I could pretend to be a classical music snob, but I would be caught short by anyone who knew anything in a minuet – er, minute. But my mother listened to the masters during my youth, and because of this I was granted at least the possibility of enjoying all those horns and tympanies and oboes and other instruments that would never make it into my normal listening fare of blue grass and folk. So it was that this possibility, along with an Olympic game and a commercial for beef (“What’s for Supper”), would send me to Aaron Copland, the composer of Fanfare for the Common Man and Rodeo. Because of their commercial exposure, everyone knows at least a part of both. Of Rodeo, anyone born before 1965 has heard most of the movements in the John Ford western movies, especially those featuring John Wayne. They are quintessentially American tunes, expressing the best of the myth of our country by eliciting a panorama of wide open spaces and the rugged individualism epitomized by the roving cowpoke or the striving industrialist of the expansionist era. These melodies define us as we –at least the older generations – wish to be: tough, optimistic, and ready to move on a dime to another corner of the half-continent that we call our own.
But there’s an oddity here to be found in the composer himself. In the button-down era of the first half of the 20th century, Copland’s homosexuality would have been appalling to the average Joe who he wished to epitomize. Fortunately for him, he was born into an upper class New York City family where such things were seen as quirks of intellectual superiority, and into an era where people simply didn’t talk about such things. While his sexuality would not be a big deal for the average Joe now, we still have in the man and his best-known works a juxtaposition that is hard to fathom. How could this financial and cultural elitist speak with the voice of the common man in America?
He was there on the religious front as well, speaking for an extreme latter form of Puritanism found in the Shakers @ 1900. These people created great furniture, but never any heirs to their great agricultural holdings in rural America, as they forbade sexual contact. Just a few decades ago, as the last of the Shakers were dying off, several younger people rushed to join to inherit their vast, and now priceless, real estate holdings. I don’t know what happened in those cases, but in another very popular work, Appalachian Spring, Copeland works his opus around the Shaker song that I know as The Turning. You have heard it, too. It speaks of religious fervor and purity and the rejection of material comforts. Again, this would not include Copeland in just about any way. And yet, there his work stands as a deep calling to the myth of American religious purity.
What are we to think of this clash of personality, lifestyle, and creative renderings?
I came upon this dilemma through a comment by a friend of mine. I had made a silly joke with adolescent sexual innuendo – the dumber the funnier as far as I am concerned – when he retorted with something like, “And this from a guy who writes about the mysteries of the Holy Spirit.” Yup, and this has puzzled me about myself as well as guys like Copeland and all sorts of culture creators who often belie in their works the cruder aspects of their own nature.
There is a man, David ….. , who writes some of the best Catholic popular tunes out there – note that “good” and “popular” don’t often go together in Catholic music – with some absolutely filled with the sense of the Holy Other. Meanwhile, as of this writing, he is involved in a bitter court case involving several young adult males and sexual abuse. We who present music to the church have been advised to avoid his works, at least until the man is cleared in court (which seems increasingly unlikely). Again, what the heck? Such things seem to present us with an unsolvable dilemma.
Except that they don’t. We all not only know someone who is both a jerk and a good guy all in one, but know that often enough, that guy is us. This is not only a reflection of our own failings, but a reflection of our attempts to BE good guys. It is well-known among Catholic priests, for instance, that the more one tries to engage the Holy, the more one will be tempted, even besieged, by the opposite, or even the demonic. Nearly every saint I have read of has had confrontations with the demonic, some of these lasting a life time. The only difference between the saint and the man sincerely looking for the good is that the saint never budges an inch for the bad. We should all understand by personal experience why saints are in extremely short supply. Veering from the sacred, it is also known in linguistics that comprehension of something is in part known through its opposite. Without black, we would not fully understand white. And so it seems, too, with the sacred, or the good, or the viral or the chaste.
But our spasms of emotions and desires go beyond a simple internal dialogue defining things both physical and moral. In “It’ a Wonderful Life,” the good man yells at his wife, takes a swing at another man, and questions why he ever engendered “all these kids.” Such inner conflicts and contradictions in the real world are not only normal, but nearly universal. Still, the initial criticism of the friend points to a deeper reality – that inner conflict (often expressed in outer conflict) is normal in the world we have built, but is not normal in the universe at large. Natural laws rarely contradict themselves, except in Star Trek. The truth seems to be that we simply do not understand our true natures. We are contradictions to ourselves because we are befuddled, both about ourselves and the nature of the world in general.
By Christian definition, the world’s only perfect man was Jesus Christ. Yes, he expressed anger and even despair, but does anyone believe that he lost control in these situations by releasing repressed emotions? We are rather to believe that certain situations called for such emotions. Anger at another’s brutality or harmful stupidity, for instance, might be compared to the spank or rebuke you give to your little child who keeps running into the road. “Wake up!” says the shout. And so it could be that our inner contradictions are wake-up calls to alert us to our true natures and to the dangers of the false narratives we have incorporated into ourselves. Could anything be more telling about the overall health of our civilization than the gender dysphoria now sweeping through the young like a plague? Or the peaceful protestors everywhere burning down our cities? Or the proponents of both national and personal disarmament obsessing over the right to abort children?
Yes, we are a bundle of contradictions. The music of the elitist can truly elicit the spirit of the common man, just as the music of a sexual predator can set in us the peace of the Holy Spirit – and just as a common buffoon writing from his home computer can touch on that same Spirit. But in a perfect world – in the world that Christ calls us to in the Sermon on the Mount – these contradictions would not exist, or so the voice of the saints tell us. Much of humor rises from a recognition of contradictions, to make fun of ourselves for our daily hypocrisies. How could this be wrong? But when we live by these contradictions and are controlled by them, we mess up the world, at least a little. The worst aspect of this is that by living in them, we pass them on to the next guy and to the next generation. It is from contradictions of values and morals that the wheel of humanity’s tragic history turns.
To seek purity of heart and soul, then, requires a complete overhaul of the self that is built upon the shifting sands of personal and social contradictions. So it is that the saint is an outcast and the prophet – along with the honest comedian - is despised. To reject our collective contradictions of thought and behavior is to reject ourselves, and, worse, is to tell us what we already know and do not want to hear. It might even be that a naughty joke can expose our contradictions about sex and love – and, just as likely, expose the clay feet of the clown who tells it, the same clown who might also be looking for an exit ramp from the endless circus.
I could pretend to be a classical music snob, but I would be caught short by anyone who knew anything in a minuet – er, minute. But my mother listened to the masters during my youth, and because of this I was granted at least the possibility of enjoying all those horns and tympanies and oboes and other instruments that would never make it into my normal listening fare of blue grass and folk. So it was that this possibility, along with an Olympic game and a commercial for beef (“What’s for Supper”), would send me to Aaron Copland, the composer of Fanfare for the Common Man and Rodeo. Because of their commercial exposure, everyone knows at least a part of both. Of Rodeo, anyone born before 1965 has heard most of the movements in the John Ford western movies, especially those featuring John Wayne. They are quintessentially American tunes, expressing the best of the myth of our country by eliciting a panorama of wide open spaces and the rugged individualism epitomized by the roving cowpoke or the striving industrialist of the expansionist era. These melodies define us as we –at least the older generations – wish to be: tough, optimistic, and ready to move on a dime to another corner of the half-continent that we call our own.
But there’s an oddity here to be found in the composer himself. In the button-down era of the first half of the 20th century, Copland’s homosexuality would have been appalling to the average Joe who he wished to epitomize. Fortunately for him, he was born into an upper class New York City family where such things were seen as quirks of intellectual superiority, and into an era where people simply didn’t talk about such things. While his sexuality would not be a big deal for the average Joe now, we still have in the man and his best-known works a juxtaposition that is hard to fathom. How could this financial and cultural elitist speak with the voice of the common man in America?
He was there on the religious front as well, speaking for an extreme latter form of Puritanism found in the Shakers @ 1900. These people created great furniture, but never any heirs to their great agricultural holdings in rural America, as they forbade sexual contact. Just a few decades ago, as the last of the Shakers were dying off, several younger people rushed to join to inherit their vast, and now priceless, real estate holdings. I don’t know what happened in those cases, but in another very popular work, Appalachian Spring, Copeland works his opus around the Shaker song that I know as The Turning. You have heard it, too. It speaks of religious fervor and purity and the rejection of material comforts. Again, this would not include Copeland in just about any way. And yet, there his work stands as a deep calling to the myth of American religious purity.
What are we to think of this clash of personality, lifestyle, and creative renderings?
I came upon this dilemma through a comment by a friend of mine. I had made a silly joke with adolescent sexual innuendo – the dumber the funnier as far as I am concerned – when he retorted with something like, “And this from a guy who writes about the mysteries of the Holy Spirit.” Yup, and this has puzzled me about myself as well as guys like Copeland and all sorts of culture creators who often belie in their works the cruder aspects of their own nature.
There is a man, David ….. , who writes some of the best Catholic popular tunes out there – note that “good” and “popular” don’t often go together in Catholic music – with some absolutely filled with the sense of the Holy Other. Meanwhile, as of this writing, he is involved in a bitter court case involving several young adult males and sexual abuse. We who present music to the church have been advised to avoid his works, at least until the man is cleared in court (which seems increasingly unlikely). Again, what the heck? Such things seem to present us with an unsolvable dilemma.
Except that they don’t. We all not only know someone who is both a jerk and a good guy all in one, but know that often enough, that guy is us. This is not only a reflection of our own failings, but a reflection of our attempts to BE good guys. It is well-known among Catholic priests, for instance, that the more one tries to engage the Holy, the more one will be tempted, even besieged, by the opposite, or even the demonic. Nearly every saint I have read of has had confrontations with the demonic, some of these lasting a life time. The only difference between the saint and the man sincerely looking for the good is that the saint never budges an inch for the bad. We should all understand by personal experience why saints are in extremely short supply. Veering from the sacred, it is also known in linguistics that comprehension of something is in part known through its opposite. Without black, we would not fully understand white. And so it seems, too, with the sacred, or the good, or the viral or the chaste.
But our spasms of emotions and desires go beyond a simple internal dialogue defining things both physical and moral. In “It’ a Wonderful Life,” the good man yells at his wife, takes a swing at another man, and questions why he ever engendered “all these kids.” Such inner conflicts and contradictions in the real world are not only normal, but nearly universal. Still, the initial criticism of the friend points to a deeper reality – that inner conflict (often expressed in outer conflict) is normal in the world we have built, but is not normal in the universe at large. Natural laws rarely contradict themselves, except in Star Trek. The truth seems to be that we simply do not understand our true natures. We are contradictions to ourselves because we are befuddled, both about ourselves and the nature of the world in general.
By Christian definition, the world’s only perfect man was Jesus Christ. Yes, he expressed anger and even despair, but does anyone believe that he lost control in these situations by releasing repressed emotions? We are rather to believe that certain situations called for such emotions. Anger at another’s brutality or harmful stupidity, for instance, might be compared to the spank or rebuke you give to your little child who keeps running into the road. “Wake up!” says the shout. And so it could be that our inner contradictions are wake-up calls to alert us to our true natures and to the dangers of the false narratives we have incorporated into ourselves. Could anything be more telling about the overall health of our civilization than the gender dysphoria now sweeping through the young like a plague? Or the peaceful protestors everywhere burning down our cities? Or the proponents of both national and personal disarmament obsessing over the right to abort children?
Yes, we are a bundle of contradictions. The music of the elitist can truly elicit the spirit of the common man, just as the music of a sexual predator can set in us the peace of the Holy Spirit – and just as a common buffoon writing from his home computer can touch on that same Spirit. But in a perfect world – in the world that Christ calls us to in the Sermon on the Mount – these contradictions would not exist, or so the voice of the saints tell us. Much of humor rises from a recognition of contradictions, to make fun of ourselves for our daily hypocrisies. How could this be wrong? But when we live by these contradictions and are controlled by them, we mess up the world, at least a little. The worst aspect of this is that by living in them, we pass them on to the next guy and to the next generation. It is from contradictions of values and morals that the wheel of humanity’s tragic history turns.
To seek purity of heart and soul, then, requires a complete overhaul of the self that is built upon the shifting sands of personal and social contradictions. So it is that the saint is an outcast and the prophet – along with the honest comedian - is despised. To reject our collective contradictions of thought and behavior is to reject ourselves, and, worse, is to tell us what we already know and do not want to hear. It might even be that a naughty joke can expose our contradictions about sex and love – and, just as likely, expose the clay feet of the clown who tells it, the same clown who might also be looking for an exit ramp from the endless circus.
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