On Beauty, Music, and Noise

Sorry my post is a little late this weekend!  And probably a little shorter as well.  As much as I have been loving reading the last letters of Screwtape, I was pulled away from book, computer, and the like by a family wedding this weekend in Wisconsin (yay weddings!).  But without further ado, let’s get started on some thoughts from Letter 22:

“Music and silence – how I detest them both!  How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell. . . all has been occupied by noise.”

Let’s hypothetically say it’s Monday (I might be dreading tomorrow a little bit).  I work at an office all morning, I try to amuse a screaming four month old all afternoon.  Then I attend my four hour lecture class on American Authors.  By the end of the day, I’m exhausted and about 1000% done with people and with generally keeping my eyes open.  I climb into the car and turn up the radio, roll down the windows and sing my own made up lyrics – I never can get the lyrics right – to whatever song is popular on the radio today.  I want the song to fill me up, so that I don’t have to listen to all the built up worries of the day in my exhausted brain. 

It is difficult, in our over-worked proletariat society, to determine “music” from “noise.”  When we hear birds sing, we say it sounds like music.  When we blast the radio at the end of the day, this is technically “music,” too, although we don’t use the word in the same sense at all.  So what is the difference?  And how do we find music that brings us closer to Heaven, helping us to understand the rhythms of silence, rather than trying to shout it all down?  HINT: the answer is not to listen exclusively to your Christian radio station. 

So what is it that makes music so different from noise, and so powerful?  Well, lucky for us, C.S. Lewis had a friend and his name was J.R.R. Tolkien (Mary is laughing at me because I managed to pull in Tolkien already and it’s only the second week).  In the mythology behind The Lord of the Rings, however, music is the language of creation.  God (Iluvatar) and the angels (the ainur) literally sing the world into being.  I bring this up because I had the advantage of reading Mary’s post this week before writing my own and she brought up a very important point; that is, Beauty.  And I think this is the main distinction between Music and merely Noise.  If you approach the art of song with heart yearning to understand who Beauty is and if you hear music that helps you to understand a Beauty that is ever ancient, and ever new, you have found Music. 

It is important for Christians to remember, though, that God is infinite and can be found, therefore, in infinite ways and places.  This is why I mention the Christian radio station before.  I have run across a number of people in my small Catholic bubble world that seem to be under the impression that they must listen to “Christian” radio or “oldies” in order to find any “good” music.  Don’t go near the stuff of popular culture – it will corrupt you to the world.  While I agree that you probably don’t want to set your morally uninformed 9-year-old down to jam out to Blurred Lines, it is good to reach out beyond our little bubble and see how everyone is reaching out, somehow, for the Beauty we know is in God. 

One of my favorite artists, Paul Simon, once said in an interview that he believed in God because he knew that his songs did not come entirely from him.  There was something more to his writing that he simply couldn’t explain.  I think that just maybe he found himself speaking the language of creation and he had no idea what it meant to hear, if only for a moment, the song of angels.  This does not mean that all of Paul Simon’s songs are divinely inspired or theologically sound, but it does mean that he has seen something Beautiful and is trying to express it to the world.  And that’s worth listening to. 

But that also doesn’t mean that if I get in the car at the end of my long Monday, blasting Paul Simon will solve my proletarian problems.  As Screwtape makes so painfully obvious, even the some great spiritual goods are corrupted by temptation.  It is possible for us to turn music into noise by how we use, or abuse, it.  If I am using music to avoid my life, it will not sound like music to me at all.  If I am using music to understand my life and my relationship to the divine, then I will find it everywhere, including the popular Sara Bareilles song on the radio (actually, though, have you listened to I Choose You?  So cute!) 

That brings us to a rather shoddy conclusion on my ramblings for the day.  But tomorrow night, just for you readers, I will try to listen to that Sara Bareilles song on the radio instead of using it to shout down fresh memories of family dramas and a certain adorable four month old spitting up on my shirt.  And maybe it will help me remember why I love my jobs and my education and how grateful I am that I am an overworked American only sometimes.  Every week has a Sunday.  And so we carry on in the every-constant, ever-changing rhythm that makes up the beauty of our lives.