Songs Without Words

A few years ago one of my piano students gave me a paper weight with this message engraved on it: “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Depending on my mood and my circumstance, I can always find a song that speaks to me and seems to sum everything up.

I recently read an article in Christianity Today, June 2009 issue, by Carolyn Arends that talked about music’s ability to “put into words” those things which we cannot say with words alone. Whether music with lyrics or without lyrics, music has this amazing ability to transcend the message we are trying to communicate. Felix Mendelssohn, the great Romantic era composer who composed two sets of pieces for piano which entitled “Songs Without Words” said the following:

“A piece of music that I love expresses thoughts to me that are not too imprecise to be framed in words, but too precise. So I find that attempts to express such thoughts in words may have some point to them, but they are also unsatisfying.”

Whether it is thoughts of joy and celebration or remorse and sadness, music can, in Arends words, “say more than we are even saying.” She gives tells the story of Olivier Messiaen, the great 20th Century French composer, who was sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis in 1940. Rather than just waste away, Messiaen convinced a guard to get him some paper and pencils and he composed one of his most famous pieces, the Quartet for the End of Time, which was performed for 4,000 people in the camp, prisoners and guards included. Somehow, music communicated something that could not be spoken otherwise. As Arends concluded, “art must be, somehow, essential for life….an unquenchable expression of who we are.

I find that I agree with Arends when she concludes that our gift of creativity comes from the fact that we are made in His image. Arends states:
“When we meet this God, our creativity becomes one of the ways we delight in him. When we are lost in some endeavor – consumed by singing a song, dancing a jig, building a presentation, or telling a story – people say we are “in our glory.” In truth we are in God’s glory, participating in the beauty overflowing from the Creator himself.”