蜜芽传媒

I have long suspected the claim that 'music is the international language'. My suspicion was partly fuelled on reading this appalling observation made by the Revd Dr Wauchope Stewart in a lecture about church music given in 1926:

There is a vast difference between the frenzy induced in the savage by
the beating of a tom-tom and the peace and solace that steal over the
heart as we listen to one of Bach's Organ Chorale Preludes.*

Clearly Dr Stewart regarded an appreciation of western baroque music as the litmus test of civilisation. He probably had no understanding of the sophistication of Ghanaian drumming, the complexity of Indian sitar improvisation, or even the artistry involved in playing the bagpipes.

Well, thank God such narrow attitudes have now gone, as is evident in the diverse range of music in the current Proms series. Last night there were two great concerts featuring music by native Brazilian composers - classical and jazz - whose rhythms would doubtless have Dr Stewart burling in his grave.
And interested audiences are no longer as homogenous as they once were. I noticed this last week when, in a street in Amsterdam, I heard Vivaldi's Four Seasons consummately played on two violins, an accordion and a bass balalaika, to the adulation of a crowd representing at least thirty nationalities.

Even British churches, whose singing Dr Stewart was keen to pickle in musical formaldehyde, have widened their selection of hymnody to include music from Asia, Africa and the Americas.

But na茂ve or blinkered as the dear doctor may have been, he elsewhere made more profound observations as when he suggested that there was an intrinsic connection between music and religion, on the basis that unlike other art forms music does not take its substance from the known world.

Most literature, drama, poetry, and visual art is based on what has been observed in the human life and the physical universe. But not music.

We don't see the first bars of Beethoven's fifth as we might see Picasso's Guernica. We cannot hold in our hand and connect with Barber's Adagio as we can hold in our hand and read Harry Potter. Most of us can't - of our own volition - conjure up the sound of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. The music may
be in front of us, but it has to be played and experienced to become real.

Music is therefore probably a medium more suited to spiritual reflection than any other art form. It may take us into ourselves; it may take us out of ourselves, and as such may rightly be called the handmaid and ally of God.

* Music in Church Worship. Baird Lectures 1926 Publ: Hodder & Stoughton

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