Music, Mystery & Silence

A few years ago, I encountered a book by Max Picard entitled The World of Silence. At first glance, the very title of the book appears to have nothing to do with a discussion of music, but the premise of the book is that silence is critical to our nature, that silence hovers underneath the edges of our world and is the location from which language, faith, love, and our interactions with others arise. Picard writes, “A layer of silence lies between this event [Christ in the world] and man, and in this silence man approaches the silence that surrounds God Himself. Man and the mystery first meet in the silence.” The liturgical music of the Mass arises from a literal and figurative silence. Music is notes arising out of the physical silence, offering us something before fading away again, but it is also a means of meeting the mystery of God “in the silence” between the visible and the invisible. Listening to Johannes Ockeghem’s Missa Caput and John Tavener’s Missa Wellensis, both very different masses, I was struck by the capacity of each to pull the listener into the mystery in this area between the visible and invisible where we can encounter God.

In The Culture Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass, Andrew Kirkman writes that sound is a “vital force in activating the mystery of Mass” (188). This force comes from music’s ability to stand between the physical and the invisible. The very first notes of Ockeghem’s Kyrie reveal the physicality of music. The deep bass sound points the listener to the core of humanity, for there is a kind of primal sound to the repetition in the depth of the notes. That repetitive nature is present in each component of the Caput Mass as a reminder of this tie to the physical world. But the very physical nature of music is also what allows for the elevation towards God. John Tavener’s Kyrie highlights the mystery present in the physical notes in the beginning of his piece as well, for the emphasis on the soprano line of the piece lends an almost ethereal feel to it. At the same time, there is a haunting feel to the harmonies that arise when the other voices join in, causing one to recognize the mysterious silence from which the notes arise.

Perhaps the way to describe this is in the feeling this kind of music elicits. Closing my eyes and allowing the notes of the piece to reach me, something is filled within the silence of my own being. I become acutely aware of my heartbeat, of each breath that fills my lungs, and yet my mind is also fully present next to the mystery of God far beyond my own body. Only something that is so fundamentally tied to the entirety of human nature, both the physical and spiritual, is capable of evoking such a reaction. The reaction that comes from listening to liturgical music is an act of worship itself, and becomes “a kind of ‘umbilical cord’ to the sacred” as said by Tavener in Jeremy Begbie’s Theology, Music, and Time (136). In both masses, there is a fading in and out through the dynamics of the piece, a kind of give and take that creates a plea aimed towards God that rises over the swell of sound, a wave that ebbs and flows towards a kind of purification in God’s mystery.

This purification in God’s mystery originates in the image of Christ that is embedded in all liturgical music. The Caput Mass is particularly interesting because it focuses on the destruction of sin through Christ and the redemption offered to us all. As discussed in the lectures and Anne Walters Robertsons’ work, Ockeghem’s Caput Mass has a tenor line that lowers as the mass progresses, symbolizing the destruction of the “dragon,” of sin, as it is crushed beneath Christ and the Virgin Mary. Robertson writes that with Christ’s Ascension, one goes from the “time of the dragon” to the “time of grace” (580). As the entire sound of the piece becomes fuller and the harmonies purer with the sinking of the tenor line throughout the Mass, one can visualize this Ascension of Christ into the silence of the mystery and into a kind of eternity where Christ’s sacrifice and Resurrection are ever-present. Tavener’s mass captures a similar feeling of Christ in the world through the simplification of the music, where the simplification becomes “an act of repentance, stripping away of unessentials, ever more naked, ever more simple” (Begbie 133). In that simplicity, all of time becomes associated with the rising of Christ and the eternity of God is revealed (Begbie 136, 149).

As I was listening to both masses, there was certainly a progression in the music towards a kind of purity. From the Kyrie to the Agnus Dei, temporal time appears to be less crucial, and there is a sense of completion in being removed from this time and pushed towards standing with God in the mystery of eternity. We are momentarily pushed into the silence before God. Listening to the final notes of Tavener’s Agnus Dei fade back into silence, I could almost feel the tangible presence of the mystery before me, a feeling that simultaneously comforts with the potential for the presence of God and unsettles with the uncertainty of the mystery. I think Picard’s ideas about silence came to mind while listening to these pieces because the connection between silence and music allows the mind to go far beyond the realm of words. In one of the lectures, Professor O’Malley himself said that when we can’t speak, we sing and listen. If it is true that “man and the mystery first meet in the silence,” then it is music that lifts us towards the silence where the eternity of God exists. It is there that we can finally hear Him speak.