One of the things that most clearly distinguishes most Christian piano music from what, for lack of time and space, I’m going to call serious, or art music (ie. what the public calls ‘classical music’, though I would frankly prefer something much less dead-sounding) is its attitude toward modulation. Modulation is the art of travelling from one key to another. It is not that easy to do well. Nor is it handled in a very sophisticated manner by many Christian piano (or choir anthem) composers today.  Generally speaking, there is really one endlessly repeated formula for modulation in so much of our music, that of playing through a hymn a couple of times in one key, and then, in the space of a few bars, suddenly jerking the music up a half step (or, more rarely, a whole step) and doing it again more triumphantly. I don’t particularly care for that ‘modulation’ to being with (for reasons I'll get into in another article), and am less impressed that it seems to be the only one in town. I am going to suggest to anyone interested that we really ought to consider a much wider variety of possible key changes, and also take the trouble to do more than simply stop on one wildly out-of-place ‘pivot’ chord to get us into the new key, but rather consider where we have been (keywise) and where we are going and try to get there a bit more smoothly, and also that we should place more importance on those spots of transition than we generally do. This means abandoning the one-formula-fits-all method, and it means that modulation is really not something you can learn in an afternoon, or by using a simple chart such as the one in the back of some hymnals. It is instead, much more of a life study, much the way our faith ought to be a life study, rather than a utilitarian thing we 'do' once a week. In fact, I am going to suggest a connection between the richer, deeper, and more difficult approach I’m suggesting, which some of you may be thinking sounds like so much elitist snobbery, and its importance to our faith. If you’ve been practicing ‘modulation’ all your life in this simple, limited way, and it works for you and your congregation, why on earth would you want to change it? I’m going to spend this article outlining some reasons for that.

Often, when there is a conflict between those who do and those who don’t, or those who are rich in something and those who are poor in it, it is hard to draw the line between those who can’t and those who just don’t want to. I suspect that if more of our Christian pianist/composers wanted to modulate more effectively, they would do it—not as well or in as great numbers as one would like, considering that not all minds are created with the ability to do the things that are hard, but an increase in desire would surely mean at least some increase in execution. Most of us can do a lot more than we think we can, but we have an inborn reflex that rejects anything which is perceived as threatening—and that includes education, or things which we have to strive for with no guarantee of attaining, as opposed to those things we already have, which we often tend to assume came naturally.

This article will only scratch the surface regarding the technical aspects of modulating; it is mainly about exploring the idea itself, giving it some philosophical perspective, and yes, connecting it to the gospels, which is not being done to accuse composers who don’t modulate well (or at all) of being unchristian, but to uncover out what I believe is a worldview which informs the common attitude toward music making. I would stop well short of calling it unchristian, but I do think it is taking the easy way out, which is something that is usually not found in the thinking of the gospel writers (to say nothing of the attitudes of Jesus himself). I hope that people who have no idea of advanced musical practices will stick around since I am writing mostly to describe something which can be understood by non-musicians on a philosophical level; seldom will I dip into the well of nitty-gritty. But I’m afraid it will require some patience, which is one of the first requisites for modulating.

I arrived at this novel idea one morning—the thought of connecting the art of modulating to the ideas found in the gospels—and found it attractive precisely because I haven’t seen it done before. It seemed fresh, but it also did what I have heard that thinking in general does: it creates something new by the fusion of old ideas. It is in the connections between things that thinking happens. Metaphors and similes are so powerful because they explore often unforeseen connections. Anytime Jesus said ‘The kingdom of heaven is like…" or told a parable, he was demonstrating the power of these thoughtful connections. Modulating is also a way to connect things. Listen to these two versions of the opening of Blessed Assurance:

example　

Most of us, I think, will have been able to detect that the second version is higher than the first. Those more musically inclined might have been able to add to this by saying that the second is four steps higher than the first—on the ‘dominant’ of the first key. If you are not given to music theory, don’t worry. Dominant is simply a musical buzzword that means it is on the fifth note up from the bottom of the scale; it is an interesting word, because it shares the same root as words like dominate and kingdom; in its Latin form Dominus it means Lord. It was once considered God’s favorite pitch (by a raft of medieval music theorists).

A piece of classical music of Mozart’s era would have made a pretty big deal out of this relationship; it would have formed the harmonic backbone of the whole piece, most likely. Probably the music would have begun with a tune in one key, and then, over time it would have gradually modulated into a new key whose principle pitch, or gravitational pull, or place of rest, or center, was on the dominant note of the first key. The journey to that new key might take several minutes, or it might be fairly abrupt, but it was so common that composers who didn’t know how to do it were in for a pretty rough ride. You'll note that it is not 'right next door'--it is several keys away, in fact, which keeps many less-trained musicians from discovering it, apparently. That's not all bad. Mozart and his gang probably overdid it a little. But it is useful to note that, in past centuries this dominant key was considered musically closer than the keys that were in the immediate physical vicinity of the home key.

After arriving on this new plane, a second tune or series of tunes was given out, and the first section of the piece closed in this key. If it was a short piece, the whole process might have taken only seconds. If, on the other hand, it was a long piece, it might be prolonged. There are some pieces by Mozart where he modulated to the dominant a couple of times-- the first is a false start and he has to try it again; the first one is too weak to convince us that we have actually picked up and moved to the new key and are not just visiting. The ears of great composers are fascinating—like wise consumers who won’t buy every fad item because some excitable fellow shouts at you on television about how great it is, their ears aren’t convinced by every local shift in the musical winds, and have to set up a modulation with care and precision so that the full musical weight has relocated.

After going away from the original key and ending up in the new one, a new section begins which generally includes a whole lot of musical moving around, but eventually travels to the original key, where it stays. The idea is that the music has to achieve balance harmonically, by beginning and ending in the same place, travelling away from it in the middle to achieve drama, and a kind of tension which is then resolved happily by returning to the place of origin, and not incidentally, carrying the tunes that first appeared in other keys with it. It is a noble idea; it is also a pedestrian idea. Every episode of a 1950s sitcom could be described this way—order which is threatened, and then a happy ending by restoring things the way they were in the beginning so nothing has changed. Whew!

I think it is safe to say that the philosophical ship has sailed on the classical version of modulation; I don’t know anybody, including ‘classical’ composers of today who use the method I’ve just described. But there are a couple of things about this scheme that have not worn out their welcome, and this brings us to philosophy (and, eventually, the gospels).

There are two things to note here. This first is that modulation is a transition (not an abrupt change)—a time when the old is going but not yet gone, and the new is still coming into being. It is not a time of stability; it is a time of picking up and searching for something new. Most of us are not too fond of that.

When I was at a church some years ago there was a period of time when they did not have a head pastor. This seemed to enormously bother everyone but myself: I enjoyed the fact that we had a new speaker every Sunday, and that there was some sense of the unknown and unexpected to break into what was a pretty well programmed routine. I knew then and I know now that this is not a typical response: most of us like to have a feeling of stability, and I’ve noticed that most of our popular Christian music provides it by being pretty repetitive and staying in the same place harmonically. Most praise songs avoid modulating until they absolutely have to; ie. we get completely bored by staying in the same key so long that we have to do something to give our ears relief. Then we get thrown with little warning into another key; a rough transition indeed, but one which is forgotten as soon as we show just as much stubbornness about staying rooted to our next position.

I once compared this to a person who spends their life on the couch watching tv, only leaving their house to go to the end of their driveway and back to get the mail, then one day packs up and moves to Borneo where he rents a house, a tv, and spends the rest of his life watching tv on the couch. Does the move to Borneo seem a little out of place with the rest of the narrative? (Abraham, by contrast, spent a good part of his life in transit after God told him to relocate.)

By contrast with this approach, which avoids transition until it is unavoidable, and then localizes it to one wrenching moment, the music of artists like Mozart, Beethoven and company was in an almost constant state of movement, preparing for the modulation before it happened, and affirming it, (even questioning it) afterward. Obviously this sort of technical approach requires a lot more harmonic vocabulary, and complexity of thought in terms of harmonic direction and understanding of purpose. It is far easier to stick a few pleasant chords under a familiar melody and worry about whether it goes anyplace afterward, or not at all, than it is to be constantly planning ahead. Or referring to what has already happened. Most of what survives in the ‘great art’ department contains materials that refer to other materials in the same work—either ahead or behind it; the details are reflected by the large plan of the piece, and the other way. This means that there is a concern with the ‘form’ of a piece; it also means that the piece is ‘organic;’ that it all belongs together and does not appear to have been slapped together out of the composer’s several favorite ideas until he ran out of them. A modulation will not simply be a transition from one thing to another, but will also participate in the logic of the piece as a whole.

I realize that this sort of thing is not popular. For one thing, it is much more complicated than the standard practice of staying in one key until the verse ends, giving out a measure of the V7 chord to the new key, and going straight there—invariably one step or one half-step up from the first (a poor choice in itself because it has nothing in common with the first key and the ‘modulation’ cannot help being wrenching). People seem to like this sort of thing, which is why it will remain the most frequently done; it is a musical cliché, but clichés get that way for a reason. There is always a minority who like to point out what is crude and simplistic, but they are a minority, and who says they aren’t a bunch of elitist snobs?

By the way, if you happen to think that way, you are more likely to lump all the 'classical' composers together, and assume that their music pretty much sounds the same. I should point out that, for a while, when the 'sonata' was new, 'classical' composers weren't very good at modulating, either. They tended to do it pretty abruptly, and formulaically. Early Mozart pieces show us that it took him a while to grow in this area as well. The fact that the most gifted composers of the time struggled with the concept might give us hope for ourselves, but remember, this was 200 years ago. Musical technology has improved a bit since then.

I was on the internet a while back and saw a version of a hymn tune whose chords (all 3 of them) were all in C major; when the verse ended, the next began in D major, without any attempt whatever to connect them; then the next in E, same sudden shift. Several of the people who commented on this version found it to be very ‘powerful.’ Obviously there is not going to be any wholesale attempt to try more difficult, integrated modulations when a gratuitous key change is so exciting to so many people. You would think the effect would wear off after a while but it doesn’t. And since hardly anybody listens to music with an ear for before and after, any local effect is bound to get a reaction from listeners. I am proposing another way, but I’m not doing it because it will seem evidently superior to most of your congregation. In fact, if you want to sell your music to as many people as possible I would advise against taking any of my advice. Of course, if the narrow way was all that popular it wouldn't be the narrow way.

So why do it at all? Aren’t these just a bunch of rules designed to make everybody feel bad but an elect few? And aren’t they just as narrow and uncreative as I’m accusing today’s general practice of being?

Actually, no. When I mentioned Mozart’s scheme of modulation above, I neglected to mention that Schubert had a quite different approach to the pivotal key shifts in his piano composition, and that Beethoven had a third alternative. I didn’t mention that all three of them constantly experimented with the way to make a modulation effective and while the basic plan was usually the same, the details vary enormously each time, with plenty of room for creativity and invention. And perhaps I didn’t make clear that the point is not that I want people to write like Mozart: far from it. The idea that your modulations stand for more than a single moment in time, that they should be introduced and finished well, and that they should be given more thought than ‘well, this is the way everybody else does it so here goes’—this is what I had in mind, not that you slavishly imitate what somebody did 200 years ago because everything was better then and the world these days is just completely gone downhill. It is the philosophy of paying attention to details, having the bigger picture in mind, and not just tacking on an often ill-fitting formula that I am hoping you’ll value. I can’t really get any more specific than that at the moment because this article is already too long and I haven’t driven my point home yet. Showing you why must come before we start to explore how, which is a long and exciting enterprise. Giving you a one-size-fits-all way to modulation is exactly what I don’t want you to do. The kind of recipe that shows you in five minutes what should take years of experimentation and struggle is exactly the sort of lifeless, meaningless paint-by-numbers approach I’m hoping you’ll avoid. If you don’t want to avoid it there are about 500 websites offering a brief lesson in how to jack up your piece a half-step. There are dozens of composers who make, perhaps, decent livings and have achieved within their circles pretty good reputations with a handful of compositional tricks, one of which is the old sudden half-step modulation. So while I’m being brutally honest about things, let me add that if you want commercial success you don’t need to try this hard. But if you really want to have something to say musically you are going to have to learn to say it. Just like someone who wants to be a poet can’t get all of their ideas from greeting cards.

Perhaps I’m being unfair here: by comparing the music of today’s market-driven, mass-consumed Christian piano music, intended not to demand much of the minds of its listeners by stretching their musical vocabulary in any way, allowing them to simply bask in the pretty sounds, nor to require that its composers be unusually or uniquely gifted, to the music of a trio of musical giants whose music is still being listened to a couple hundred years or more later is like comparing apples to…tanks? There were many, many composers who were alive in Beethoven’s time whose business it was to set familiar tunes in ways that encouraged humming along and tended to confirm listener expectations instead of challenging them with formal innovations or transitional passagework. If I wanted to set the bar a little closer than Valhalla I would find the names of those composers and use them as a standard of comparison. Names like…uh….ummm…..

Musicologists know the names of some of them; they wind up in footnotes occasionally. But, oddly, the ones who were writing simply for the temporary pleasure of people who wanted music to flow like water out of a faucet tend to be forgotten about by the next generation. They are replaced by others with the same method of working. There is always a need for this kind of approach to music as evidenced by the market. If you are commercially successful, or want to be that way, there is, frankly, not much to recommend the long, lonely road of improving one’s craft or taking the hard way out. Technical challenge and the surprise or scorn of one’s contemporaries does not attract many people. So I’m not worried that anything I have to say here will interrupt the delicate balance between a few great musical practitioners whose music will be celebrated by both experts and novices for some time to come because it says something to them that the other music simply does not--and the much larger group that fills the immediate needs of the bulk of listeners with tuneful and pretty music that comes as-is and does not suggest that there is a necessary process of cultivating one’s ears so that what is not understandable now will become so later.

So what am I suggesting here? That you should attempt long-term fame as opposed to the popular grassroots here-and-now fame? How is that any more Christian than the other kind? It’s not. The main purpose is to improve your craft, whether it brings recognition or not. For those able to do it, there seems to be a close connection with the spiritual here as well. Doing one's best as against doing what will win easy approval is actually one of Jesus' sub-themes, it seems to me. It may be a surprise to you how much of an elitist Jesus appears to be in that respect (I'll elaborate in another article).  Obviously, we are on a collision course then with the idea that the gospels must be made real for everyone, regardless of training, and really shouldn't ask too much of them. Art frequently falls on the wrong side of this divide, in many people's estimation. It is an idea which may be worth many more strokes of my fingers as we try to figure it out together. Meanwhile, if you are used to thinking of artists, writers, and composers who can get college professors excited or get their works displayed in a museum well after their death as just a bunch of dry bones types whose ideas about workmanship are obviously useless and without any real substance; wasted words, wasted notes, wastes of paint, (not to mention contempt for all those ‘real people’) what I’m going to show you in a minute will be a surprise. Those Gospels that form the written backbone of your faith were written by people who took some of these ‘scholarly’ ideas seriously. Maybe we wouldn’t have them otherwise. Maybe if bright people like St. Paul hadn’t done what they did our very religion wouldn’t be around now, either. For every missionary journey he made there are now letters filled with dozens of long sentences, confusing illustrations, apparently contradictory stands on things: this is not a man who thought what he had to say would be easy, and it contains few formulas. (How we treat these books, excerpting a few popular verses, and ignoring the context in which various passages were written, for instance, is another matter.)

When I discussed a philosophical approach to modulation above I concentrated on two things. The first was that there was transition involved, namely a bridge from the old to the new, and that composers who take this idea seriously also make sure that the moment-to-moment functionality of a measure of music is reflected in its larger purpose, and refers to other musical moments scattered throughout the life of the composition. The writers of the gospels shared these concerns. While many Christians today like to think of Jesus as a completely new thing that has come into the world, focusing only on a few verses of comfort and promise to back that up, and to distinguish themselves and their Jesus from the cultures around them, the gospel writers did not have so narrow a focus.

Many of them sprinkled their accounts quite liberally with scriptures from what we now call the Old Testament. They thought of them as prophecies that pointed to the life history, ministry, and purpose of Jesus. Some of them are a bit strained: for example, the place in Matthew where Jesus is entering Jerusalem in triumph on what we now call Palm Sunday. All of the gospel writers quote a verse from Zechariah as a prophetic pointer to that moment. Matthew, however, has some difficulty understanding a device in Hebrew poetry called parallelism--the specific kind I refer to is climaxing. Often the poet will repeat a line, but not exactly. If there is a number in it, that number gets raised in the second line. for instance, this made-up example--

There are six things I like about Hebrew poetry
Seven that make me sing for joy

--may sound like I can’t make up my mind about how many things I like about Hebrew poetry, but this is in fact a standard poetic convention. So when the prophet writes

‘behold your king comes to you riding on a donkey
a colt, the foal of a donkey’

he is simply steering clear of exact repetition, and in this case, providing a synonym, or a more exact description of the animal on the second go around. Like ‘classical’ composers (the better ones, anyway) the ancient Hebrew poets wanted to provide a sense of formal design through repetition but they didn’t want to shut the mind off by giving out exactly the same thing they’d already said; they handled this conflict by the use of developing repetition.

Unfortunately, Matthew doesn’t get the point; he thinks this means Jesus is supposed to be riding on two different animals (of wildly different heights!) which is, if you’ve seen it transferred to the big or little screen, pretty funny. Matthew is alone among the gospel writers in doing this; the others either understood what was going on or discreetly decided to go with their common sense.

There is obviously a risk in trying to make connections; if you don’t know your source, or the traditions out of which it sprang, there is a chance you will look silly. Nevertheless, all four gospel writers engage in this pursuit with great frequency. This includes many creative interpretations with which our Jewish friends will often disagree. Often the degree of new-ness dwarfs the importance of the old, as when Jesus effectively rewrites Mosaic tradition with a series of ‘but I say to you’ admonitions. Even here, however, he is bouncing off of an old tradition, reacting against it, yet acknowledging its existence. Clearly there was an anxiety among gospel writers to locate Jesus within and against a long history and tradition. It would have been much easier, of course, to simply ignore all of it, and to make Jesus simply a new start, as many Christians today assume he is; but that wouldn’t have made sense to an early Christian audience, or it would not have answered the standards of the gospel writers themselves, apparently. They go through a lot more work. Perhaps for them, in order for Christ to have a legitimate claim as Lord of the world, he has to be able to command their thoughts as well as their hearts, and ignoring history and law and the important works of scholarship that they knew and adored just won’t do. A writer without those concerns wouldn’t have included all of those scriptural references, shown Jesus involved in all of those arguments with other religious persons representing the various factions of his time, or attempted to fit the parables into the overall narrative of his life and ministry. But those writers didn’t make the cut; those with ‘elitist’ scholarly concerns did.

Even John, who is the least concerned with locating Jesus against the backdrop of his religious environment, has this concern. John, whose Jesus speaks in no parables while it is a staple of his ministry in the other three gospels; John, whose Jesus does none of the same miracles (save two) and spends most of his time in Jerusalem instead of visiting it once for a week at the end of his ministry; John, whose Jesus makes the abhorrently un-Jewish demand that we eat blood and lays blame for his death squarely on ‘the Jews’ rather than implicating the authorities (and fanning the flames of centuries of anti-Semitism to boot). This John, who is ignorant of the traditions which were Jesus’s environment, and who does not reverence it, feels the need to suggest to his probably Greek audience that Jesus is not merely some new God who was sprung up out of no-where, but that he was in God’s mind from the beginning. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ he writes, showing us that God did not merely get part-way through his symphony and decided it needed a key change, but was preparing the world for the presence of Jesus from the start. This gives Jesus legitimacy in John’s mind. The world around him is a reflection of his divine role in it. It was created that way. Thus the local element of one man whose life spanned 33 years is reflected in the overarching structure of history. This man can also command the natural world, which is his own. It is organic—the momentary elements of this ‘theme’ of creation are connected to what came before and what is coming after and to what is happening simultaneously. The details of Jesus’s short life are reflected in the overall purpose of the universe and vice-versa.

It is impossible in this short space to reflect on the diversity of approaches the various writers take, just as I had to do a gross injustice to the composers discussed above. One thing they all have in common is avoidance of the easy way out. If they were to ‘modulate’ the life of Jesus into the unfolding narrative of God’s creation as it is often practiced by many hymn arrangers, they might have read one of those short articles you see on the internet now that offer a simple formula for how to handle any situation. Composers of Christian keyboard music are nowadays often told:

To modulate:

Finish up in the key you are in.

Play a V7 chord of the new key (a half step higher) for one measure (here follows a handy chart of all twelve possible V7 chords so you don’t need to know them)

Continue in the new key. This works all the time, for everything, just like that.

In the case of the gospel writers such a ‘modulation’ might have looked like this:

"Write about God for a while. Then paste in this line: ‘As the psalmist wrote: ‘behold, I am creating a new song, says the Lord.’ Then write about Jesus. See how easy that is?"

Modulating the way I have in mind is much more difficult; it takes a lifetime of study, which is why I am only giving the reasons why one should consider such an approach and saving the technical manual for live teachers and students who take the time to do more than memorize simple formulas. (reading long articles is a good start, however!) Just as there are far more identically made items from factory mass-production adorning our living rooms, crowding our persons, and entering our bodies than individually crafted, thoughtfully produced pieces of food or furniture, so there have always been and will always be pieces of music whose composers, when confronted with a potential challenge, grab for the few technical tricks they know and paste them into whatever they are writing for an audience that doesn’t mind the cliché or the disunity.

But if I may, I’d like to throw down this challenge for those who are willing to take it. It is a creative appropriation of something Jesus liked to end his parables with. It is also an acknowledgement that not everybody is going to find these thoughts appealing enough to take seriously. Maybe because they don't know what I'm talking about (in which case the fault may be mine) or because they are too comfortable with what they already know. Remember that 'elitist' Jesus who said things like ‘narrow is the road…and few find it’ or ‘not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven’ or ‘Those who can accept this, should." Yes, that Jesus:

"He who has ears, let him hear!"

I’ve been reading a few blogs by Christian pianists this year, and came across one by a fellow who doesn’t try to put Amway to shame with his zeal for salesmanship and does not come across as God’s gift to the piano and the rest of us---which is a nice change, unfortunately—and therein I have read some things of interest.

A while ago, this gentleman decided to make a New Year’s resolution. It was to not play so many notes.

Now, that is not necessarily such a bad idea. But my first reaction to it (forgive the rudeness) was, oh, bother. The reason for that reaction is that it seems to be the dominant bit of rhetoric in church piano music today. The thinking is, apparently, that runs and passages with a lot of notes in them must always be for the sole purpose of impressing people with the technique of the pianist. This is itself widely regarded as a bad thing because it is supposed to take the emphasis off of worship of God and put it on the showman-pianist. Neither assumption is without foundation, particularly, it seems to me, when you see many a Christian pianist putting gallons of notes in what appears to be exactly that use. When, similarly, their press-kits and personal prose are used to talk themselves up to such heights as mere angels feel is above their pay grade, it seems to cinch the deal.

Like so many assumptions, however, there is another side.

Mozart was accused of writing ‘too many notes’ (that episode in the movie “Amadeus” is actually based on a historical reality). So was Bach. On the other hand, so were any number of pianistic pyrotechnicians who made their careers out of stunning and stupefying every fellow citizen they could make a few bucks from. Schumann had sort of a problem with this. He called the practitioners ‘Philistines.’

My thumbnail survey is intended here simply to convey the idea that accusations of excess notes befall justly and unjustly alike. It is indeed a hallmark of persons in every field that involves communication trying to impress others by throwing as much apparent content into the mix with a dizzying prolixity that hopes to substitute volume for quality. On the other hand, every composer of merit has at some time been accused of either requiring too many notes or being too complicated.

The idea of how many notes are necessary is, therefore, not something that can be quantified like a tax table, where you look it up and try to stay below quota. Unless Mozart was wrong and his critics were right, there are times when it is necessary to use plenty of notes, maybe for purposes that go far behind simply stupefying people into appreciation.  But there are also, among composers of merit (we are assuming the voice of history to be substantially correct) those who preach the virtues of fewer notes. Brahms, for instance, who said in later life (which is often an apparent requisite for this sort of orientation) that it was wonderfully hard to let the extra notes fall beneath the table. In which case, many of today’s church pianists whose blogs I have read and whom I have personally heard laud sonic thrift are in good company.

When it comes to matters of religion they are in even better company—or, at least, the avalanche of opinion is on their side. There are any number of living composers, some quite famous, who have embraced both spirituality and simplicity, and a belief that the two are intimately connected. One of them, England’s composer-par-excellence John Tavener, went so far as to say that he believed that ‘complexity and evil are closely aligned.’

Anyone who has read this blog before can gather what I think of that comment. Simplemindedness has been responsible for much more evil than complexity ever will be—simply because complexity can’t get enough votes.

As a man in middle age, at perhaps the most complex stage of life, sliding inexorably into what one hopes will be a serenity granted uniquely to the aged, I am beginning to feel increasingly a temptation toward simplicity. Pieces with more notes in them take more energy: to write, to practice, to conceive, to prepare, to maintain. For a long time I was a voracious proponent of allowing complexity into matters of music and theology (and musical theology), partly because it seemed like no one else was doing it, and yet the world around me seems to cry out for an outlook that allows an authentic response that does not include stripping most of it away until what we are left with is comfortable and bland. Of course what is complicated can also be frightening and we long for security, particularly when we no longer have the courage to reach out and beyond whatever we know. For some, this is a characteristic of old age; for others it happens almost immediately.

I imagine this increasing simplicity to be an antidote to the years of bewildering struggle to tame great challenges. And in this regard, the Master Narrative can be upheld by countless examples. The same Brahms of the above quote spent the years of his relative youth trying to grasp the entire piano with two hands (witness the sonatas); it is no surprise his latter-day disciple Marteau tries to take hold of the universe in his. Our esteemed contemporaries have perhaps two reasons for a return to a ‘spiritual simplicity,’ one being the case of personal biography (they have grown weary of tilting at technical windmills) and the other being an answer to the musical heritage of Romanticism and its rapacious demands of size, virtuosity, and a canvas that tried to encompass everything—except the infinite. These, apparently, lend themselves to small gestures and much repetition. Or so the current school thinks.

One thing about being friends with complexity is that it causes one to hesitate before making sweeping statements. (Sometimes you can’t help yourself) It causes one to attempt a friendship with this approach of narcoleptic ritual even while giving it that unflattering name. It recognizes that despite the sins of complexity, (Prokoffiev was forever complaining about his but seemed unable to do anything about them, despite—or because of—the political ramifications) simplicity is not so innocent as it would like us to believe. It can also be an idol, or at least an untested assumption.

Are there not places for its opposite? Suppose you are writing of the profligate generosity of God? Should it be done in many notes or few? Would it not cause you to waste notes boundlessly in response to the awesomeness and wonder of creation? Is there no room for a magisterial procession of notes or a sweeping gaggle of them, giggling over the whole range of the piano in intimation of the joys of a new creation? Just a thought.

Surely there is something dopamine-inducing about a serene succession of c-major chords. But assuming them to be the will of God? Remember, there are 6-billion people on this planet of His. And more insects. (even species of insects!) And not all of them think alike.  Let us not use our religious insight (limited as it is) to box people in.

It is written that no man is an island. To which I would add that no person is a monopoly.