This week, while visting my family, I got a chance
to attend a classical violin concert, which was a real treat. One of the pieces
on the program was J.S. Bach’s Partita in D Minor for solo violin. The final
part of the Partita is Bach’s very famous Chaconne, an absolutely exquisite
piece of art (you must listen to it
here and
here). It was the first time I had heard the Chaconne performed live, and it
was breathtaking.
Hearing Bach’s Chaconne reminded me of a speech I heard
while in college that had an enormous influence on me. The speech was by
Professor Christian Moevs and it was given at an
event honoring Arts and Letters honors graduates at Notre Dame. I was a junior
at the time and I worked at the Performing Arts Center, where the event was being held, and this is how I happened to hear this speech.
In it, Professor Moevs talked
about a fascinating experiment conducted by The
Washington Post—they hired Joshua Bell, a great violinist, to play his
violin in a D.C. subway in jeans and a t-shirt. Among other things, he played
Bach’s masterful Chaconne in D Minor, and he played it on his 3.5 million
dollar Stradivarius violin. They
wanted to see what would happen.
Sadly, what happened was basically nothing. In the 43 minutes
that Bell played, 1,097 people walked by on their way to work, and exactly 7
stopped. 27 people gave money. The other 1,070 went by without pause or notice.
I somehow (I can’t remember how) got my hands on a copy of
Professor Moevs' speech, so rather than paraphrasing the part that has been so
meanginful for me, I will let you read it here:
...the
response to beauty is not really a question of education. It is innate in the human soul. In fact, one of the people most drawn
to Bell’s playing was a 40-year-old career busboy in a cafe in the [subway]. He was working hard, but every chance
he got, he’d stand at the very edge of the cafe, craning his head out to see
and listen. When they asked him
later, he said he had no idea what the violinist was playing, but it gave him
peace.
Peace. Peace is the innate nature of man; it
is a bottomless, shoreless ocean in the heart. Great music is the ocean calling to the wave, which is
really the deep calling to the deep. When the soul responds to that call, it is awakening to its own
infinity, its freedom, its transcendence of nature and time. That is the experience of beauty. This experience of the eternal in time,
of the infinite in the finite, is what great music and art and literature are
about; it is what Bach’s Chaconne is about. Our response to beauty is our response to God.
How
do we lose God? Like those people
at rush hour who walked by Bach and Joshua Bell. Those people had things to do, things to become, with an eye
on their watches. We lose eternity,
and enter the prison of time, by striving to be this or that. We lose being by becoming, by not
knowing how to be still, how to simply be. We must play our roles in the world, do what God has given
us to do, as well as we can. But
we must not live for our roles. Let us live only for God, who has given us those roles. That’s what Bach did. He worked as hard as anyone ever
has. He also inscribed “For the
glory of God” on top of every piece he wrote, including the Chaconne.
I can’t read this without tearing up, and I must have read
it two dozen times by now. He captures so beautifully what music is, what great
art is, and as a musician it cuts right down to my core. In fact, this
line—“Our response to beauty is our response to God”—is one of the major
reasons I decided to continue my music studies in graduate school. I was a
double major in college and was trying to decide which path to pursue after college. I happened to pull out this speech as I was packing up my room
after graduation and that line spoke to me. God gave me a gift, I thought, the
gift of music, and it’s a gift that brings beauty to my own life and to others.
What I do with this gift is up to me, and how I respond is my response to God.
Professor Moevs concluded the speech by describing one
incredibly telling, poignant, and unexpected outcome of the experiment:
There
was one demographic group in that rush hour crowd that did respond unanimously
to Bach and Joshua Bell. That was
the children. Every single child
was instantly mesmerized, tried to stop, kept turning back. And every single one of them was pulled
away by an adult, who had someplace to go.
I
want to leave you with that image: the child turning back to Bach, entranced by beauty, longing for the
ocean, and being pulled away by an adult.
Isn’t it beautiful that
these children were drawn to the music? And heart-breaking that they were
pulled away? I will never forget this, and I pray that I never inadvertently
pull my children from great beauty but instead lead them to it.
