Stopping in at the NY Philharmonic's lobby Jumbotron for the Messiah. Remembering last year at about this time, the performance by the Transylvanian orchestra at the centuries-old university. I had my customary seat, front-row center, which was at balcony prices, following the usual practice for classical music events, but the space was so small that the mix was perfect there, and as the evening progressed, the music surrounded me and drew me into the mystery. It wasn't hard to imagine this a 19th c. orchestra deep in the mountains of the Balkans, playing the piece that had just come in from London. Sensing these mediations, understanding the mechanism that is creating the representation, is one way to enter a work of art. This is a paradox, in that attention is being turned to the things between the work and us, but like agitating the surface of the water, of the lake, it brings your attention to the place between the worlds, and from thence to the hidden world.
Otherwise, the place between the worlds is invisible. A stick, extending halfway out of the water for some reason seems broken. And then we begin to repair the mistakes of our own mind, rather than contemplate the rift between things. We try to make our minds more accurate, rather than our vision more clear and distinct.
I saw an extraordinary rendition of the piece on tape from the Edinborough festival; I think it needs some tincture of the North to it. Otherwise, as with this Jumbotron version that I'm currently eavesdropping, it's romantic instruments sounding their timbre and colotura embroiderings. What's missing is the rough creak of the rift in the lute, the cold wind of the spirit. Even in London-town. There is a story that the soprano in Handel's original company for the Dublin performance, I think, had some rumors swirling about her, and the audience entered into the story of her redemption. These things give us a foothold in the representation. A clew.
This (again in the lobby with the Jumbotron) is a very insipid performance. And yet, somehow perfect for the overpriced luxury-goods that make up the arts in this city. They expect a luxuriant experience. And yet: "Woe to you who are comfortable." Perhaps that offers a foothold on that expression. I think the Koran teaches that on the day of judgment, molten gold will be poured into the ears of those who listen to music. Keeping in mind, of course, that the Medina Philharmonic wasn't very highly ranked at the time. The music he condemns is likely the idle marketplace music. Music as appurtenance to a comfortable life, not a mechanism of revelation.
The Transylvania Messiah actually was a very powerful experience. To encounter this piece as a Christian is to meditate on a series of specific propositions. But within the context of a message being proclaimed. I remember thinking, after one particularly strong Beethoven's Ninth at Carnegie Hall (Barenboim/Staatskapelle Berlin), that if there were justice in the world, every newspaper on the planet would, tomorrow morning, have the banner headline: "We Won."
Art requires this transformation of reality. Not the plastic deformations of the fiction, but the conviction that what it is to exist has been changed by witnessing the event. "A tune beyond ourselves, yet ourselves," as the poem has it -- a work I once found fragments of in blue spray paint on the construction paneling at the Chelsea Hotel as I walked past early one morning, long before dawn. Peregrination. The Enlightenment critic once said that seeing the sculpted torso of the idealized figure, something should arise in us that says "I must amend my life." I'm convinced that this is the same phenomenon as the transformation of reality mentioned above -- something about what it is to exist has been vouchsafed to us, and we are duty-bound to change our stance to the world a bit.
So art has the obligation to bring to us this good news, to show us that things are different now. And on some level we realize that it is our notions of things that have been enlarged, since the tune was beyond ]us at first. But then we recognize ourselves after this sublation. Things having changed somewhat.
Christianity is a religion that happens within history. Actually, our notions of history, especially those having to do with Whiggish perfection, are intimately associated with the Christian viewpoint, the notion that things are fighting to change to the good inside of each person. The value placed on the individual soul's fabric is the great change from the darkness of antiquity.
And now, on the lobby screen -- "despised and rejected." Described with langour, as if marketing a khaki luxury bag. The notion of worthlessness itself being sold in the marketplace.
The sea of faith was once full, of course, and these terms had specific meaning. Now, I'm reasonably certain that very few of the folks in this lobby take these propositions to be true, and yet, they have meaning for them. What this meaning might be, without belief, perhaps presents an interesting question. To the modern mind, the truth-value of a sentence is generally thought to be whether it is the case. The cat is on the mat = true. And yet, we are not verification machines; determining whether something is the case might not be the work given us by the universe in hearing a certain sentence. It is not for us to judge whether the holy time is in fact as quiet as a nun. In fact, the proposition is more of a command, effective words, creating a certain disposition in us towards the world, and what it is to be in the world has changed a bit after hearing it.
Now in the lobby version -- "But thou did'st not leave his soul in hell" -- there was no reversal there. The point is that there has never been someone so desolate, and then an assurance arises. If there's no reversal between these two thoughts, the second one has no meaning for us. This reading has gone from langourous to funereal.
I'm not sure that I could talk through the insights that I had in listening to the version in Transylvania last year. I do know that I took each one of these propositions to be the case. And I understood that this message was being relayed, mediated by the local ensemble, so they were giving it the meaning that came naturally to them in the mountains of Romania. Both of us, then, peering at the source of this message from distant London. It seemed infinitely logical that the soul who had suffered should govern all things. And so, by the measure of that logic, it might very well have happened. The victory was more possible, once I understood what it was thought to be. Listening to that Ninth at Carnegie Hall, I didn't go in expecting a transcendent experience, I experienced the event, and once the event had substance, it became transcendent. Approaching the question of the truth of the message after the hermeneutic is vastly different from reaching for the higher meaning after deciding whether the proposition is true. We might believe many more things if our first question was "what is this?" rather than "is this true", the latter usually standing place for "do I like this?"
Woe to the comfortable. Those who do not take the thing in hand before deciding whether or not it pleases them. The difficulty, the thing interposed between ourselves and the representation, is often what gives us the key to the work. To place the question of our own comfort, whether the thing agrees with us, or we with it, before inquiring into the nature of the thing itself, is a basic error. On one level, this can be applied to a certain performance, and on another level, to a certain proposition of faith. Whether we believe it or not is not the first question we should have on hearing it. And we might find that, having understood, we might then believe.