In our Advent course this year at St Stephen’s we have been thinking about music and how it helps us understand waiting and longing for God in our Christian lives. I am not the first person to say that Advent is the season in the church year that seems to have the most wonderful music written for it. From all periods and styles of church music there are great pieces about the process of waiting and preparing for Christ’s coming. We have heard some of them from our choir and music director over the past few weeks.
Tension in music
I wonder whether the reason that Advent seems so inspirational for composers might have something to do with the nature of music itself, at least in the Western (tonal) tradition. Music sets up tension and resolution over short and long periods. Chords resolve into one another, and over a whole section and then a whole piece different keys and modulations resolve back to the original key for a satisfying ending.
Music and life
Music, then, is a good illustration of life. We are always breathlessly waiting to move on to the next thing, for resolution to tension, for an overall meaningful arc to our lives. We will only find this at the end of the whole work, when God provides the final resolution. In the meantime we live in an unfolding pattern of tensions and resolutions, harmonies concordant and discordant.
In Advent we are particularly called to live as in the middle of a piece of music, holding on to the tension of being ready for something not yet here. The beauty of music, of being in the middle of it, is a foretaste of the beauty of heaven, where music goes on worshipping God continually. And yet the patterns of tension that it sets up remind us that we are not yet there, that in this life there will be discord and even pain before things finally resolve into something much better.
Rebecca Lloyd
