Music Hath Charms

In his 1697 playThe Mourning Bride, playwright William Congreve wrote that “Musick hath charms to sooth a savage breast [i.e. a savage heart], to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak”. 

Proof of music’s power to soothe and soften even a rock-hard human heart was on display in Auschwitz during the Second World War.  A women’s orchestra was gathered by the camp authorities to play music for the Nazi rulers there.  One of those rulers listening to the music was a young woman named Maria Mandl, born in Austria in 1912 (see inset image). 

Mandl was notorious in the women’s camp for her brutality and sadism.  She walked around with a dog whip and was not shy about using it.  She began her cruel career when she was about 26 years old, serving concentration camps such Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Belsen.  She referred to prisoners as mistbienen (i.e. dung beetles).

At the end of the war Mandl fled from a German camp as the Russians advanced upon it. She tried to hide in the home of her sister but was apprehended in August 1945 and tried in Poland for war crimes. Mandl was executed by hanging on January 24, 1948.  It was estimated that she was complicit in the deaths of about 500,000 people.  Maria Mandl was not a nice person.

       It is therefore all the more remarkable how listening to music affected her.  In Anne Sebba’s book The Women’s Orchestra of Auchwitz we find testimony from one of the women in the Auschwitz orchestra about Mandl’s reaction to listening to the music: “They had very cruel faces, especially Mandl. Yet when she was listening to music her face would completely alter. She became beautiful. I used to watch her.”  The spell, however, did not long survive the end of the music. She went on to relate that “Five or ten minutes later someone was beaten and kicked.”

       But permanent in its effects or not, musick hath charms indeed.  And by “charms” I mean “charms” in its original meaning— not simply something pleasing, but something magical, “endowed with supernatural powers” to quote one dictionary definition.

       Music is divine, something straight from the hand and the heart of God.  Music (i.e. real music, not music like rap which hath fewer charms) creates new realities and heals.  C. S. Lewis knew that which is why his Christ-figure Aslan creates the world by singing it into existence in his book The Magician’s Nephew.

       And not just the world down here but also the world up there.  It was said (by George McDonald, if memory serves) that in heaven “all that is not music is silence”.  Heaven therefore is a place of praise— and not just faint lisping praise but loud tumultuous praise.  We popularly imagine heaven to be a place of calm and relaxed serenity where everyone sits atop a fluffy cloud holding a harp— and maybe humming. But Scripture teaches us otherwise: “And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands saying with a loud voice, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and blessing!’ And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying, ‘Blessing and honour and glory and power be to him that sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever and ever!’” (Revelation 5:11-13)

           Note: thousands of thousands, above and below in all the universe, shouting praise to God and the Lamb.  Praise is what the cosmos does.  It is what created beings were created to do. That is why music has always been a part of the Church’s worship. St. Paul speaks of offering “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” to God when the local church assembles (Colossians 3:16) and we even find snatches of such hymns in Paul’s letters (e.g. Ephesians 5:14).  Christian worship without song is unthinkable.                                

Why is that?  Because song is the response of a heart set free, of a joyful spirit. When joy fills our heart, we sing— sometimes even a song so mundane as “Happy birthday” to celebrate a loved one’s natal anniversary.  Reciting the lines of “Happy birthday to you” would be  unthinkable.  When we are happy and joyful, we sing. It is clear why we Christians have always sung in our worship— because Christ has set us free and (in the words of the Liturgy) “has endowed us with Your Kingdom which is to come”. When the joy of the Lord fills us, song is inevitable.            That is why the Psalter is suffused with the praise of God and with exhortations to praise Him.  One psalm, Psalm 47, bids us praise God four times in a single verse: “Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praises!”  When Christ dwells in our hearts and in our assembled midst, our heart and our flesh cannot but sing for joy to the living God (Psalm 84:2).                                     That is, by the way, why Islamic worship does not contain such music, why Muslims do not break forth in song when they gather for prayer as the Christians do. (Chanting is okay, but it is not music.) For where in their religious services are the Islamic equivalents of the Te Deum, of the Gloria in Excelsis?  Of the Magnificat, of the Orthodox “Great Doxology”?  Christian song characterizes Christian worship because Christ makes even the woeful heart to sing.   

           I repeat the assertion unapologetically: true spiritual joy is the possession of the Christians, of those with Jesus in their hearts and in their midst, those in communion with the living God.  Happiness and excitement and fervor can be found almost anywhere, but spiritual joy, like the salvation which brings the joy, comes from Christ alone. 

         Is there a practical conclusion to this reflection, this extended extolling of music?  Yes, a very practical conclusion for Orthodox parishes.  It is this: those most responsible for arranging and leading the music— the choir directors— should be honoured and recognized and rewarded.  All the choir directors that I know are hardworking, dedicated and (may I add) dramatically underpaid.  When congregational budget time comes around, let us remember their worth and recompense the accordingly.  As the Lord once said, “The labourer is worthy of his hire.”  When our congregational singing, led by the choir, is beautiful, the music does indeed have charms even for the savage breast.  Our choir directors are directly responsible for that charm.