Light On Dark Water

I first heard John Coltrane’s Meditations when I
was a freshman in college, almost forty years ago. The hip
graduate student who played it for me and a few other youngsters
seemed much older and more sophisticated than the rest of us, and
though we were determined to be cool and our reactions were
probably evasive, I think we were all appalled by it. I know I
was. I’m not sure that the graduate student didn’t
prize it mainly for its shock value, because he described it as
sounding like a slaughterhouse. That seemed pretty accurate to
me, and although I soon learned to love some of Coltrane’s
earlier works, such as My Favorite Things and A Love
Supreme, I didn’t bother with Meditations
again. I supposed that he had, toward the end of his life
(Meditations was recorded in ’65 and he died in
’67) wandered off into some angry musical wilderness.

I hadn’t thought about it until right now, but I think
that impression was reinforced by some people I knew in the early
‘70s who were admirers and practitioners of what still, in
spite of its now rather advanced age, tends to be called
“avant-garde” music—unstructured, atonal,
arrhythmic, usually abrasive, often improvised: it sounded
hostile, for the most part, and hostility was certainly present
in the musicians. They were likable people person-to-person; the
hostility I’m referring to was the social and philosophical
hostility of hippies discovering the anti-bourgeois avant-garde
of the Dadaists and others. It seemed to me that the whole point
of it was to attack conventional ideas of what music should sound
like, and by implication to attack conventional society.
Resistance on the part of the audience (which of course soon
dwindled to the vanishing point) seemed welcomed as a
confirmation that the music was doing its job and that the
musicians were superior to less advanced persons. I’m being
careful to say “seemed” here, because I may have been
misjudging them, but the fact remains that they left me with the
impression that not music per se but some vague program of
philosophical liberation was the point of their activities.

Although I don’t consider myself a serious jazz fan, and
am not terribly knowledgeable about it, I’ve always been
drawn to Coltrane’s music. Over the years I accumulated
eight or ten of his albums, twice as many as those of his nearest
competitor, Miles Davis, but still avoided his late work. A few
years ago, by way of a visit from my son Jesse Canterbury, who
both listens to and plays this kind of music, I had a chance to
hear a sample of Meditations for the first time since 1967
and thought it wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered. So I
decided to give it another try.

I like it, a lot, and am a little surprised by the fact.
It’s as if I suddenly heard the music in an entirely
different way, a bit like the sensation you get when you look at
one of those optical illusions that can be either a single vase
or the silhouettes of two faces, depending on the setting of some
mysterious optical-mental switch. The sound is pretty much as I
remembered it (at least in the more intense sections) but it
isn’t saying what I thought it was. What I took to be anger
and anguish now seems like intense yearning, so intense that it
explodes out of the limits of ordinary means of expression. This
could be, perhaps paradoxically, a recipe for monotony, and in
fact I find most music that lacks the clear and naturally
recognizable elements of music to be monotonous. But Coltrane and
the other musicians on this recording make it work by their
inventiveness. The experience is mesmerizing. I’m still far
from convinced that this approach to music is a good example for
anyone else to follow, as I’m not convinced it’s wise
for a fiction writer to try to follow Joyce, but in this case at
any rate it succeeds.

I don’t often find an opportunity to listen at any
length to music without interruption or distraction, but
I’ve been able to hear Meditations under those
circumstances twice now, and both times the forty-plus minutes of
the suite seemed more like ten. I didn’t read Nat
Hentoff’s liner notes until after I’d heard the
piece, and I found that the same metaphor had occurred to both of
us: that of speaking in tongues. To quote Hentoff, it’s
“…as if their insights were of such compelling force
that they have to transcend ordinary ways of musical speech and
ordinary textures to be able to convey that part of the essence
of being they have touched.” The idea that there is
something to do with religion going on here is unavoidable, and I
don’t think that’s entirely because the first section
is entitled “The Father and the Son and the Holy
Ghost.” Coltrane is quoted as saying he “believe[s]
in all religions,” which is logically impossible, but that
doesn’t matter: he’s not a theologian and I think
what he’s expressing in this music is the longing for God
that exists in every single human heart and is indeed the
basis of all religions, however near to or far from Him
their solutions may take the believer.

Another religious reference comes to mind, the somewhat
mysterious words of Christ which were used by Flannery
O’Connor as the title of The Violent Bear it Away:
“The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent
bear it away.” I was puzzled by that until I read her
explanation of it in one of her letters. If I remember correctly,
her idea was that an extraordinary and in a sense violent effort
to attain the Kingdom would be rewarded. (I just tried to find
her comments, but the index to The Habit of Being contains
several dozen references to The Violent Bear it Away, and
I don’t have time to check them all.) Something of that
seems to be involved in Meditations: an effort to climb
into the transcendent by the sheer force of desire to get
there.

Music, specifically the symphony, is often used as a
theological metaphor, to convey the idea of many and frequently
conflicting chains of event and meaning woven together to form a
fabric that God alone perceives in full. If there is any such
structure in Meditations, it isn’t apparent to me.
But I think it functions as a variant of that metaphor: a lot of
things happening at once that seem to have little structure in
themselves and hardly any in relation to each other, but which
nevertheless cohere in some broad and fundamental way. It’s
an emotional coherence rather than a formal one, and suggests to
me another way of thinking about the apparent near-chaos that is
this world. I can’t quite articulate this on
short notice, but I suppose that’s fitting when the subject
is music.