Conversation Starter 18 | Requiem for a Polyphonic Wormhole, with Fr. Carr

In this conversation starter, Fr. Carr dives deep into Mozart's Requiem and how it drives imagination.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Dear listener, welcome to the Academy Podcast. My name is Nathan Carr. You are among the growing council of both resistance and delight. Very grateful for Andrew's sweater vested comments last week on beauty, and before we're looking to that of Josh's bowtie comments on beauty, which are to come. Here in the middle, your good friend and headmaster Nate. I talked with two others, of course, in January. We call it January term, entitled Philosophy of Beauty. And an effort to give students some elementary vocabulary for music, I used an obvious and stirring composition that haunts movies and imaginations alike, Mozart's Requiem. Perhaps you have seen Amadeus. My goal? To lead students to consider why he Mozart would omit the flutes. He's so specific, right? A solo quartet, mixed chorus strings, organ, a distinct wind section of two basset horns, two bassoons, two trumpets, three trombones, plus timpani his text Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, the opening prayer in the funeral mass for the departed soul. How do you tell the Christian story of godly grief? Well it is a story found within beauty. And the answer is you shove it into the woodwind section. Trees tell the story of godly grief. Brass is there to carry the trees and sure have the basses come in first with requiem and then trick that thing out with a polyphonic wormhole of a pierced first century rabbi who hangs on the same tree that sings your sorrows in that readed tree instrument. Of course trees sing our sorrows. It was always going to be the readed section, and Mozart knew that brass is for coronation, trees are for sorrow. And yes, we will set aside this time the flutes. They shall sing our happy hearts another time today. However, a saint has departed this life, and so we leave our flutes backstage. Let the trees sing Let the trees sing. Our sin sick thirty-five year old alcoholic starving artist named Amadeus, who once knew Marie Antoinette, has now, by omitting the flutes, dragged me into the very throne room of that great company that no man can number the resurrected to see God on the throne because Amadeus hears the throne room in his very bones. He knows what it sounds like, and there, in that moment as we listen in the January term course, the students awake. We have to leave the flutes aside, they say. Get the trees and grab the basses and make sure the timpani are struck no more than two dozen times. I am now sailing through the cosmos destination. Heaven's throne. In fact, we are now in an antechamber of heaven itself. Question number one What causes you to sail through the cosmos? My guess is that it is something beautiful. And number two, have you ever experienced or even designed a way to set your soul up for that sense of crushing beauty that crushes the soul even while still inflating it. That's what I search for day and night with your students.