This introduction to the annual music service was offered by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, what is below is a reading text. The actual introduction contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.
Readings
The first reading is by Ned Rorem. Rorem is one of our best living American composers, and he is an accomplished writer in the genres of diary and memoir. This reading comes from his memoir Knowing When To Stop:
“Ninety-nine percent of the globe thrives without art. Maybe, after all, art doesn’t last forever. No symphony, no ballet, not even a painting can withstand a generation without being reinterpreted, and finally growing out of fashion like an old song…. Virgil [Thompson] used to say, fifty years ago when the craving for ‘authenticity’ in pre-Bach performances was already avid, that we have reached a point where we can turn a searchlight onto the music of the past, illuminating every dusty cornerful of neumes and mordents and dynamics and metronomic tempos, and reproduce the formal sounds precisely as when they were created. Indeed, we know everything about that music except the essential: what it meant to those who first heard it. How can we in a godless time purport to listen as true believers listened?”
The second reading comes from a biography of the mathematician Paul Erdős. You will need to know that Erdős, an agnostic, often referred to God as “SF,” which stood for “Supreme Fascist.”
“There’s an old debate,” Erdős said, “about whether you create methematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don’t yet know them? If you believe in God, the answer is obvious. Mathematical truths are there in the SF’s mind, and you just rediscover them….
“I’m not qualified to say whether or not God exists,” Erdős said. I kind of doubt he does. Nevertheless, I’m always saying that the SF has this transfinite Book — transfinite being a concept in mathematics that is larger than infinite — that contain the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect.” The strongest compliment Erdős gave to a colleague’s work was to say, “It’s straight from the Book.”
[The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, by Paul Hoffman, p. 26.]
Introduction to music
Before the real sermon starts [i.e., Taktakishvili, Aria and Allegro scherzando from Sonata No. 1, played by music director Randay Fayan and regular guest musician Mana Washio], I offer this brief meditation.
In our Unitarian Universalist religious tradition, we like to distinguish between the transient and the permanent. Some “truth” is transient, so for example we Unitarian Universalists are likely to say that religious creeds, dogmas, and doctrines are transient, because while they may sound true when they are first written, they will not fare so well with later generations, who will first doubt and then reject them. Yet even these transient creeds and dogmas have their use, for ultimately they all point (or try to point) to those truths which are permanent.
We can see this same principle at work in fields other than religion. Mathematicians prove universal principles, but some mathematical proofs are valued more highly than others. A mathematical proof should be elegant, beautiful, and it gives insight into what is being proved. The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős liked to say that somewhere there is a transfinite Book filled with beautiful, insightful mathematical proofs, the best proofs, proofs that are elegant and perfect. Whether you believe in a God who is the keeper of that Book, or whether you simply believe that somewhere there is such a book (Erdős was probably in the latter camp), he said that you have to believe that there is such a book. And all the best mathematics comes straight from that Book.
The Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau put it another way. He said that in every age, we human beings can gain insight into the eternal truths, if we would but try. Those eternal truths are just as fresh today as when the first human being comprehended them; and to the extent that we gaze upon those eternal truths, we too become immortal. Everything else we do, any fame we acquire during our lives, founding a family or even a country, all this is impermanent and mortal; it will die away someday.
Of the things we do together as a religious community, listening to music together is one of the things that allow us to apprehend those permanent, eternal truths. Music, like its close cousin mathematics, is one of the human activities that point us towards eternal, immortal truth. An individual performance of music does not last forever, but while the musicians are playing, through their playing we have direct access to eternal, immortal truth. We may hear a performance of the same piece of music five or fifty years from now, and by then performance styles will have changed, and society will have changed, yet still will we be able to apprehend the eternal and immortal. This is why music is central to our religious tradition: because through it, we can transcend the impermanent, the mortal, the imperfect — transcend that to reach eternity.