22 May 2025 – More Feelings pursued further

I have received a few replies following my last Diary Entry – thank you!  Please keep them coming in!

One of you wrote saying that I should ‘not be shy about writing longer entries’, and another expressed particular affection for ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

So today I shall try to bring these two things together by expanding my feelings about ‘The Will’, which I mentioned last time.

 Interestingly, when I play ‘The Lark Ascending’, something propels me to ‘go with the flow’, without adhering to a strict, regimented or rigid regular pulse.  I need to allow the music itself to guide me, flow through me, and determine the rich varieties of tempo and tone waiting to emerge.

I am reminded of some thoughts by Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098-1179):

‘A voice traces lines across the silence like a flame through the dark. Each breath expands, floats upwards, hangs suspended, and glides slowly down. From its constant ground, it takes flight, momentarily becomes two, testing the sweet dissonance of separation, the miracle of interval. Over and again, it stretches, divides, holds itself open, leaps up and spirals down. In the resonance of this vast space, I am enveloped. Immersed in the flow of sound, I am dissolved and become liquid. I am carried in its play of weight and weightlessness, tension and release, inhale and exhale. Unmeasured, it moves to its own rhythm, the words merely edges of the sonorous depth to which they give way. Pure, clear, unguarded and unfettered, each line reaches out with the sureness of touch. Each gesture brings forth an answer, like a slow-motion dance. I too take flight, carving a path through fields of air. Being completely here, I am also elsewhere. Breathing myself out, I am more than me’.

[Hildegard von Bingen: ‘O vis eternitatis’ (The power of eternity) – Barbara Thornton, Sequentia, Canticles of Ecstasy. Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, 1994.]

This precisely captures the approach required by the violin and my player. I remember how Dietrich Bonhoeffer was profoundly moved as he listened to young Walter Harrison (aged 7) playing ‘The Lark Ascending’ with me in his school in Forest Hill, London, in the 1930s.  Was not Bonhoeffer struggling then with an understanding of ‘the Will’ and the need to discern and participate in the one Will that is truly powerful?  The one Will that gives meaning beyond individual obsession in ways that are compassionate, transforming and salvific for the whole community of creation?  Was he so deeply moved because he knew in his very being that there was a growing and menacing ‘Will’ with an ‘iron fist’ in National Socialism hammering out its rejection and total opposition to the vulnerability and flexibility of a truly liberating and flowing Will?

Are we, even today, similarly affected and conditioned by the heavy hammering hand of inexorable economic growth, with profitable deals, material success, celebrity and control?

I suppose we could be forgiven for associating the shattering assertions of the opening bars of Delius’s ‘A Mass of Life’ with such thoughts, even though, as we noted last time, there is an abundance of vulnerability and flow, especially towards the end in the ‘Mitternachtslied’.

In conversation with Eric Fenby, Delius said that a sense of ‘flow’ is what really matters, and yet we musicians are never expected to be ‘timid’ or ‘weak’, especially in pieces such as ‘A Mass of Life’. The opening movement cannot be played without the full ‘thickness’ of the bow hairs placed on the string, or without the full extent of the bow, from heel to tip, following through in an uninterrupted cyclical pattern.

So, when I reflect on playing through the whole of this monumental work of Delius, I cannot help feeling the fundamental challenge of understanding the concept of ‘The Will’.

Do you remember how Friederich Nietzsche (author of the words in ‘A Mass of Life’) ‘philosophized with a hammer’, even though the ‘hammer’ can be understood as a ‘tuning fork’?  [see my earlier Diary Entries ‘Am I in tune? – A Spiritual Intermezzo’ and ‘1995-97 Music and Aesthetics (1)’]

As far as my feelings are concerned, I feel a stark contrast between ‘hammering’ and ‘tuning’ in the full performance experience of ‘A Mass of Life’.

For me, it is as though something is indeed ‘hammered’ out of performers and listeners alike, while fluid vulnerable sound waves from nature are struggling to flow around us and within us.

‘The Lark Ascending’, on the other hand, does not resonate with such a conflict.  The vulnerable flow, with accurate tuning and timbre (tone colour), especially in the solo passages, enables player and listener easily and unambiguously to become one with nature resonating with a ‘sonic flux’. Perhaps this explains why it is so popular.

But I am still struggling with the ‘Will’!

With my passion for bringing Theology and Music together, I wonder of Nietzsche’s ‘hammering tuning-fork’ might help. In earlier Diary Entries I have suggested that Jesus Christ might be a ‘tuning-fork’ for the world. As the cross of Christ strikes the earth, like a tuning fork striking a resonant surface, having been hammered on to a cross of wood, can we catch an echo, a whisper, of God expressing his Will of perfectly-tuned love, sounding through all creation?

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The cross taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

(George Herbert 1593-1633)

Next time, I hope to share even more feelings and emotions.