Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Thursday, 30 April 2009

Music: the "Heart's Abandonment to God"

At a concert, (half of which was not sacred music,) the Pope proposed that music becomes prayer and the "abandonment of the heart to God."

But the final piece was the Mozart "Ave Verum," after which Papa said that:
"meditation gives way to contemplation: The gaze of the soul rests on the Blessed Sacrament to recognize the Body of the Lord, the Body that was truly immolated on the cross and from which sprung forth the fountain of universal salvation."

"Mozart," he continued, "composed this motet shortly before dying, and in it one can say that music truly becomes prayer, abandonment of the heart to God, with a deep sense of peace."
[He thanked those responsible] for the concert, which, he said, "has richly been able not only to gratify the aesthetic sense, but at the same time, to nourish our spirit."
It is not only in the Liturgy that music's power is abused and debased. How much of what is listened to today, I do not say "how much of what is played or sung" because those for whom music is something passively and remotely received are so vastly in the majority -- but how much of it "nourishes the spirit?"

I had to leave a store last year, (I should have sought out a manager to complain, but it didn't seem like a safe situation in whihc to do so,) because blaring from the sound system was a profanity-laden piece of "music" whose "singer" was describing how much better his girlfriend's sister was at a particular sex act than she.

How could the producers market that? How could the station play it? What does it do to young people to be bombarded with that?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Excellent!

Sir Monocle