Anam Cara

Over hundreds of millions of years, the earth deepened its elemental music. Each note arises out of the infinite silence of the earth and falls away again into the vast stillness. The elemental conversation of the silence and the music of nature gives the earth a spirit of intimacy. There is an interesting symmetry between the silence of the earth and the silence of the human body. Just as the music of the wind and water breaks the deep silence of the earth, so the sound of the word breaks the private silence of the body. This threshold between silence and word sets the imagination free to create beauty. A world without this threshold would be a world of nightmare. An earth where noise never stopped or where clear dead silence was endless could never be a home for the mind. It is somehow consoling that at a primal level the heart of silence ripples in music and word. In terms of our theme, it is as though the deepest dream of silence is the beauty of music and word.

Unlike all our ancestral creatures, we have transformed the earth. We have brought much destruction and done much damage, yet our music is among the most delightful sounds on earth. Faced with the strangeness and silence of the earth, one of the most beautiful human creations has been music. The creation of exquisite music is one of the glories of the human imagination. Indeed, if we had done little else, music would remain our incredible gift to creation for there is no other sound on earth to compare with the beauty and depth of music. It has an eternal resonance. Yet of course that is as we hear it. Perhaps to animal hearing, there is nothing more beautiful than the sound of wind through a forest or the rhythmic salsa of Wild Ocean as it crashes against a cliff-face. To the human ear, however, music echoes the deepest grandeur and the most sublime intimacy of the soul.

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Music survives, composing her own sphere,

Angel of Tones, Medusa, Queen of the Air,

And when we would accost her with real cries

Silver on silver thrills itself to ice.

GEOFFREY HILL, ‘Tenebrae’

IN CONTRAST TO MOST OTHER FORMS OF ART, MUSIC ALTERS YOUR experience of time. To enter a piece of music, or to have the music enfold you, is to depart for a while from regulated time. Music creates a rhythm that beats out its own time-shape. Whilst theatre invites the suspension of disbelief as we enter and participate in the drama the characters create, in music there is a suspension of the world. We are deftly seduced into another place of pure feeling. No other art distils feeling the way music does; this is how it can utterly claim us. Despite the complexity of its content or structure, the tonality of music invades the heart. In music, the most intricate complexity can live in the most lyrical form. Music is depth in seamless form. It is no wonder then that all poetry strives towards the condition of music. As T.S. Eliot said: ‘Poetry like music should communicate before it is understood.’

Feeling is where the heart lives. In claiming the heart so swiftly and totally, the beauty of music crosses all psychological and cultural frontiers. There is a profound sense in which music opens a secret door in time and reaches in to the eternal. This is the authority and grace of music: it evokes or creates an atmosphere where presence awakens to its eternal depth. In our everyday experience the quality of presence is generally limited and broken. Much of the time we are distracted; we might manage to be externally present, but often our minds are secretly elsewhere. Music can transform this fragmentation, for when you enter into a piece of music your feeling deepens and your presence clarifies. It brings you back to the mystery of who you are and it surprises you by inadvertently resonating with depths inside your heart that you had forgotten or neglected. Music can also stir memories, good or bad, and transport you back in time.

Music embraces the whole person. It entrances the mind and the heart and its vibrations reach and touch the entire physical body. Yet there is something deeper still in the way that music pervades us. In contrast to every other art form, it finds us out in a more immediate and total way. The inrush of intimacy in music is irresistible. It takes you before you can halt it. It is as though music reaches that subtle threshold within us where the soul dovetails with the eternal. We always seem to forget that the soul has two faces. One face is turned towards our lives; it animates and illuminates every moment of our presence. The other face is always turned towards the divine presence. Here the soul receives the Divine Smile or the Kiss of God, as Meister Eckhart might express it. Perhaps this is where the mystical depth of music issues from: that threshold where the face of the soul becomes imbued with the strange tenderness of divine illumination.

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The essence of rhythm is the preparation of a new event by the