Transcript
Speaker: There is a sense in which there is a wonderful non-specificity
Speaker: about music because Calvin was right.
Speaker: We don't know exactly what it means, but we say, that's what I'm feeling.
Speaker: That's what I thought.
Speaker: Beethoven's architecture, when he puts these incredible cathedrals of structure together and it just sets right.
Speaker: And somehow, even if I know nothing about music, it just feels complete.
Speaker: Hello everyone, welcome back to Artists of the Way.
Speaker: I'm John, the host.
Speaker: I'm joined today by Robert Nordling.
Speaker: Robert and I met through church.
Speaker: We did.
Speaker: He is, you're a music director for several orchestras across the world or mostly in North America.
Speaker: Where are most of those based out of?
Speaker: Two organizations here in North America and then one in the Far East.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: You've been awarded conducting fellowships to work with Leonard Bernstein, Michael Tilson, Thomas, Boris... Boris Goldofsky.
Speaker: Like, I don't know that one.
Speaker: And then Helmut Reiling.
Speaker: Reiling.
Speaker: This is why Robert's here to correct all my pronunciation of all the fancy conductor names.
Speaker: Helmut Reiling, yeah.
Speaker: And you used to teach at Calvin College, correct?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: And then you dabble in composing and arranging too.
Speaker: Is that true?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: Sweet.
Speaker: I'm really excited to delve into this with you.
Speaker: As I mentioned, just a couple minutes before we started, I'm a violinist.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I found you.
Speaker: You've been discovered, dude.
Speaker: You are so going to go to work back on your violin now that this conductor knows that you're a player.
Speaker: You are busted.
Speaker: But yeah, I have a... I just... I love classical music.
Speaker: I'm not really well...
Speaker: listened, I guess, like broadly listened, but I just, I love it.
Speaker: So I'm really excited to delve into the spiritual side of that.
Speaker: Cause obviously I'm usually in the theater world, so we don't delve into music as much.
Speaker: First, I want to ask you a couple of questions.
Speaker: I ask everybody first, are you working on anything at the moment?
Speaker: Oh, goodness sakes, yes.
Speaker: My to-do list runs off the end of the page.
Speaker: But it's this very interesting desperately looking for work situation and really, really busy with a bunch of small tasks.
Speaker: I am the music director, like you said, of three organizations.
Speaker: One is the Bandung Philharmonic in Bandung, Indonesia.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And this is a full symphony orchestra in the fourth largest city in Indonesia, Indonesia, which is the fourth largest country in the world by population.
Speaker: I've been there 20 times and helped get this orchestra started.
Speaker: It's a wonderful, wonderful orchestra.
Speaker: and I was scheduled to go back in 2024 again to work there.
Speaker: So that's where we're preparing that concert, making repertoire selections, talking about personnel.
Speaker: That's sort of an ongoing.
Speaker: Here in Michigan, I'm the music director of the Baroque on Beaver Island Music Festival.
Speaker: It's been going for 22 years.
Speaker: I've been there 14 years.
Speaker: I'm in my 15th year now.
Speaker: And it takes place on Beaver Island, just north of Charlevoix.
Speaker: And the largest island in Lake Michigan.
Speaker: And it's a professional music festival.
Speaker: It's a phenomenal music festival.
Speaker: We have players from all over the Midwest and even further afield.
Speaker: And we do a 10-day music festival during the summertime, but there's a year-round sort of off-festival things we're doing.
Speaker: So my involvement there is obviously musical.
Speaker: We're selecting repertoire.
Speaker: We're talking to players.
Speaker: We're filling spots.
Speaker: But we're also arranging fundraising events.
Speaker: We're also talking to the board.
Speaker: We're also making decisions.
Speaker: I'm also arguing with the board.
Speaker: I mean, yeah.
Speaker: Yes, we are going to do music that you don't like from time to time.
Speaker: You know, time to put on your big boy aesthetic pants and listen to it.
Speaker: But yeah, so there's ongoing responsibilities with that that we love.
Speaker: And then one thing that we're really excited about is I'm the music director of the Shoreline Music Society.
Speaker: My good friend and incredible trumpet player, Matt Thomas, is the executive director.
Speaker: And he and I started this
Speaker: we call almost a society of friends where we're organizing small concerts, mostly chamber concerts, sometimes solo things, sometimes chamber orchestra things all around the Midwest.
Speaker: We're doing this two series here in Grand Rapids.
Speaker: We're doing one in Midland.
Speaker: We're doing one up in Manistee.
Speaker: And these
Speaker: Now, a lot of people try and do this, but we're doing it in particular.
Speaker: We're trying to shorten that distance between player and listener.
Speaker: So everything from the physical space, we're on the same level.
Speaker: We wear civilian clothes when we play.
Speaker: It's close up.
Speaker: Sometimes we do in the round.
Speaker: To conversation not at an audience.
Speaker: This is what you're going to hear, lifting up your head, dumping stuff.
Speaker: But hearing from the audience.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: What's been your experience hearing, you know, how many took violin lessons when you, what was your experience with that?
Speaker: Now you're gonna hear this.
Speaker: here's your assignment as you listen, listen for this, this, and this.
Speaker: And then after they play, the players will ask the audience, so what did you hear?
Speaker: What did it sound like?
Speaker: You know, we will, so it's really a conversation among, among, among friends about music.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's really cool.
Speaker: Cause I feel like in theater, it's a very responsive relationship with the audience, but I feel like in orchestra, a lot of times it can be more like it's the,
Speaker: It's the orchestra's turn and then it's the audience's turn to respond at the end with the clapping.
Speaker: Orchestras have become almost temple mentalities where you have a darkened room where people sit facing forward in silence, turn that cell phone off, stop talking to the person next to you and let us tell you what good music sounds like.
Speaker: Well, I think mercifully that's giving way to a new way of experiencing music together.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Those are things that I'm hot on right now.
Speaker: We've got leads on doing a number of other music series around the area.
Speaker: So it's sort of production.
Speaker: But at the same time, I'm very much looking for a place to guest conduct.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: At the end of the day, I want to work.
Speaker: I want to make music.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: As you're working on things, as you're...
Speaker: kind of engaging with art on the side and through these different projects?
Speaker: Are there ways that you feel God's speaking to you right now through art?
Speaker: Oh, goodness sakes.
Speaker: The heavens are full of the glory of God, and the earth shows forth his handiwork.
Speaker: Day by day they pour forth speech, the psalmist tells us.
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: One has to have one's ears decidedly closed to miss what God is speaking.
Speaker: Yeah, you know...
Speaker: The simple, a simple answer to that question is I'm also now involved, as you know, in making music in our church.
Speaker: We're part of a small Anglican church here in town.
Speaker: And it's been just lovely because making music in church has been a large part of my background.
Speaker: And in the past, it's been large churches with 50 voice choirs and big church programs.
Speaker: And I vowed never to be involved with that again.
Speaker: And this has been wonderful.
Speaker: A small handful of players,
Speaker: Just a little bit of music, liturgical music, singing the Sanctus, singing the Psalms, singing the Gloria.
Speaker: This long, ancient, thousands-year-old traditions of singing these various parts of the service, as well as singing hymns.
Speaker: And working intimately with just a couple of people to help lead music, that's been delightful.
Speaker: So to watch the Lord bring to life the liturgy through that has been great.
Speaker: That's been one thing.
Speaker: But God using art in my life, that's just a huge, huge thing to think about from God revealing beauty and revealing beauty
Speaker: insight and revealing things through the musical text itself.
Speaker: How does... Even when the composer had no idea... The composer had a specific idea of what they were trying to express there.
Speaker: Sometimes we know what it is, sometimes we don't.
Speaker: But that's the wonder of exegesis and hermeneutics, right?
Speaker: We dig and we find out what the composer meant, honor that, portray that, but the hermeneutic is what does it mean to us now.
Speaker: And so to take...
Speaker: anything that I'm working on and watch, watch God change that, apply that, give voice to things that I'm thinking, things that I'm feeling, things that I'm, that I'm reading is that, that happens, that happens constantly.
Speaker: Um, and then just the whole idea of the, when we make art and you know this, John, when we, when we, when we make art, when we make music, um,
Speaker: Not that we are being creative like God is creative.
Speaker: That's foul.
Speaker: That's illegal.
Speaker: We are never creative.
Speaker: Only God creates ex nihilo.
Speaker: We recreate, we reassemble.
Speaker: But to watch the process of making music, the process of getting people to do things together, the process of making these sounds happen, of creating beauty,
Speaker: of enabling beauty, enabling people to experience beauty.
Speaker: Watch something that I do affect somebody else.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean...
Speaker: God's at work all the time with it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, that's just touches a couple of, a couple of mountaintops, but, but I think, you know what I'm talking about in theater.
Speaker: You see that as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, it's, it's definitely a collaborative thing, um, for many artists and the beauty is seeing how, uh, a, how like a director or, or a conductor, um,
Speaker: can kind of shape something out of that, but also then what God is doing just through the individual people that then you just pour all these different like pieces of chemistry together in a pot and stir it and you get some beautiful thing.
Speaker: And that would be totally different.
Speaker: Never.
Speaker: One of my favorite things that I've gotten to do before was I used to help teach the summer stock at master arts for kids.
Speaker: And we would do, uh,
Speaker: one show but we would cast it two times so we had uh cast a and cast we did a in one because we didn't want one cast to feel less important than the other not the b team right they're both 18 exactly well done you so we had cast a and cast one
Speaker: And it was amazing to just watch the show divulge into two completely different things from the same script because of the totally different people that were there.
Speaker: Well, you recently just did Hamlet.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Were there ever two performances that were the same?
Speaker: No, I remember there was one Saturday where my Hamlet was as manic as my version of Hamlet could possibly be.
Speaker: And then that evening, he was like as sad and sensitive as he could possibly be.
Speaker: And it was still like the same character, but it was like...
Speaker: In the afternoon, he was leaning towards this end of the characterization and then the evening this end.
Speaker: And it's crazy.
Speaker: And the audience's engagement with it will change it as well.
Speaker: They'll laugh at totally different things.
Speaker: One of my favorite things in Hamlet was people would laugh every time Polonius got killed, which I think was mostly uncomfortable laughter.
Speaker: Because I took like a...
Speaker: big metal candlestick thing and I just bashed him.
Speaker: Oh no!
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: So we had like this curtain here and I would bash it and there was a piece of wood on the other side so you would just hear crack and then he would fall through.
Speaker: But one night people like laughed for like 30 seconds.
Speaker: And me and Gertrude got so mad at that that we got way angrier at each other.
Speaker: Well, that was the Three Stooges crowd.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: But it was just so, because both Susie, who played Gertrude, and I got like so mad.
Speaker: frustrated at that and then just looked at each other and just started like shouting at each other our lives well to be fair too Shakespeare does inject some comedy into it when what Hamlet says later says something about you know if if he not find them within the month you will nose him as you walk down the hallway yes I love it he's just so great with words which is probably because he's Shakespeare but fair enough who does he think he is Shakespeare right oh wait
Speaker: He is.
Speaker: He originated that term.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Well, let's move on to music.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I'm just curious what led you to falling in love with music and then pursuing conducting in particular as opposed to a specific instrument or singing or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Well, I, you know, like so many folks, I grew up in a very musical home.
Speaker: My mom had a rather extensive career as an operatic mezzo-soprano.
Speaker: She sang all over the U.S. I had residency at La Scala in Italy.
Speaker: And, you know, there was a piano, a big grand piano in my house since I was, before I was born, that got this piano.
Speaker: And I would grow up...
Speaker: My dad would put on his favorite piece, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony of the Pastoral, and during the storm scene, we would crawl under the piano together, you know, so we'd get out of the rain.
Speaker: So there was that that we experienced together growing up.
Speaker: But I started on piano.
Speaker: She was a piano teacher.
Speaker: I started on piano when I was four or five years old and then quickly had the chance to play violin when I was about five.
Speaker: and took to it.
Speaker: You know, I struggled with practice.
Speaker: I struggled with the discipline.
Speaker: I tend to be interested in lots and lots of, you know, lots of things, but played that for about 10 years before sports and other things kind of took over interest, but it set in me not just,
Speaker: a way of discipline study and a way of, but a means of expression because it, I, I, it did get to the spot where I was able to express all these great big feelings rather than hit my brother.
Speaker: I could, I could play something really aggressive on the violin.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, so it became a means of expression.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Then it wasn't until university, until college, when I had gone thinking I was going to be a chemistry major.
Speaker: But realized quickly that not only, it wasn't just that I couldn't do chemistry, I couldn't.
Speaker: Organic chemistry was not going to happen.
Speaker: let alone pecan but I just loved loved loved music and realized that in my freshman year and I remember I was I played soccer for the first years I went to Wheaton College and I played soccer and made the varsity squad my sophomore year but realized that
Speaker: I wanted to play in the orchestra.
Speaker: And at that point, I hadn't played violin for a while, so I had to take lessons and get up, and they sat me in the back of the second violin section, which was a gift.
Speaker: I had to quit the soccer team.
Speaker: But that's when I first realized that...
Speaker: my first experience of playing in an orchestra.
Speaker: Now, growing up, you know, you played in the Suzuki Orchestra and I played in the ensemble and stuff like that, but it was almost all by yourself.
Speaker: You take lessons by yourself, which I think is a big mistake in our training of young players.
Speaker: I think we should, as soon as they can make a sound, get them in groups to play because that's how 99% of players are going to play anyway.
Speaker: But to...
Speaker: I remember before I actually got in the orchestra, I asked the conductor, I said, could I come and watch rehearsals?
Speaker: Because I didn't know how orchestras worked.
Speaker: So for a semester, almost every rehearsal, I sat in the back of the room and just watched rehearsals take place.
Speaker: I watched how communication took place.
Speaker: I'm noticing...
Speaker: the chain of command that's not altogether evident when you watch and it's highly complex.
Speaker: I'm watching how certain people with great ability had a certain authority, but also where you sit had a certain authority and not always the person with the most ability sat in the place and watch what the conductor did and how the conductor asked for things.
Speaker: And I'm watching the conductor say...
Speaker: I could do that and I could do that differently.
Speaker: So yeah, so that ignited just an incredible respect for and a passion for that environment of orchestral environment.
Speaker: But also I could never make enough sound on this instrument.
Speaker: I literally broke bow hairs constantly and broke strings because I was trying to imagine all this sound.
Speaker: And when I called my mom the end of freshman year and said, I really, really want to study music, my dad, okay.
Speaker: My mom said, all right.
Speaker: And she sent me, I will never, I still have them.
Speaker: She sent me six LP recordings, all of Brahms' First Symphony.
Speaker: Six different conductors doing Brahms' First Symphony.
Speaker: I said, Mom, she goes, this is what, listen to those and listen to the difference between.
Speaker: It was a huge help and educational moment at that point to hear the dramatic difference that one person's thinking can make on the same piece of music.
Speaker: So that's a long answer to your question, but I thank mom, I thank dad, and some wonderful teachers.
Speaker: My mom was at the Tanglewood Music Festival, and I tagged along just as a 10-year-old.
Speaker: At 10 years old, I watched Michael Tilson Thomas, who was 19 years old, conduct an opera my mom was in.
Speaker: And when I studied with him 30 years later, 20 years later, I reminded him of that.
Speaker: We had a good laugh about that.
Speaker: So yeah, you know, musical environment, musical parents, the grace of the almighty, all those things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a lot I could pick out there, but I want to keep moving.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Do you have like a favorite piece?
Speaker: One that like... No.
Speaker: Yeah?
Speaker: No, I've asked that all the time and usually the answer is whatever I'm working on now.
Speaker: Do I have pieces I go back to?
Speaker: For certain reasons, yeah.
Speaker: Mahler 9 has played largely in my life since I was 18 years old.
Speaker: That epoch-making piece of music where Mahler disintegrates in front of our eyes in the last movement.
Speaker: I've conducted Mozart 40, the G minor, many, many times.
Speaker: I did just this last summer up at Beaver Island in that piece.
Speaker: He wrote that piece in eight days.
Speaker: I spent 40 years studying it and I found new stuff.
Speaker: and it blasts them.
Speaker: This year I found new stuff in this piece of music and there's like 10 lines of music.
Speaker: It's so thin and sparse and it's just absolute incredible genius in music.
Speaker: So yeah, but I don't,
Speaker: I'm really eclectic in what I listen to very, very widely.
Speaker: And there's
Speaker: I can't identify a piece of music.
Speaker: I think certain pieces.
Speaker: The war record with Benjamin Britten just about undid me the first time I heard it live.
Speaker: The Brahms Requiem.
Speaker: The German Reckon, but it's not a requiem.
Speaker: Also, when I conducted that, it just absolutely and hugely impacted me.
Speaker: First time I did opera.
Speaker: It's...
Speaker: It's a long list of experiences, but to say a single piece, yeah, that's hard.
Speaker: Because they all have special...
Speaker: They're all special in their own way and they're all different.
Speaker: They're all special and different, yes.
Speaker: And the context that I experienced in the Pacific, the time in life.
Speaker: What was going on in me?
Speaker: What was going on in that experience of having that piece of music?
Speaker: Maybe it was among a group of people.
Speaker: Maybe it was, maybe I was playing in the orchestra.
Speaker: Maybe, yeah, I mean, music is so set in context and how we experience music is so set in context.
Speaker: It's really hard.
Speaker: I mean, I watched Bernstein about... This would have been in 79, so four years before I worked with him, I watched him do Mahler 9 live at Tanglewood.
Speaker: I will never forget that.
Speaker: I will never forget that experience.
Speaker: It was just an incredible experience.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Lots of different pieces.
Speaker: The Bach B minor Mass, if I'm pressed to the wall and say pick a piece, a Jesuit piece, probably the Bach B minor Mass.
Speaker: Even that.
Speaker: Doesn't do justice to the other pieces.
Speaker: The Bachman-Mannermasso has, to be fair, is probably the greatest piece of music ever put on paper.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I don't think I've listened to that one, so I'll have to.
Speaker: I'm telling you, I'm not very well listened.
Speaker: You're a violinist, dude.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I just, the thing about classical music for me is I like, I want to pay attention to it because there's so many layers.
Speaker: Especially with Bach.
Speaker: And I love hearing...
Speaker: what everybody's doing in concert with each other.
Speaker: often I don't have time to just like, especially like right now with school.
Speaker: So like, it's something I really want to do is sit down and like, be like, okay, I know all these like great composers whom a lot of their work I've not listened to.
Speaker: And so I, there's, I want to take some time and sit down and listen, but I have papers to write.
Speaker: Of course you do.
Speaker: Of course you do.
Speaker: And, and, and the idea of listening to these great pieces as background music while I do something else.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: No,
Speaker: Once I'm really familiar with one, I can put one on.
Speaker: Like if it's one that I've played and it's kind of like comforting.
Speaker: Like there's some pieces where it's just like, I love this.
Speaker: I love bopping to the violin part that I remember playing.
Speaker: And that can kind of help.
Speaker: But at that point, I've like already explored it to a degree.
Speaker: So I feel like I can and just kind of let it wash over me because I've already explored it.
Speaker: But I don't want to... My wife and I have always...
Speaker: I've always had this conversation repeatedly that whenever music is playing, the conversation becomes background.
Speaker: It's background conversation to what's actually going on.
Speaker: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker: Did you hear that G minor chord?
Speaker: Sorry, what were you saying?
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: That'll happen to me in movies a lot.
Speaker: I love movies.
Speaker: I used to want to make movies, but I almost always just get sucked into the score and then realize what they're doing and the way they're mixing different characters, bits and stuff.
Speaker: Especially when the music score becomes a character in the movie.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: That's another conversation.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Hey friends, I hope you're enjoying today's episode.
Speaker: I just wanted to let you know that in two weeks, we're going to be announcing a really exciting project that Artists of the Way has been working on.
Speaker: I'm really excited to share it with you guys.
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Speaker: So something that I'm kind of fascinated by, but haven't given a lot of thought to, but I kind of just let it percolate.
Speaker: I feel like if somebody were to ask me to describe the spiritual in some sense, I would point them to music.
Speaker: Like there's something just music can capture things that I feel like words can't.
Speaker: that rationale or intellect necessarily can't, um, or can't necessarily got those words mixed up.
Speaker: Um, there's just something so abstract and spiritual about this wall of sound that almost defies explanation that moves you for no particular reason.
Speaker: That somehow through just rhythm and dynamics and arrangement, um,
Speaker: can feel completely different.
Speaker: Have you pondered that at all, like the spiritual aspect of music and how that kind of reveals the, I guess, mysterious unseen side of the world?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.
Speaker: And it's been written about endlessly, endlessly.
Speaker: And people have taken positions on this, on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Speaker: You know, John Calvin famously, in his institutes, talks about instrumental music and hated it.
Speaker: When they didn't hate it, he made it illegal to be used in church because his reasoning was,
Speaker: There are no words, but people experience, are moved by it, and we don't know what it means.
Speaker: Therefore, we don't trust it.
Speaker: So out you go.
Speaker: So only songs and only unaccompanied singing.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Oh, I can't wait to have words with Calvin someday.
Speaker: The spiritual in music.
Speaker: You know...
Speaker: There are so many different ways.
Speaker: Again, we can talk about that.
Speaker: The way that we think about music now is a relatively recent development in the history of music.
Speaker: The idea that music is self-expression, that it gives voice to my feelings.
Speaker: Mozart and Haydn would think that was just, it would be so uncomfortable, that idea, that personal feelings of the composer spread out for the whole world.
Speaker: It would never do that.
Speaker: That would be unheard of in most beautiful,
Speaker: Baroque music, I'm going to say that carefully, Mozart's Renaissance music, certainly medieval chant, the idea that the composer is writing something out of self-expression.
Speaker: Now Mozart's music is very emotional, Haydn's music is very emotional, but it's Beethoven that suddenly changes this idea that it must come from your heart, from within.
Speaker: And that's the only way we experience music now, whether it's rock and roll, whether it's country western.
Speaker: She done took my truck and took my dog.
Speaker: It's all about my experience and my personal expression.
Speaker: Great value in that.
Speaker: The ancient Greeks' music, of course, was one of the foundational areas of learning.
Speaker: And there's seven subjects, the trivium and the quadrivium.
Speaker: Music and mathematics were very, very tied.
Speaker: But music for the ancient Greeks, as prevalent as it was in society, was not, not about expressing feelings or emotions.
Speaker: It was about number.
Speaker: Music was in our hearing a picture, an illustration of the cosmos.
Speaker: So you have different intervals, the fourth, the fifth, the octave, which are numerical ratios that tell us the position of the stars.
Speaker: So music was way more important in that sense, is that it gives us a picture of God or what the gods did to create the cosmos.
Speaker: It's this wonderful picture
Speaker: all-encompassing illustration, right?
Speaker: Then, you know, was there dance music being written?
Speaker: Of course, but its functionality was to enable other things to happen.
Speaker: So that's my preamble answer to your question, is that how we listen to music has changed hugely.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Two basic ideas I'd like to discuss real, real quick.
Speaker: One has to do with the music itself and how the music can be an avenue for expressing the unseen.
Speaker: But also, equally importantly, how we experience music.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Music forever.
Speaker: Let's assume that since Neanderthal first took a bone and started beating it in rhythm against a mammoth clavicle, that music has existed in human society.
Speaker: Music is universally present in human society.
Speaker: Music is not a universal language.
Speaker: It is dramatically different from culture to culture.
Speaker: We can talk about this too, but music is universally present in all cultures.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, but from that time, it was a communal activity.
Speaker: It was something that people did and experienced together to create community.
Speaker: Now, I'm sure that Neanderthal, when he was banging on that clavicle, his brother over here didn't like that done that way.
Speaker: And they argued about it, but they argued about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: bring forward to the only way music could be done for thousands of years was in the real, in real time.
Speaker: So somebody sang and somebody listened.
Speaker: The listener and the performer had equal status because it was an interaction.
Speaker: Then when ensembles sang together or ensembles played together,
Speaker: Long before we wrote blobs of ink on a piece of paper, I would play something and you would play it back and say, no, that's cool, like this.
Speaker: Oh, you do something different.
Speaker: And we played a different back and forth.
Speaker: And so there's this wonderful communal...
Speaker: One of my favorite musical asceticians, Christopher Small, writes the title of a book, Musicking.
Speaker: Music is not a noun.
Speaker: Music is a verb.
Speaker: Music is something that is done communally and together.
Speaker: In that sense, the experience of community, spiritual, communal, emotional, intellectual, it's something that is done together.
Speaker: It's something that is talked about together.
Speaker: It's something that's argued about, that's agreed on.
Speaker: Music is not a great uniter.
Speaker: Music is equally a divider as it is a uniter.
Speaker: And this is good.
Speaker: This is, you know, we should feel things.
Speaker: We should experience something new.
Speaker: And because you tell me that I should listen to this, and I say, why did you ask me this?
Speaker: And I hear why, and then I say, oh.
Speaker: Okay, let me listen to that again.
Speaker: That is kind of cool.
Speaker: I hadn't liked that before, but I would like to listen.
Speaker: So the way we music together, musicking together, in a sense, God creates community within that.
Speaker: Certainly within the church.
Speaker: Early on when all instrumental music was kicked out of the church and made illegal in the church for a thousand years and only unison chant for a thousand years because with one voice we sing.
Speaker: It was a community creating activity that together we come before.
Speaker: So that's I think a big part of
Speaker: of how we, I'm always suspicious of the word spiritual.
Speaker: I don't like the word spiritual.
Speaker: For Christians, there is no spiritual.
Speaker: There is only capital S, holy spiritual.
Speaker: But let's use the word for it right now.
Speaker: The romantic philosopher Schopenhauer writes extensively about the power of music to get past and get in.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Music does tickle certain parts of our brain that very few other things do or that strange other things do, you know?
Speaker: And music takes residence in the brain with a kind of permanence, you know, and
Speaker: I can sing you the exact tune and text of television ads that I heard when I was four years old.
Speaker: And it sticks.
Speaker: And everybody knows the stories about Alzheimer's patients who are unresponsive.
Speaker: And then when a certain piece of music is played, they absolutely come alive and can play it on the piano or something.
Speaker: So there is a way that music does get inside people.
Speaker: So that's sort of the active communal side of experiencing music.
Speaker: And music intellectually, music aesthetically in itself also.
Speaker: Can...
Speaker: in these mysterious ways, give voice to things that I'm unable to give words to.
Speaker: You mentioned this before.
Speaker: What did St.
Speaker: Francis of Assisi say?
Speaker: Praise God in every way, use words if necessary, type of thing.
Speaker: And there is a sense in which there is a wonderful non-specificity
Speaker: about music because Calvin was right.
Speaker: We don't know exactly what it means, but we say, that's what I'm feeling.
Speaker: That's what I thought.
Speaker: Beethoven's architecture, when he puts these incredible cathedrals of structure together and it just sets right
Speaker: And somehow, even if I know nothing about music, it just feels complete.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: To, you know, famous express of things, Barbara Zadagio for strings.
Speaker: People who know nothing about music weep when they hear that song because something is going on.
Speaker: And Barbara himself didn't even realize.
Speaker: Barbara himself wasn't, I mean, he thought it was beautiful and stuff, but he had no idea what he was unleashing when he writes this piece.
Speaker: And then, of course,
Speaker: We talk a lot with audiences and with hesitant boards about the role of music in our society to give voice to communal concerns.
Speaker: Where is the role of the arts, music in particular, for protest?
Speaker: Where is the role of music to give voice to grief?
Speaker: That bothers people.
Speaker: You do pieces of music that express deep,
Speaker: harrowing grief and three people in the audience are so grateful and 200 people in the audience are like I don't like this it makes me uncomfortable yeah and then we go back to the communal side for the sake of those three people we're going to listen to this right yeah so yeah um I guess I the the sort of two spots to where music can enable
Speaker: our experience of the things unseen in and of itself, because it can get past intellect while engaging the intellect.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But we also experience this communally and together, at least until the last 75 years when we invented recordings, which I suggest foundationally changed how we experience.
Speaker: But again, that's another subject.
Speaker: No, it did.
Speaker: I was, I was pondering that while you were talking.
Speaker: It's like, man, there's so many like,
Speaker: artists or people working today where I'm like, man, I love their stuff, but I probably will either rarely or never get a chance to like see it in concert.
Speaker: Or like I could message them on Instagram and be like, I love your music, but that's kind of creepy.
Speaker: So it's like, yeah, I mean, think of great.
Speaker: Again, I'm going to lean on the classical.
Speaker: Think of a performance of the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky.
Speaker: To hear that live is overwhelming.
Speaker: It's 100 years old, and it's still overwhelming to hear that live.
Speaker: I saw U2 for the first time live about four years ago at Soldier Stadium, Soldier Field in Chicago with 70,000 people.
Speaker: I had listened to their music forever.
Speaker: Hearing it live was an overwhelming experience.
Speaker: It's crazy.
Speaker: There's a band I love called The Grey Havens.
Speaker: They're a small indie Christian band.
Speaker: I love their stuff, and I listen to it when I'm working on shows, like building sets and things, which means I've listened to their music.
Speaker: hundreds if not like thousands of times while i'm building this set um and then we went and saw them what was it last november i think um and it i just was like sobbing the whole time and i was like it had gotten to the point where like listening to the recording it was like right
Speaker: where it kind of gets, not necessarily numb, but it's like, yeah, this is the song and you're relaxed and comfortable with it and it's not necessarily punching you anymore.
Speaker: But to hear it live, it like renews it.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: I mean, it's an archaeological aesthetic find.
Speaker: Lo and behold, live communal experience of music matters.
Speaker: I mean, if you think of the history of how we experience music before even written notation.
Speaker: Now, there's some evidence of ancient...
Speaker: indications of written notation, but we really didn't have written notation until about the year 1000.
Speaker: Up until that, we were making music for 30,000 years by me singing it to you and singing it back, by playing it and playing it back.
Speaker: So now suddenly, here's something written, so now this piece of music can be experienced without the composer even being there.
Speaker: You take this away and you can play it and I don't have to be there anymore.
Speaker: That was a big leap, written music.
Speaker: It can be... And many, many copies of this.
Speaker: It can be played at the same time in 14 cities.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What a strange idea without the composer being there.
Speaker: Then the recording industry, orders of magnitude different.
Speaker: Now, the primary way people experience music, the primary way is by yourself with nobody else hearing what you're hearing.
Speaker: And it's here.
Speaker: And I am no longer...
Speaker: at the mercy of the performer.
Speaker: The composer, you know, in a sense had the power.
Speaker: And then the performance had the power because I had to go to them and they played it and they said when and where it would happen.
Speaker: Now I, the consumer, have all of the power.
Speaker: I hit a repeat button, a repeat button.
Speaker: In a concert, I stand up and say, could you play the second movement again?
Speaker: But think about how changed that is that I now experience something that was never intended to be experienced this way.
Speaker: And I have all of the control here.
Speaker: The advantages of it are wonderful.
Speaker: I can listen to Balinese gamelan music.
Speaker: I can listen to music from South Africa.
Speaker: I can listen to Chinese music.
Speaker: I can listen to music from all over the world.
Speaker: So that's amazing.
Speaker: In a sense, it widens, but it also eliminates that whole area we talked about earlier about a communal experience of music.
Speaker: You know, I've got my kids and now their kids and my nieces and nephews and things and
Speaker: they've experienced music in speakers this big in their ears.
Speaker: And that's the only way.
Speaker: You know, it's just fascinating to me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I do feel like there's a way God can like...
Speaker: speak through that.
Speaker: There can be like an intimacy of like, I guess like an intimateness where the music is the conduit for something God wants to engage with the listener in.
Speaker: But there, it does shift it in the sense of like,
Speaker: there is less control or there's more control for the listener and less like, well, I shouldn't say less in God's hands because God has ultimate control.
Speaker: I was going to let yourself paint yourself into a corner.
Speaker: You just go ahead.
Speaker: But like, if I wanted to, I can just hit skip because I'm uncomfortable and I don't want to engage with whatever I'm listening to right now.
Speaker: Or I might hear something for,
Speaker: 10 seconds and be like, oh, that was kind of a weird synth thing.
Speaker: I'm not a huge fan of weird synth things I'm going to skip.
Speaker: Whereas maybe there was something three minutes into that song or piece that could have hit me so strongly.
Speaker: And what we end up doing is simply reproducing what we already like.
Speaker: And so by definition, we get smaller.
Speaker: See, and I've noticed that in my own listening habits, because I use Spotify a lot, and it has an algorithm, which a lot of times is great, but a lot of times just, like they have daily mixes.
Speaker: Early on, it was like every time I'd hit it, I was like, great, I'd get this nice mix of new music and music that I love.
Speaker: And it was a new kind of thing every day.
Speaker: And then eventually the Daily Mix just slowly started stagnating into the same thing.
Speaker: Because now it knows what you like.
Speaker: And it just repeats the same.
Speaker: And I love those songs still.
Speaker: But I was like, wow, I'm going to just not listen to this Daily Mix for a while because it got too used to being the same thing.
Speaker: It creates narcissists of us all that our...
Speaker: Our taste as it exists now is what, in fact, I want to build my world with.
Speaker: And that is a foundational opposite thing of how we should experience art because art should make us bigger.
Speaker: Art should introduce ideas that are...
Speaker: crazy to us that I'd never thought of before so that my head and my heart and my spirit can become bigger.
Speaker: And I feel like that almost plays into, now we're almost into cultural commentating, but like there's a sense in which I feel there's a lot of good things about the internet and it can be used really positively, but there's a sense in which it keeps changing
Speaker: creating these smaller and smaller like echo chambers of people that are just like, this is my community.
Speaker: So I'm going to join this Facebook group and I'm going to block these people on Facebook.
Speaker: And so then we, the only things that we're receiving are what we want to receive.
Speaker: Isn't that fascinating that simultaneously the web is the largest thing we've ever created to connect the world.
Speaker: And simultaneously it's making us more and more atomized.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: more individual people looking at their flipping phone during a concert and experiencing smaller and smaller pieces of the world.
Speaker: It's very, very interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I'm going to hit one more of these questions here before we jump to resources.
Speaker: I just have to pick which one.
Speaker: Who?
Speaker: I guess I would be really interested in...
Speaker: if you have a story of a time when you feel like God really reached you through working on a piece of music.
Speaker: Because I've definitely felt that with theater, but as I was kind of talking to you about a little bit beforehand, like music has taken a back seat to my theater and there was like some conflict there between my violin and my love for theater.
Speaker: So I got less and less involved with music in like an orchestral sense and playing it the more I went through music.
Speaker: the farther into high school I got.
Speaker: And so I feel like since I've been more spiritually mature and experiencing these things, I haven't been engaging with music in the same way.
Speaker: So God hasn't necessarily been using that.
Speaker: But I'm really intrigued as to, I guess, just the experience of that and ways in which God has pointed out things through a piece of music as you've worked through it.
Speaker: I'll talk about two pieces, two very, very different pieces.
Speaker: And these will come from my classical world.
Speaker: So, you know, this is not saying that God doesn't speak through Tom Waits as well.
Speaker: He does.
Speaker: And this also, these two things were part of a paper I wrote about faith and art integration when I was at Calvin on faculty there.
Speaker: I'm going to come back to the Bach B Minor Mass.
Speaker: This piece is written by a man of faith, a man whose faith I shared and share.
Speaker: Bach never heard the piece performed in his lifetime.
Speaker: It's his greatest composition.
Speaker: He never heard it.
Speaker: He wrote it, or he assembled it.
Speaker: He had pieces, you know, that's the way Baroque composers wrote is they rarely wrote something from beginning to end.
Speaker: It was, this is a piece he had already set and he put it together as a job application, a job he didn't get.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: But the B minor Mass is arguably the greatest setting of the statement of Christian faith in existence.
Speaker: It's mind-boggling.
Speaker: And the more you know about music, the deeper and deeper that water gets.
Speaker: But the one part of the Mass, the Sanctus, the Holy, Holy, Holy in the B-minor Mass, will change one's life.
Speaker: It changed mine.
Speaker: We know the text.
Speaker: Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.
Speaker: Heaven and earth are full of His glory.
Speaker: Hosanna in the highest.
Speaker: These are not human words.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: These were not written by people.
Speaker: These, if we believe the evidence of Scripture, these are the actual words spoken into the face of Almighty God by the angels.
Speaker: They say to one another and they say to God.
Speaker: When we say these words, we are borrowing the language of heaven.
Speaker: It's like this giant...
Speaker: cosmic galactic carousel that for a little while we jump on and we sing this holy holy holy and then we get off and then we do less meaningful stuff so the text itself has always been
Speaker: Just incredible to me.
Speaker: I've already arranged for the words on my gravestone to be sung to, sung to, sung to, Stominus Dei, Plenis Vincelia, Terra, Gloria Tua.
Speaker: Just to tell people, I'm experiencing this a sneak preview.
Speaker: I'm experiencing this right now.
Speaker: When we read these words, I'm seeing this happen right now.
Speaker: But Bach's setting of this, John, is...
Speaker: It's a five voice choir, multiple choir, and each of the sections of the choir
Speaker: Because he's read, Bach has read Isaiah when he says the angels calling to one another.
Speaker: Holy, holy, holy.
Speaker: And you hear this multiple choir do this.
Speaker: And then they answer.
Speaker: And then they answer from this side over here.
Speaker: And then they circle on top of each other.
Speaker: And then they're together.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: And then it's in unison, and then it's all in parts again as they sing to one another.
Speaker: It is absolutely magnificent.
Speaker: That piece to me still will move me to tears listening to what I've heard a thousand times.
Speaker: I've never had the chance to... I've conducted the song too, so I've never had the chance to conduct the whole B minor mass.
Speaker: I would be a wreck getting to the song too.
Speaker: So that is a piece where, for those reasons, I think...
Speaker: I have really experienced the nearness or the, the, the, that, that musicking fellowship with, with, with the angels in a very, I don't want to say literal way.
Speaker: That's, that's overstating it.
Speaker: But I am quite sure that the angels do sing Bach.
Speaker: I am quite sure about that.
Speaker: But the other or N other piece is,
Speaker: Extremely different piece by a very different person.
Speaker: Richard Strauss, the great romantic tone poem writer.
Speaker: Articulate, devout atheist.
Speaker: Despiser of all things Christian.
Speaker: wrote a piece called Tod und Verklärung, Death and Transfiguration.
Speaker: It's a tone poem he wrote early in his life, in his 20s.
Speaker: And like a lot of Strauss's tone poems, it's music about something non-musical.
Speaker: It tells a story.
Speaker: And this is literally telling a story
Speaker: of watching a man die in front of our eyes.
Speaker: And he has text that tells what the story is.
Speaker: The man is very, very sick, he's old, he's dying, and he's wracked with pains.
Speaker: And then he begins to remember through his life.
Speaker: And this music about his childhood and this young man and then this old man.
Speaker: And then the music is interrupted by this pain-wracking, very difficult...
Speaker: music and we hear him gasping for breath, duh, duh, duh, in the instrumentation and then we listen to him die as the music goes down to nothing.
Speaker: One single note and then follows eight minutes of the most spectacular music as what happens is as this dead person is transfigured into something else.
Speaker: Now for Strauss that meant I don't know what, it meant something.
Speaker: And I know that Strauss did not have in mind Christian death and resurrection.
Speaker: He did not have this in mind.
Speaker: He despised that idea.
Speaker: me that's what it was yeah i've conducted these so many times and it still wrecks me as this um this transfiguration theme happens and finally arrives and builds and builds and in my mind literally passing from death into life yeah
Speaker: splendor, people I know, finally seeing face to face.
Speaker: It's in a sense a simplistic overlay.
Speaker: And again, Strauss did not mean it.
Speaker: So we have to honor what the composer meant.
Speaker: And when I do the piece, I give it for all Strauss.
Speaker: But inside me, when I do the hermeneutic, that piece for me has been incredibly meaningful at times when I've lost people, when I've lost family, when I've lost friends.
Speaker: knowing that I'm changing its meaning.
Speaker: But openly and honestly doing so.
Speaker: We did that piece at Calvin College and I had the students write about this.
Speaker: Is it okay?
Speaker: Is it okay to do a piece of music by somebody who despises what you believe in?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're going to deal with it.
Speaker: But why would we do this?
Speaker: And why is this a good idea?
Speaker: Do we raid the temples of Pharaoh?
Speaker: And it's what I used to call an exegetical model.
Speaker: It's as long as we dig deeply and understand what the composer meant.
Speaker: play it for what it is, then we can say, but for me, this is what it means.
Speaker: So those are two examples, I think, of things that have given voice to stuff deep within that the Lord has touched.
Speaker: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker: This has been a lovely conversation.
Speaker: We are getting near to the end.
Speaker: So I want to ask you, one of the big things I want to do is help anybody who is listening to this to know where to go as a young artist or Christian to deepen and what's the word?
Speaker: Deepen was the right word, but I don't know what's supposed to follow deepen.
Speaker: Oh, gosh.
Speaker: It's early in the morning.
Speaker: We're good.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: Yeah, to grow.
Speaker: There's the word I'm looking for.
Speaker: So what resources would you recommend to a young artist or to a young Christian who's wanting to grow either in their art or in their faith?
Speaker: Oh, gosh, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, what cup of water from the ocean do you want to take?
Speaker: You know, I was on staff of the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship over at Calvin University, and their website there and that institute is a phenomenally deep and wide resource to...
Speaker: pan-denominational, pan-music style.
Speaker: I can't say enough for how rich a resource that is.
Speaker: Whether you are in a liturgical context, whether you are in a more free-wheeling Pentecostal context, whatever.
Speaker: Whether you're talking about preaching, whether you're talking about music, whether you're talking about theater.
Speaker: That is a wonderful, wide resource.
Speaker: CICW, Calvin, in Super-Christian worship.
Speaker: Get five or six or ten hymnals from different traditions.
Speaker: I've developed about a 400-volume collection of just hymnals from many, many different traditions in my library over the years and to look through hymnals and to see what the voice of certain traditions are.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm talking just the Christian world at this point.
Speaker: Seek out things that we're unfamiliar with.
Speaker: You know, what are things outside of my tradition?
Speaker: Listen to Gregorian chant.
Speaker: Listen to chant.
Speaker: Find out what the text is, get a translation, but listen to chant, which was the only voice of the church for a thousand years.
Speaker: There were some bad reasons for that.
Speaker: There were also some very good reasons for that.
Speaker: And chant is gloriously expressive music.
Speaker: Gloriously expressive.
Speaker: You know, subtle detail changes.
Speaker: Listen to chant.
Speaker: You know, it's so helpful when we get outside of our backyard and go into somebody else's backyard with the intent not to judge what I hear, but to learn what I hear.
Speaker: You know, there were a number of styles of music that I knew I just didn't care for.
Speaker: So I purposely listened to that music on my mind.
Speaker: you know, I woke up in the morning, whatever for a year.
Speaker: I wanted to learn it and at least understand what, what was going on with this.
Speaker: I still have preferences, which is fine, but lo and behold, you know, you get bigger when you, when you move into stuff that's outside of your experience.
Speaker: Um, yeah, you know, I think that's, that's a specific resource.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: We can talk about specific writers.
Speaker: Dr. Jeremy Begbie, B-E-G-B-I-E, if you want to dig a little deeper into Christian aesthetics, has written brilliantly about...
Speaker: the role of music, a unique role of music in its ability to express theology through music is what he says.
Speaker: And I take some issue with what he writes, but it's a brilliant Cambridge University and Duke University professor and has written amazingly about
Speaker: music's unique role in being able to access theology.
Speaker: So those would be a few things I would go to and recommend.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: And then anything Bach has written.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Because everything Bach wrote is theological.
Speaker: Everything.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Sweet.
Speaker: Thanks again, Robert.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: This has been so fun.
Speaker: It's been great to have you on.
Speaker: Appreciate the invitation.
Speaker: All the very best.
