and creating experiences, immersive experiences, if you like. 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. Can you give me a definition of music? Well, you know, there's one floating around which is quite functional, I believe, and...
I think it might have been Lee Landy who said that music is organized sound. That idea, I might not be right about the source of 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. There's 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, organising the tone colours, starts to work in a meaning underlying those sounds and that music. In some ways it's a bit like writing, isn't it? In that you organise lines into something that has greater meaning.
It's the organisation of the thing that turns it from a scratch on the ground to the letter Z, 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 and the story it tells, and the materials that do it aren't incredibly important, but it's the message. So you've got kind of the Marshall McLuhan in the middle with the medium is the message. That's become a popular phrase amongst both digital media and music, that how you say something is part of what you say.
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, 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 colours and constructs 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.
And it's that joint participation with the listener that's led to some amazing developments in our understanding of music and medicine, in particular, aged care. What is going on when a tune can animate someone with profound dementia who can't recognise their own family members, but...
they know the song like a best friend and can often even sing it. Yes, absolutely. What is going on there? Singing and participation is definitely something you see. Why is music doing that when the face or voice of a human being can't? Yeah, I think, well, you've touched on a complex question. I don't think there's just one right answer. By the way, I should explain that Kirsty worked for a couple of years on an amazing musical program among people with dementia.
We do 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. Those more than utilitarian recent memories are more likely to be accessible.
I think music, you can see by the fact that it might conjure up 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.
So it does reach very deeply into their subconscious and perhaps there's an emotional trigger, perhaps there's that cognitive depth that music is able to plumb. I've seen it work spiritually too, I believe. I've certainly seen people for whom words were gone, but hymns or singing the Psalter could bring back that experience or a prayerful type of contemplation.
And subsequently to the work with people with dementia, that was something that I did in hospitals and palliative care and working last year at St Vincent's as well, 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 versa. And music can be key to some of those things sometimes.
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 they kind of intersect. And I'm not sure everyone has the explanation, but it's almost magical, the responses that you see sometimes. 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 psychosocial. Jeremy Begbie goes further, actually so does Kirstie, in suggesting that music points us not just to each other and our inner self, but to the divine. That's coming up after the break.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
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Do you place much stock in the philosophical arguments going right back to Plato, but then through Augustine and even Immanuel Kant?
that music is an audible manifestation of the rational elegance of the universe and therefore a pointer to the mind of God. 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 era, 1,500 years of the Christian era, that was the commonest way. If you were going to think about music and theorize or philosophize about music, you did it with reference to the created order as a whole. And that goes back to Pythagoras, and yes, indeed, Plato, to the harmony of the spheres, all that cluster of ideas, which says...
that musical sound is, or ought to be, a way of tapping into and giving voice to, giving sound to, the order of the cosmos. You'll find a wonderful elaboration of that at the beginning of Silmarillion, Tolkien's Silmarillion, but it goes right through many, many cultures and is still very much around in many cultures.
The Silmarillion Professor Begbie refers to here isn't terribly well known. It's a book by J.R.R. Tolkien. Most people have heard of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, of course, partly thanks to director Peter Jackson. But director Mark tells me that Tolkien's Silmarillion is a book of the myths and prehistory that sit behind the land of Middle-earth, and its creation story involves quite a bit of music. And Mark says,
begged me to play this little part. Uh, go on, come on, you can go, go now, go!
There was Eru, who in Arda is called Iluvatar, and he made first the Enor, 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 the 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.
Anyway, we'll leave Mark in his happy place. Good fade, engineer Nathaniel. The point is, Professor Begbie reckons, like many other philosophers reckoned before him, that music points to God. So yes, I give a lot of credence to that. I have hesitations about some forms of it, especially if, I mean, in the more, let's just generalize from, in the more platonic 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, a form, something that is always beyond the material. I think as Christians, we want to say that 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 God wants us to, we can celebrate its beauty, its order, its possibilities. 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 they suggest that we have to somehow move beyond or escape or...
How can I put it? It's 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.
uh no there's never a point at which we kick the material away god has take takes creation his creative world very very seriously yeah so it's not just mathematics which is how often that ancient musical tradition for it it's mathematics embodied in well sound waves and you know the biology of our ear and so on that's a very good way 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 cords, patterns of sound in the air and so forth. We should celebrate its materiality even as we recognize its beautiful form.
Philosophers have been reflecting on this multi-level nature of music for as long as, well, probably since there were philosophers way back in Pythagoras and even before him. 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 he felt was beneath him, but he was intrigued by the way the rational elegance of the universe out there also appeared in the rational elegance of melody and harmony.
In the 5th 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 as a pointer to God. He confessed, actually, that he loved music a little too much. It would bring him to tears, he tells us.
But 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 analyze rhythm, melody, harmony, and what it says about the harmony of creation itself.
Winding forward to the modern world, the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers, also believed that music revealed to us the genuine orderliness and rationality built into the fabric of material creation. He wasn't exactly a fan of music. He actually 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 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, he said, to the divine.
Put a little more 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, our minds, that recognize and delight in that elegance and rationality in the physical world. The whole thing looks set up to get our attention.
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 C.S. Lewis, Charles Darwin and even Jesus, lost his atheism and returned to a kind of hesitant Christian faith precisely because he thought atheism couldn't make sense of music as well as language and love. When he announced his departure from atheism to Christianity in the New Statesman, he described music as
as one of the strongest phenomena indicating that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me, he said, 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.
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. You know, alone hearing a beautiful piece of music, you can just be moved and you don't know why. You can be brought to tears. But there's also an intellectual, a logos dimension of music. Like music is actually highly mathematical. And so I
I'm thinking of the skeptic listening to our conversation who thinks, yeah, sure, people think music takes them to God because it interacts with our neurons and it fires us and creates this... A chemical. It's a chemical thing going on. But actually there is something external objective about the mathematics of music. Can you speak to that?
purely intellectual dimension of the reality of music. 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 musics. 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 the most common or popular kinds of music. But even quite, shall we say, studied or art music needs a degree of appreciation to really grasp its message.
But then what I find really remarkable are things like Mozart, who was one of the composers who Karl Barth really, really admired. Mozart's interesting because he was a little bit sacrilegious, if anything. 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.
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 because it's pleasing to the eye and it's meant to be the series of perfection in so much of the ratios, the bar lengths, the note lengths of his music, the phrase lengths,
I'm suspecting he did not do that consciously, but somehow that mathematical principle snuck in there in the perfection of just an aesthetic intuition in his case. Bach is probably a different story in so far as he might have 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, 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 sequence. Isn't it curious? That pervades all these aesthetic things, artistic things, and yet it's a mathematical principle and it's
Perhaps Bach and Leonardo da Vinci and certainly the architect Palladio 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. And that's where Kirstie and Jeremy harmonise with each other. Music might not be a universal language, but it draws on realities we can all understand. It tells us stories we can all relate to.
In your view, music itself speaks. Even without lyrics, music can narrate story. Tell me how that works. Well, built into the way a lot of music operates, yeah, are certain possibilities. It has potential 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
with stories and can be used therefore to embody stories. And one of the most basic in Western music is the story, as I call it, of home away and home again. When you start in a key, particular chord or whatever, or perhaps it's a little motif or something, and then you go into a section, when 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, you 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 pervasive. And virtually all jazz, all popular music, majority of classical music, and certainly up until 1900, 1910, film music, most of the music that's around us operates according to that pattern.
And it does it not just with harmony, but also with melody and rhythm and meter. Virtually every parameter of music can be brought into that. I got particularly interested in that pattern, of course, because it resonates with the Christian story, with creation for redemption, 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,
in the new creation. So that pattern of home away and home again is just built into 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 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. 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, we're told, in Luke 15. And it has a resonance for both. On the one hand, he's got the sinners gathering around him. And then the religious leaders, the Pharisees, are muttering, Luke tells us. And then Jesus dives into this parable designed to hit both the sinners and the so-called religious or righteous people.
The parable is really just two sons. One represents the sinners, the other the religious people. The young son asks for the inheritance from his father and then takes off to a foreign country and spends it all on himself in wild living, we're told. It's a pretty modern picture of the sinner, actually. Yeah.
The sinner is someone who wants everything the creation has to offer and nothing to do with the creator. We want the gifts. We just don't want the giver. Anyway, Jesus says this son came to his senses. I love that expression. He came to his senses and got up and decided to go home and face the music, as it were. The father's response is meant to be a picture of God, according to Jesus. And this is what we read.
But while he, the sinful son, 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. It's the ultimate homecoming. This is the move back from D major to G major at the climax of the prelude to the cello suites.
Equally important, though, for Jesus' original parable is the oldest son in the story. He comes back from the field, hears the music and dancing, we're told, and he is outraged.
He refuses to go inside the house and join the celebration. And he ends up saying to his dad, look, all these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him.
It's a powerful critique of religion from the lips of Jesus. Religion turns you into a slave. It robs you of any sense of God's generosity.
And here's the striking thing. The oldest son, who obviously represents the Pharisees, might be living in the home on the property, but he might as well have been in a foreign land. He is estranged from the father. He's a long way from home. Thinking musically for a second, it's interesting how Jesus ends this parable.
There is a beautiful home, away, home again resolution in the story of the young son. But the end of the parable with the older son isn't a resolution. It ends in discord, or at least without a resolution. We want to get back home to the G major, but we're stuck out in D major. The older son complaining, the father 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. 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, oh Lord?
and really great music often, is great because it keeps you away while giving you enough sense of home to keep you in the story. Oh, I'm thinking of the final sort of 12 bars of the prelude to the cello suites, which takes you away from where you want to go. I know, absolutely. No, you're right. And you're longing to get back to the, is it G, whatever it is? Yeah.
G major, that's right. Yeah, I know. Bach is absolutely adept at that. So it's not like he's telling you the story in the obvious sense. He's making you feel the shape of that story. And, of course, because music is so involved with the body, it's not just with your mind. You're feeling it with your whole self. That pattern of home away and home again is built into a great deal of bodily activity, you
You know, you're at rest, there's tension of some sort, you have a pain or you're not sitting quite right or whatever, and then you resolve. Oh yes, we've sorted that out. That pattern of kind of equilibrium followed by tension, resolution is built into so much bodily activity. And music is resonating with that. It's reminding you what it feels like. And that, I think, is a large part of why music is so emotionally gripping and so powerful. ♪
Music is gripping and powerful, but this isn't just about pleasure and beauty. Next episode, Jeremy and Kirsty are back with us to explore bad music, dissonance, and why that can be just 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.
I often feel close to tears when I just think about my former career in music. Do you mean of joy or regret or of...? An ache, an ache. It's like the best friend in my life that I haven't seen for 20 years. Friend and heartbreaker. That's the spectrum of music. However you're feeling about music at the moment, I hope you'll join us next episode. MUSIC
Got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them, and we'll answer them in an upcoming Q&A episode. Tweet us at Undeceptions or email questions at undeceptions.com. If you're game, head to undeceptions.com, scroll down and hit the record button. We'd love to hear your voice. And while you're there, check out the growing Undeceptions library, a feast of articles and audio designed to let the truth out.
And if you're looking for another show to add to this one, not replace it, head to eternitypodcasts.com and check out, for example, With All Due Respect by Megan Powell-Dutois and Michael Jensen. See ya. Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne, and directed by Mark Silmarillion. Silmarillion.
Our theme song, mostly in the key of G with a little bit of help from D, is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing is by Nathaniel Schumach.