Lord of the Dance

Poussin: "Dance to the Music of Time"

 

This will be a small essay on a huge subject, namely universal harmony, or the “music of the spheres,” called the mundana musica by the learned among our premodern European ancestors.  I begin with one Sir John Davies (1568-1626), hardly a household name, but nonetheless a Renaissance man of parts.    He was an Elizabethan lawyer and parliamentarian who left a footprint or two in the sands of time as a writer of elegant philosophical verse fashionable in the Inns of Court of his day.  Two ambitious poems merit some attention: (Nosce teipsum, or “Know Thyself”, and “Orchestra: A Poem Upon Dauncing.”)  It is the latter I touch upon here.  I first encountered it as a graduate student sixty years ago, and I have been studying it a bit recently.  It is full of “wit” in the Renaissance sense, meaning a large display of the playful use of wide-ranging literary learning.  It pretends to be a dialogue between a secondary character in Homer, Antenous by name, and the woman he is wooing, Penelope, faithful wife of the endlessly wandering Ulysses.  Antenous is perhaps the chief of the many suitors who take up residence in Ithaca in the belief or at least the hope that Ulysses is dead, leaving behind a highly desirable widow.  Davies says “Orchestra” records an episode Homer forgot to include.  At the literal level the poem is about a guy trying to persuade a girl to dance, but Davies so clearly has no interest in the literal level that you can forget that immediately.  His interest is proposing dance as an image of the harmony of a divinely created universe.

 

Christian humanists delighted in finding parallels between scriptural narrative and the classical narratives of ancient Greece and Rome.  When the pilgrim “Dante,” lost in a dark wood, is told by Virgil that he must undertake a difficult journey, he demurs, pleading incapacity; “I am not Æneas; I am not Paul.”  He thus invokes two famous wanderers of the Mediterranean world, the one pagan and fictive, the other Christian and historical.

 

            St. Paul’s metaphoric moral terms, enshrined in the baptismal liturgy, had a great impact on the European vocabulary, in which old and new were widely used with broad moral implications.  Paul spoke of corrupted human nature as the old man, and nature regenerate in Christ as the new man.  St. Augustine, taking the phrase new song from the ninety-sixth psalm interpreted the “old” and “new” songs as two versions of love, cupidity and charity.  The musical metaphor embraced dance as well.  Two of Chaucer’s “experts” in cupidity, Pandarus and the Wife of Bath, knew all about “the old dance.”  Chaucer did not have in mind the Virginia Reel.

 

            It is an ill wind that blows no good, and enforced Covid isolation allowed me to improve through study my ability to read the Portuguese language to a level that opened a new literature to me.  At that point I had already written a book about a remarkable poem by Luis de Camões, the “Portuguese Shakespeare,” but knew little beyond the Renaissance period.  Camões's poem is an extended poetic exegesis of the psalm “By the Waters of Babylon,” which is a song about songs and musical instruments and thus invited me to learn a bit about Renaissance music and music theory.  The rich exegesis of the psalm (Super flumina, no. 137 in the Authorized English Bible) was a logical place to begin.  That all of life, indeed all of human history is a dance is a commonplace idea in premodern Western thought.  And if life is a dance, so also is death, in the Danse macabre, or Dance of Death.  The music for this dance is time itself, as in Poussin’s famous painting “Dance to the Music of Time,” a title then appropriated by the twentieth-century English novelist Anthony Powell for what can justly be regarded as the Anglophone answer to Marcel Proust’s huge and famous book(s).  There are not a lot of modern hymns that have impressed me, but Sydney Carter’s “Lord of the Dance” (1963) is an exception.  The idea of a cosmic dance, led by a cosmic Christ seems possibly Byzantine in its inspiration.

 

The philosophical and even explicitly ethical examination of musical harmonies is pre-modern, indeed pre-Christian.  It is the basis of what we usually call Pythagoreanism, named for its famous philosophical founder, Pythagoras who was born about six hundred years before the birth of Jesus.  A legend concerning him—concerning which there is no particular reason to doubt the basic details—is that he discovered musical harmonic episodes by chance.  He was walking by a large blacksmithy, where the smiths were working simultaneously on multiple anvils, beating on heat-softened metal with hammers of differing weights.  Anyone with a sentient ear would probably discern the differing tones produced under these circumstances, but Pythagoras, who was of course a genius, was able to figure out the harmonic progressions involved.  One of the early English vernacular alliterative poems, sometimes called by modern editors “A Satire on Blacksmiths,” begins thus: Swart smekyd smethes smateryd with smoke/dryue me to deth with den of here dyntes.  That is to say, roughly speaking: “Dusky smoky smiths darkened by smoke/are going to kill me with the noise of their blows.”  Until fairly recently we didn’t really understand the subject of the poem, which, though humorous and satirical, is intellectually serious.  Then a good friend of mine, Richard Schrader, a medievalist (now retired from Boston College) published a brilliant article* suggesting a connection to this anecdote of Pythagoras.  The recognition of the learned inspiration behind an ostentatiously vernacular and “popular” poem  is unlikely to surprise any medievalist.  But of course it does take somebody smart to make the recognition in the first place.  The poem itself is actually rather brilliant, as the consonantal coarseness of its language seems intentionally jarring and percussive.

               

                The interference of "artificial" lights,  from gas and from electricity, make it almost impossible on our earth today to see the night sky with the brilliance experienced by our pre-Edisonian ancestors—a sad fact recognized and lamented already by Ruskin and others in the 1880s!  But in one of his typically brilliant throw-aways C. S. Lewis points out that medieval sky-watchers not only saw the night skies but heard their thrilling harmonies: the mundana musica, the music of the spheres.  The animator of the motion.  “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”  Such was the music taught to the poet Keats by an ancient ceramic urn.  Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. 

 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

 

Before this silent music--“ditties of no tone”—even the author of the “divine poem”, Dante Alighieri, fell silent.  Thrilled by the silent music, the great poeta himself fell silent.  The last words of his poem are these: “To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and will were rolled—even as a wheel that moves equally—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”  Love.  On that animating power of the universe the medieval Catholic Dante and the Renaissance Protestant John Davies were in agreement.  Mundana musica.  Quite a song, quite a dance.

 

 

*Richard J. Schrader, “The Inharmonious Choristers and Blacksmiths of MS Arundel 292,” Studies in Philology, 104 (2007): 1-14.

 

New Worlds

 

 

I came out of the weekend boosted by a nearly forgotten optimism.  Last Sunday afternoon we attended a full-scale performance of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra in Richardson Auditorium, a large, elegant, and acoustically superb concert hall on the Princeton campus.  Among the cultural treasures of the town in which we have lived for more than half a century now is the PSO.  This is a very high quality group of community musicians founded about 1980 by the late Portia Sonnenfeld.  It is in a sense the Town Orchestra as opposed to the Gown Orchestra of student musicians.

 

            Sunday’s concert was not strictly speaking the first live music we had enjoyed during the pandemic.  The inventive director of the Princeton University Concert Series, which brings musical artists to Princeton from all over the world, had earlier managed to arrange some very small, meticulously socially distanced events that we were able to attend.

 

            Those were imaginative and welcome palliatives.   But Sunday’s event was different in kind, a real concert, with lots of people sitting next to one another in the permanent fixed seats of an auditorium.   A spokesman for the orchestra  prefaced the musical performance with a few words of welcome, noting that this was the first time in two years the orchestra had been able to perform in Richardson, fulfilling the shared desire of players and audience alike to be able to come together in proximity in pursuit of a pleasure all shared.  The enthusiasm of the applause that greeted his remarks revealed a striking intensity of emotion in a usually restrained demographic of classical music lovers, many of us on the antique side.  Everybody in the world is fed up with Covid and the often vacillating and incoherent measures adopted by political authorities to address it.  Everyone was masked, of course, and we had to present vaccination credentials to gain admission.  There was no reckless hugging or backslapping.  But “symphony” means a joining of sound, and there was plenty of that both from the audience pit and the stage.

 

            To this audience of the music-starved, any performance would have been a treat, but in fact the quality of this performance was very high.  The two principal pieces played were of superb quality: the violin concerto of Sibelius, and Dvorak’s “New World” symphony.  And in both, for differing reasons,  I was able to find reassuring refutations of the heavy gloom of the pandemic.  Music is called “the universal language” with good reason.  Though like any language it must be learned  in order to achieve its fullest eloquence, the mode of its communication transcends the cultural boundaries within which all the world’s spoken tongues are necessarily confined.  Yet at the same time every piece of music  is a cultural artifact bound up like all such artifacts in historical particulars and local and temporal specificities.  And if simply being able to join in the truly social event of a musical concert felt like an act of self-liberation, the music we heard was of a sort to invite the mind beyond—or perhaps through—an aesthetic experience to an intellectual one.

 

            I am not certain that I had ever heard even a recording of the Sibelius violin concerto before, but I am unlikely ever to forget this live performance.  Though I am married to an excellent amateur violinist I could not identify the great professional players of the moment, except that one of them has to be the young soloist on the stage that afternoon, Alexi Kenney, a handsome, svelte, lithe fellow in his twenties whose bow is indistinguishable from a magic wand.  Of course a concerto is a symbiosis; and here the orchestra played its coequal role perfectly.  In contrast to the soloist, the concert’s conductor, Kenneth Bean, has the build of a football lineman.  His affect was one of precise and encouraging steadiness rather than of theatricality: he supervised a perfect team.   It was as though Bean and Kenney, animated by the spirit of  Sibelius, became a trio of benign pied pipers, recalling us all from two years of pandemic torpor.

 

 

            It has been said that the greatest example of American symphonic music was composed by a European, Antonin Dvorak.  We had the opportunity to ponder that paradox after the intermission.   The natural tendency of nineteenth-century European immigrants to America to stay in their familiar cultural clusters, not infrequently exacerbated by the disdain or hostility of anglophone “nativists” whose immigrant forebears got here a little earlier, created for a time odd linguistic islands throughout the plains and backwoods of the Middle Border, one such being the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa.  The much-travelled and cosmopolitan Dvorak might be a cultural lion in New York, but even citizens of the world can get homesick.  It was more practical to visit Spillville than Slovakia.  At the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1892, America had reached a new level of self-confidence, not to say obnoxious chauvinism.  But in Boston and New York the cultural mavens still tended to look toward London, Paris, and Berlin.  Emerson had delivered his famous talk on “The American Scholar” in 1837.  America had become a force in the international literary world through Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain.  What of American music?

 

            That question is still being answered, and brilliantly.  At a time of such political doubt and darkness one treasures the light all the more.  And here Dvorak’s ideas continue to inspire.  Part of his greatness as a musician was an extraordinary versatility.  Music like all art is an intuition but also an expression, and music in its expressive aspect expressed something real, human life.  Among Dvorak’s most thrilling works are the Slavonic Dances, based in what is perhaps the most elemental form of music, that of folk.  Too few American cultural arbiters of the nineteenth century actually realized the artistic claims of democracy.  There were some Walt Whitmans of the visual arts.  Surely there should be some of music.  I Hear America Singing.  Dvorak astonished many and probably offended a few others by insisting that classical music in America should honor its own particular indigeneity, its “nativeness”, and especially the rich body of African and Afro-Carribean song that he had discovered here with such excitement.

 

                                         Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
 

            His own great monument to this idea was his ninth symphony, the “New World Symphony” (1893).  More precisely he called it “from the New World,” as he thought of it both as an announcement of and a gift from this extraordinary and still new place.  We might call it the “Spillville Symphony.”  Its haunting theme, a “folk” theme, is indefatigable but never itself tiring.  Is our country still an extraordinary new place?   There is plenty of reason for doubt, even despair.  Yet each day in the news I see terrible reports of people drowned in their desperate attempts to reach our shores and others willing to set off on foot from Lima on a thousand mile walk through the Darien peninsula to the difficulties and dangers of the trek toward the Rio Grande.  The testimony of the wretched of the earth has its own peculiar eloquence.  I left Richardson Auditorium feeling not merely personally liberated but comforted by a larger, inner hope.

 

                                                      Spillville IA, 1893
 

Music , Dvorak (Antonin), Covid liberation