This week’s theme is…Caffeinated Music! The satisfying and enormously popular beverage known as coffee migrated to Europe from the Middle East through Venetian trade routes late in the 1500s. Initially met with suspicion for its origins, coffee nonetheless wasted no time in winning over Western culture, boasting countless devotees within a century and inspiring plant after plant of coffee house establishments, which remain centers of philosophy and culture to this day. Numerous artists, authors, philosophers, theologians, and other influential Europeans consumed coffee in awe-inspiring quantities, often prepared through elaborate and eccentric rituals. Every piece this week was written by or inspired by a great coffee drinker.
Caffeinated Music, Day 2 – Prayers of Kierkegaard by Samuel Barber
Søren Kierkegaard was born into comfort, and as such was able to spend his days pondering and writing. Much of his thought can be seen as a way to reconcile post-Enlightenment society with an older way of regarding divine commands in religious traditions. Constitutions bring freedom, and with freedom, Kierkegaard argued, comes the anxiety of not knowing the best choice. With rigid authority comes a measure of comfort; choices are largely determined in advance and there is little wiggle room when all works as the order dictates. And so Kierkegaard wondered how to harmonize the religious sensibilities that often resonated more comfortably with pre-Enlightenment societies with the modern freedoms that he and his fellow classes enjoyed as a result of new democracies like the recently established Danish one.
Every decision, then, is motivated by one of three “duties”, all of which contradict one other. You can decide to do the aesthetic thing, that is, what gives the most temporary pleasure. You can decide to do the most ethical thing, that is, what works best to bolster the general good of societal structures. Or you can do the most religious thing, that is, the the one that most fully reflects an absolute reliance on God’s will (Kierkegaard acknowledged that the religious path is quite a challenging one to discern). Naturally, all three of these motivations will conflict with one another. If you study his Fear and Trembling you will learn about how Kierkegaard read the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac as a conflict between religious and ethical duties, which is pretty heady stuff. I tend to resonate more with the kind of pedestrian conflict between aesthetic and ethical duties, deftly and insightfully described by Kierkegaard, and developed in his book Either/Or.
He may have been a bit emo before his time, and many philosophers point to him as the grandfather of Existentialism, the school of philosophy which disavows any external source of ultimate meaning in favor of discerning one’s own. I’m not convinced Kierkegaard, with his deeply theological underpinnings, would entirely embrace this tribute, but many, many philosophers, authors and thinkers of all stripes look to Kierkegaard for inspiration and philosophical foundation.
And maybe you could say that Kierkegaard himself was searching for the balance between the three duties? I’m sure he would have agreed. But can you suggest an ethical or religious duty that the following coffee-drinking ritual might fulfill?
“Søren Kierkegaard drank a lot of coffee and had a strange way of preparing it. According to the biographer Joakim Garff, Kierkegaard would seize hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.” Then he gulped the whole thing down in one go.”
From http://coffeemakersusa.com/famous-coffee-drinkers-in-history/
Sounds pretty “aesthetic” to me 😀 But, hey, the guy wrote a lot and I would certainly be willing to grant him a personal indulgence like that. Especially as his work resonated so deeply with future generations of philosophers and artists. Artists like the American composer Samuel Barber.
Samuel Barber was an American wunderkind, proficient in singing, playing piano, and composing. He had composed his first work, a 23-bar song for piano called “Sadness”, at the age of 7 and after that continued to channel his energy into his precocious musical achievements. At age 14 he was accepted to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia as a triple threat, studying seriously his three aforementioned areas of specialty: piano, voice and composition.
Throughout the middle decades of his life, his 20s, 30s and 40s, he enjoyed great success as an American classical composer, tempering the abrasive harmonies of his contemporary avant-garde with a more popular, tuneful and generally audience-friendly approach, which helped his music to find acceptance with a wide range of listeners. Barber’s music can be challenging, with a tendency to portray raw and primitive passions, but it is always combined with a warmth that makes it more bearable. In the 1940s, Barber turned to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard to serve as the basis for a commission by Sergei Koussevitzky for chorus and symphony orchestra. The Second World War inhibited his fulfillment of this work in a timely manner, but 1954 finally saw the completion and premiere of Samuel Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard, based on texts drawn from the philosopher’s Journals and a couple of his books.
The texts deal with searching for the will of God, almost imploring God to draw the subject into knowledge of His divine will, and always seeking to remember His unchanging love for mankind. The great choral conductor Robert Shaw, well acquainted with Barber, observed that although the composer never wore his faith on his sleeve, the sincerity of his setting of Kierkegaard’s texts reveals that something about them spoke to him. Prayers of Kierkegaard is an imposing cantata that moves seamlessly from section to section, at once transcendent and turbulent, timeless and terrifying, 20 minutes of inner spiritual struggle. The complete cantata has a rightness, a smoothness as it moves from beginning to end without ever overstaying its welcome.
The coloristic palette of the orchestra is deftly applied to set the pace from section to section. I am particularly struck by the use of ticking mallet percussion, almost a minimalist texture, found in a few of the movements which seems to help the musical setting resonate with deep contemplation. Here is the first section, called “Oh thou who are unchangeable”, a wide-ranging reflection on the unchanging yet compassionate God of Christianity:
Kierkegaard seems to ask, how can one be moved to sorrow but not be changed? How is it possible to perpetually respond to the needs of all the sparrows in the world and yet remain the same? Does Barber find the answer he is looking for?
“O Thou Who are unchangeable,
Whom nothing changes,
May we find our rest
And remain at rest
in Thee unchanging.
Thou art moved
and moved in infinite love by all things;
the need of a sparrow, even this moves Thee;
and what we scarcely see,
a human sigh,
the moves Thee, O infinite Love!
But nothing changes Thee, O Thou unchanging!”
Listen to the complete Prayers of Kierkegaard here:
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