Amy Beach's 10 Commandments for Young Composers

I am a sucker for lists, and especially for lists made by creative masters about how to approach their art. Such lists look beyond their subject into the deeper shape of human mastery itself. This list was written by fin de siècle American composer Amy Beach. I am going to annotate it, however, placing her items in bold above my own glosses. As much as I love music, what I am really after is how theology should be done as a craft. Theologians, beholden as they are to the academy of today, no longer apprentice their work. The craft of theology is simply not done. And so, therefore, it has to be recovered from the arts that do.

~~~

1. Spare neither time nor strength in the perfecting of the technique of composition, beginning with the simplest rudiments. Your musical material must be perfectly under control as is language in the case of a writer of literature. One must never be compelled to pause in the development of an idea through lack of knowledge of spelling or grammar.

Be about the business of your craft. Don't start by writing a systematic theology. Start at the level of your control and work from there. Start at a place where your biography and curiosity meet at the edge of what you know. Jürgen Moltmann's Doktorvater advice to the young Miroslav Volf was to pick hard problems. Work from the top of your intelligence, but do not give up control.

2. Begin with small things--ideas that can be expressed in small form.

I turn to Moltmann again, whose work first introduced me to this truth: theology is a biographical discipline. Your story is your approach and your goal. Do not deny your history anymore than you would deny the historicity of your sources or the tools of historiography itself. Discover the questions of your life. Find your project is how I've said this in the past. And, screw the academy, be honest about it. Doesn't Augustine do as much in the Confessions?

A great deal of theology--most of it--has been occasional. The New Testament itself is so. So-called systematic theology is just a mirage. Origen wrote First Principles when one human mind might know everything. The systematics that came later are products of tradition--we can see that--and products of their time. Aquinas's summas are governed by a purpose. So be ok with your own. Whatever makes theology in you, that is enough.

3. Study how best to develop all the possibilites of a small form. A small gem may be just as brilliantly cut as one weighing many carats.

Respect the theology that you have enough to be serious about it. Use the best grammar and rhetoric you have to speak clearly and memorably, even beautifully. You are not cutting a gemstone with tools. You are cutting (interrogating) your idea with criticism, with varied contexts, with curiosity and even skepticism until what is left is as true a form as you can make.

4. Learn to employ as much variety in form as possible. Above all things, avoid becoming stereotyped in the expression of melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic ideas.

In his book The Intellectual Life, A. G. Sertillanges talks about what to read before you begin writing. Consider your influences. Ask what it is about the theology you love to read that makes you want to write. What inspires you and what deflates you and why? Discover your lights. Karl Barth wrote under the gaze of John Calvin, Amadeus Mozart, and before Matthias Grünewald's central panel of the Isenheim altarpiece.

Consider too the straightjacket of form and syntax brought on by the academy. Writing no one reads. Speaking no one listens to. So much technical language and so little life. One may have to step to that meter, but there are other genres. Theology lives in the praise of many tongues. The unseen gravity here is money and the need to make a living or perhaps some idea that writing theology will make one famous. The former makes sense; the latter not so much. In my opinion, neither of those reasons should figure in to the occasion of reading and writing theology. What matters is the desire to do the work. What matters is the doing itself. Be like those cathedral artisans who drew in the highest ceilings hidden figures meant for the pleasure of God alone.

5. Subject yourself to endless labor in the analysis of works by the old masters, especially using, as illustration for the form upon which you are now engaged, a master's work in the same form. There is no better way to learn how to write a fugue than dissecting one by Bach, preferably one from "The Well-Tempered Clavichord."

To do theology is to participate in a confessional tradition. No question or problem is unique to you. There is a moment where a Christian realizes he or she stands in the dim center of a giant cathedral. The body feels the immensity of the house and the ears take in its labyrinth. The work is to explore and learn the house of your people. It is your house, not the house of a stranger. But you grow like a ward into maturity. To do theology is to grow into maturity. Theologians are explorers. What are libraries but maps of charted (or uncharted) territory?

Find a master in the house and begin your acquaintance. A theologian I know devotes each year to a one contemporary and one classic theologian. If there is no better way to learn to write a fugue than to dissect one by Bach, then go and dissect Athanasius's De Incarnatione or Anselm's Cur Deus Homo. Dissect arguments. See how ideas move together. Choose theologians who are working on the problems you are working on.

6. Begin early to study the scores of stringed quartet music by Haydn and Mozart and the early Beethoven. It is well to select one work and subject it to the most careful analysis, studying it until it is learned by heart.

Begin early. Do not get bogged down in secondary material. The best theology is held away from those who need it most. Don't read about Luther, read Luther. Don't read about Gustavo Gutiérrez, go read him. Begin early. "Stop throat clearing," as a friend would say. Don't wait until you can understand. Begin.

It is well to select one work. Every theologian is best known for a few works. Even Augustine may be limited to the Civitas Dei, the Confessionis, De Trinitate, and perhaps De Doctrina Christiana. Most do not have near that many, and all circle around a handful of ideas. Go read sermons. Sermons are a genre in which the author is trying to be as clear and concise and as interesting as possible. We do not read enough sermons.

7. Use every possible opportunity to hear a good stringed quartet, if possible at rehearsals, as well as at concerts. Take a score of the composition and study it while it is being played.

Luther famously said that a theologian is made by three things: Oratio (prayer), Meditatio (study and esp. of scripture), and Tentatio (failure, angst, distress, and suffering--what is called Anfechtung). With Luther, I believe that in order to theology as a craft, we must be intent about our pursuit of Jesus. The prayer closet is akin to the practice room; oratio as contemplatio. But let me turn this outward as well: I believe that craft requires some public demonstration of one's work, whether by preaching or publication or in some other method.[1] Next, study. Where as before there was the business of your cell, now get to your carroll. You are never too old to use a highlighter, a reference book, a lectionary, a whiteboard. These are the tools of the trade. I do not think temptatio needs explanation; theology is a fruit theodicy begets. But, also, we do theology in the play of the thing. We read and write in the middle of our life and within the lives of the people and communities around us. Pay attention to the play.

Karl Barth is rumored to have said, Pray with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Theology is made better by being well informed not only by sacred but by secular history and by the book of nature as a whole. Do not shun the sciences, the marketplace, or the judge's bench.

At rehearsals as well as concerts. If possible, join societies and attend conferences. Go to where theology is being done. And go to church; theology is done there every Sunday. If you can, participate. Share your work. If no one gives rehearsals and concerts, give one. "The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing matters except sitting down every day and trying."[2]

8. Hear as much choral music as possible. The study of voice writing, as illustrated in the master works. Is of the greatest importance.

Know your confessional tradition. Do not be ignorant about the tradition in which you worship. Learn everything you can about it. And if you cannot abide what you learn, go where you can. Liturgy is theology's muse. Find a community where your voice can be lifted up, and where other voices lift yours up in praise to Jesus.

9. The crowning glory of music study is familiarity with the master works in symphony, played by a fine, modern symphony orchestra. Carry into the study of symphonic composition the same thoroughness with which you have analyzed works for the piano, stringed quartet and chorus, beginning with the simpler and earlier composers.

As you grow in understanding and maturity, you will be able to take on more. Aquinas's Summa. Barth's Kirche Dogmatik. Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes. Mastery of the craft is firsthand knowledge of the greats. There is no shortcut.

10. Remember that technique is valuable only as a means to an end. You must first have something to say--something which demands expression from the depths of your soul. If you feel deeply and know how to express what you feel, you make others feel.

Hans Urs von Balthasar said that his theology was a kneeling theology. Luther devoted himself to a theology of the cross. Those seeking to do theology should carefully weigh Paul's words of 1 Corinthians 3:10-15.That which is not worship is pride. And avoid avarice.

Sacred theology is not a word to be lightly taken upon our lips. Theology is a very human business, a craft, and sometimes an art. In the last analysis it is always ambivalent. It can be sacred theology or diabolical theology. That depends upon the hands and hearts which further it. But which of the two it is cannot necessarily be seen by the fact that in one case it is orthodox and in another heretical. I don't believe that God is a fussy faultfinder in dealing with theological ideas. He who provides forgiveness for a sinful life will also surely be a generous judge of theological reflections. Even an orthodox theologian can be spiritually dead, while perhaps a heretic crawls on forbidden bypaths to the sources of life. How all-important it is that a vigorous spiritual life, in close association with the Holy Scriptures and in the midst of the Christian community, be maintained as a background to theological work. ~ Helmut Theilicke

Also:

"For the young Orwell, the world as it was made no sense. His upbringing at Eton and work in the Imperial Burmese Police jarred so horribly with what he saw, and felt, that he spent the rest of his life in the gaps, trying to explain them. This led inexorably to a political philosophy. But, as an abnormally acute looker, he found he had to change his whole way of life to see what mattered and in order to write honestly about it.

"Decades later, John Berger went through the same kind of transformation. A keen young painter, he came to wonder what the point of art was, in an age facing nuclear ­annihilation. Growing up in the crucible of modern British patriotism, his father a war hero, learning his craft during the London Blitz, gifted and lettered, he found he had to change his life, to live with other kinds of people – Haute-Savoie peasants above all – in order to make sense of the world." ~ Andrew Marr for "New Statesmen"

__________

[1] "The amateur . . . does not expose himself to judgment in the real world. If we show our poem to or friend and our friend says, 'It's wonderful, I love it,' that's not real-world feedback, that's our friend being nice to us. Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure." (Stephen Pressfield, The War of Art (New York: NY. Black Irish Entertainment, 2002), 71)

[2] Ibid., 108.