The Alchemy of Transfiguration in Music

“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