Chamber Music and Perichoresis

…just as you are in me and I am in you…  – John 17:21

“Now, playing the music – because, as we all know, we play rather than make music – has become a part that each of us plays, played here as a double act. Each one for himself, with his instrument as a crucible, and at the same time each of us for the other, since after all we are engaged in a performance. We don’t know how to play alone. […] This is where we find our shared expression: in a shared ordeal, we still don’t fully understand. […] Our playing goes far beyond dialogue: for us, it is not about responding to each other so much as it is about questioning and inviting our listeners to join us in this exploration with no answer or resolution. […] So we brood over this music, we play it endlessly, and we play endlessly.”

Jean Rondeau, for the album “Barricades,” recorded with Thomas Dunford

Why is it called playing music? A quick survey reveals that play is a rich word, encompassing many activities and ideas (of which the following are only some):

• Sports 
• Board/card games
• Theater (whose performances are called plays)
• Swordplay
• To feign a state or quality (playing dead)
• To toy with something (playing with your food)
• To flutter or frisk
• To keep a hooked fish in action
• Brisk, fitful, or light movement (the play of colors)

Taken together, these meanings carry two main themes: the theme of the self and other, and the theme of levity — or, in the case of a learned skill, levity through mastery. Real playfulness begins not by breaking the rules, but by learning them so well that you forget them. We know this from the worlds of sports and the performing arts: we recognize an expert not by his great exertion but because he seems to move as freely and naturally as a hummingbird. It is only through great effort that we become trivial. This is the great joke.

But then there is the other theme, the theme of “you and I.” The word play seems to insist upon a we — as Rondeau says, “we don’t know how to play alone.” Music, Rondeau suggests, can no more be played alone as a game of baseball can be played alone. It requires the Other, the counterpart and coequal, different yet the same. Watching Rondeau and Dunford makes this plain:

Jean Rondeau & Thomas Dunford record “Les Baricades Mïstérieuses” by François Couperin

From the start, the music seems to take possession of the two men. They maintain piercing eye contact, appearing to stare through each other rather than at each other. Their bodies, mirrored, sway gently in tandem. Between them, the music’s pulse is always certain yet never still; rather than beating like a metronome, it breathes like the sea. 

What is this intimacy of playing music with another person? What is the difference, as Rondeau describes it, between playing and making? And how can it be that each performer can remain utterly himself and yet be utterly given to the other?

Any musician who has enjoyed such an intimate collaboration knows that the ‘secret ingredient’ is not a matter of mere mechanics. Two musicians may be individually exceptional and yet not play well together. There must exist between them a kind of trust and delight. They must trade roles freely, exercising assertion without ego, submission without subordination. In short, they must engage in play. When done successfully, the players abide in what Tolkien called a Secondary World, where they are primo and secondo; in the Primary World, those roles have no parallel bearing, and to carry them over would be strange. Thus, the word ‘play’ does not trivialize chamber music — it protects and liberates it.

In all the language used thus far, it seems increasingly fair to say that what we are describing is a type of love. In C. S. Lewis’ terms, it is both a gift-love and a need-love (“We don’t know how to play alone…”), and it resembles Affection in that it may exist between two people without presupposing either romance or friendship (though with them it may certainly mingle). It is “free as solitude, yet neither is alone.” And yet, in a real sense, the love expressed in chamber music is more accurately a love of the act. It is love that passes back and forth, delighting in the very gesture of being taken and given. A musician would likely not say to his chamber partner, “I love you;” he would say, “I love playing with you.” The beloved thing is the immediacy, precision, and vulnerability of wordless communication that normally only occurs within one’s own mind. It is the joy of being humanized.

Corroboration of this point comes from the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards, himself a deep lover of music:

The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other, is by music. When I would form in my mind an idea of a society in the highest degree happy, I think of them as expressing their love, their joy, and the inward concord and harmony and spiritual beauty of their souls by sweetly singing to each other.

The striking thing about Edwards’ image is how he paints the highest individual happiness as dependent on the presence of an Other. Happiness kept to oneself is not the truest kind. Music, according to Edwards, provides that channel by which each person’s happiness is shared and thereby perfected. 

Where does Edwards get such an idea? Obviously, the societally binding power of music has been an object of human curiosity for millennia, and one will find talk of it everywhere from Plato’s Republic to Psychology Today. When we watch Rondeau and Dunford perform, what are we looking at? The release of oxytocin? A momentary human alignment with the ‘music of the spheres?’ A game, certainly — but more than a game?

Looking deeper into Edwards’ quote, its real root is in Christian theology proper — the doctrine of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God. When Edwards speaks of happy society, sweet concord, and harmonious love, he draws their definitions from the nature of God Himself. As generations of Christians have attempted to describe the Triune God, their prose has often collapsed into poetry. Words repeat and revolve, spiraling upward in the manner of the Athanasian creed:

And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.

If the reader feels dizzied by this, then he’s gotten it right:

No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendor of the three;

no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one.

Gregory of Nazianzus

Over its lifetime, the church has used various words to describe the mystery of the Godhead. Arguably the most beautiful is perichoresis, a Greek word that means something like the “dance” of the three Persons, mutually interdwelling and inter-resonating with One Another from all ages and forever. The God of Christianity, then, is no solitary Person; neither is He a pantheon of many. He is a Trinity, which within the Christian worldview explains not only music-making but absolutely everything else besides. The love of the Father for the Son, ever-poured and ever-pouring in and through the Holy Spirit, is the reason why there exists something rather than nothing:

The seventeenth-century Puritan theologian John Owen wrote that the Father’s love for the Son is “the fountain and prototype of all love…And all love in the creation was introduced from this fountain, to give a shadow and resemblance of it.” Indeed, in the triune God is the love behind all love, the life behind all life, the music behind all music, the beauty behind all beauty, and the joy behind all joy.

Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity

If this is true, then it follows inevitably that shared happiness is the truest kind. The first Happiness, the Divine Happiness, was never individual in the sense of belonging to a single Person, a Monad, a cosmic Hedonist. The Father, from all eternity, was a Father — a begetter, a bestower of love upon His Son. And just as Rondeau described chamber music-making as invitational rather than insular, so the Christian Gospel declares that the love of God has been performed on earth, and we — “we,” plural — are invited to join the dance. Chamber music, then, might be the most “Christian” music of all.

Thus I find my “self” only in finding my “other” (and vice versa) in the splendor of the infinite. […] In the “sounding together” of our intervals and phrasings, within the harmony of the good, we possess the analogical medium that permits us to know and be known, to be obligated, shamed, enticed, blessed, and forgiven. 

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite