{"id":969,"date":"2021-08-30T08:45:25","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T12:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=969"},"modified":"2021-08-30T08:45:25","modified_gmt":"2021-08-30T12:45:25","slug":"finding-our-way-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2021\/08\/30\/finding-our-way-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Our Way Home"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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(c) 20th Century Fox<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the musical The Sound of Music<\/em>, the Von Trapp children beg Fraulein Maria to teach them how to sing.

She insists that it\u2019s easy.  She introduces the basics of harmony, rhythm, and tonality \u2013 the building blocks of Western music for the past thousand years. 

Maria teaches the notes that make up the classic octave.  We begin at Do<\/em>.  That\u2019s home.  Then we leave home and set out on musical adventures up the scale.  We encounter Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti<\/em> (\u201ca drink with jam and bread\u201d), which brings us, inevitably and joyfully, back to Do<\/em>.  We return home. 

Before the children know it, they\u2019re singing like NSYNC before the departure of Justin Timberlake. 

Classically, Western culture has always embraced the notion of \u201chome.\u201d  We start somewhere and after a while we return.  We may be different when we get there \u2013 hopefully we will be wiser \u2013 but we can always know that home is waiting for us.

These ideas shaped Western painting, music, and literature.  Over the centuries, the arts mirrored the Christian idea that life is a Grand Story that has meaning, purpose, and direction.  We begin at Creation and are heading towards the New Heavens and New Earth.

On any given day, individuals might feel lost and alone and cut off from home.  But they can always know that home exists.  They can live in the hope that they don\u2019t have to be stuck forever on So <\/em>or Fa<\/em> or Mi<\/em>, feeling unresolved and incomplete.  They can make their way back to Do<\/em>. 

All that changed, however, during the opening decades of the 20th<\/sup> century.

The cultural movement called Modernism swept across Europe and North America.  The old ideas (including the specifically Christian assumptions about the universe) had begun to seem staid, stifling, and stuck in the mud.  Enlightenment philosophers, emboldened by new discoveries in the natural sciences, suggested that maybe, just maybe, there was no Grand Story after all.  That meant no fixed rules for personal behavior. 

When Sigmund Freud published Interpretation of Dreams<\/em> in 1899, the veneer of European civilization was pulled away.  Every human mind, according to Freud, was a deep well of unsettling thoughts and feelings \u2013 including fantasies about sex and violence \u2013 that were typically banned from polite conversation.   

But there they were, nonetheless.

World War I (1914-1918) shattered Europe\u2019s confidence that life had meaning.  Artists began to portray human existence as rudderless, directionless, hopeless.  In 1922, James Joyce published Ulysses<\/em>, a long, rambling account of the stream of consciousness of a single man over the course of 24 hours in Dublin.  Although many have found Joyce\u2019s book to be virtually unreadable, critics widely identify it as the single most important novel of the 20th<\/sup> century.  That\u2019s because it brilliantly depicts a world in which there is no home.   Life is just a series of disconnected moments leading nowhere in particular.

In the field of music, up-and-coming composers like the Austrian Arnold Schoenberg (pronounced “Shurnberg”)  made it their ambition to dismantle the traditional Western tonal system.

It was time to leave Do Re Mi<\/em> in the dust. 

Schoenberg helped pioneer the 12-tone scale, whereby the dozen white notes and black notes within every octave on a piano keyboard are treated with absolute equality.  The composer endorsed the \u201crule\u201d that no note could be repeated within a given melodic phrase.  As musicologist Howard Goodall observes in The Story of Music<\/em>, this was \u201cthe equivalent of decreeing that no letter of the alphabet can be used more than once in a sentence.\u201d

Schoenberg\u2019s most famous composition debuted in 1912, a few years before he committed himself fully to the 12-tone scale.  But it rocked the music world nonetheless.

Pierrot Lunaire<\/em> (\u201cMoonstruck Pierrot\u201d) is a compilation of 21 short pieces based on poems by Albert Giraud.  Pierrot is the traditional \u201csad sack\u201d clown of European theater.  In Schoenberg\u2019s work, it\u2019s hard not to conclude that Pierrot is descending into madness. 

Each piece illustrates the turbulence of the Freudian subconscious.  Each is a protest against rationality.  There are no catchy tunes that one can hum in the shower. 

A single soprano voice performs the lyrics by means of sprechstimme<\/em>, German for \u201cspeech-singing\u201d \u2013 a bit like rap music at the center of a bad dream.  Here\u2019s<\/a> the first of the 21 segments of Schoenberg\u2019s disquieting masterwork.  Notice that the piece starts and ends suspended in midair.  There is no center of gravity.  The composer has banished the idea of \u201chome.\u201d 

Other musicians lauded Schoenberg\u2019s innovation.  The composer declared, \u201cI have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.\u201d

Talk about swinging and missing.

The public at large was baffled.  Goodall declares that atonal music has failed to produce \u201cin its purest, strictest form, not one piece of music in a hundred years\u2019 worth of effort that a normal person could understand or enjoy.\u201d  I must admit that when I was sounding out various recordings of Pierrot Lunaire<\/em> on YouTube, my dog put down his ears and quickly left the room. 

Notice that Goodall believes there is such a thing as a normal person. 

Modern and post-modern philosophers (as well as many artists, scientists, and theologians) may dismiss out of hand the notion of something like normality.

But there is a reason that the vast majority of people find the music of Mozart and Haydn soothing to the soul \u2013 not to mention the transforming effect of beautiful sunsets, starry night skies, paintings that capture something of the human spirit, and stories that rekindle our hope that we are not cosmic accidents but players in a drama that means something in this world and the next.

In Jesus\u2019 most famous parable (Luke 15:11-32), a young man who has thrown away his life wonders if he can ever return home.

What will his father say \u2013 the father he so gravely disrespected? 

The father runs<\/em> to meet him, to embrace him, to weep over him. 

Which is Jesus\u2019 way of assuring us that there really is a place called home.  And we really can go there again.

Even if the music of our lives has shifted into a minor key we no longer recognize, the Father can always, through the miracle of his grace, bring us back to Do<\/em>.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the musical The Sound of Music, the Von Trapp children beg Fraulein Maria to teach them how to sing. She insists that it\u2019s easy.  She introduces the basics of harmony, rhythm, and tonality \u2013 the building blocks of Western music for the past thousand years.  Maria teaches the notes that make up the classic octave.  We begin at Do. … Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":970,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[300,299],"class_list":["post-969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-modernism","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=969"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":971,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969\/revisions\/971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}