Value of music

ONCE again Pope Benedict has given us some very beautiful considerations about music on the occasion of the anniversary of the start of his pontificate last April 19.

Especially in the context of the increasingly harsh realities of the world today, the papal words offer us a most reassuring balm of comfort. We cannot deny we are drifting in a turbulent sea of anxieties.

We, of course, can always have recourse to prayer. But music adds indescribable beauty to it. When set in music, prayer seems to assume wings and to take off to distant, exhilarating destinations.

In this particular occasion when a concert was held and performed by young students of a music school, the Pope focused on the highly educative dimension of music, especially for the youth of today.

Here are some of the papal words, which I prefer to remit verbatim and unvarnished since they hardly need any improvement. I strongly believe they are worth pausing for and reflecting on.

- “The study of music has high value in the educational process of the person, inasmuch as it produces effects in the individual’s development, fostering his harmonious human and spiritual growth.”

- “We know that the formative value of music, in its implications of expressive, creative, relational, social and cultural nature, is commonly recognized.”

- “Music is capable of opening minds and hearts to the dimension of the spirit and of leading persons to raise their gaze on High, to open to absolute Goodness and Beauty, which have their ultimate source in God.”

- “The joy of song and music is also a constant invitation to believers and to all of goodwill to commit themselves to give humanity a rich future of hope.”

I must say that those words contain a great wealth of truth often lost in the banality and worldliness of our daily activities. They are worth all the effort to mine them, so as to bring out and savor the hidden precious gems of happy verity embedded in them.

To me, music touches a mysterious part of our being, a certain place of contact and linkage between the spirit and the body, the abstract and the concrete. It is capable of bringing the mundane to the sublime, the sensual to the sacred.

It makes the presence of God more felt, more arresting and engaging. It has a language that goes beyond the technicalities of meter and measure. It acquires its own life and awakens our soul, bringing with it our body with all bodily complement of emotions and passions.

It allows us to fathom deep, soar high and traverse the whole length and breadth of human experience and possibilities. It certainly exceeds what our senses and our intelligence can perceive. It gives a new dimension to our life and outlook.

It seems to be the language of the heart that manages to articulate those parts of the heart still covered in mystery. It has a universal appeal as it goes beyond the conditioning of a person’s culture, educational background, social status, etc.

There’s just one crucial point to consider to make music achieve its most sublime potential. A psalm captures this point very well. “Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous deeds. He has revealed to the nations his saving power.” (98,1-2)

In fact, the sacred book is full of exhortations to sing a new song, a new canticle, indicating that Christian life is a happy life, with a certain musicality to it, in spite of its requirements for sacrifice and penance.

Yes, music can release its best potentials when inspired by God, his love, his wisdom, his power that can manifest itself in simplicity and humility, and in mercy and patience. Its beauty exceeds the best that can be found in the natural and material world.

We have to be wary of getting hooked to music that is inspired somewhere else other than in God and in what is objectively good in man. Sad to say, this kind of music is also proliferating, a sign of the thread of decadence also present in the fabric of our present life.

I believe there’s a great need to evangelize that part of our culture today. Many of the songs and music nowadays are tone-deaf to spiritual values. They seem to be born for purely worldly purposes, highly titillating and seductive, but cruelly trapping the human spirit in time and space and the ways of the flesh.

We need to recover the genuine value of music.