Castalia 307
The beams of love
Dear Friends,
Near the beginning of a sonata by Schubert, the Sonata in B flat major, opus posthumous, comes a trill in the bass. The music borrows tones from the minor. When, as a boy, I played this for Mieczyslaw Horszowski, he observed: “Like a warning”. In these few words is implied an entire metaphysic.
Music has a face. This face is not projected on the notes by the performer — it is not that, as a classmate put it, “I add a bit of temperament” — this face is the music’s own. In this face we can read a world of emotion.
Music can have a face because in all that is, God’s face shines forth.
It is easy to lose sight of this face. As I notate my own music, for example, choosing from a drop-down menu of durations, it seems all there is is eighths and sixteenths. The music has fallen into notes, and I too have fallen.
In forgetfulness of God’s face, my own becomes a mask — becomes a lake upon which move the clouds, driven by the wind, of the Current Thing.
Having seen the light in Mr. Horszowski’s face, and heard the light in his playing, I can’t imagine him falling in such a way. He was certainly protected by the Mass — according to his student Darrell Rosenbluth, he would go every morning. In my own case, among the lifelines have been Centering Prayer and musical analysis — looking deeply to find what Heinrich Schenker called “the will of the tones”.
In reeducation, we find the attempt to destroy a face; in bureaucracy, the attempt to live as though faces could be put to one side. A face can turn us to stone, and we often avoid faces in order to avoid embarrassment: in a short story by Saki, a young man remarks, “How frightfully embarrassing to meet [in heaven] a whole shoal of whitebait you had last known at Prince’s!”
If we are open to faces, we must be involved; but on the other hand, we are no longer alone.
William Blake puts it this way:
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love…
Thank you so much.
With every good wish,
Ishmael
I offer tutoring online in music theory — for a taste, please see my website:
Mr. Horszowski, 1990