[I originally blogged this piece on a now-closed blog back in 2005. I'm reposting it here for a friend.]
I signed up for music school in England the summer before my senior year in college. I’d heard about the opportunity during the year I worked in Finland, so I hopped on the double-decker bus, so to speak, for a glorious month-long experience in Berkshire, complete with culminating concert tour through England and Scotland.
The best part of the whole experience was taking organ lessons from Veselinka Becejac, pronounced “Veselinka Be-CHAY-ess.” In studying with a mediocre—to be quite honest—organ teacher back at my home college, I’d never had instruction this picky, this good, this challenging. I progressed more in those four weeks than I had during the three years of college up to then.
Mrs. Becejac made me really analyze (or “analyse,” as she would spell it) the music. Every note. Every phrase. Every measure.
“Where is the music going? What is it trying to say? Where do the sentences begin and end?” Her questions came one after another and I struggled to find the right answers. I had no clue.
Veselinka Becejac taught me how to think about Bach’s organ music at a “micro level,” and in doing so she unwittingly taught me a truth about God and about life.
“The silences are as important as the notes,” she said. “Listen to this. On an organ you press down a note, and it sounds. It is either on, or off. You cannot express the music more deeply by the strength of your touch. You must express it with sound or with silence.
“Therefore, the silences are as important as the sounds. Notice that each group of notes comes in fours, and there are usually four groups in a measure. Theoretically, you must sound the first of the four notes the longest, because it is the most important.
“But the silence is also important. The shorter the silence between two notes, the less the second note is emphasized. The longer the silence between two notes, the more the second note will be emphasized.” She demonstrated. Sure enough, when she played a four note grouping she touched the last one only briefly, leaving more silence between it and the first note of the next grouping.
And the next note after the silence sang out into the void.
The idea was that on the 2nd and 4th groupings of each measure, the last note would sound shorter than the others, leaving space after it so as to emphasize the first note of the 1st and 3rd groupings of each measure. The last note of each measure was the very shortest of all.
(Does that make sense? Maybe I've lost you, especially if you've never had to persevere through years of music lessons.)
I have wondered all my life about God’s silences. God's silences are sometimes short, sometimes long, sometimes ended by voices of instruments that we don’t expect.
The silences have hurt. Deeply.
And yet when the Voice finally rings out, it’s stronger, with more emphasis and glorious sound because of the silence preceding it. Just like in my organ music.
