Leonard Cohen and our human struggles with love, loss and limitation.

Recently been listening to Leonard Cohen. Not sure if he's a poet who sings or a singer who writes poetry, or a singer who reads poetry with musical accompaniment, or a poet who uses the range of his voice to make words sing. It's one of the great omissions of my life that I didn't try to work the miracle of getting a ticket for one of last year's concerts.

But it's hard to listen to the two disc recording of the London Concert and not want to write a review. I'm not qualified. I don't know enough about music. The range of voices in Cohen's oeuvre, from playful raconteur to contemplative poet, from lyricist of longing to apocalyptic seer, and from biblical prophet to lover and lover of words, makes any categorisation ridiculously reductionist. These two discs contain two and a half hours of the London performance and 26 tracks, and listening to them in a sitting has been a musical experience like a limited few others in my life.

One was when the Beach Boys ignited for a generation an enthusiasm for life with what I think is still one of the best tracks they ever produced, "Good Vibrations". Though my favourite Beach Boys track, as those who have lived in my orbit any time know, is "Sloop John B" - not because of its depth, but because of its sheer joie de vivre about heading home when one's vivre hasn't been much joie! Second was when I listened to the first classical LP Sheila ever bought me, Yehudi Menuhin playing "Brahms' Violin Concerto". The second movement, played with heartbreaking intensity, was for me a personal graduation from what I thought I liked to a different musical world where music is heard to serious humane purposes. A third, (and there are probably still one or two more) was the first time I heard the Ode to Joy from "Beethoven's Ninth (Choral) Symphony". It was on a TV Documentary in the early 1970's in which Jimmy Reid the Union Leader of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders strike, was interviewed. He spoke of his dad's long working life for low wages and long hours of hard graft, and the way those with money made more on a stock market deal than his dad could in several lifetimes of such hard graft. His vision, long before the EU captured the Beethoven chorus for its anthem, was of a society where humanity itself was valued, where materialism was subservient to humanism, and where money and power are means to more humane ends.

Which brings me back to Cohen, and why this recorded concert is itself a musical and humanising experience. Some of Cohen's songs are also about how joie de vivre is often ambushed by circumstance and accident. Witness the masterpiece that is "Hallelujah", at least as sung by Cohen himself - this arrangement has lost none of the intensity and affirmation of humanity and our struggles with love, loss and limitation, and it is sung by a 73 year old who still deeply, defiantly and gently cares. And some of the songs take you to those far reaches of emotional responsiveness we know we have treasured away somewhere deep inside us, but which aren't easily accessed without the right guide - and in songs like "If it be your will", Cohen knows his way there, and back - and the version here by the Webb Sisters is quite simply beautiful. And then you only have to listen to "Democracy" to sense  essential combinations of satire and seriousness, compassion and cynicism, rebellion and patriotism. So many voices in that voice.

And so on. One of the areas I'd like to spend time learning about is music as a form of biblical exegesis. Not the advanced technical stuff about aesthetics and hermeneutics - but the more straightforward use of words and music to sound the depths, to explore the options, to guage the texture of a text. Not just the obvious choices like Handel's Messiah, Bach's Matthew Passion, but lesser known texts which form the basis of musical compositions, or which are echoed in the songs that move us. I once arranged a service around the theme music for the film "2001 Space Odyssey" (Also Sprach Zarathustra) played as background to the first verses of the Gospel of John. That's the kind of hermeneutics I mean. The intentional and imaginative juxtaposition of biblical text with music which is totally unrelated, until it is brought into conversation with that specific text and we hear the words and we are affected by the music, we hear the music and we are interpreted by the words.

The brief benediction at the end of the concert comes from the book of Ruth, so the concert ends with a prayer that people of difference learn to live together, not in mere tolerance but in faithful companionship, which is the more telling gift of blessing for our times, living in the jagged fragments of a broken world.

Off to listen........ again.
 

Comments

[Geoff Colmer]

Hi Jim! Music as biblical exegesis is something that really interests me. I think it's full of pitfalls because of the 'sticky' nature of music and the associations that a person has with a piece of music, and because appreciation of music is so personal and therefore subjective. But this notwithstanding, it's something that fascinates me deeply.

I attempted to do this in the 'Music through the eyes of a musician' service that I led in Lent, and I hope to do it again in a session I've done before on 'The spirituality of the psalms through music', using Brueggemann's structure of orientation, disorientation and reorientation. In all of this, I explore music that resonates with the theme/text, that wasn't necessarilly written for it. It's listening to music through a theological lens. It would be good to explore this further! Maybe we need our own 'Theology through music' or 'Exegesis through music' symposium!!

[Jim Gordon]

Thanks for this response Geoff. Music is sticky, but also slippery. At the same time I think what fascinates me is the way music can evoke different responses from the text - not that the music exegetes the text, but that the music facilitates the text as it exegetes us so that in turn we respond differently to the text. To read the passion story, after listening to Christian Forshaw's My Song is Love Unknown, or to have it on while listening, does something to the music and the text and me. What precisely, does it do?

[tony]

Hi Jim,
Music as exegesis interests me too. Music is sticky in that it often forms a commentary to a person's life, but you're right about its slippery nature too. Like all text, music opens itself to interpretation. I sometimes think of music as aural imagery.

Simply putting different images to a piece of music can completely change its meaning. How can anyone who saw the images of the 1985 Ethiopian famine ever forget those images when they hear the song "Drive" by the Cars which was used as a backing track for them? I know I can't!

The danger in musical exegesis is that music is very much a matter of personal taste. Not everyone is going to appreciate Metallica's "Creeping Death" - an Egyptian view of the exodus which goes some way to capturing the sheer horror and terror of events we so easily become comfortable with.

Music is a very powerful means of communication, which goes some way to explaining why it is so often at the centre of disputes in our churches. I believe Spurgeon referred to the music ministry in the Metropolitan Tabernacle as "The War Department." Not much has changed in the ensuing century.

[Graeme Clark]

I found Christian Scharen's "Why U2 Matters to Those Seeking God" a suprisingly good theological reflection on U2's music but also in a wider capacity insightful and helpful on music as a form of biblical exegesis.

[Jim Gordon]

Thanks Tony. The effect of music on how we read a text, or think about it, is primarily a reflexive and responsive thing for me. In one sense the music interprets me by opening me to the truth, message, dimensions (or whatever term would be better)of the text. My question is, what difference does it make to my relationship to a text when it is read accompanied by music, or is set to music. The poignant benediction in Ruth which Cohen sings at the end of the concert is almost word for word biblical text - it has never moved me more than when it is sung at the end of a live concert which has had songs about human loss and love, hate and love, violence and peace. What does music DO to a text? Tony, Geoff, Graeme and others interested?

[Geoff Colmer]

I've been mulling over 'What does music DO to a text?'. And it's a hard one! 'What does music do to me?' I can answer more easily but even then, inconclusively. Among many things, it can open me, having an effect upon me physically, intellectually, emotionally. It can call forth the deepest things. It can help me make a connection with God (I love the idea that music is rife with rumours of God). More negatively it can be used to manipulate me and to manage my mood as in muzak; and I myself can use it as a mood enhancer. And in all of this, and much more, as you say, it is reflexive and responsive.

Great music, like all great art, is metaphorical, i.e. 'suggestion-rich and multiply evocative' (the phrase comes from Brand and Chaplin, Art & Soul - great book sadly out of print), so it has the potential to constantly reveal more. Brand & Chaplin also speak about 'elusive allusivity' (another brilliant phrase) as the quality that best defines a work of art and I wonder if this is where it begins to have an effect upon a text, opening me to fresh insight, but also to fresh encounter.

What does a text do to music? is maybe easier to grapple with because of the sticky nature of music which invites association. Your Also Sprach is 'landing on the moon' music, and Bach's Air on a G String is Hamlet Cigars, to use two well-known examples to some of us. A topical example is the Benedictus from Karl Jenkins, A Mass for Peace, which is played at the In Memorium at the Baptist Union Assembly. At the climax, the words, 'I am the Resurrection and the Life' appear. This works for us and against us. My associations with Also Sprach, take me to a different time and place and experience of life, which wouldn't resonate for me with John 1. The Armed Man, which I think is vastly overrated as a whole, works superbly for me in the context of Assembly. In all this my experience reinforces that what works for one person doesn't work for another.

This not withstanding, 'The intentional and imaginative juxtaposition of biblical text with music that is totally unrelated' is something which I'm keen to go on exploring. And in a way that both text and music are treated with respect so that one is not subordinate to the other.

Just to add that I've thoroughly enjoyed listening to Leonard Cohen on Spotify and will probably purchase the CD.

[Jim Gordon]

Another very helpful part of the conversation Geoff. You are completely right to point o0ut the ambivalent nature of music as a form of art that is manipulative - and not always to noble purposes. But also the revelatory power of music, as for example the Brahms Violin Concerto did for me as a young man.

All of this fascinating and some helpful nudges and shoves in new directions. Thanks.

[Geoff Colmer]

'Live in London' arrived while I was at the BUGB Assembly. But since returning I've been listening to it - as have the rest of the family - and we're captivated by it. I shouldn't be surprised, but the fact is that there is so much wonderful music that huge amounts of it simply bypass me, and Leonard Cohen, whose fairly mainstream, hasn't been part of it. However, when there is a new discovery, as in this instance, there is a particular joy that comes with it. Thanks again!

[Jim Gordon]

Hello again Geoff. I too was ambushed by Cohen first time I heard him - it's the poetry, the voice, the richly textured accompaniment, and the dangerous edginess of some lyrics in the same performance of music that can be heartbreakingly tender and humane. Och it's juist puir ded brillyant so it is! :))

[huw williams]

I have set up a facebook group For sloop john b lovers
http://www.facebook.com/#/group.php?gid=392462405382&ref=nf