At the last concert offered for Benedict XVI at the Vatican (the Haydn Seven Last Words before Holy Week), I remarked after translating his remarks on the occasion that by now, he must have said and written enough about music and the other fine arts to put together a volume on Joseph Ratzinger, art lover and art critic. And here it is! It must have been in the press even as I was expressing my wish... The Preface is written by one of the leading conductors of our time, Riccardo Muti, who has also been the music director of La Scala since the 1990s.
Actually, it is the second book of the kind put out by Marcianum Press in a few months - the first La Musica: Un'arte familiare al Logos [Music: An art akin to Logos] was a compilation dedicated to sacred music and song - of which the Holy Father has said and written much!
Music is a question of education
by RICCARDO MUTI
Translated from
the 4/29/10 issue of
Editor's Note: The book Lodate Dio con arte [Praise God with art] (Venice, Marcianum Press, 2010, 254 pp) which puts together writings and discourses of Joseph Ratzinger - before and after becoming Pope - dedicated to art, but particularly to music and song. Here is the Preface to the book.
Of course, it is not necessary to be Pope to frequent the world of music as Papa Ratzinger does who, at his venerable age and with all the tasks that his high position of Pastor for the entire Church must mean, does not disdain sitting down at the piano himself to nourish his spirit by playing his favorite composers.
But it is a great gift to mankind and for the Church at the start of the third millennium to have a Pope who claims a place and respect in the Church and in society for this high human expression.
He started to love music and to make music from childhood up to the time when, as he tells it, thanks to his brother, he could feel himself part of the family of the Domspatzen, the boys' choir of Regensburg, who perform at liturgical services in the city cathedral.
His early musical experience has marked his life, as it does the life of us who are professional musicians. The experience of music enriches human existence and opens it up to horizons that seem to be infinite and eternal.
"To sing is almost like flying," the Pope confided after a Domspatzen concert. "It is rising up to God, in some way anticipating the song of eternity". Whoever learns to sing as a child will sing all his life, and all life for him becomes a song.
The Pope is right when, on quite a few occasions, he has lamented the low level of consumer music, particularly the music and songs executed in churches these past few decades, especially here in Italy.
But the reason is inadequate musical education. Too little is given in the schools, and alternative or subsidiary activities that could include music are only for the fortunate few.
And in the parishes, at least in Italy, I think that the musical education of Christians is among the least of the parish's pastoral concerns, and perhaps even of the bishops.
(Teaching) music and singing in Italy has been left to private initiative. And only for those who have the predisposition and the talent, who also have the financial means to attend a private music school or are lucky enough to be employed in a conservatory.
In our country, one has to fend for oneself - even for music and song. And I have denounced this on so many occasions. In an evolved society, musical education cannot be treated this way. It means not having respect for the cultural value of music. Above all, it means not acknowledging or not respecting the anthropological value of music in the formation of persons who must live in society and communicate with others.
Choral and instrumental practice, like reading and writing, should accompany the entire time of basic schooling, from kindergarten to high school. Just as education in written and oral expression are part of a person's school itinerary from start to end, gradually enriched by the different cultural elements that provide the material for what to say or what to write, it is hard to understand why the same thing cannot be done for educating our children for musical expression through he voice and musical instruments.
If something could be done in this respect, then we could also reverse the tendency to consider music as an activity for a few elect, as simply one of the possible professional undertakings, a commodity to be sold, or nothing more than a leisure activity. It would surely follow that even in our churches, there will be more singing - and far better.
So it would not be too much to hope, even from these pages, for a musical education that not only will not emarginate anybody from music training and the pleasure of listening, but above all, promote in every schoolchild the development of self-perception, which reaches maximal expression and self-understanding in making music together.
It will never be too much to ask for musical education that not only teaches children to listen to music, to decipher its language and its messages, and make it into part of their baggage of cultural values; that not only teaches them to read music and to play at least one musical instrument, but above all, to sing and make music together, assimilating its rules and exigencies through practice, because this will train them for choral teamwork even in life.
I am truly grateful to the Pope for having brought back music to its right place - as he does through this book - within the Church and outside it, simply calling attention to it as an essential factor in the life of men.
His studies are illuminating especially in the field of sacred music. They clear the ground of equivocations and fundamentalist absolutisms pro and con, that have created confrontation rather than dialog and a common striving for the good of the Church and her liturgy.
They explain the uneasiness that so many experience when they go to Sunday Mass. But they also make us hope for a restoration of musical art that makes for good service to the liturgy and to the life of this world.
I share completely what His Holiness says:
"If the Church is to transform itself, improve and 'humanize' the world, how can this be done while renouncing beauty, which is one with love, and with it, is the true comfort, the closest possible to the world of the Resurrection?
"The Church should be ambitious - it should be a house of beauty, it should lead the battle for 'spiritualization', without which the world would become 'the first circle of Hell'.
"Therefore one must aim for what is appropriate to the liturgy and to the participation of the faithful, but we must do everything so that what is appropriate is also beautiful and worthy of the most important ecclesial action for which it is used" (P. 33).
"Rightly, a Church that makes only 'music for use' falls instead into the useless and itself becomes useless," the Pope says further.
The Church has and should carry out a much higher task: "It should be a place of 'glory', and also a place in which the lamentations of mankind are brought to the ear of God. She cannot content herself with what is merely ordinary and 'useful': she should raise the voice of the cosmos to glorify the Creator, reveal his magnificence to the cosmos, and make the cosmos itself glorious, and therefore, beautiful, habitable, and lovable."
Additionally: "Musical art is called, in a singular manner, to instill hope in the human spirit, which is so marked and often wounded by the earthly condition. There is a mysterious and profound kinship between music and hope, between song and eternal life: it is not without reason that Christian tradition depicts the blessed spirits in the act of singing chorally, rapt and ecstatic at the beauty of God. But authentic art, like prayer, does not alienate us from the reality of everyday; rather, it makes us able to 'irrigate' this day-to-day in order to make it sprout and bear fruits of goodness and peace" (p.124).
Undoubtedly, the cultural revolution that took place in the past century has placed into crisis the traditional codes of reference which conventionally served to establish what is beautiful and what is not in music.
The tonal system, chosen for centuries to represent the natural complicity between the world of sounds and man's consciousness, has been systematically abandoned, and new paths have been followed and will certainly be in the future.
Music, especially in the last decades of the past century, has become a phenomenon that is extremely varied and variable. There has been a renewal and an amplification of the musical language just as there have been theological, liturgical, cultural and existential innovations.
The idea and the claim of a single cultural and musical model has fallen off, and an infinite number have taken its place. Music has ceased to be an occupation of the Church or of the bourgeois salon, to serve the dominant religious or political idea.
Every idea has its own music, and every music claims its own space and recognition on par with so many other cultural expressions. To judge their value is not possible if one does not enter into the human and religious dynamic that inspires each kind of music and expresses it.
This varies from people to people, from group to group, often from person to person. This has produced a great variety of expressions and styles, whose objective is not the transgression of conventional or natural rules, but the composition of music that expresses what they want to say while being other than what our ears have been used to hear. One cannot form a value judgment without taking into account this plurality of styles.
There is no style that can boast of primacy over the others and to which the others must measure up in order to be legitimately useful in the liturgy. All styles have a right of citizenship in contemporary culture, and, I daresay, even in liturgy, at least if one considers that behind every style, there is not just the work of the musician, but also men, or even peoples, who in that particular way express themselves, their life and their faith.
It would not be proper to make a choice. That is to say, to select the men and the image of themselves and of God that they cultivate and wish to communicate.
Nonetheless, even in the complexity of the present time and its plural expressions - all legitimate - I dare to hope that the inspiratory principles of authentic beauty evoked by the Pope will never be obscured or forgotten, principles upon which the musical patrimony of our culture and our history was created as an inestimable treasure, and which continues to speak in exemplary manner to the heart and the spirit of contemporary man, including the younger generations.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/04/2010 13:58]