A Love Supreme: Music is Spiritual #12

 

After many years of resisting it, I finally succumbed to the inevitable iPod ownership.  Now, having once been one to turn her nose up to the masses who wander the earth with wires hanging out of their ears, I find myself spending large chunks of my walking time with wires hanging out of my ears, and, god forbid, enjoying it.

Even more than enjoying it.  On a recent walk in the hills above my home I listened to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme from beginning to end (something that I have not done in years and years), and found the experience of hearing it while moving out amongst the world to be transcendently beautiful.  At the time I considered writing something about it and reviving the music is spiritual category on this here blog, but felt too limited in my explanatory powers to be able to say much of note.  Today, in Dragoncave (one of my favorite new blog discoveries), Art Durkee did what I had imagined, but in a far more knowledgeable and articulate way:

Do you think it odd to call a musical master a saint? I don't. In A Love Supreme, Coltrane speaks of the unity and necessity of God. Near the end of his life, I remember reading years ago in a biography of Trane, he was asked what he wanted to do next. He replied, I want to become a saint. That's a good ambition for any artist.

Don't get it wrong: Trane wasn't speaking from ego or spiritual ambition; he was speaking from humility, and the desire to transcend ego. His late musical works, including A Love Supreme and Ascension, among others, all speak of that yearning, and that straining towards the Divine. This is what artists who are also mystics do: strain towards Union.

Yes, I think the music is rising, in my estimation, it's rising into something else, and so will have to find this kind of place to be played in. —John Coltrane

Durkee goes on to write, "Creativity is a spiritual practice, even a religious one. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart say that when we create, we are participating in the Creation, both the original Creation, and its continuous, ongoing process of growth and change. Music is one of the most authentic forms of worship, I believe."  I agree. 

Read the whole piece here, preferably while listening to the Branford Marsalis Quartet performing Acknowledgment, the first of the four-part Love Supreme suite.