3. Chill
Now that we’ve reminded ourselves what silence might have been like, and now that we’ve broken that silence with a blues-like howling that connects you and your friend with our primitive forbears and the wild wolf and dog packs that were their close companions, we are ready to think about the first music that was written down, that could be replicated once that written language was learned, and which certain people who would eventually be known as composers, could create. We are going to put our toes, and more importantly our ears, into Gregorian Chant.
Goethe described architecture as frozen music, and when we think of fifteenth century gothic cathedrals, we can get imagine what kind of music they were frozen from.
Let’s walk into one of these cathedrals.
The first thing we feel is the great space of enclosed stone — vast heights, hard floors, parallel walls that return any sound with its colder mirror image. A great stillness, even in the midst of a great city. We want to bring our worship to life in this space, and our basic musical instrument is the human voice. We sing, using just a few different pitches. Up a note, down a note hold it, listen to the long echo, repeat. Make a little variation. Have others, men or boys, sing the same notes at the same time. This is chant. Find some Gregorian Chant on your music source. Be in a quiet place when you listen to it. And not just quiet from outside noise, but find some quiet deep in your soul and go there for a moment. Let it bore you, lull you, and maybe, eventually, put you in a contemplative state.
If you want to hear the work of one of the earliest known women composers, find Hildegard of Bingen. Her thousandth birthday is coming up in this, the 21st, century. If you want to try out some much more modern chant music, look for Tomas Luis de Victoria and listen to the Requiem performance led by David Hill. Victoria wrote some 400 years after Hildegard, but you will see how similar they are in attempting to enhance contemplation among the stone walls.
For the past six hundred years, Gregorian Chant has been the music of meditation, a contemplative sound just above silence itself. In cathedrals and monasteries all over the world, at every hour, a choir somewhere is singing an ancient chant. At first, when you put this music on, don’t expect your dog to get all waggy on you, as in, “Oh thanks, Mom. This just knocks me out.’ But given time, and depending on what kind of tranquility you’re capable of modeling, even the most bonkers puppy is going to find Gregorian Chant contagious and go into a contemplative zone. Watch for closed eyes, snoring, and drool.
For some people, this little adventure in music with your dog will end here. For some, this will be enough, light a candle, put on some quiet chant, the dog is zoned out, you’re feeling pretty serene. If so, dear listener and reader, I bid you farewell. It’s been lovely. Bye!
But for many of us, as beautiful as Gregorian Chant is, it doesn’t really ask for us to listen to it. It is, as it was intended to be, music for a certain kind of space, that cathedral space. But most of us are not in a cathedral space most of the time — we’re in a busy world, curious about what’s around the next corner. Eager to be delighted.
If you’ve ever taken in improv class or watched improv comedy, you know the tension and excitement that can come from trying to build on a few words or ideas that audience members randomly offer up. Musicians, too, often take an improv challenge. Most of jazz is built on the skills of the improvisor — and much of rock has been infused with improv, with Jimi Hendricks right at the top.
Your dog might not know that Bach was quite the improvisor, too. It’s actually hard not to do when you’re sitting at the keyboards of a mighty pipe organ. So many possible sounds and combinations, all just crying out to be tried. I must confess to drawing an Episcopal priest out of his study one day after school, when I was working on some variations on ‘Night Train’ when I should have been practicing my pedal work. “I hate to ask you to tone it down, but I’m trying to write my Sunday sermon.” “Sorry, Father.”
Johann Sebastian Bach’s most famous improvisations are called the Goldberg Variations. The complete set starts with a charming little melody, an Aria, that is played at the beginning and at the end with thirty variations in between. I know some people who don’t have a huge appetite for classical music who nevertheless return to the Goldberg Variations when they need a calming moment, or just something extremely simple and beautiful in their lives. One of our granddaughters was born to the Goldbergs, so you get the idea.
The Goldbergs were pretty obscure until January, 1956. Not many people, even classical enthusiasts, paid a lot of attention to them. And then a young, previously unknown Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, released his first record, and it was of these rare variations. The record sold 100,000 copies and a later, Gould’s stereo recording, sold more than 2 million.
By now, you and your four-legged friend are probably eager to hear what the excitement was all about, and I’m going to ask you to do yourself a couple of favors first. No matter how you download or stream the Goldbergs, please take few precautions or else you might screw up the whole experience and end up hating Glenn Gould, Johann Sebastian Bach, and even me. And your dog might hate you and you might even get pissed at your poor innocent pooch. These Variations need to be played in order, and you need to hear all of them. They are not ‘songs’ as most streaming services treat most music. You need to make sure that your setting on your player is not set to mix, or random. You want to start at #1 Aria and make sure you’re listening to Variation 1 next, not 23. If the total time is less than 38 minutes, something is seriously missing.
If you look around, there are three major recordings Gould made of the Goldbergs. The first, from 1955, is generally very fast, mono, and breathtaking in many ways. The last recording Gould made is quite fine, possibly more thoughtful. And there is my favorite, one I came across quite by chance in a record store on an island in the Caribbean. This version was a live radio broadcast in 1969 in Salzburg and has a lot of excitement and beauty throughout. It’s my favorite of the three, but you or that drooler over there should feel free to disagree.
You can put a pin in this chapter now and take some time to enjoy Bach and his Variations. I’d like to add one more piece of Bach here just to give a sense of how incredibly broad his musical sensibility was. I first heard Bach’s music for a cello playing all by itself when I was in high school. A friend put one of these records on and I was knocked out by how much complexity could come from an instrument that could only play one note at a time (as opposed to a piano or guitar, for instance.) Over the years I have listened to what are known as the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello hundreds of times and always hear something new.
The wisest thing anyone said about them that was meaningful to me, was this was music that could only exist, or come together, in the listener’s mind. The cello plays a note, a scale, more notes, but only in recalling and holding as much of it as possible in our memory does it begin to make sense. It is almost as if Bach wants us to be the cathedral, where the lone voice of the cello floats in a vast space, runs into itself, clashes and harmonizes, and ultimately constructs a vast edifice of its own.
Try the Bach Suite #1 for Unaccompanied Cello as performed by Pierre Fournier. There are six parts — one introduces the piece (the Prelude) and the next five are named, and feel, like dances. Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Minuet, and Gigue.