One of the first thoughts that comes to us when it comes to philosophizing about music is the ineffability of music. There is quite a range of this ineffability, of course. Some music is so bland that one would never know there was a mystery about it, and some music is nearly impenetrable. Ineffability is not equivalent to complexity. Complicated mechanical structures in music, in themselves, offer little sense of mystery and some of the simplest folk melodies sound as if they were whispered at the dawn of creation. In hearing music as ineffable, one is in a far distant region from the detective tale where a neat solution is available. The mystery in a cryptic melody may seem to ask questions of life, but it offers no answers, neither does it suggest that an answer is to be found anywhere else. In being a mystery that cannot be solved, the mystery we hear in music is mystery that we must live with. When mystery is expressed, there is room for God. The expression of mystery does not prove that God exists or that God is present in the world. But hearing mystery in music alerts the believer to some of the nooks and crannies and heights where God might be hiding, waiting to be found.

Perhaps, at a technical level, there are puzzles that to be solved. Musicologists can analyze the chord progressions or the implied tonality of melodic lines and explain how the mysterious-sounding effects have been arrived at. However, there are a number of instances where the musicologists cannot agree on how to label this or that chord or how best to categorize the tonal progression of the melodic line. Even in the mechanics of music there are mysteries.

For all of the sense of mystery that much of the best music conveys to the listener, there are pretty articulate organizing principles to this music. The organization in the music of Western Civilization is mostly based on one of three systems of music. These are the modal, the tonal, and the twelve tone. The tonal system, of course, is the one that is familiar to us from grade school music class. We learn the do-re-mi system of classifying notes and we learn that do is the most important note, the note from which we start and the note we end on. Leonard Bernstein called it "home plate." The modal and twelve tone systems tend to sound more foreign to our ears in spite of the fact that the latter is a product of our century. Far from being airtight, these three systems have a very fluid relationship with one another with the result that much music combines two or even all three of these systems. In short, one could classify endless styles that offer variations of these systems. All three systems and their variants have their own ways of expressing mystery in music. My comments on these systems are designed to pinpoint a few fundamental ways that each system has resources for helping the listener grow spiritually and be drawn closer to God. I do not mean to speak for the intentions of composers, I only speak to what seems to happen in the music itself. Although human choices as to what sounds will be made in music count for quite a lot, the systems are not so much human-made as they are discovered by humans. That is, like organic matter, musical systems seem to be self-organizing more than they are organized by us. I think Igor Stravinsky was right when he said that musical theory is hindsight. I will comment briefly on how I hear these systems probing into the cracks of the order of Creation.

The modal system is an inheritance from ancient Greek culture. Like many other products of the sophisticated pagan culture, the church took it over and developed its own theory as to the structure of the modes. Compared to the solidity we are used to from the home plate of tonal music, modal music seems to hover, usually peacefully, from somewhere else than home plate. In the modes as they were used in medieval and Renaissance European music, the scale tended to begin and end on notes other than do. They will hang and give a sense of repose, but they don't give the feeling of having come "home." To extend Leonard Bernstein's baseball analogy, the modal system is like a cockeyed baseball game where you can begin and end on any base. It might be home plate, but you could start at, say, second base and try to get back to that base. It might interest jazz enthusiasts that the modal system allows for the intrusion of a "blue note" that makes a modern listener think that a bit of the pre-born spirit of Duke Ellington had sneaked into the Middle Ages.

The chanting of psalms, using medieval plainsong helps to illustrate. There are eight tones (plus a couple of oddball tones that don't fit the system. One of them, the "tonus irregularis" is enough to do Anton Webern proud.) The tones use different notes as the reciting note. That is, you chant the reciting note up to the end of the verse at which point there is a small musical figure that serves as the ending. Tones III and VII are especially interesting. Tone III uses ti as the reciting note and Tone VII uses re. The tension generated by these reciting tones make them the hardest to sing on key.

Compared to the tonal system that developed later, the modal system is much simpler. Only the seven notes of the scale are used. The only exception is use of the flatted ti to make some of the scales come out right. This is to say that the modal system uses only the white keys on the piano plus B-flat. The richness and complexity of polyphonic music in the Renaissance shows how simple musical means can lead to great things.

Although there is nothing about the modal system that dictates what rhythm should go with it, the rhythm of modal music tends to be quite fluid. Monophonic plainchant flows along, shaped by the rhythm of the words. Even in polyphonic choral music, there is this same flow of line, a trait which seems to provide many headaches for editors translating early manuscripts into modern notation. This unmetered flow has the feel of the Spirit, as breath or wind, moving through the music, unhindered by the bar lines introduced into later music.

Even when modal music plays the variant of the musical baseball game of beginning and ending on home plate, home does not have the feel of being the root of the music as much as it will have later in tonal music. Perhaps that is because home plate is about as good as any other base. As a result, modal music seems to float a bit above the earth where humans walk. Especially in the serene, soaring lines of Palestrina, the effect is that of Heaven coming towards the earth while the music lifts us up towards Heaven. It is understandable that some church leaders declared that modal music was the only style suitable for sacred music. Modal music embodies the sense that there is no definitive home on this earth and that our true home is elsewhere.

On the other hand, the emotional range is rather narrow or not emotional at all by modern standards. Monophonic plainchant does not have the expansive melodic lines that we associate with composers like Tchaikovsky. Rather, it is a melodic flow built out of small motifs that keep reappearing like so many hooks that hang the music somewhere in the sky. Music that flows endlessly without hitting any significant emotional snags is most conducive to sustaining a heavy liturgical schedule. It is no wonder that contemplative monks and nuns have cultivated it so assiduously.

Some of the modes are similar to the major scale of tonal music and so have an affirmative sound to them, suitable for rejoicing with the saints in Heaven or celebrating the birth of Jesus. Other modes are similar to the minor scale, and are suitable to lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem or the sufferings of Christ. But neither the quick shifts in emotional expression, nor subtle shades of emotion typical of later European music are possible. Rather, there is a sense that the music touches human emotions and then rises well above them, as if offering a glimpse of how both earthly pain and earthly joys are taken up into the heart of God.

Although modal music scored for several voices includes block chords, there is very little scope for complex harmonic development. Harmonic textures are used mainly as a contrast to the polyphony to which modal music is much more suited. Where tonal music evolved to a style where one can often conceive of one voice as the melody and the others as accompaniment, polyphonic music (i.e., many voices) treats each voice as an independent melody. So, in a polyphonic motet or Mass setting, each voice goes its own way, although each voice is also connected to all the others through the sharing of motifs and the lavish use of imitation, i.e., each part imitating the one that came in ahead of it. A modal polyphonic work, then, has the sound of many voices, all of them very much alive and free to move where they will, and yet in close contact with each other, as of many levels of creation all sounding together while maintaining their own levels.

Modal music is not usually altogether static, but it does not usually have much of a dynamic flow. There are some works that build intensity to a climax in much the way later music will, but generally speaking, there is a sense that the work has picked up from somewhere rather than beginning and that it could continue after it stops. The tendency to use any or all of the bases as a point of repose has a lot to do with that effect. There is movement and transformation of the motifs that make up the music, but there is little sense of taking the listener anywhere. But then, if one is more or less resting in God, there seems little reason for the music to seek any other place.

The historical and social factors involved in the changes in music during the seventeenth century are interesting but I cannot go into them now. It seems that the combination of the limitations of the modal system and the growing interest in understanding human experience during this period has a lot to do with it. In any case, as composers such as Schuetz and Monteverdi began to explore such realms of musical expression, the notes began to organize themselves in a different way until the tonal system was discovered and then articulated.

There are many things that can be said about the tonal system. It has a definite home plate. Not only that but each note in a scale has a place in a hierarchy of importance. The fifth note in the scale, for example, called the Dominant, is the second most important, the fourth degree, the Subdominant, is the third most important, etc. This hierarchical ordering allows for a far greater dynamic movement in the music than the modal system. There is a definite place from which to begin and the same definite place at which to end up. The ear hears the tonic as home plate, that is, a piece ending on the tonic really sounds like an ending, with a sense of finality. This same ordering in tonal music also allows for a far richer and much more intense expression of human emotions. The greater dynamism to the music is made possible through the flexibility that allows for quick and easy modulations from one related key to another, even ending up in some distantly related keys. With a major scale being closely related to the minor scale built on the Submediant (the sixth scale degree), not to speak of the ease from which one can switch from C Major to C Minor (and vice versa) it is quite easy to introduce a quick fluctuation of emotions into a piece in a way which was hardly possible (or desirable) in a modal composition.

This is not to say that the tonal system was all gain and no loss for Western Civilization. The floating, transcendent quality that came so naturally to modal music is much harder to arrive at in tonal music. Tonal music allows for great exploration of the human heart as it is experienced with both feet on the ground. When tonal music does lift its notes heavenwards, there is more the feeling that it is expressing the yearning in the human heart for a realm above human turmoil rather than inhabiting that realm. The tonal system made the masterpieces of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert possible. It did not make it likely that another Palestrina or William Byrd would come along, and indeed, that did not happen. When composers did reach for sounds designed to sound like sanctity come from Heaven, it proved difficult to avoid ending up with the sanctimonious instead. Interestingly, when Beethoven particularly wanted a transcendent effect in the slow movement of the A Minor string quartet, he used the Dorian Mode. All of these factors likely had an effect on attempts by the Roman Catholic Church to ban this new music from worship. The attempt to freeze religious music in the style of Palestrina however, was only a hindrance to both religion and worship.

The gravity of home plate in tonal music causes tension in the music when the notes stray from home. The further from home, the greater the tension. It is this tension which does the most to create the sense of longing so characteristic of Romantic music and the Romantic spirit generally. During these times of wandering from home, there is a restless quality to the music. The music in unresolved and it stays that way until it comes home. Modal music could rest on any base without causing tension, but tonal music cannot. Tonal music cannot hang serenely in the sky. It is always being pulled towards home until it actually returns.

Tonality's home plate made it possible for music to dispel any sense of mystery. The finality of the tonic at the end of a piece could make a song or even a whole symphony sound as if all the world and its tensions had been put into a neat package. While it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to listen to a modal piece and feel that the music is self-contained, it is possible to feel that way with tonal music. However, that is not the whole story. The wandering from home and the consequent yearning for home can become quite complex. In the course of this wandering, it is possible for music to probe into many crevices of emotional ambiguity. Much of the mystery is at an earthly level, but deepening our awareness of the mystery at this level helps to save us from thinking that we have the heavenly scheme of existence all figured out when we don't. Mozart and Schubert were among the most consistently subtle composers in exploring ambiguous emotion. As tonal music wanders away from home, it is possible to go so far away that the return home may not feel so final after all. There is a real possibility that Home Base will be overshadowed by the distant realms visited during the journey. The further into the nineteenth century one goes, the more this sort of thing happens.

That tonal music doesn't seem to reach Heaven very well does not necessarily mean that it is unspiritual compared to modal music. Spirituality does not turn its back on humanity. Rather, spirituality takes human nature as it is, warts and all, and goads that nature in the direction of God. That means that by opening up vast possibilities of exploring the human heart as it fluctuates on earth, tonal music creates patterns out of both the altruistic and wayward impulses of the heart. Within these impulses can be found the yearning for that which is beyond humanity, the yearning that Christians believe to be the natural yearning for God. Much romantic ideology that accompanied the development of tonal music in the nineteenth century affirmed the divine within the individual soul. Therefore, the expression of human emotion would awaken this inner divinity. For a Christian, it is the image of God within us that is activated so that the yearning in the music will energize our quest to be drawn closer, by Grace, to the One who created that Image within us.

Tonal music can journey the way it does and create irresolution because it uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. As in modal music, a tonal work is based on an octave scale consisting of seven different notes. However, while the other five notes are not even usable in modal music (except for the flatted ti) the five chromatic notes--the notes left out of the scale--have a place in the hierarchy of tonal music. Not a very high place, of course, but a place. The notes are usable. And it is the use of these notes that allow for modulation and shifts from one key to another. The chromatic notes by their very nature take the music away from home, thus creating the tension that gives the music so much vitality and interest.

The chromatic notes are an integral, even essential part of tonal music, but they also are the downfall of tonal music. The tension created from wandering from home plate is a tension that threatens to break the entire system and loose all ties to home plate. In the course of the nineteenth century, there is a growing tendency for music to become more and more precipitous with the growing possibility that the music will not return home. Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner are among the composers blamed for causing this phenomenon. But one could argue that they were following the self-ordering of the notes as they began to order themselves differently. Besides, this strain in tonality can be seen as soon as the system became discernable to music theorists. Franz Liszt was not the first to prophesy the downfall of tonality by using all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in the first theme of his Faust Symphony. J.S. Bach had already used all twelve notes in the subject of the B Minor Fugue that concludes Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Much is made by music historians of the crisis of tonality at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the strain inherent in tonal music made this downfall inevitable from the start. Or did it? At the time that Arnold Schoenberg was fretting about what ordering principle was left after the disappearance of the tonic, many people were blissfully singing songs like "The Band Played On." If the band really was playing on, Arnold Schoenberg didn't hear it. What he heard was the twelve notes of the chromatic scale playing on, free of their hierarchical relationships in the tonal system, all of them free and equal. In short, twelve little anarchists. Some musicologists have denounced the serial twelve tone system as a human invention in contrast to the gift of Heaven that is the tonal system. Richard L. Crocker, in his book A History of Musical Style, makes a strong case, however for Schoenberg's system being yet another discernment of what the notes themselves were doing. That is, Schoenberg saw, in analyzing his own music, a tendency of the notes to organize themselves in serial groups, each using all twelve of the notes, and he built a theory on how to organize atonal music on that basis. In this system, the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are arranged in a row where each note is used once and once only. This row can be reversed, inverted, or twisted in any number of way. However, this row remains as the basis of organizing the composition of music. The ear may not hear much of this ordering, but the ordering is there nonetheless.

After almost a century, serial twelve-tone composition has yet to catch on with the general music public, for all the enthusiasm with which some people have greeted it. Even so, twelve tone music was hailed as the wave, the only wave of the musical future. Crocker even put Anton Webern on a pedestal as the Omega Point of all Western Music. I think Anton Webern was a great composer, but to declare any one composer to be the Omega Point of music is bad theology (i.e., idolatry.) Theodor Adorno, the Marxist philosopher and musicologist, seems that have looked forward to the day when the Proletariat would march towards the Revolution singing the stirring tunes of Arnold Schoenberg. That did not happen and it probably won't.

With the hindsight available at the end of the twentieth century, serial music does not emerge as a great rival and supplanter of the tonal system at all. There is some great music that has been written by means of this system, but only a few composers ever showed the musical genius and imagination to write real music in this way. For many composers, it became an artistic graveyard. More to the point, it turned out that there were many more responses to the crisis of tonality than to opt for serial atonality. These responses had to do with attenuating tonality. Debussy based many works on the whole tone scale. Bartok used the modal system, Hungarian folk material, and an increase of chromaticism. Charles Ives and the early Igor Stravinsky used polytonality. Other composers found other ways to organize their music without reverting to either tonality or anything remotely resembling serial music. Andrzej Panufnik, for example, based each composition on a cell of three or four notes.

The band played on for the likes of Irving Berlin and Paul McCartney and Aaron Copland (most of the time), Walter Piston and a host of others. A song like "Yesterday" uses the resources of tonal music about as well as they have ever been used. Interestingly, rock music of the late Sixties that proclaimed the New Age of Aquarius was not often very revolutionary musically. At the same time, the possibilities of musical expression and patterning opened up by atonality or the attenuation of tonality called for a great deal of attention. Regardless of the system or lack of one, the effect was the disappearance of home plate. Either Home Plate was deliberately removed, or it was covered up with so much dust nobody could find it. There were several bases around, but numbering them as first, second, etc. was quite arbitrary. Much modern music became music for the homeless. Homelessness can be an uncomfortable thing to think about, let alone sing about. That may be a reason that "modern" music is not popular.

Atonal music is admittedly difficult for the ear to adjust to and that is surely one reas that Twelve Tone composition did not grab the whole musical future. Another major reason is that this system is just as unstable as the Tonal system, if not much more so. In Schoenberg's theory, for example, all references to key were to be eliminated. Therefore no thirds, perfect fifths, etc. But it proved to be quite impossible to avoid tonality altogether. That is, just as atonality crept into tonal music, tonality crept into the atonal. In short, the two turn out to be mirror images of each other. It seems that the notes yearn to escape for Home but still yearn for Home as well. A powerful example of a dovetailing of the two systems come in the final movement of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, one of the greatest twelve-tone works. Berg found that a fragment of the Lutheran chorale "Es ist genug" fit right into the twelve-note row he was using, so that he could quote the hymn within the system.

Many of the basic qualities of serial twelve-tone music, attenuated tonal music and, for that matter, what one might call non-tonal music (where sounds predominate with little or no pitch, and what pitch there is has little relevance) add up to roughly the same effect on the listener. That is no Home Plate or a lost Home Plate. Such music tends to disorienting until one gets used to it, assuming one ever gets used to it. My own experience is that the intelligibility of atonal music unfolds after a few listenings and it begins to make sense, in its own way, as much as tonal music does. Modal music had hooks on which the music could hang. Atonal music, of course does not even have these props. There is much the same floating quality to atonal music, however, and this music too, can reach a point of repose at the end, although this point can hardly be called Home. This music tends to be dissonant. However, in both modal and tonal music, dissonance moves towards a resolution, no matter how delayed the resolution might be. In atonal music, there is no resolution. This has the paradoxical effect of making the dissonance less tense than in tonal music. The dissonance can hang quite comfortably up above us.

Many people find it hard to experience any sort of spirituality in some of this music of the twentieth century. Others, including myself, find the breakdown in modern music a fertile source for meditation on the things of God. When atonal music explores intense expressions of emotion, it can be such strong medicine that we would rather avoid it, but there are times when we are called to enter deeply into the pain experienced in our time and some of our music expresses that pain in powerful ways and, more important, shapes that pain into intelligible patterns. Lest one blame atonal music for all the painful music in our century, however, it should be noted that composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich could express the horror of our time with the tonal system quite well. However, there is much atonal and nontonal music that is quite contemplative and downright relaxing. In his last works, Igor Stravinsky achieved the same effect of rapt stillness in atonal works such as his Requiem Canticles as he did with the attenuated tonality in the Symphony of Psalms. The most important thing about atonal music, however, is that, given the absence or loss of Home Plate, the music leads us to no home in this world. If we are going to rest at all with music such as this, we must rest in the ineffable Hands of God.

Another thing about twentieth century music is that, with the exception of more and less traditional tonal music, it tends to be static. This is, there is not the dynamic movement that one finds in most symphonic music from Haydn to Mahler. As in modal music, there is movement, but atonal music does not to take a listener anywhere any more than modal music does. Most other techniques developed as alternatives to both tonal and twelve-tone systems also tend to be static. A stuttering sort of dynamic movement is made possible through mosaic techniques that such composers as Lutosawksi, Tippet and Schnittke achieved by radically different means. The static quality of so many contemporary styles often has the effect of leading the listener to a tense homeostasis that crates an impasse as far as this world is concerned. Poul Ruders, for example achieves this. Many composers have intentionally used these same possibilities to convey the effect of resting in God or drawing the listener in the direction of Eternity. Messiaen and Jonathan Harvey would be examples here. Schnittke and Gubaidulina have gone after both types of effect with stunning results.

Whereas in earlier eras and in most other known cultures, there was one predominant musical "language" at a time. In our time and place there are several. This state of affairs disconcerts some people and stimulates others. I personally find it stimulating intellectually and spiritually. One thing that helps keep the situation from getting out of hand is the fact that much that is new is really old. Many contemporary composers look to earlier styles for models that they can develop in ways that speak to the human heart in our time. Another thing: just as writers of fiction find themselves manipulated by their fictional characters, composers seem to be manipulated by the acoustic properties of the notes and sounds that they use. For example, a melodic line needs to be elegantly shaped to be pleasing. This principle applies to Mozart as much as it does to Elliott Carter, both of whom are artists at this sort of thing. Music makes sure that composers who are really composers discover their organizational properties. The results sound chaotic to some, but that the order and patterns do emerge with time, or at least one can feel very deeply that the coherence really is there. It can be a journey of faith. We may end up feeling let down by a few works that seem impressive at first, but I think that, in general, the small acts of faith we make in giving up ourselves to difficult musical works help to educate us in the major act of faith we need to renew in God.