So far this week I have talked about the way sound can affect you, enrich you and bring you closer to the world that surrounds you, even when it comes in the guise of musical translation. Hm, I start sounding like I teach Intro Psych to first year college students on a M/W/F schedule again. Old habits die hard.

Today I thought it would be interesting to look at how sound, music really, translates a sense of spirituality. Modern music, that is, not the traditional beautiful chanting of the Eastern Orthodox Church, or the Baroque equivalent of Western religion or the cantorial accomplishments of Judaism and Islam.

The two examples I picked exist, of course, not in ahistorical space, and so are rooted in some aspects of faith traditions. But they bring something new.

The first is the music of Galina Ustvolkskaya (1919-2006,) a Russian composer who was closely linked to Shostakovitch in artistic, spiritual and personal ways (people always introduce her as his student, but many think the influence went in the other direction.) Her work was pretty much surpressed until Glasnost and has only been performed in its entirety in the West since the 1990s.

Her music is strange, using repeated blocks of sounds and unusual combinations of instruments (8 stand-up basses and piano and percussion?) The way rhythm and loudness hits you over the head explains why some critics called her The Lady with the hammer….

But here is the truly unusual part: her pieces require techniques that physically hurt the musicians, particularly the pianist: they inflict pain. Her instructions: “Strike the keys with the knuckles of the left hand (four fingers curved, thumb protruding at an angle), and ensure these strikes are clearly audible.”[Sonata No. 5] Or: each tone cluster should be struck with the edge of the hand,” the “flattened palm,” or the forearm (6th piano sonata.) You might wonder why anyone attends a concert that puts your own sensory apparatus under assault, or has you witness someone else, the performers, experience physical discomfort.

Or performs it, for that matter.

A fascinating study by Maria Cizmic, Performing Pain, Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe, points to the Russian composer’s dealing with the societal trauma of the Stalinist era, trying to reveal the truth of the people’s suffering. The author puts those compositional forces in the context of a term new to me, “Hesychasm, a kind of a monastic tradition of the Orthodox Christian tradition, a way of conceiving pain in a person’s life as having, ultimately, a kind of positive experience. Pain as redemption, compositions with sacralized suffering.” Music as a moral reckoning then, grounded in the spiritual traditions of asceticism.

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Here’s something less heavy – in fact unbelievably light: the music of Julian Loida. The interview linked below calls it music of introversion. But when you dig a bit on Loida’s website, you find a lot of connections to the beauty of church bells calling to service. It is no coincidence that he has a BA from Malboro College in music and religion. He is an all around talent, incorporation tons of different musical styles into his compositions which makes them fresh, different, but the most astounding thing is the tempo of his performances: his hands have wings.

Music of Introversion: Julian Loida’s “Wallflower”

Montages today are from a 2015 series Augentrost (Eyebright, gen. Euphrasia.)

And I’ll close with something more familiar from the spiritual realm, directed by the inimitable Marika Kuzma, to add some beauty to this day.