“A blueprint
is a guide for making something — it's a design or pattern that can be followed.” —Vocabulary.com
After
listening to John Fahey’s vintage album, The
Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, I began thinking about transfiguration.
My first step was to look up the word. Transfiguration is type of transformation.
Transformation has many nuances of meaning. It could
be something as mundane as simple change or
something as profound as metamorphosis,
or something even more than that— like transfiguration.
Change implies making different and different
does not, in and of itself, imply either better or worse, while metamorphosis implies a change to
another level, a higher level of consciousness or structure, like when a
caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
Transfiguration is something even beyond metamorphosis; like metamorphosis it is a change to another level of consciousness or
structure, but additionally, that new level seems to imply aspects or qualities
associated with divinity, perfection, ultimate reality, infinite beauty,
infinite, bliss, and infinite consciousness—in other words, the highest
strivings of creation. In music, transfiguration
is when a musician raises his or her expression of the music to a level
that inspires the mind and heart of the listener to contemplate the infinite
and the eternal.
For there to
be transfiguration, a kind of alchemy
is required between the composer and his music, the musician who plays that
music, and the occasion, or performance, of that music.
Andre
Segovia was once asked by Studs Terkel about this alchemy and Segovia answered
him by saying, “Lazarus was dead and in
his grave and Jesus walked up to him and said, ‘Lazarus arise!’ and Lazarus
arose and was alive. At that moment, Lazarus belonged as much to Jesus as he
did to his own mother and father.”
The
Scriptural context that Segovia was paraphrasing is found in Acts 20:7-12
“And when he thus had spoken, he cried
with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound
hand and foot with grave clothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin.
Jesus said to them, ‘Loose him, and let him go.’”
So, the musician
brings the music to life by playing it and, in that moment that piece of music
belongs as much to the musician as it does to the composer. That is what
Segovia was saying. But what I wonder is if all the music I hear is truly
alive? Can the singular act of translating a blueprint into sound be enough to
bring a piece of music to life? After all, the notation of a piece of music is
only a blueprint that enables the thoughtful musician to arrive at an
expression of the music that is acceptable to the composer, the musician, and
the audience.
On another
occasion Segovia told a young woman that she was disrespecting the music. She gasped
and then fell silent. Segovia said that he would try to explain and went on to
say that both the good musician and the bad musician disrespect the music. He
said that difference was in how they disrespect it.
My understanding
of his statement was that when Segovia said “the music,” he meant the notation of the music—the blueprint. I
think he was saying that the lesser musician does not extrapolate all of the
information from the blueprint and makes mistakes with it and therefore, what
comes out, does not respect the music
and the composer’s wishes. A good musician, on the other hand, goes beyond the
limitations of the literal blueprint, understands beyond the explicit
information of the literal blueprint, and creates an expression of the music
that disrespects the literal blueprint by transforming it into something more.
As a musician
and as a listener I begin to lose interest if a musician is merely translating
a musical blueprint, even if the expression is superficially different than
other expressions I have heard. I get more interested if the expression of a
piece of music reveals something new to me about the music, something that I
was not formerly aware of—something about its harmonies, or melodies, or
rhythms, or structure. I am interested, yes, but still wishing, still yearning,
for something more—something that can take me to a higher level of
consciousness, a higher experience that touches the highest expectations of
what art is and can be and inspires the deepest of longings for a real
fulfillment of myself and the meaning of my world.
When music
realizes its potential to take us into places that cannot be described in
words, places where one sees a glimpse, or hears a whisper, or senses an
awareness of that which is real, that which is infinite, and eternal, then that
music is not merely inspired, it is transfigured and it is the nature of that
which is transfigured to transfigure all and everything that it touches.
© copyright, 2016, Michael Kovitz
