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Reflection for February 12 2006

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Won't you play some simple melody? / Like my mother sang to me.

This experience has happened before. Take Harry Halder in a novel by Hermann Hesse. He has this fantasy in which his favorite composer Mozart appears to him and places a record of Handel on an old gramophone. The sound that issues makes Harry wince - a tinny, scratchy, blasphemous distortion of Handel's profound music.

Then there's the experience of Old Jolyon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga who in his old age lives a lonely life. Taking a solitary dinner at his club, he bemoans the fact that "his dinner tastes flat. His pint of champagne was dry and bitter stuff, not like the Veuve Cliquot of the old days." He then decides to brighten things up by taking in an opera, something he hasn't done for several seasons. That doesn't work either. He sits down, takes out his opera glasses, looks around, and sighs. "More poignantly than ever he felt it was all over and done with him . . . Where was that old feeling in the heart as he waited for one of those great singers? . . . There was no opera now! That fellow Wagner had ruined everything; no melody left, nor voices to sing it. . He sat watching the old scenes acted, a numb feeling at his heart."

I only mention these episodes because over the past year I've had a similar experience relative to music. Mine had nothing to do with a bad record player or with boredom akin to that of Old Jolyon. It had more to do with something biological or neurological. I mean, sometime around last spring I suddenly lost my ear for music, for melody. Suddenly everything musical - at church, off the radio and CDs, off television - became noise! I went to a doctor about it and he casually said, "Oh, it will clear up." But it didn't and so whatever music I heard became an ordeal, be it a violin quartet or bluegrass at the Pub or TV specials featuring Roy Orbison or Andrea Boccelli or some opera or even Christmas carols. Noise, with heavy emphasis on the bass notes and no melody to speak of!

Well, being old I soon reconciled myself to accept the fact that music, which I have always enjoyed so much, would no longer be a factor in my life. I stopped playing CDs or going to local concerts or even movies (because of the their sound tracks). When guess what! Just about two weeks ago (and I noticed this first at church) the melodies and harmonies began coming back. The noise began giving way to pleasurable and familiar sounds. I was hesitant to trust the change. I still am. But the fact is I've begun to play CDs again while driving, starting with some Puccini arias (and I almost wept when these began to come across so clear and pure) and then the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou film sound track with that hymn I love so much; "I went down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way . . ."

It has been like experiencing a miracle (although the doctor did say it would come back). And right away I saw in it a metaphor for me and you, because down through the ages so much of the essential melody and harmony to be derived from our religious heritage has been muted by controversy, minute moralizing, divisiveness, escalating even into schism and wars. In other words it has given way to so much "noise"!

Except that now I'm hearing things like our Sunday hymns and arias like Mi chiamano Mimi loud and clear again! So may we not hope - individually and culturally - that all that "noise" we've learned to live with as a seemingly irreversible malady may one day at last give way to melody - the way Beethoven's Ninth Symphony gives way in its final movement to the harmony of a chorus of human voices united in one sublime Ode to Joy?

-- Geoff Wood