Music and Mystery

On March 25th, the Solemnity of the Annunciation, the St. John Paul II Seminary choir completed a project that had been in the works for three years.
 
I remember coming to one of our weekly rehearsals in 2018—my sophomore year—and being told that we were going to begin learning “Ave Maria” by Franz Biebl, an a cappella piece that involves seven different voice parts and lasts at least five minutes. While we made solid progress, the choir did not perform the piece because some unexpected singing events demanded our time elsewhere. We were disappointed, but those of us who returned to SJPII the next year resolved to finish what we started. After months of rehearsal, and just weeks before last spring’s Annunciation, the pandemic struck, once again foiling our plans. Despite two years of frustration, this year’s choir unanimously decided to pursue the “Ave” once more. Our persistence has paid off: the years of practice have translated into the six-minute piece we sang last night.   
          
What strikes me most about this journey is the disparity between rehearsal time and the performance time. Even without delays, performing a song well demands much more time in rehearsal than in performance. There is more to the song than what the audience hears, which is why our long delay in performing Biebl’s “Ave” is so fitting for the Annunciation. Christ the Son is born of the Father before all ages, and yet He unites His divine nature to humanity in order to spend a mere thirty-three years in the flesh. The choir’s musical praise to God requires many hours of preparation, yet is experienced by listeners in a couple of minutes, and we are invited to give thanks for this miniature participation in the Incarnation.         
 
Another apparent weakness of music is its lack of endurance through time after a performance is over. Unlike visual art, in which the finished product remains when the artist is finished, every musical experience, from a professional ensemble’s performance of Handel’s “Messiah” to a first-grader’s faltering rendition of “Chopsticks,” disappears into silence. We can now record music, but the difference between a gorgeous soprano soloist in a large concert hall and an electronic echo of her voice is significant; why else do people pay for expensive tickets to hear their favorite artists live when their albums can be accessed at the push of a button? Once a song has been sung, it vanishes. Even if the same group performs it again as an encore, they can never make it sound exactly the same way as it did minutes before.  
 
But this impermanence of music also provides an insight into the mysteries we celebrate on March 25th and at every Mass. The liturgical year is a cycle. We return to the same Church feasts repeatedly, but we do not spin our wheels spiritually. The liturgical year is cyclical because it inspires a deeper appreciation of a particular holy day each time it is celebrated by the Church. Every year on March 25th, for example, we reflect on Mary’s “yes” to her role as the Mother of God and Jesus’ conception in her womb. Hopefully, we have been deepening our relationship with Christ in prayer each day over the past year, disposing us to enter further into the mystery of the Incarnation. In other words, we do not start from scratch each time we approach a feast, but we rather renew our devotion to a particular aspect of God and His work in our lives.

In a similar way, choirs prepare songs specific to a feast day that are in one sense finished as soon as they have been sung, but this affords the choir the opportunity to renew the piece the following year. Renewal is not simply repetition: the choir and each of its members should be improving their overall musicianship over the course of the year. With each rendition of a piece, choir members go deeper into the details and thereby improve it precisely because they have sung it before. In the same way, all Catholics, whether they sing or not, are invited to approach every feast of the Church with renewed hearts, praying for a deeper appreciation of the great things the Lord has done for us.

Mr. Kirby is a College IV seminarian for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.