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In the sixth century BC, Pythagoras—yes, that Pythagoras—was the first
person to come up with the idea of an eight-note musical scale, where
the eighth note was an octave higher than the first note. More on
Pythagoras later—but for now, I want to take that structure, that idea of
a set of related sounds, that organization of the way we do music that
was the ancestor of our modern major scale, and I want to use it as a
metaphor and a structure for today’s sermon. I want to present to you
eight notes—eight ideas, eight stories, eight things that are related to
each other at least in my mind as I think about music on this day we’ve
decided to call “music Sunday.” Eight notes. One scale.
The first note. Cantus firmus is a way of composing music. It means
“fixed song,” and it involves taking a preexistent melody as a kind of
persistent, anchoring sound, and then using it as a foundation on which
to build the rest of the composition. The cantus firmus was at least in
the beginning sung by the lowest part, what we would call the bass, and
then the other parts would harmonize on top of that thematic melody
and sound. The cantus firmus, with its intricate rules, then controls the
whole song, the entirety of the composition, but it’s also possible for it
to go mostly unnoticed, shading in behind the harmonies of the higher
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voices. Composing with a cantus firmus allowed musicians to give a
structure to their work that anchored it in a repeating, familiar sound,
while also giving incredible freedom to the higher voices to create new
sounds and add to the repeating melody. You can almost think of cantus
firmus like a canvas onto which something is painted, or a stage upon
which a drama is performed. It is a piece of creativity that makes other
creativity possible.
The second note. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing
the first time I heard the song Smells Like Teen Spirit by the ‘90s
alternative rock band Nirvana. It was sometime in 1992 or 1993, and I
was in my ten year old Buick Century that I had bought for $200, and I
was sitting in my small town’s only drive-through, called Hardee’s,
which had just been built. Up until that point I had mostly listened to
country music, but that day for whatever reason I had flipped to the
brand-new alternative rock station, and this song by Nirvana came on.
And it was unlike anything I had ever heard before. And I remember
sitting there, thinking, even at 16 years old, thinking, “this changes
everything.” That song—that new music that felt like it had come from
outer space, it was so new and different—it suddenly felt like I had
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always known it, like I had been expecting it, that song suddenly and
immediately encapsulated everything about my life at that moment,
what it was like to be me in the early ‘90s in rural North Carolina, and
sitting there in that drive-through, my whole perspective shifted
because of that song.
I know that sounds overly dramatic, but I also know that you can
probably point to the same kinds of moments in your own lives. Think
about it for a second. Think of where you were and what you were doing
when a certain song came on. Think of how a piece of music came to
symbolize everything about your life for a time. Think about how a song
or a band or a sound came to stand in for a season, or a relationship, or a
phase in your life—how it came to be a kind of cantus firmus for
everything else that was happening at that time. I don’t know for sure,
but I think most of us have probably felt this way at one time or another;
each of us has probably had a fixed song that has anchored our life—
maybe it was a song on the radio like mine, maybe it was a hymn, maybe
it was a tune you couldn’t get out of your head. Music has a way of
getting under our skin that few other art forms do. Painting and
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sculpture can inspire us, literature can move us, but it sometimes seems
that music has a direct line to our souls like nothing else does.
The third note. Legend has it that in the 6th century BC, the Greek
philosopher Pythagoras—yes, that Pythagoras again—he was walking
by a blacksmith’s shop when he had an epiphany. Two smiths were
swinging their hammers, but Pythagoras noticed that the two hammers
made two different sounds when they hit the metal. One was highpitched and the other was low-pitched, and when Pythagoras stopped to
look, he noticed that the hammers were different sizes. The big hammer
made the lower sound, and the small hammer made the higher sound.
And the story goes that Pythagoras figured out that the difference in the
sound might have something do with the mass of the hammer. This
turned out to be not exactly right, but it led to another of Pythagoras’s
observations that did turn out to be right: that if a plucked string makes
a certain sound, then a plucked string half as long makes a sound exactly
one octave higher. And if you cut the string in half again, a quarter of its
original length, and pluck it again, it makes a sound two octaves higher
than the original sound. And so on and so forth. What Pythagoras
discovered, basically, is that music is mathematical, that sound is not
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simply a matter of personal taste or preference, but that it has a basis in
the very way the universe is put together. Music is physics; music is a
kind of practical geometry, music is part of the way the universe is. And
here Pythagoras really hit his stride: if music is a function of the physical
properties of the world, then music could be a way to know the mind of
God. And so Pythagoras became a stark-raving mystic, plucking strings
and leading a monastic community and seeing in mathematical
equations hints of the way the world was stitched together. It’s almost
like Pythagoras saw in the world, in the universe, a kind of cantus
firmus that God was humming, a baseline tune, a primeval creativity,
from which all other creativity and activity and art in the world sprang
forth. Pythagoras really thought that the world worked that way, that it
was physically and aesthetically, artistically, attuned to God. More on
that in a moment.
The fourth note. This is one of my favorite stories, and kind of like how
scales don’t move only in whole notes but sometimes half notes too, this
is kind of a half-note kind of story. It might not be immediately obvious
what this story has in common with the other things I’m saying, but I
just have to tell it, and I hope you’ll understand why. It’s a short story,
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but it’s a story about the power of music to move us. There has been a
legend, a rumor and nothing more until one of the parties confirmed it a
few years ago, that Bob Dylan and Mavis Staples were once in the same
buffet line together. They were both in their late teens or early twenties,
both getting started in the music business, and Mavis Staples was
farther up in line than Bob Dylan was. Dylan spotted her up there, and
he recognized her. And he knew her music—she had been singing with
her sisters for a long time—and he had been so powerfully moved by
her music that he knew he had to act. So there in that buffet line, Bob
Dylan yelled up to the front where Mavis Staples was getting her food,
and he proposed marriage to her. Bob Dylan proposed to Mavis Staples
in a buffet line. Isn’t that the best story you’ve ever heard? Bob Dylan
was a musical genius, and he knew musical genius when he heard it, and
he heard it in Mavis Staples, and so he did the only thing he could think
to do to respond to that genius. He proposed. Mavis Staples said no, by
the way. She thought she was too young to marry. But a few years ago
she described Bob Dylan as her “lost love.” As for Dylan: when you
know, you know.
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The fifth note. Many of you know that the Bible is something like a
library. It’s a collection of a lot of different books from a lot of different
times and places, brought together under the umbrella of sacred
scripture. Because of that, some parts of it are newer and some parts are
older, and one of the parts of it that is thought to be the oldest, as much
as 3200 years old, is a part called the Song of Deborah. You can find it in
Judges 5, and it’s a victory hymn sung by Deborah and a man named
Barak—I’m not making that up—it’s a victory hymn sung by Deborah
and Barak about a battle they had just won over the Canaanites. “Awake,
awake, Deborah;” reads the victory hymn, “Awake, awake, utter a song”.
Most of the material in the Old Testament dates from the 500s or
perhaps the 900s at the earliest, but this Song of Deborah, this victory
hymn of the great judge Deborah, has come down to us mostly intact
from the 13th century before the birth of Christ. What is it about song
that endures longer than everything else? Narratives, genealogies,
poetry, proverbs—they all were changed, edited, revised, lost to time.
But the song has withstood the ages.
The sixth note. I said earlier that Pythagoras was a mystic, convinced
that music was a key to understanding the world, that it was a key to
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understanding God. You know Pythagoras from his theorem that you
had to learn in school, A squared plus B squared equals C squared, but
Pythagoras was also the leader of a religious community, a band of
musical mystics convinced that understanding the relationships
between musical harmonies could be a way to understand the harmony
of the universe. Pythagoras believed this so strongly that he developed a
theory called “the music of the spheres,” which held that the cosmos—
the planets, the moon, the sun, and all the rest—they were a kind of
music, existing in harmony with each other and reflecting the harmony
of God’s creation. This theory, the “music of the spheres,” was so
compelling that it held sway among scientists and musicians alike until
the Renaissance. You see, this notion that we modern people have that
religion is separate from science and science is separate from art—that
has not always been how people understood the world. It was possible,
in Pythagoras’ time, to be a religious mystic who looked to the art of
music to undertake his scientific inquiry. This strict separation of art
from science, and of religion from everything else, is a very recent
innovation in human history, and it is not in my opinion an especially
useful one. But pay attention, because Pythagoras is on the rise again,
because these days it is often the scientists who sound like the stark
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raving mystics, the scientists who speak of vibrating strings at the base
of all being, scientists who describe deep mystery in the doings of
subatomic particles, scientists who do most of the work of trying to
understand who we are and where we come from. And we religious
folks would do well to pay attention to them, because they are in the
same business we are: the business of figuring out the truth.
The seventh note. The word “song” is mentioned in the bible eighty
times. Musical instruments are mentioned too. The lyre is mentioned 24
times, trumpets over a hundred times, and cymbals sixteen times.
Forms of the verb “sing” are mentioned over one hundred and fifty
times in the bible. And none of this captures the most famous line of
Psalm 98: make a joyful noise. This is a kind of cantus firmus of
scripture, the notion of singing for joy to God, of singing lament to God,
of taking what is ineffable about the human response to God and putting
it to music. Since the Song of Deborah and down through the ages to the
gospel music of Mavis Staples and yes, Bob Dylan, we have turned to
music to say to God and say about God what we struggle to say with
mere words.
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The eighth note, which lies an octave above the first. About ten years
ago a group of scientists undertook to discover what kinds of sounds the
universe makes. It’s a curious question to ask, isn’t it—what sounds the
universe makes. It’s not so different from the question Pythagoras
asked, that question he had of whether the spheres in the sky form a
kind of harmony by which we might know God. These scientists
measured in particular the note emitted by a black hole in the Perseus
Cluster 250,000,000 light years away. How they did this is a scientific
tale above my pay grade, but I take it that objects in space—“the
spheres,” to use Pythagoras’ words—objects in space have resonance,
like a plucked string or a blown horn. And what they discovered was
that this particular black hole was resonating as a B flat. A B flat. It’s an
extraordinarily low B flat—fifty seven octaves below middle C on a
keyboard. Here’s how to put that into perspective: sound travels in
waves, and those waves have a frequency that our ears pick up. The
waves vibrate our eardrums, and that is how we hear. The lowest sound
humans can hear vibrates at a frequency of one wave every 1/20th of a
second. So, twenty waves a second. The black hole in the Perseus Cluster
is resonating at a frequency of ten million years—one wave passing our
eardrums every ten million years. So that is a very, very low B flat.
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The gist of what Pythagoras asked was this: what if when God created
the universe, God made music a basic part of how it worked? What if
music, beyond being an act of human creativity, was a direct response to
God’s creativity? What if God laid down a cantus firmus, an underlying
tune that even the spheres of space sing, a song that even the rocks cry
out to, a tune that even the heavens declare? What if God created like a
composer who first laid down a fixed song, and then said to the other
voices, said to us, go and make your music here? What if Pythagoras was
on to something?
I don’t know if I believe that or not. But it sure would explain a lot,
wouldn’t it? It sure would help to make sense of the fact that music
holds such sway over our lives, that music has such a conduit to our
souls, that song can transport us or transform us or make us feel the
presence of God. It sure would make the world and the way it works
make a lot of sense.
So. When you sing, in a few minutes, do it as if you were singing over the
melody God laid down at the beginning. When your favorite song comes
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on the radio, ask whether it tells you anything about God. When you
play an instrument, or sing in the shower, or appreciate good music, or
tip a street musician who sat on a corner and improved your commute,
ask yourself whether you just felt closer to God. Because I bet you did.
And that might not be an accident. Amen.