A composer who soothes my savage inner beast on an almost daily basis is a 16th century pre-Bach gent named Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. What I love about his music is it is not as demanding a listen as much of Bach’s stuff can be (although hands down Bach is my favorite composer) and it is not stark and sometimes boring as the earlier medievel/Gregorian chants can be.
Like I said, it’s perfect for soothing the beast.
What I find fascinating about much of the work of this era, is the writers considered their work to be entirely an act of devotion to God. As ‘All Music Guide’ contributor James Reel puts it-
“The majority of compositions written through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance are by people long forgotten, and attribution often remains a problem. In fact, it is not known who was responsible for the foundation works of Western classical music.”
I do think it is a bit overreaching to say “it is not known who was responsible for the foundation works for Western music” as it can be argued what actually constitutes ‘foundation works’ and it almost implies there is one or a few guys that somehow invented it but they got lost somewhere in a castle quake. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that, well, as again Reel states-
“…a composer’s personal expression simply didn’t count once the music was adopted for liturgical use, and, in many cases, it would have seemed presumptuous for an individual to take credit for a piece of sacred music.”
And this leads to my thought about the ‘sacred vs. the secular’. It appears back then, that the act of musical or artistic creation was entirely a sacred venture and for a composer/musician/artist to claim a piece as his own (or his to own) representing an expression of himself was, as Reel says -‘presumptuous’. The spirit of the time was the consideration that all music was of God and from God and consequently for God. From this consideration we have the creation of what we now consider Western music which in many if not most ways is the most advanced music (and the multi-culturalists screeeeamed!!!).
The building blocks of western harmony is what has given us everything from Beethoven to the Beatles and these building blocks were formed by people that made music as a completely selfless act of worship and devotion to their creator. It is because of their spirit of giving to first God -and through that to us- we have music as we now know it and appreciate it. In fact we hear the way we hear because of what they gave without consideration of what they could get.
In our modern (mix ups of) worldview(s) we struggle with the notion of what it is to find out who we are– to become human. And Christians find themselves wrapped up in the tension of the ‘sacred vs. the secular’ in this quest, along with a nagging feeling that at some point or points we may not be ‘honest to (or with) ourselves’. We wrestle with the question of whether we are being true to our humanity in our acts of devotion, especially if we feel we have something to contribute in an artistic medium.
Our medieval friends appeared to see no tension and in fact considered total selfless devotion of artistic expression to be the path to becoming fully human. Their idea of making music to and for God is not something in which you deny your humanity; you in fact totally embrace it.
To be fully human is to express the divine.
I think the anonymous invention of an entire musical paradigm is pretty good evidence that maybe they were on to something…