Can You Hear the Music?

“Algebra is like sheet music - the important thing isn’t can you read music, it’s can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?”

“Yes I can”, replied Robert.

-Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer discussing quantum mechanics at the University of Cambridge, Oppenheimer

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This may age me terribly, but so be it. Claude Debussy’s “Clair De Lune” is not only my favorite piece of classical music, but it very well may be the dearest song in all the world to me. Though “Clair De Lune” is not a hymn, it stirs my soul as mightily as “Nearer, my God, to Thee” or “It is Well With My Soul” ever has. What the piece lacks in lyrics - for there are none - it makes up for in the sheer transcendence of its musical glory. What “Clair De Lune” is found wanting in theological precision, it makes up for in the utter beauty of its composition - and if beauty itself is not a masterclass lesson in theology, then I don’t know what is.

Every time I hear “Clair De Lune”, I feel as though I can hear the whispers of Heaven in my ear - an echo from home played upon a celestial organ. The piece is as a light breeze from a far, far away land; a gentle breathing upon the back of my neck, beckoning my soul upwards and onwards. 

I say all this as a man who knows very little - terribly, terribly little - about music. Indeed, I spend most of my Sunday mornings either singing in the key of H or struggling to find a key at all. However, none of that matters when I hear “Clair De Lune”. When confronted with true beauty, words are not necessary to convey truth. Truly beautiful music, like the heavens themselves, need no words to “pour out speech” (Psalm 19:2) - their beauty alone is a faithful witness to the beauty of their Maker. 

Truly, the song is beautiful. And given that all beauty belongs to God, “Clair De Lune” has a way of pointing me back towards Him every time I hear it. As beings made in the image of our Creator, we have an innate proclivity towards beauty. Indeed, true beauty needs no translator.

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard” (Psalm 19:1-3). 

This echo of glory, this mighty transcendence, is by no means silenced in the art of song. All of creation is the medium through which the eternal shouts; a grand metaphor that reverberates throughout the universe like a chord struck upon an organ, crafting a mosaic that points to greater things beyond the curtain of the cosmos. Music, like the stars themselves, has a way of shouting at us out of the darkness. “Wake up!” declares the universe from the deep, “Look at me, and behold your God!”

The very best of music, the kind that lingers within our souls, must always point beyond itself. Behind all the beauty in the universe stands the Lord Himself, giving weight and purpose to the beauty that our eyes and ears observe, and souls taste. However, unlike the sparrows, roaring seas, and all-consuming stars, music is invisible - it is intangible, immaterial. Bound by its invisibility, music then must become a single entity with the thing it is trying to point to. Music not only whispers of things beyond the stars - it is almost one and the same with these intangible, transcendent mysteries. To properly enjoy the beauty of music we must step inside the beauty itself. Indeed, music invites us to participate in the dance rather than simply watching it. 

The word transcendent suggests something that is beyond our natural experience. A thing that surpasses our everyday comings and goings to such an extent that we no longer have words to explain it. Transcendence is to the human mind what quantum mechanics is to the amoeba. 

There is a certain kind of transcendence that presents itself within not just any kind of music, but in the great pieces from long ago. These are gusts of wind from a far away country that whistle through the keyholes of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and of course, Debussy. While the classical form may have been perfected by these artists, the echo does not end with them. Transcendence endures into all music - all art and beauty - that seeks to utter things far more mysterious and glorious than itself.

No doubt we have all at some point heard the music? Tasted within our souls the very essence and nature of the eternal itself, so near that we could almost feel its breath press upon the back of our necks? The hearing of those notes and melodies, perhaps as brief as half a second, that seem to catch our souls for an eternity; not quite the thing itself, but perhaps the closest our souls have ever been to it. A remembrance of sorts, a kind of nostalgia for a thing not yet experienced, a place not yet been - an echo of home. As Trevin Wax describes it,

“Music isn’t just something physical and material. There’s something beyond the notes on the page. In great works of art, we touch the edges of the transcendent because the best of our human creations are consciously or unconsciously reaching for the true, good, and beautiful. Music, like other art forms, resembles the beauty we see in nature. These aesthetic experiences are like cracks in the sidewalks of secularism, through which shoots of grass and the occasional flower appear. They’re pinholes in the ceiling of immanence, laying waste the claim that nothing exists beyond this material world. They’re whispers in the wind that send a chill up the spine and tell us we’re not alone. There’s something more there.”

There is something more, much more, beyond this world of ours. Behind every piece of truly beautiful art or resplendent spectacle of nature is the original Artist. All beauty is His, and He is jealous over His glory - indeed, we cannot truly appreciate beauty, truly taste it, without first considering it in the light of His glory.

I recently learned that “Clair De Lune” was in fact a name given to three compositions by Debussy. Think of these as ‘sister-compositions’, as it were. These pieces were originally set to a series of poems by Paul Verlaine, the poems themselves inspired further by the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau. How fitting: all beauty is inspired by the beauty that proceeds it. For all his genius, even Debussy was not truly original. If we take all beauty back to first principles, to that first cause, we find God - the uncaused Cause. He does not need to borrow beauty, He is beauty.

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you” (Werner Heisenberg, the father of Quantum Physics).

Beyond all things is Him, the great I Am, the only one “with whom we have to do” (Hebrews 4:13). If there be any craftsmanship in the work of the builder’s hands, or even a single, solitary stroke of pure brilliance in the artist’s brush, or but an iota of eloquence in the poet’s verse, then there lies beauty, His beauty. Beauty that is true, eternal, and infinite, breaking through the fetters of this world, frame by frame, to remind our souls of that end to which we were made. 

And so, when you look around this world, do you see His craftsmanship, the work of His hands? Can you hear the music?