The Beauty of Music

Tanglewood

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” – Aldous Huxley

“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence in between.” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I would like to spend some time thinking about Beauty in its various shapes and forms. When I consider the beauty of music I am jolted away from reliance on my eyes and to some extent even my cognition and I enter a world not only of deep listening but one in which memory is keenly evoked. Music never seems to come alone; it enters my soul, reverberates and loosens tight defenses revealing times and places once gone. 

The Doobie Brothers, Little Feet, James Taylor and Loggins and Messina transport me to Williams College with or without Christopher Robin. Mozart locates me more specifically in Currier Hall and Music 101 as I focus on Prof. Shainman’s trumpet finger moving up and down reflexively. La Traviata puts white gloves on my 10 year old hands and takes me to the Lyric Theater in Baltimore with my grandfather the tenor. Patsy Cline takes me to a hospice room in Maine where “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” became the prelude to a sweet sigh and last breath. “Precious Lord Take My Hand” reminds me of a few precious moments of letting go and letting God in all kinds of crises.

If challenged to answer the question: what would the one song be if you could only listen to one more?, I would be hard-pressed and weave and bob for a while. I suppose I would land somewhere between Brahms violin concerto and Deep River. 

I cannot even write them down without a tear falling and a sense of peace descending. They say all will be well to me in “harmonies of liberty”.

There is a holy power to music which is numinous and penetrating. As the opening quotations indicate, music and silence cooperate. Sound waves move through silence at imperceptible rates creating notable rhythms, in our brains and in our bodies. It feels like the power of prayer when the Holy Spirit prays in and through us with sighs too deep for words, making that which is inexpressible, expressible.