The Divine Language of Music: Beauty and Influence

As we continue now with our study of the Christian and the arts, we recall that, historically, there have been those in the ancient Greek tradition who have argued for certain standards of objectivity for beauty such as proportionality, harmony, simplicity, and complexity that I’ve mentioned briefly. And today we’re going to turn our attention now to one of the art forms – and that’s to music – and see how some of these principles of aesthetics apply. [00:00:01]

Any time I think about the phenomenon of music, I find it almost quickening within me a sense of a mystical response to the profound mystery that’s involved in the very making of music. And I think also of the conferences and seminars that we do and have done over the years at Ligonier, where we have people who use American Sign Language to communicate the messages and so on and the words of the hymns to a group who attend who are deaf. [00:00:33]

And it’s always amazing to me to see their response to the words, to the contents, and the way they use their hands and their shoulders and their facial expressions to communicate with each other in a soundless world. And I thought, what a tremendous, tremendous burden it would be for the human person to lose their ability to hear altogether, because sound plays such an important role in our daily lives, and that every sound that we hear has a pitch to it. [00:01:16]

And again, I stand in awe at musicians who have what’s called perfect pitch, in which – there aren’t many that do – but they can not only tell the sound or the note, the tone of a note on a piano or on a violin or on a trumpet, but I heard of one lady that would say, “Well, my cat purrs in B Flat.” And that’s true; they can identify the tone that a bird chirps in or a cat purrs in because there are certain definitive what they call “colors” to each tone that the ear picks up. [00:01:52]

But music is not made up of one tone; music is made up of all kinds of tones, either played in a sequence – do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do – we’ve taken just certain individual tones and put them in a sequence and produce a melody, or we can take tones, three four, five tones, or whatever, and play them at the same time and produce a harmony, which may be pleasing or unpleasing to the ear. [00:03:49]

But again, we hear tones of sounds daily with birds, with the wind as it whistles across the landscape, and the sounds that we hear have a powerful ability to impact the heart and the soul – that is, to affect our moods, to affect our behavioral patterns. And even Plato in the ancient world was very much concerned about the popular music of his time because of the tremendous impact it had, obviously, on the behavior of the young people of Athens. [00:04:38]

I find that fascinating because when I look back to my own youth, I think about how much of our youth culture was conditioned, if not determined, by the popular music of our day. And we were all, as it were, slaves to the radio shows that played nothing but popular music. We knew all of the disc jockeys, and all of them offered the opportunity for us to call into the radio station and ask a special playing, you know, “For my girlfriend, Vesta, please play me, ‘When I Fall in Love,’” and so there would come Nat King Cole on the air. [00:05:20]

And so it’s just amazing to me how much impact music can have on individuals, and that impact doesn’t stop when we go through adolescence. It continues throughout our entire adult lives, and it begins before we’re adolescents; I’ve watched infants begin to move and simulate a dance pattern as they’re listening to different forms of music. And people use music intentionally to create moods. [00:07:38]

But this is not new; from all history, we’ve seen that people understand music has a powerful influence on people’s behavior. Think back to the Old Testament and the explosive temper, the madness that was suffered by King Saul, and yet, in order to calm his spirit, he would bring David in to play music for the king because his music was soothing. You’ve heard the old saw that music soothes the savage beast, and so music can be used to calm the spirit, to excite the sensuous desires of people. [00:08:52]

Now when we talk about music, we are talking about something different from noise. There may be a specific tone that a jackhammer emits when it’s tearing up the sidewalk, but we don’t usually associate it with music. Music is a little bit more sophisticated in that, and here’s where we run into these principles of aesthetics that I’ve talked about already, principles of proportion, harmony, and so on. [00:15:02]

Now in music, the basic elements that make up music as we know it involve the elements of melody, harmony, rhythm. What else? Anything else? How about timbra? It’s pronounced completely different from what you think it would be pronounced when you spell it, t-i-m-b-r-a, timbra – texture, form, so on. These are the inherent elements of music as we encounter it. [00:15:36]

Now timbra has to do with how the sound is influenced by the instrument or the mode in which it’s expressed. For example, if you hear the tone of B Flat played on the piano, it sounds one way and it’ll be pitched exactly at B Flat; now if you hear a B Flat played by a violin, it’s the same note, the same tone, but it sounds different because the timbra of a violin is different from the timbra of a piano. [00:16:18]

And we see one of the things, for example, is that western music is basically, not always, but basically tertian. That is, western music is built on tones of thirds, a simple C Major chord, C, E, G. It’s built, first of all, of a major third, and then on top of that, a minor third, and that’s the way all the major chords are built; and the same way, if you want to make it a minor chord, then you have a minor third, and on top of that is a major third, and you have your basic chord. [00:22:18]