Stravinsky, Chord Organs, and Metaphysics

As I was sitting here the past couple of nights writing some journal entries, a lot of thoughts flowed into my head about so many things.  It has been a pretty intense couple of weeks for me actually as I write this - I have been getting ready for a Metaphysics final exam (which I took yesterday - fingers crossed I passed it!), I have caught some flak over an interview that I had regarding some of the theological liberalism going on at my former university, and the holiday rush has also been quite evident in our household - all the decorating, baking, candy-making, etc. So, I just had to take a step back, smell the proverbial roses, and recollect myself a little.  That being said, I want to share some insights that I organized out of my past few journal entries for your edification, although I had not planned on writing anymore this year.

First, let's talk a little Metaphysics.  One thing about studying Theology at a Catholic institution is how much Philosophy you are expected to learn, and so far I have had to do two prerequisite classes this year for my major - one was Philosophy of the Human Person, and the second was Metaphysics.  I finished the Human Person course a while ago, even getting a pretty decent grade in the course, but this Metaphysics course has royally been kicking my butt!   Surprisingly though, it is not the content that is a problem - it is actually quite good.  The actual issue is the professor of the class almost expects you to have the equivalent of a Ph.D. dissertation by the time you finish the course - it is just a prerequisite!  But, despite challenges, I learned a lot, and in the near future I am going to synthesize a lot of that into a separate writing those of you who subscribe to my Sacramental Present Truths site will see.  Summarily to say however, I now understand why we need those Philosophy prerequisites - they aid in a great way in making people more well-rounded in their faith, and that is a good thing.   That being said, I want to preface the rest of this discussion with a little something from that course.

The primary text for the second half of the course was a book by Fr. Norris Clarke entitled The One and the Many, which is a primer on contemporary Thomistic metaphysics.  Written in 2001, this book essentially takes the question of the "one and the many" and it breaks it down in such a way that it is more digestible.  And, being Fr. Clarke is a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest who taught Philosophy at Fordham University for many years before his repose a couple of years back (as well as guest-lecturing a lot at Franciscan, where his good friend and my former Philosophy of the Human Person professor, Dr. John Crosby, serves as program chair - Dr, Crosby is a fine scholar in his own right, by the way).  However, it is weird that Clarke taught at the same university as another less-savory individual, Merrold Westphal, whose book Whose Community, Which Interpretation was used as a text in a Hermeneutics class at my former university - Westphal is a postmodernist who essentially believes that Nietzsche and Marx are "prophetic voices of Christendom" (read it on page 140 of his book) and in thought he is as far removed from Clarke as Texas is from Alaska.  Any rate, the one thing that stood out in Clarke's text and will provide the focus of some of my discussion today is found page 7 - Clarke on that page talks about distinguishing Metaphysics from religion and Theology, but in doing so he notes that many early theologians (notably his predeceased influence, St. Thomas Aquinas) were simultaneously philosophers, and he notes that their guiding principle was the fact that God has spoken to us in two great books.  The first he called the Book of  Nature, which is where natural reasoning comes into play and nature bears witness of God directly.  The second is the Book of Revelation, which would essentially be Holy Scripture (although he elaborates that it also is deeper than even Holy Scripture).   Clarke contends that both "books" have the same author, but Revelation perfects nature - if I were to put that into theological language, it is this - the Book of Nature would be equivalent to God's rhema word, while the Book of Nature would be more of a Logos.  Again, I will elaborate more on that when I get to the writing on Sacramental Present Truths later, but I mention it here to provide a groundwork for the discussion.  To take all this to a more personal level, each of us has our very own Book of Nature that is being written on practically every day of our lives, and when you read these articles I have posted here, you are actually reading some excerpts from my own Book of Nature.  Of course, the perfecting part comes from our conversion and acceptance of our free gift of salvation in Christ, who in his person is the ultimate Book of Revelation, according to John 1.  Again though, that is getting into theological writing for another time.  Today, I want to now focus on this whole Book of Nature from my own perspective, and what I have come to understand about it, and then I want to talk about some specifics.

For years now, I have been working at writing down so much about my own life story - it has been a journey of self-discovery.  This started somewhat back in 1996, when going through a rough patch I decided to keep a journal.  In October of 1996, I recall, just before writing in my journal that night Mom had come over to visit, and for some reason we were talking about our old dog Jill from years ago, and it sparked in me something that initiated a project - writing down my memories as detailed and specific as I could remember them.  That resulted in a series of journal entries that spanned about a year and a half - it took me all the way up to April 1998 or thereabouts - and later in 2006 I began to rewrite those stories into their own volumes - they are sitting here as I write now in about 5 full spiral-bound notebooks.   Out of that comes a lot of the articles you have been reading here for the past five years or so.  There are still gaps I am filling in with much of this stuff, and it is supplemented by a host of pictures, genealogy paperwork, and other things.  As all of this gets into my head, it comprises what I call my "master book" which one day I want to just type, print, and bind for my own edification after I get through all my schooling and begin to come to a place where I can devote time  to doing so.  I would not call this "Master Book" of my own life necessarily my personal Book of Nature, but it does comprise a significant part of it.  Much of what you have read in recent years - my recipes, my memories of specific individuals, etc. - come out of that "master book" though in some aspect or another.  This is something now though that I can definitely begin to give form too thanks in part to Fr. Clarke's insights, and that is why I wanted to mention it.  Many stimuli go into evoking the memories that make up my "master book," and those can include a musical piece, a book I have read in the past, some people I have met and gotten to know over the years, or other things.  And, that sets my stage today for talking about a couple of things I have thought about the past week or so.

First, a question - do any of you fellow old geezers over 40 like myself remember a small musical instrument called a chord organ?  It was a small, portable keyboard instrument invented by the same company that created the Hammond back in the 1950's, and at one time they were pretty popular due to their portability and ease of learning.   It was simpler than most organs though in that it only had a single keyboard and a set of chord buttons to supply melody .  At one time in my early teens I had 3 of them, as they were relatively easy to find at most junk stores and yard sales (you could pick up one for about $5 actually).  In sound, they more resembled an accordion or a harmonica, but they were good to learn how to play basic tunes and you could actually learn to play piano from one.   

An electric chord organ similar to the ones I had back in the day.

I used to pick around on it then, and as I became more serious later on about its potential, I actually learned to play a tune or two on one.  I kind of miss having one of these around, and perhaps I should do some looking.   According to this article I read on Wikipedia, the chord organ is used by some new musical school called "minimalists," which originated with Danish composer Hennig Christenson in the 1970's and utilizes simpler instruments like harmonicas, xaphoons (a bamboo saxophone-type instrument), recorders and such.  I am not really up on that stuff or really into it, but I think that something like a chord organ has potential and would not mind having another one.  

The second point of today's musings has to do with a composer whose works I really appreciate, Igor Stravinsky.  For some reason this past week I got this overwhelming urge to pull out my copy of Stravinsky's work Petrushka and listen to it - Stravinsky composed this around 1909 or so, and it is essentially based on a Russian folktale similar to "Pinnochio" about a puppet that comes to life.  It is a wintery composition, and has been one of my personal favorites since I was 17 years of age.  Stravinsky is a composer I also got to appreciate at around that point in my late teens, as I recall wanting to find out more about his 1913 ballet le Sacre du Printemps (or, The Rite of Spring). When this ballet first debuted in 1913, it was so controversial that it caused riots, but it is actually a beautiful musical score although somewhat melancholy and dark.  A large part of the early hoopla of this piece centered behind the story that inspired Stravinsky to compose it.  In the late 1800's, a movement swept Russia called Pan-Slavism, and it was a sort of cultural renaissance in the Slavic roots of Russian culture.  Stravinsky I believe was influenced greatly by that, and as he researched historical data, an ancient pre-Christian pagan Slavic fertility rite that actually involved a human sacrifice got his attention (I want to say this was associated with the ancient Slavic idol Perun, a storm deity, but could be wrong) and he composed a ballet based on that.   Some wags over the years - including some over-zealous fundamentalists such as Texe Marrs (my warning -stay away from this character, as he is racist and bases much of his own theology on weird conspiracy theories!) - have misinterpreted Stravinsky's writing of this to mean that Stravinsky was somehow encouraging paganism and he has even been accused by less-informed people of being "pagan/anarchist" himself, which is a frank absurdity.  The reality though, as Dr. Alvin Schmidt writes in his book Under the Influence - How Christianity Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) on page 332, was that Stravinsky was devoutly Christian, having undergone a heart-felt conversion at age 26, and his two core convictions can be summed up in two points:

1.  "The more one separates himself from canons of the Christian Church, the further one distances hinself from the truth."
2.   In order to compose religious music, one cannot be merely a believer in "symbolic figures" but must believe in the real person of Jesus Christ, the fact a real Satan exists, and what he called "the Miracle of the Church." 

I don't know about you, but it sounds like Stravinsky had a vibrant faith to me!  Sure, he was not perfect - he did love his vodka, like any good Russian - but at the same time his ideas on sacred music are something that many in the so-called "Contemporary Christian Music" industry should pay attention to!   The mystery in all of this, however, is this - why would a devoutly Christian composer like Igor Stravinsky write a ballet about a pre-Christian Slavic sacrificial ritual?   I believe there are two explanations for this.  First, let us look at the chronology - Le Sacre du Printemps debuted around 1913 or so, when Stravinsky was about 31 years old.  He would have been relatively young in his faith then.  That being said, he also noted in a 1920 interview that the music dictated the story, and as he was writing the score this vision of a solemn pre-Christian pagan ritual came to him.  Composers are inspired by both good and bad things, and a composer writes based on that information and it has no bearing necessarily on the composer's own convictions, strange as that sounds.  Also, it is worth noting that the avante-garde (for the time anyway) character of Stravinsky's work, not its story, is what set off the uproar when it first debuted.  For most people reading this, all of this has little bearing, but I do have some more conservative voices that read these articles, and the point was that Stravinsky was telling a story, not preaching paganism - there is a huge difference.  And, when I hear le Sacre, I don't really envision any pagan ritual at all - it is a beautiful and moving piece of music that evokes for me instead the folktales of my youth, as well as feeling the winter morph into spring, and I can even see some of the drama of the Orthodox liturgy or the coronation of a czar in the music.  There is a distinctly Russian character to the music that actually touches my own soul, being a descendent of St. Vladimir, Prince of Novgorod, myself.    And, that is probably why I like it so much.

When I first got into Stravinsky in my junior year of high school, le Sacre was one of the first works of his that I was able to get to know in its entirety, although thanks to my senior-year English teacher, Mrs. McConnell, I also was exposed to his other works, in particular The Firebird and the aforementioned Petrushka.  The thing I remember though about it was the summers at home those years - we took care of an old lady named Myrtle out on a farm on Salt Lick Road south of Terra Alta, WV, and I spent many days foraging woods for stuff like wild garlic, which I would then experiment with recipes - my main thing in those days was a rather spicy concoction I made out of stew beef that only I could eat, and although now I see it needed some work (I have come a long way in my cooking since then!) it was a relaxing hobby I did when I wasn't involved with church activities or my itinerary with the high school marching band.  It was at the same time that I became interested in Eastern Christianity, and the beginnings of my involvement with the dear Assyrian people can be traced back to around that time too.  It was an exciting point in my life when I was younger, more idealistic, and I had great ambitions for what I planned to do.  There are many days I miss that early enthusiasm of my youth, as it is an important part of my own Book of Nature, but that is why I am writing all this in the first place.  Also, my recent studies at Franciscan are starting to call me back to some of my own early Christian roots, and I am realizing that as a Christian (even when I was a very young one) I have had my greatest intellectual development.  The more vibrant my faith, as a matter of fact, the more hungry for expanding my own intellect gets.   And, that is what all this is about - "studying to show myself approved."  

I hope you don't mind my ramblings today, as they have been verbose, but I needed to share.  May you all have a blessed Christmas season, and may God grant you all a blessed 2015 that lies just ahead of us.