Epiphany in music

The emotional landscape of music is a terrain no less variegated, scenic and wondrous than the one we walk on. It has its valleys and mountain ranges, wellsprings and oceans, cliffs and waves splashing beneath them. Sometimes you walk off such a cliff and find yourself falling down, with a terrible sinking feeling in your stomach, until you plunge into cold waters — but then are somehow miraculously brought back to the shore, safe and sound.

Other times, you wander in the fog, disoriented, stumbling, seemingly moving in circles, if at all. And then the fog clears at once, and all your wanderings are rewarded with a sight of a stunningly crisp clarity. It all makes sense now. This is where we were going all along.

The phenomenology of musical epiphany is akin to a flash of insight — an intellectual insight with immediate overpowering emotional consequences. It stuns, stops you in your tracks, pierces your heart.

All cognition is akin to recognition, says Jung. And often, a musical epiphany is a homecoming — a return to where we started from, after a long journey to lands unknown, rife with obstacles and transformations. The place we come back to may be the same but we are not. Aria that opens the Goldberg Variations is not one that completes them, even though the score is the same, — they are like the birth and death of a life. O Fortuna at the end of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is even more weighty and crushing than it is as the first movement. The ascending motif in the first movement of Reena Esmail’s This Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity makes a comeback in the last movement, and it is all the more striking and overpowering after the peregrination in between.[1]

Recognitions can also happen repeatedly throughout the piece, like reappearances of the subject in a fugue — transposed to different keys, augmented (slowed down), diminuted (sped up), inverted (with reversed interval directions) or retrograded (played backwards). Solving these puzzles in real time — or sometimes only after many listens — is a source of microepiphanies that make fugues inexhaustibly delightful to listen to and play. But even with such an abundance of microepiphanies, fugues can deliver massive ones as well — when, after much wayfaring, the subject crashes down on the listener in the lowest register, as a point of no return, a final judgement. This happens, for example, in the C# minor (BWV849)[2] and D# minor (BWV853) fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. Another favorite example of mine is Canon per augmentationem in contrario motu from The Art of the Fugue (BWV1080) where the two voices mirror each other with a delay, and then switch places in the second part of the piece (this animation reveals the structure of the canon visually).

A whole species of epiphanies emerges from the interplay between the text and music, thanks to the sorcery of word painting. In Beata viscera, a monophonic piece for soprano by Pérotin (12-13th century), the last line of the first stanza reads: ‘Dei et hominis’. There’s a subtle movement of the melody in it that I think signifies the relation between man and God: Dei is sung to an upward moving melodic line, coming down at et, and vacillating, up and down, at hominis. Perhaps this is just my reading of it, and not the composer’s intent, but it certainly struck me when I first noticed it.

Radiohead’s Jigsaw falling into place, which I linked above in the passage about wandering in the fog, is also a case in point. For a good 3/4 of the song, the only musical movement that happens is circular, and it seems like there will never be a way out of it. Until, that is, the title of the song is finally uttered, resolving the tension and justifying itself. Everything in its right place, in contrast, is where the title of the song completely contradicts what is going on musically. The song cycles through four chords, never resolving, and leaving us with a vague sense of anxiety and unease, magnified by the lyrics that don’t make much sense (‘Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon’, ‘There are two colors in my head’). There isn’t anything in its right place in this song.

Then there are epiphanies that emerge out of structural features of the piece, of its composition as a whole (the epiphany of the return is a special case of this). In the third movement, Passacaille, of Ravel’s Piano Trio M. 67, the slow, pensive subject is first introduced in the lower register of the piano, and then spelled out in turn by the strings. After some further turbulent development, we arrive at a cliff’s edge: hovering above the abyss, the violin and the cello sing the subject together again, but unsupported by the grounding presence of the piano. There’s a wistful feeling of utter loneliness that they evoke in this moment — a piercing epiphany.

Another kind of epiphany arises when music imitates the sounds of the world less abstractly, almost too directly, too life-like — to a staggering effect. A prime example of this is how bell motifs appear in music. You can hear, among other ambient marine sounds, seagull cries — singlehandedly enacted by the cello — in George Crumb’s Vox balaenae. Paul Wiancko’s string quartet, Benkei’s Standing Death, is telling the legend of the Japanese warrior monk Saitō Musashibō Benkei who died standing after being shot by thousands of arrows, protecting his master, Yoshitsune (if only by buying him time to retreat from the enemy and commit seppuku). With just 16 strings — 2 violins, viola and cello — Wiancko is able to evoke an extraordinarily vivid imagery of medieval Japan, with its quiet temples, fierce and zestful fighting, — and the flight of thousands of arrows that rained down on Benkei on that fateful and doomed day when he proved ultimate loyalty to his master.

The most emotionally shattering musical epiphany that I’ve experienced in my life happens in Eric Whitacre’s Cloudburst, written for an SATB choir, piano and percussion. I’ve listened to this piece exactly four times. I must approach it with caution, as it is highly psychoactive and invariably induces cathartic sobbing in me. It starts out as a lovely choral piece, and it gets better and better as you listen to it — but nothing can prepare you for the revelation at the end.

[1] This work consists of 7 movements signifying the major religions of India, and is written for sitar, tabla, a mixed choir and Baroque orchestra.

[2] There’s an excellent analysis of this fugue by the mathematician Philip Engel.

Banner image: Nicholas Roerich, Call of the Sky (1935)