How do you see music in conversation or in relationship with the liberal arts? Is music part of the liberal arts?

I would say a very emphatic yes, because it’s one of the original seven. So if we’ve got the trivium and the quadrivium, the trivium are all of the arts of the word—grammar, logic and rhetoric—and they’re geared towards knowledge of the self, and all of the quadrivial arts are geared towards number and knowledge of the material world. In the quadrivium, music is the art of measurement and measuring tones. Pythagoras already knew in 500 BC that if you take a monochord—a string—and then you pluck that full string, and then you pluck exactly half that string, you get a 2:1 relationship. You get an octave, and it sounds like the same note to us, just a higher or lower version, but it is not obvious why we should recognize it as the same note because their frequencies are completely different. There’s nothing in the physics of it that would say, okay, yeah, 440 Hertz and 880 Hertz, that’s going to sound like the same note. But yet that’s what happens when we recognize an octave and this is perceived across all cultures. Every culture has music, and everybody recognizes the octave, although they divide the octave differently, depending upon where you are in the world. But everybody figured out the octave. We discovered it, we didn’t invent it, which means that there’s an element of music that is us responding to the natural order. 

The liberal arts are supposed to free a person, right? So when you study music in this sort of way, investigating the order of things, music becomes a reflection of the patterns that exist everywhere in the cosmos. And if that’s a little abstract, I always mention how back in the Middle Ages, they had a different sense of astronomy than we do, because they didn’t have modern science. They thought of the music of the spheres and the heavenly bodies rotating in a certain kind of harmony, and they thought that the music here on Earth was a reflection of that celestial harmony. We know a little bit more now—there’s not actual music in space—but there’s the orbital resonance of several planets and their moons. If we look at Jupiter and its three inner moons, they have a 1:2:4 orbital relationship, meaning one moon is orbiting twice as fast as the other, and the third four times as fast. If you speed up that relationship, that’s two octaves. That’s insane. The fact that it’s happening out there in space, and it’s also the same thing that causes us to hear an octave. It’s just like if I tap on the table here 440 times per second, then you’re gonna hear an A. 

I love this definition of music more the older I get. I stole it from Dr. Tacke, and Dr. Tacke learned it from a harpsichord builder whose name is Keith Hill. Keith Hill says that music is the science of proportion and the art of arranging those proportions to express meaning. And that’s all the math behind music. It’s all proportion. It’s all ratios. I did this experiment with the Music 204 class where I played a Chopin Prelude in E minor, and the form of it is basically a parallel period. So it starts on Sol, scale degree 5, and then it goes down to Re, and then it has to start over again because it didn’t get to Do, and so you have to do the whole phrase again, but this time it goes through a climax and finally gets to Do, our home note, after much trying. The golden ratio of the piece is precisely where it turns to go to the climax. And so I just did a little tampering with the score, and I put the climax way earlier, so it’s not at the golden ratio of the piece. And then I played the first part of the piece at the end, and the kids were just like, that’s all whack. The climax doesn’t come at the right proportion. We know that instinctively, because music is also a story, and it kind of imitates or mimics the human quest for fulfillment. 

I always think of the liberal arts as initial inquiries into the self and the world that are supposed to free you to study higher sciences. I mean science as in the old term, which is an organized body of knowledge, not like biology, psychology, what have you. And the queen of the sciences is theology, and right below that is philosophy. So the liberal arts are initially intended to lead you to those two doorsteps, to philosophy and theology. And when you study music as a liberal art, that’s where you’re going, because you’re investigating the order of the world through music, and you’re asking the question, why? Why is the music like this? Why is it not like that? And so you begin to realize that everything in a score of music is contingent. Nothing has to be the way it is. Nothing explains itself. And then that’s when you know that you can connect that with Aquinas and his five proofs for the existence of God. One of the best arguments for God’s existence is the contingency argument, and music is a participation in that, because the composer had to make choices at every step of the way in the composing process. This is another thing that connects music with theology and philosophy, because Aquinas says that art and prudence are sisters. What that means is they both answer the question, what’s the next right thing that I should do? Prudence is practical wisdom. It allows me to make the right choices, to know the good, and then hopefully to act on it. With the four cardinal virtues, justice is equal to the good thing that you should do, and prudence helps you know what the good thing to do is, and then fortitude helps you do that, restraining all external threats to your doing that good. And then temperance restrains you from all the internal threats to your doing that good thing. But prudence helps you know what the right thing is. 

And then you realize that in an art, in the liberal arts, there’s an aspect of producing something. The liberal arts produce things. Yes, they free a person. Yes, they’re good in themselves. But they also are geared towards a making of some sort—not a servile making, like the servile arts, like textiles or carpentry, architecture—the liberal arts are good to do in themselves. They’re inherently good and they ennoble, but they also enable the person. They enable the person to make sentences without error. They enable a person to make a logical argument. They enable a person to speak convincingly and give a speech to a crowd, and they allow you to make things and manipulate things with numbers. I always love this little short, quadrivial summary, that arithmetic is pure number, geometry is number in space, music is number in time, and astronomy, which is basically now our modern physics, is number in space and time. It’s just so elegant.

So music participates in that cosmic ordering, and when we know that, we take into consideration what St Bernard of Clairvaux says, that what we love we will eventually become. So it’s really important to love what is beautiful and to love what is well-ordered. This is why art matters so much—it doesn’t change us overnight like Ebenezer Scrooge, and it’s not a direct cause and effect, that because I listened to X piece, now I’m a good person. But art develops our appetites and our desires. It actually pulls our desires one way or another. And if you begin to love that stuff, you begin to conform to it, just like if you have a boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, whatever. When you get married, you become one with that spouse, and hopefully you become more like each other, although retaining your distinct differences, but you become what you love. That connects into theology, because the imitation of Christ is what we’re here for, right? We’re trying to get to heaven. We want to become perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. We conform ourselves to that which we love, and music can help us conform our lives to the beautiful.

At Hillsdale, we talk a lot about truth and goodness, but less about beauty. Obviously there are studies like literature or art that include beauty, but we don’t talk specifically about the goodness of beauty or the necessity for beauty as good in itself. So how do you see beauty in relation to music? How do you think music conveys or creates beauty?

This is a great question, and actually such a big question that it’s too big for an interview, but it’s still worthwhile. So we know that beauty is a property of being just like truth and goodness. So in everything, there exists beauty. I always rely on Thomas Aquinas as a starting place, and he says that we call things beautiful at the intersection of three things: wholeness, which he calls in his Latin integritas, integrity; consonantia, which we’ll translate as harmony; and then claritas, and that’s translated as radiance. 

What does wholeness mean? It means it’s about one thing—it hangs together as one. There is a sort of unifying principle throughout the whole work. You can think of the rose window at Notre Dame. It’s whole in such a way that none of the little medallions are over-contributing or under-contributing to the sense of the whole. And they’re beautifully outlined according to the pattern of eight, which is a reflection on the number eight, which is the number for eternity. The consonantia comes into play when you’re thinking about all of the little parts and how they contribute to making the whole, not just one part. And this goes for singing in choir, too. A choir is less beautiful when you’ve got one or two people sticking out. It’s no longer harmonious, because not everybody is doing their equal part, and it doesn’t even have to be equal parts, but the parts in due proportion. That’s another way you can translate harmony—as due proportion, because sometimes things need to be unequal for them to be proportional.

And then claritas. The best way I’ve heard this explained was by Father Gregory Pine, who says that it seems like this thing was made by an intelligence for an intelligence. So the clarity of the form, the clarity of the essence of the thing, radiates to your mind, and you pick it up—for example, “that’s a beautiful rose window. If it’s a rose window, I can tell what it is.” Let me just use music as an example in performance. Sometimes if a chord is out of tune, a chord doesn’t ring as well. And there’s not this kind of clarity of overtones that will happen when you lock in a chord. And I would say that the first two, wholeness and harmony, are objective qualities within the thing, and claritas is a little bit more subjective. The radiance is the thing that you say, oh wow, that’s a choir. It’s the thing that leaps out at you and projects its radical intelligibility.

I always like to investigate the order of these three things within a score of music. How are the parts contributing to the whole structure, to the form? How do those choices that the composer made contribute to the wholeness? Does it seem like that part is out of place? Or is it supposed to be there? Because if it wasn’t there, it would be lacking something. Another way to think about wholeness is that nothing is extra and nothing is missing. When you look at a famous painting or sculpture, like the Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, you don’t say to yourself, “I wish he would have used more green.” No, it’s perfect the way it is. It’s absolutely perfect. All the parts are working harmoniously together. There’s nothing extra, nothing missing.

So then music comes in. There’s so much to say about music, and there’s this whole play between order and surprise. We love order, but we also love surprise, because nature is both orderly and surprising. You can look at a pine tree and know that it belongs to the form of pine trees, and you can look at one pine tree. You know that that belongs to the family of pine trees, but every single pine tree is so varied in its presentation in the sensible particular. Then you could think to yourself, “Okay, so beauty has to do with pleasing the senses,” which is what Aquinas says. That which you see pleases you, but that’s more like the effect that it has on you, rather than the objective qualities of the thing itself, right?

So, if beauty were subjective, that means truth and goodness would be as well. And I love this pithy definition of beauty, that beauty is simply truth and goodness perceived by the physical senses. I just love that. It’s so right. But beauty delights not only our physical senses, for example, our aural senses when we listen to a piece of music, but it also can delight our interior senses too, especially our imagination. And we can then have like this sort of contemplative delight that’s the mind influencing the senses and the emotions, which is irresistible for us because we’re both matter and spirit. We’re made in the image and likeness of God. We’re formed from the dust of the earth. But then we also have the Ruach, the breath of God, breathed into us like He breathed it into Adam. And so art, and specifically music, is this combination of the sensual aspect of the auditory, pleasing sounds with this rational mind stuff— it’s the perfect combination of the rational and the sensual. And we as human beings can’t resist that concoction. And actually all art is, in its own way, trying to appeal both to our senses, internally and externally, our physical senses and our interior, intellectual, mental senses, especially the imagination. 

So I’m not really answering the question of what music has to do with beauty. But Arnold Schoenberg in the twentieth century said something very interesting—that he cured himself from the disease of needing to make beautiful music. So he cured himself of this “oppressive” view that it’s the artist’s job and responsibility to craft something that’s beautiful. We, as Christians, know that God is beauty and that He is the source of all beauty. So once you say that “I have freed myself from the shackles of trying to create something beautiful,” you have metaphysically taken God completely out of your art-making. But I will go one step further, and I’ll be devil’s advocate, and I will say that things that don’t appear beautiful to the senses, like the crucifixion of Jesus, are still beautiful. Actually, that’s probably the most beautiful thing humanity has ever seen. And that’s where we rise from the sensual and the sensible level now to the supernatural level of beauty, where, with your mind, you can perceive the beauty of that self-sacrificial gift of the Son offering himself to the Father on our behalf—that self-emptying act of love. And we recognize that it’s so beautiful, and it’s whole because it’s perfectly in keeping with his nature as God. And God’s being is to overflow goodness, because God is all good. And the principle is, the good is diffusive of itself, bonum diffusivum sui. Good spills over. And that’s why we have creation, because God was enjoying Himself and His goodness so much that He wanted to share His goodness with all of creation. So his sacrifice on the cross is beautiful, and we can perceive that with our intellect, but our senses tell us otherwise. 

But there are different levels of beauty, and that’s why, when you get really great art, it appeals to us on a sensible level, on a sensual level, on an intellectual contemplative level, and even on a will level. You can actually get a catharsis after experiencing a great work of art. You listen to, for example, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the whole way through, and you’re somehow changed because you just witnessed something so grand and miraculous that a human could come up with something like that—through divine inspiration, probably. But even with novels, it’s the same thing. It can cleanse and adjust your will to order its appetites more rightly, and you can say to yourself, “I want to be like that character, because that character is virtuous in ways that I’m not. And I’m seeing a lack in myself that this person has, and I kind of want to be like that character.” That’s the appeal to the will. And so great art can do all three things. It can delight the senses, it can delight the mind, and it can delight the will. And it does that when it tells a story. And in The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton says that “art is the signature of man.” And if art is the signature of man, that means that man is the signature of God, right? And any time that we cocreate, or as Tolkien said, sub-create, with God, we’re participating in that creative faculty that God, in His goodness, has bestowed on the world. I heard this once from Samuel Andreyev, who’s a modern, living composer. He says that “it seems to me there’s no better reason to become an artist or a musician than to celebrate being itself.” I don’t think he’s a Christian, but that is a true statement—to celebrate being—because if you put a capital B on that, that’s celebrating God, who is the ground of all being. He is “I AM,” the very act of “to be” itself. And that’s what we do when we do music. We’re participating in a metaphysical reality of ordering tones that reveals the natural, created order of being, the way that God made everything else in this world. And the fact that we discovered all these principles, like we discovered the harmonic series—we discovered that based in every single tone is a structure of other tones that are higher that form a major chord, and then you go up another octave, and it forms a dominant seventh chord, and then you go up higher, and then it has micro tones—it’s all built in. It’s all built into nature.

Good music can really change a person. It’s the Bernard of Clairvaux thing where you begin to resemble what you love. I had a really profound experience on the March for Life trip when I was a senior in high school, and we went to DC, like everybody does, and we had Mass in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Music had always been with me my whole life, but I had never heard a choir as good as the Shrine choir, especially for Mass, and in that kind of a space, too, and with that kind of repertoire, and so in the introit of the Mass, I started to cry because the sopranos were just soaring so high, and it sounded like heaven on earth. It gave voice to the soaring of my spirit to God. And I get chills just now thinking about it again because I’m right back there. Bishop Barron says this a lot with beauty, too: beauty doesn’t just please us. It actually invades, and it changes the one to whom it breaks through. And Pope Benedict said that beauty is the arrow that wounds the heart, that opens it up to receive truth. Beauty allows truth to come in more smoothly. And so my heart was changed. And even if you go on YouTube, and you look at the Bach Mass in B minor by the Netherlands Bach society. One day, I just decided to scroll the comments; always a fun thing. And I can’t tell you how many comments I read from self-proclaimed atheists that said “this music is turning this atheist into a believer,” or “the music of Bach was the thing that converted me to Christianity,” over and over and over again, because you encounter something so magnificent in its splendor, in its claritas, where you say, now that’s real music. You’re not judging the music—the music is judging you with its greatness. When you listen to that Mass in B Minor, or Beethoven 9, or any great symphony or great work of art, it’s judging you. You have to rise up to it. And that’s a little bit of the Divine breaking through.

So I think that music can do such a great good to deepen a person’s faith. And Augustine also has something interesting to say, because he said, if you get too swept up when you’re singing your prayers, you’ve got to caution yourself a little bit, because if you’re focusing only on the beauty instead of where the beauty is pointing you towards, that can get a little bit disordered. But the beauty should order you towards the source of that beauty. So I’ll just make that little caveat. But it can help enliven the faith. It can help deepen the faith. For me, it definitely has done that. 

The Church has the longest and richest musical tradition, right? So I’ll just say some things about Gregorian chant, since we’re talking about music and faith. Chant is an art of pure melody. Aristotle says that art imitates human beings pursuing their final telos—their fulfillment, their beatitudo, their happiness, their eudaimonia. That’s what all of these mimetic arts are—mimetic meaning “imitative.” They imitate human beings on a quest for their ultimate fulfillment. Now I know that in music this happens in a very abstract way, but hear me out. When you think about Western music of the last 500 years or so, a lot of this music ends with a V to I cadence, an authentic cadence. We have to ask why did this convention form and why has it pervaded tonal music to this day? We don’t tire of this kind of ending because it’s not a tacked-on appendage. Rather, it’s a natural outgrowth of the musical drama that has unfolded through tones. At the end of a piece, those tones have reached the telos, that final cadence, that they were moving towards. It’s so fascinating that we on this planet never reach our own telos, but we’re engrossed with making and listening to music that reaches its own internal telos. You can tell when you stop right before the end, right before that final “home” note—imagine if all of our music did that. Wouldn’t you go insane? You want the story to come to its fruition, its fulfillment, the ultimate purpose. That reveals something about us, too, that we can’t escape our own telos. It’s baked into our music and the music’s ending. We don’t get that on this earth. We have our little goods that we pursue from our day to day. For example, I got up; I brushed my teeth; I took a shower; I ate breakfast; I came here to work; I taught my first lesson. Why do you do that? You ask, why? Why? Why? Why? All of these whys are nested in higher whys. Keep asking the question, and the final answer is some teleologically oriented aim, right? I want to get to heaven. That’s why I do everything that I do. Music does the same thing. Those little cadences peppered all along your piece—those are little goods. Those are little ends. Those are little teloi. The tones are searching for the ultimate rest, which you get in the final cadence. But it’s a perfect metaphor for the human journey, the human quest for fulfillment, because I get a little rest here at this cadence. I have a V to I in the home key, like your Mozart sonata, and then the tones are going to do that same cadence in the dominant key. But that’s not where it’s finally resting. It’s gotta get home, right? 

So anyways, chant. Chant imitates so many things. And by imitate, I’m speaking of an Aristotelian conception of the term in which some formal aspect of the thing being imitated appears in a new medium for our delighted contemplation. First of all, kairos versus chronos time. We’re obsessed in this life with measuring our time: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years, right? But chant lifts you out of that into the kairos time, which is God’s time. God’s time is the appointed time. It’s the right time. The incarnation happens at the fullness of time. And everything happens in God’s time. Nothing happens in our chronos time that is not overseen by God. So He knows when He wants everything to happen. But chant lifts you out of the measured, metered pulsations of daily rhythmic, cyclical activity, and it takes you into something that’s timeless and eternal, because there are no measured pulses in chant. There is a big metacrusis, a beat beyond the beat. There’s nothing measured about that. It’s floating, which is why the chant also imitates formal qualities of incense. Psalm 141 says, “Let my prayer come before you like incense.” And the swirling of those melismas in chant is like the swirling of the incense as a prayer offering rising to God. Chant also imitates what we should be, which is holy, and I mean the technical definition of holy, which is set apart—we should be set apart for God. And that’s why Gregorian chant sounds completely unlike everything else that we listen to. But the irony is, everything in Western music is descended from Gregorian chant. All of us are descended from Adam and Eve and really Noah’s family, right? And all of our music now is descended from the “Adam and Eve” of Gregorian chant, and that’s descended from the earlier Jewish chanting. 

And not only does chant imitate holiness, but it also imitates the evangelical counsel of poverty and the virtue of humility, because you have to blend as one voice, una voce, and that single melodic line is impoverished in a way—it doesn’t give you the luxury, the richness of harmony, although there can be a harmonic backdrop to the melodic structure. It can be outlining a triad, but it’s not harmonized. There’s a certain detachment from the sensuality of harmony so that the sacred text can shine through. And so you have an imitation through an abstracted medium of the poverty of spirit: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” There you go—Gregorian chant. 

Dr. Daniel Kuehler is an Artist and Teacher of Piano at Hillsdale College.