Music is not just entertainment, it is worship

I prefer the creation story told at the opening of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” to that of any scripture. There, God’s generative force is music itself. Tolkien’s tale prefigures “string theory” — the dominant model in modern physics, where inconceivably small vibrating strings are thought to underlie all physical reality. If string theory is correct, music lies at the bottom of everything we know.

For me, this translates into the fact that music is not merely an aid to worship; music is worship.

In common with perhaps 85 percent of humanity, I cultivate a spiritual hunger. Recent discoveries in deep time and deep space, however, compel in me the belief that the God I have met in scripture — any scripture — is (to use a biblical number) 40 orders of magnitude too small. My religious impulse must be redirected to a Primordial Singularity greater than any scripture can contain, and the language of this Primordial Singularity is mathematics.

Music helps me understand this. It manifests mathematics in time as well as in sound. To me, it’s not just entertainment; it’s also a way of knowing. Few pieces of music, however, are as deep as life itself. Among classical music lovers like me, no human music is deeper than that found in the late string quartets of Beethoven.

For 45 years I struggled with these thorny masterpieces, not quite understanding what all the fuss was about. I listened to many performances, studied the scores and read monographs, but they remained opaque to me. My greatest moment of spiritual illumination came when I finally “got it.”

It was on Earth Day Sunday a few years ago when I was playing hooky from my job as church organist. Under the dark skies of Eastern Oregon, I was left alone for 45 minutes at the eyepiece of a large amateur telescope. I focused on filaments of the Veil Nebula, the distant remains of a giant star that exploded around 8,000 years ago in the constellation Cygnus. For 20 minutes, while tracing out its delicate wisps, I listened on my iPod to the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet, opus 132, the Heiliger Dankgesang (“sacred song of thanks” — his expression of gratitude to the deity after recovering from a debilitating illness).

This was Music of the Spheres — almost. Words fail me, as they do in moments of spiritual illumination. I had never before been able to grasp the transcendent insight that Beethoven expressed in his late quartets, not until that moment at the telescope. Beethoven, for all his temper tantrums and health issues, was a Mahatma, a “great soul.” He knew.

For me, fine instrumental music is wordless scripture. God writes it anew at every moment.

A retired environmental defense lawyer, Dan Rinnan plays Bach and Ellington at Central Presbyterian Church in Eugene and is a member of the Eugene Astronomical Society and the Eugene chapter of the American Guild of Organists. This column is coordinated by Lane Interfaith Alliance to offer inspiration, share personal spiritual experiences and bring a deeper understanding of individual faith perspectives with the intention of blessing our community and the world. For information, visit www.lane interfaithalliance.org or call 541-344-0430.