A Tune We Have Not Yet Heard

Music in art: poster found at a flea market

by Anne White

In his address The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis said:

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (emphasis his)

Yes, the pile of books can betray us.  A book can disappoint. It can have a terrible ending. It can make us angry. It can bore us. It can leave us in tears or give us nightmares.  The whole pile could (literally or metaphorically) fall on our heads and kill us.

The music we love can suddenly become insufficient. A few among us may remember the ratings-busting finale of M*A*S*H* (in 1983, further back now than the actual Korean War was when we were watching it).  Near the beginning of the episode, Dr. Charles Winchester discovers that five captured Chinese soldiers are musicians, and he begins teaching them to play a Mozart clarinet quintet, using their own instruments. Later, the prisoners are taken away as part of a prisoner exchange (playing Mozart as they go). But just as a ceasefire is being announced, they are killed in a last round of enemy attacks.  When Winchester hears this, he goes to his tent and tries to listen to the Mozart record, but ends up smashing it to pieces. It is not only the music that betrayed him, but everything else in which he put his trust and which it represented.

Charlotte Mason also warned us about seeking beauty too much for its own sake:

The Beauty Sense adds so much to the joy of life that it is not easy to see what danger attends it...[We may think that] that the joys of Beauty are so full and satisfying that nothing else is necessary to complete the happiness of life...The person who is given up to the intoxication of Beauty conceives that Beauty and Goodness are one and the same thing, and that Duty is no more than seeking one's own pleasure in the ways one best likes. People, too, become excluded. (Ourselves Book I, p. 54)

We are fully allowed to value poetry, visual art, music, plays, and the natural world (including its tastes and textures). But we can love the scent of the flower, the echo of the tune, the rhythm of the sonnet (as Mason says) without becoming intoxicated by them. When they show themselves (as the Greek philosophers said) as only shadows of the true and wonderful things yet to come, we can understand and not grieve for what they are not, knowing that it is what comes "through them" that really matters.

And as our friend Lynn used to say, that enables us to enjoy every sandwich.

But Sunday's Coming

Backyard barbecue, 1967. (The giant coffeepot was a must.)

by Anne White 

Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life...Thou hast set my feet in a large room; should be the glad cry of every intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking––the strain would be too great––but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. (School Education, p. 170)

About two years ago, Malcolm Guite did a video in which he introduced viewers to the philosopher-critic-professor George Steiner, and read a passage from Steiner's 1991 book Real Presences. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to paraphrase it. "People of many beliefs understand something about both Good Friday and  Resurrection Sunday. The horror of the Crucifixion mirrors the deepest pain of their own lives. The hope of the Resurrection, no small thing even for non-believers, is symbolic of their own 'liberation from inhumanity and servitude,' no matter where they might be looking for that liberation. Friday is so terribly dark that 'even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless.' And Sunday is so blissfully happy that such things will 'no longer have logic or necessity.' However, it is Saturday, stretching between Friday's 'suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste,' and Sunday's 'dream of liberation, of rebirth,' with which we need to concern ourselves here." In Steiner's own words:

The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of Ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savor of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?

Did you get that? Even for Christians, who celebrate the joy of Sunday and feel the grief of Friday, this human life is made up largely of 

one

LOOOONNNNNNNNNG

Saturday.

And that's okay.

It's exactly because of Saturday that human beings need story, poetry, art, and music. These things arise out of our "immensity of waiting." They represent something we're longing for, hoping for, searching for. At their best, they combine the memory of Friday's suffering with the hope of Sunday's happy ending. 

And when Lucy was tired of eating the Faun began to talk. He had wonderful tales to tell of life in the forest...about feasting and treasure-seeking with the wild Red Dwarfs in deep mines and caverns far beneath the forest floor; and then about summer when the woods were green...Then to cheer himself up he took out from its case on the dresser a strange little flute that looked as if it were made of straw and began to play. And the tune he played made Lucy want to cry and laugh and dance and go to sleep all at the same time." (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis)

But don't scoff  at our need for this kind of play and poetry, for the wildness of imagining, for our Beethoven's Sixth Symphony ability to enjoy a picnic on the banks of the river but follow it up with a thunderstorm. The life of "born persons" anticipates the full-on light of Sunday (though seen only in glimpses), and includes the half-remembered darkness of Friday (though we must not succumb to it).

"It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill, I know that much. But I can't remember and what shall I do?" And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book. (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis) 

As Steiner said, without this sense of longing, how could we learn patience? (And without understanding that same sense in others, how could we learn empathy?) It is that same longing that makes us attempt to recreate the forgotten story, or to reproduce that beauty we have seen in glimpses.

No, we are not decadent on the whole, and our uneasiness is perhaps caused by growing pains. We may be poor things, but we are ready to break forth into singing should the chance open to us of a full life of passionate devotion. (Philosophy of Education, p. 336) 

(Me with my great-grandmother.)

That Sense of Hairbreadth Escape

The "Mariposa Special" steam train, Orillia, Ontario, 1967

by Anne White 

"Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride...You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word ‘Victoria,’ it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed ‘Victoria’; it is the victory of Adam.” (G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday)

Certainly the question why one thing follows another must still be answered in Eliot as in Donne, though the answer be more implicit in one than in the other. Neither an emotional nor a musical effect, if it is really such, can be founded on incoherence. This study assumes that poetry as meaning is neither plain sense nor nonsense, but a form of imaginative sense.  (George S. Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot)

Now, one thing following another is necessary and good, as both of the quotes above point out. But by itself, that is not enough. Quite awhile back, my husband and I watched a T.V. miniseries about shipboard adventures in the early 1800's, very colourful and exciting. Still, it seemed to me  that something was a bit off. At the end, the main character searches for some sort of deep meaning in the voyage, but he is told by another character that it "was not an odyssey...It is, or rather it was, what it was. A series of events." Which raised the question of why we had wasted all that time watching it. 

It turned out that the miniseries was based on a trilogy of novels written in the 1980's, which explained a lot. Some critics have said that the author intended an opposite meaning, that of course the story was more than just a "series of events"; but I believe the speech had its intended effect, bursting any romantic balloons we might have held about the meaning of life or the importance of story. 

A lesson which had laid such literature beside the advertisement and really discriminated the good from the bad would have been a lesson worth teaching. There would have been some blood and sap in it — the trees of knowledge and of life growing together. (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)

Maybe Chesterton was right, and we should celebrate the fact that timetables and train tracks help keep the world moving smoothly. But also the equally important truth that story, poetry, art and music, in their best forms, are neither inconsequential nor incoherent, and woe to those debunkers who try to make them so, who drain them of their blood and sap. 

Because in their own way, they also cry "Victoria." 

Revisiting A Touch of the Infinite

 

by Anne White

In 2016, Megan Hoyt published a book especially for the C.M. community, titled A Touch of the Infinite: Studies in Music Appreciation with Charlotte Mason.  Mason’s own books recommend composer study, singing, ear training, and instrument lessons, but often in too-brief snippets. The original Parents’ Union School programmes refer to specific music books, or (later on) to detailed term notes published separately, but these have also been hard to access. Hoyt’s book fills in the gaps: it's a how-to, a what-to, but, even more importantly, a why-to.

A few years ago, I planned to use A Touch of the Infinite with a local study group, as a change from Mason’s own books. That particular study, unfortunately, was a bomb, for a couple of reasons: people had to buy copies of the book, which was a deterrent; our group was moving into a low period anyway; but the biggest one, I think, was that people assumed that a book About Teaching Music, even if it was About Charlotte Mason and Teaching Music, would have little to say about Everything Else. For many people, music seemed optional, something to think about once the math and reading were in hand (as we have been told so many times by so many homeschool experts). This was an unfortunate (and incorrect) assumption, as Hoyt points out:

There is beauty all around us and the possibility of experiencing great joy. But in our quest to fill our minds with tiny packets of news and sayings on social media, we have quickened the pace of thought and neglected to slow down long enough to examine meaning or notice the beauty that is so near. And if we are not noticing what our eyes can see, how will we notice what our ears should hear? (Chapter One: Our Reason For the Journey)

Recently I wondered, if I were bringing the book back to our group-study table, what might I do to bypass the objections? The everybody-has-to-buy-a-copy-of-the-book problem is one I can’t help with, unfortunately. But I think I would try to make it clearer that this is a book about Charlotte Mason, and the arts, and education, and life stuff, written by a longtime C.M. educator with a particular passion for music. 

I should not have been, but I was surprised (in a good way) to learn that each book Miss Mason chose for composer study and music education was littered with those same thoughts and principles she placed within her volumes: the importance of relationship, the value of ideas over dry facts, the use of story to engage a child’s mind with the subject at hand. (Introduction)

Talking about music, in a sense, is a doorway into the rest, just as a book about history, literature, or even mathematics could be, with the guidance of the right person.

God can use music in innumerable ways to get our attention. It inspires us, heals us, blinds us with its glory, tears at our despairing souls until we choose to seek Him, for nothing else will suffice. (Chapter One: Our Reason For the Journey)

On the practical side, A Touch of the Infinite is a handbook for the C.M. educator who wants to know more about ear training (it's important!), and composer study, and what sort of piano or violin lessons should be part of the curriculum. But it occurs to me that it would also be a very good follow-up to Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, which is the sort of teaching/parenting book that makes you want to open the world up a little more for your children, if only in a bit of rebellion: in time spent outdoors, in good books, in human relationships, and in things like art and music that used to be integrated into life.

This life is glorious, isn’t it? All of this—the entire universe of living ideas—belongs to every human being…The world is in desperate need of this universe of thoughts and things. We pine for them and fill our lives with busyness because they are missing. And most of us don’t even realize what it is we’re pining for. (Introduction to A Touch of the Infinite)

I don't know if or when our local group will get another chance to read Hoyt's book together. But in the meantime, I can at least recommend it for the bookshelves of those who want to look at Charlotte Mason's educational philosophy from the orchestra seats. 

Lovin', really livin'

Without it you ain't livin', boy

You're just gettin' up each day

And walkin' around

Your world is cryin' now, my friend

But give it love

And it will mend 

And teach you all the music

(Ian and Sylvia, "Lovin' Sound") 

Folksongs, Some Real Life Experiences

These are collected from some of our AO families:

 "...we were berrying back in the woods to put up our yearly jam preserves and after an hour, a bit of boredom was setting in. So we started singing folk songs from last year– especially the "Nice Field of Turnips" while we pointed out what we were seeing. It was fun, it helped the time pass, and it was collaborative unlike headphones (I love my music so I'm not bashing on headphones but headphones while keeping watch out for our bear is not a wise plan). I think that they were more common way back because there were lots of these types of jobs and no portable music players. And telling a story via song is easy and fun, and unlike listening to a storyteller, everyone can be in on it. But they're still fun and useful today. I'm grateful for the impetus to teach them to my family!" K.S.

 "We've noticed since learning folk songs that they turn up in our culture more than you would think. It's always fun when one of the kids points them out." L.N.

 A. L. says her family enjoys playing and singing them while cleaning house. Even the toddler joins in.

 "...my crew was bored in the car so they busted out in a few [folk songs] from last year too. It was fun." C. H.

 "We sang folk songs while digging a trench for a retaining wall footing this week in El Salvador this week. We were too dirty and little cell reception, so no looking up lyrics." H.W.

 " A couple months ago, we were driving through the mountains a lot later than we had intended. Dark, slow, no cell service, no radio....so we sang every folk song we knew. Over and over. It was one of the highlights of the trip for me. I'll never skip another." and "I had to come share another folk song story. This week we are camping and over did ourselves on a hike. It was too hot. In order to rally our spirits to get to a place where my husband could go get the truck and come back for us girls....we sang I love to go a wondering, and parts of Go get the axe (we are still learning it). It was beautiful, and because my husband works from home and sings with us most mornings, he was singing along." C.H.

 One of the things I try to share about folk songs is that they give us a sound track for life, and give children another emotional vocabulary. Here is a wonderful example of that in action:

 Regarding a 5 y.o. child, his mother shared that he "went through something this past year that was very sad and hard for him. He brought it up one day recently, and I affirmed with him that it was likely one of the hardest experiences he's faced this far in his life. He was quiet for a moment and then without a word of explanation, began to sing to himself, "You've got to walk that lonesome valley..." He then gave me a hug and left the room full of peace." A. R.

Sing.  Sing together, sing while working, playing, passing the time, driving in the car, sitting in the living room during a power outage, at a backyard BBQ, while berry picking, weed-pulling, car-washing, rocking the baby, washing the dishes, folding the clothes.  Make it an easy and natural part of your lives.  Your children deserve no less.

Mysticism Unveiled: The Gentle Heart of Hildegard of Bingen

By Megan Hoyt

Our guest poster today is Megan Hoyt, a longtime Ambleside Online user and the author of Hildegard's Gift (see details below).  Hildegard of Bingen is the AO composer for this term.

When I first began reading about the early life of Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth century composer, artist, herbalist, visionary, and lover of God, I really began to identify with this mysterious, solitary child. Like other good Catholics of the Middle Ages, her parents sent her away to live as an anchoress in total isolation at an early age. As their tenth child, they considered her a “tithe to the church,” which seems like a beautiful and godly idea unless you are the frightened little girl being sent away.

I was a frightened little girl, too – I was almost scared of my own shadow for most of my childhood and constantly worried about the social norms of school life, which seemed so elusive to me. I was mystical, too, in the sense that I genuinely “felt” connected to God when I worshipped at church. Unlike my peers, I cried while singing anthems in children’s choir. Christmas and Easter services? I sobbed through them. My parents called me sensitive. My Aunt Gretchen said I was one of God’s special ones. Looking back, I now wonder if I had a form of clinical depression.

Perhaps that’s why I so strongly identified with young Hildegard’s first teetering steps into the cell where she would spend years of her life, praying alone. I could definitely see myself being happy in isolation like Hildegard. And that is the duty of an anchoress, in case you didn’t know – they must live a secluded life as cloistered nuns. I wonder. Did Hildegard WANT to join the convent at Disibodenberg? She was only eight years old, after all. Did she agree with her parents’ decision? She certainly embraced her new life. And the world is better for it. But where does our genuine responsibility for accepting the advice of our parents end? Where does it begin? I really don’t have any idea. It’s a new thought for me – do we have choices when we’re very young? Do we get to decide to love God or are we simply expected to? See, I told you I was mystical. I could sit and ponder these things all day and never accomplish anything else.

Hildegard was already experiencing brilliant visions by the time she was sequestered with only one fellow nun, Jutta, nearby. She was unable to write her visions down without the assistance of a scribe, but it was clear early that she was a gifted young woman with big ideas that she insisted came directly from God. Here are a few things God was saying to her:

The fire has its flame and praises God.
The wind blows the flame and praises God.
In the voice we hear the word which praises God.
And the word, when heard, praises God.
So all of creation is a song of praise to God.

God hugs you.
You are encircled by the arms
of the mystery of God.

Good People,
most royal greening verdancy,
rooted in the sun,
you shine with radiant light.

I have read two or three of Hildegard’s books now and even written one of my own about her, Hildegard’s Gift, available through Paraclete Press. The more I read, the more I love this little girl with a giant heart. She seems so intimately acquainted with God and so firm in her convictions about how we should live. Reading even a few excerpted quotes from her chant music refreshes my soul and gives me fresh hope for the future. Taking time to contemplate, to brood, to rest in the presence of our Lord is so important and also richly rewarding in this fragmented, hurry along culture of ours.

The child Hildegard grew up, of course, as we all must. Her adult years were spent as an Abbess, leading others, writing letters of conviction and encouragement to popes, bishops, and princes. She was a strong woman with the courage to confront those living in sin. She also wrote plays, operettas, and listened for God’s whispered design for herbal remedies. Here are a few of her thoughts. They may seem a little silly now, but when she wrote them, there was no medical care, no medicine at all really.

The head of a catfish should never be eaten—it lacks viriditas (greening power) and will cause headaches and fevers.

Spelt rectifies the flesh, produces proper blood, and creates a happy mind and a joyful human disposition.

The wood and leaves of the nutmeg tree are harmful, but nutmeg itself gives a person a positive disposition and calms bitterness of the heart and mind. (Physica, p. 21)

Hildegard was a remarkable and complex woman with many talents, but she considered herself merely “a feather on the breath of God.” May we all trust God so much that we float on the wind of the Spirit, on the very breath of our sustaining God.

Megan Hoyt is a veteran writer with credits in television and print. Her children’s book, Hildegard’s Gift, illustrated by David Hill, was released by Paraclete Press in 2014. Recipes, a secret alphabet, and coloring sheets are all available at her website. For the Orthodox and Catholic among us, Hildegard’s Feast Day is September 17.

In which Ralph Vaughan Williams writes to the children of the P.U.S.

(posted by Anne White)

To the children of the Parents' Union School, Ambleside

February, 1951

A small girl was once having a music lesson.  Her teacher gave her a new piece to learn, which she explained was composed by a well-known musician who had lately visited the school.  'But,' said the little girl, in great bewilderment, 'I thought all composers were dead.'

Have we really been taught that all composers are dead? Then indeed our art is dead. Vital art must be creative.

It has been said that we should stand in the present with one eye on the past and one on the future.  Let us by all means build our house on the foundations of the great masters, but let us remember that the composers of our own time and of our own country have something to say to us which even the greatest masters of the past age cannot give us; that is the only way we can build a great future for our music.

We must not let let the dead lion swallow up the living dog.

R. Vaughan Williams.

From the Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1895-1958,  edited by Hugh Cobbe.  Retrieved from Google Books.