The Land That Hath No Music

People rooted in their native culture sing;
multiculturalists do not sing, but shout political slogans.

Sometimes I take a guilty delight in noting that the people of our time who most have “multiculturalism” on their lips detest culture in their souls. 

How could it be otherwise? To belong to a culture is to cultivate a way of life that is like the soil beneath your feet and the skies overhead. You honor it, as you honor your mother and father, not because you believe it is perfect, as they are not perfect, but because it is yours. Such honor is not a political decision, like voting for a candidate. It is mingled with gratitude and love. It is essential to a truly human education, one that builds up and nourishes the soul. At its height, it can bring you, if not into the divine, at least in view of its horizon. But the multiculturalist treats these things with scorn, as of no political use.

Put it this way. What you love, even in sorrow, moves you to sing. But no one sings about a political party, unless it is an advertising jingle scrambled up for the occasion, soon and thankfully forgotten. Imagine misty-eyed Republicans gathering at a fireside to sing, “Get on the raft with Taft, boys!” To hear “Stalinu Slava!” “Glory to Stalin!” a bombastic chorale by Dmitri Shostakovich, is to be embarrassed for the sake of secular man, exalting a murderous thug as a god—or compelled to pretend to do so, under threat of state disapproval, penury, imprisonment, exile, or death.

The multiculturalist shouts because he is a political player. His shouting is irritable because he secretly envies those who do have a culture, and who therefore sing. If he is a teacher or professor, the last thing he wants to find in his students is love for their native land: her history, her heroes, her folkways, her songs, her religious faith. His job is to debunk all that. He is like Milton’s Satan, who, “Late fallen from heaven himself, is plotting now / The fall of others from like state of bliss.” He does not love Nanking, but he sure does hate Nashville.

People rooted in their native culture sing because singing is what lovers do. Let me illustrate with an anecdote related by a man who did love many cultures, including his own, and who did sing. He is Henry Edward Krehbiel, writing in Afro-American Folksongs (1914), the first book ever written on that music. In his introduction, Krehbiel aimed to show the power of music to convey a people’s most profound experiences of love and sorrow, of gratitude and longing. In 1758, an English army had landed in Brittany and was on the march. These troops, made up of Welshmen, were “singing a national air, when all at once the Bretons of the French army stopped short in amazement. The air their enemies were singing was one which every day may be heard sounding over the hearths of Brittany.” 

The Bretons, fellow Celts with the Welsh, stood electrified, Krehbiel wrote. “They gave way to a sudden enthusiasm, and joined in the same patriotic refrain. The Welsh, in their turn, stood motionless in their ranks. On both sides officers gave the command to fire” but it was no use. “A common emotion was too strong for discipline; the weapons fell from their hands, and the descendants from the ancient Celts renewed upon the battlefield the fraternal ties which had formerly united their fathers.”

Music can awaken ancestral ties and unite people who would otherwise be ripping each other apart with bayonets. Nor was it just any music that brought the Welsh and the Bretons together. It was theirs. Sacred music, for those who share the same faith in God, has all the greater power to do the same. Therefore, the multiculturalist, battening on antagonism, will not be found inviting people to sing hymns regardless of their political views. I turn to another illustration, more powerful than that of the Welsh and the Bretons, since it had a wider chasm to bridge.

It was 1950, in a Manhattan apartment. The singer and actress Ethel Waters had come there to demand changes to the character Berenice, whom she was going to play in the Broadway production of The Member of the Wedding. She appealed directly to the author, Carson McCullers. Waters was black, the daughter of a girl raped at age 13; she had grown up in miserable poverty. She was also a baptized Catholic who never lost her Christian faith, despite her morally checkered decades in show business. McCullers was a white woman from a middle-class family; she had led her own checkered life, and she had no faith at all. She had conceived of Berenice as big, atheistic, and foul-mouthed, and Waters was there to throw her considerable weight against that creature of hopelessness.

Berenice and the two white children at the center of the play were supposed to sing a song they had made up. But Waters thought it absurd to represent a Georgia maid singing a song nobody in Georgia had ever heard of. She wanted instead the gospel song, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Here is its refrain:

I sing because I’m happy,

I sing because I’m free,

For His eye is on the sparrow,

And I know He watches me.

It is not a sprightly, happy-go-lucky song. Its mood is of confidence welling up amidst sorrow. Waters sang it to McCullers and her friends, moving that atheist to tears. McCullers gladly conceded, and Waters, Julie Harris, and the small boy, Brandon DeWilde, went on to make the play a smashing success both on Broadway and on screen in the 1952 film.

You cannot fully appreciate that gospel song unless you hear, in your soul, the Scripture that inspired it. Jesus tells his disciples that they will be persecuted, but they are not to fear. They are to place all their trust in the Father. From the Gospel of Matthew:

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

To embrace that teaching and to celebrate it in song is to incorporate yourself into the culture-nurturing power of a faith that has spanned 20 centuries and all the world. And that is the least we can say about it.

What inspired the writer of the lyrics, Civilla Martin, is also pertinent. She and her husband were visiting a couple in Elmira, New York, the Doolittles, “true saints of God,” as Martin described them. The wife was bedridden. The husband had to get back and forth from home to work in a wheelchair. Yet they were not disgruntled or angry. When Martin asked Mrs. Doolittle about their hopefulness, the bedridden woman replied, “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.” That simple reply, wrote Martin, gripped her and her husband’s hearts and set their imaginations afire. Hence the song, which Ethel Waters took to her heart, making it known throughout the world when she accompanied Billy Graham on his crusades.

How grubby, by comparison, seem the political concerns of the multiculturalist, as if some apparatchik had stolen up on a few comrades singing love songs, and in his impatience had knocked the bread and wine off the table, hollering that they had more important work to do. But what is more important, even in an earthly sense, than to build the soul?

I turn to Krehbiel again, in his day the most influential critic of music in America, as music editor of The New York Tribune in the 1880s till his death in 1923. I am looking at Volume 19 of The Century Magazine. Krehbiel was a frequent contributor to that monthly, commenting on the works of European composers, many of whom he championed when they were relatively unknown here, such as Wagner and Tchaikovsky. He sometimes traveled to the places where their music had taken root, to hear it in its cultural motherland.

The article I am reading is “Chinese Music.” It is accompanied by scores for five melodies, one of them, “The Jasmine Flower,” given with lyrics in Chinese and English. Krehbiel describes the simplicity of the Chinese pentatonic scale, asking his readers to consider what it might be like to range freely over the black keys of a piano. He presents the Chinese language also as fundamentally musical. The Chinese distinguish words by music, so that they “will quicker recognize a difference of a tone in the pitch of a word than such a vowel change as from short e to short i, the consonants remaining the same.” To their ears, the power of music is bound up with the power of language, with man’s attempt to see the truth and to convey what he has seen.

If so, then good music is indispensable to a moral and human education. Krehbiel cites the ancient Chinese emperor Chun (ca. 2300 B.C.), on how to bring up the youths of the governing class:

Teach [them] that through thy care they may become just, mild, and wise; firm, without severity; upholding the dignity and pride of their station without vanity or assumption. Express these doctrines in poems, that they may be sung to appropriate melodies accompanied by the music of instruments. Let the music follow the sense of the words; let it be simple and ingenuous, for vain, empty, and effeminate music is to be condemned. Music is the expression of the soul’s emotion; if the soul of the musician be virtuous, his music will be full of nobility and will unite the souls of men with the spirits of heaven.

Imagine the principal of an American high school, urging his assembled faculty to ground their instruction in music, to affirm the comely moral order to which virtuous music raises the human heart. His enemies would be recording his speech on their phones to get him fired. His friends would be thunderstruck, wondering whether he had lost his mind. He might as well be speaking to them in Chinese.

Or Greek. For Plato, too, as Krehbiel knows, insisted that true education is musical, meaning also that it is religious. Thus Krehbiel relates Chun’s understanding of the soul-forming power of music to the “lyrico-dramatic composition” of Wagner and his operas, and to ancient Greek drama, which “was religious in its essence,” springing “directly from the emotional part of man.” So my imaginary principal would find powerful allies in ancient China and in Greece, and in the magnanimous Felix Mendelssohn, who, when he first heard Allegri’s Miserere chanted in the Sistine Chapel, said he had experienced the very soul of music. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven—they too would all understand.

I fear that Chun’s wisdom would find no better reception from our college professors than from our schoolteachers. How many among them read Plato? Who wants to listen to Mendelssohn? Let alone to Mrs. Doolittle, singing the song she inspired Mrs. Martin to write, the song that Ethel Waters loved so dearly. When you scoff at moral, metaphysical, and religious truth, what remains for you to impart? Scientific information, perhaps; utilitarian skills; political directives. Hence the professoriate’s notorious jargon: ugly prose for ugly souls, to disguise bad faith and ignorance.

Krehbiel wrote for wiser hearts than theirs. He assumes that his readers know a little about Aeschylus and Sophocles, and about Plato’s views of music and education. He assumes their familiarity with current classical music. He praises the work of Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, a Jesuit priest who lived in China from 1750 to 1794, author of Memoires concernant l’historie, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, des Chinois, whose sixth volume of 17 is devoted to Chinese music. Krehbiel grew up speaking English and German, and he later taught himself four other languages while dabbling in many more. He does not insult his readers by translating that French title.

“But,” I hear the surly objection, “Krehbiel was writing for elites.” No, he wasn’t. The New York Tribune was a newspaper, after all, and The Century was the most popular magazine in America. But he did enjoy a unique advantage. In his day, the old world appeared to be opening into new glory, made possible by the power of the Industrial Revolution, while the destructive forces of that same revolution were still mainly subterranean, unfelt. Suddenly, anyone with a few years of school could go to a local library and read Shakespeare or Longfellow’s translation of Dante. Some of my copies of The Century come from the library of an iron mining company in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Innumerable people with access to a piano could order sheet music and learn to play Beethoven, or those Chinese airs whose scores Krehbiel included in his article. Not only could they do so; it was taken for granted that they would. The phonograph would bring excellent music, popular and classical, to millions more who could not play it.

What about the opportunity to encounter another culture? Suddenly, there were new means for doing that, too. Folk music, folk art, and folk tales had been elevated to worthy objects of study by scholars such as the Brothers Grimm, who had built up their muscles on the classics, and whose knowledge of language, literature, and art was encyclopedic. When that impetus was combined with new and quick and convenient means of travel, with the proliferation of newspapers and popular magazines, with photography and lithography, and with the first recording devices, all bets were off.

Krehbiel participated in that cultural enterprise too, promoting the work of Antonín Dvořák, the Slavic genius who brought American folk music to the world, just as he himself aimed to bring, for example, Finnish music to America. Even what moved him to write his book on Afro-American songs suggests that brief overlap of two forms of life. 

Over the years, Krehbiel had written some articles on those songs for the Tribune. These, he said, “had been clipped from the newspaper, placed in envelopes and indexed in several public libraries, and many requests came to [him] from librarians and students that they be republished in book-form.” Thus, we see librarians and their patronsso interested in a profoundly cultural project that they went out of their way to disseminate knowledge about it and to ask for more. The public library: a hallowed place where what had been the privilege of the wealthy or the highly educated was made available to millions.

I don’t know whether Krehbiel, who directed a church choir in Cincinnati when he was a teenage boy, lost the specifically Christian faith he had been brought up in. Of the broadly religious impetus of his work, there can be no question. When he read the words of Père Amiot, he must have felt as the Bretons did when they heard the Welshmen. Amiot, attempting to convey what music meant for his Chinese hosts, recalled that among “the ancient sages, who adopted music as the subject of their deepest meditations, and made it into the object of their most serious work, there were some who clearly wrote of a principle upon which they built a science regarded as a universal, a science of all other sciences.” Music with no felt connection with the order of heaven was, to the Chinese, a jangle of noise, incomprehensible, and degrading to the soul.

But that is where we are now. And the multiculturalists among us? In any genuine culture the world has known, they would be regarded as disappointing creatures, homeless, ill-educated, ill-bred, stunted in the soul. They have made themselves into political tools, and in the oncoming battle between humanity and the data-sifting, nothing-knowing, all-engorging machine, they will prove worse than useless. As for the rest of us, we must do what no people have ever had to do before. We must treat ourselves as if our brains and souls have been ravaged and left barren. We must then make ourselves into beings for whom the stories I have told would seem matters of course. We must learn, as if from the beginning, to tend and to love the land of our birth, to bend the knee to God above, and to sing.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/society-culture/the-land-that-hath-no-music