MUSIC FOR HOPE by Mark Hooper
sheer beauty and profundity of music
I was asked what it is about playing classical music that has held my passion over the years. For most of my musical life I have said it was the sheer beauty and profundity of music, its ability to ‘speak’ and communicate without words or images that captures my imagination and satisfies me immensely. This is still true, but I realize more and more the essence of what I experience as profound about what might be called ‘great’ music.
I have been involved in the world of spiritual ideas/lifestyle for many years and more recently the world of psychotherapy. I have investigated, adhered to and left behind various religious beliefs and lifestyles and experienced psychotherapy both as client, practitioner and teacher. I have explored the connection between personal experiences, past and present, internal and external, and the consequent connections we make into the world through time and relationships of all types.
an instrument for the music
At an earlier stage of my musical development I recognised that my own performance of music was largely influenced and shaped, enhanced and limited by my own personal life experiences and the emotionally/spiritually charged consequences thereof. More recently, as I take a more conscious and self-determining role in the direction of my life, I am understanding and experiencing music differently. Music had been the palate which I used to express my feelings. Now I feel the richness of my experiences/feelings are the palate from which a performance can emerge. Alongside the piano I use, I myself can hopefully become an instrument for the music.
great music embodies hope
One of the qualities which I consider great music embodies is HOPE. As we look at renowned composers it is often the case that their own lives were wrought with difficulties of one type or another. There has been the contentious suggestion that great art is born out of existential angst and/or physical suffering. Although Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Liszt are examples, Bach doesn’t seem to be although he identified with a belief based on redemption through suffering.
For me great music embodies HOPE by virtue of its resolution of conflicting, discordant elements into an expression that is experienced as beautiful or profound. The energy between tension and release, harmony and discord are woven into an architecture of feeling which is satisfying, reassuring, life enhancing and complete in itself. A mystical type truth is experienced in the ability to show a resolution of what would normally be irreconcilable positions, allowing each their own truth however ugly or attractive, with the overall result being experienced as beautiful! Great music represents its own form of Alchemy.
So how valuable is it that in the midst of an uncertain world we are able to remind ourselves of the possibility of resolution, albeit in the broadest sense, of those difficulties both internal and external which when dwelt upon seem to offer no hope!
transcendent realms of melodic beauty
Schubert completed his last piano sonata in bB only weeks before he died an agonising death from syphilis. Listening to this sonata it is hard to imagine the depth of his personal suffering at that time as one is lifted out of any mundane or painful reality into transcendent realms of melodic beauty and playfulness. Shards of pain are there and moments of fury, woven into the overall beauty, never disturbing it only enhancing it.
Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude is
prefixed with a
Poem by Alphonse de Lamartine:
From whence comes, my God! this peace which engulfs me??
From whence comes this faith with which my heart overflows?
To me who was until now uncertain, agitated,
And on a sea of doubt open to any wind of the storm,
Who sought goodness and truth in the dreams of wise men, ?
And peace in heart of a storm. ?
Hardly a few days have passed, ?
Yet it seems to me that a century and a world have passed; ?
And that, separated from them by an immense abyss, ?
A new man in me reappears and starts again.
The Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude , the third piece in the collection Harmonies poètiques et religieuses, is considered one of Liszt's most important masterpieces. The work, in three parts, unfolds with rather mystical yet sentimental and profound passages full of vivid detail and color. The act of listening to the Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude has been described as transporting one into a mystical experience where time is suspended and one arrives to the fullness of silence.