When I was seven, the girl next door talked me into attending her Catholic church. That’s where I first heard Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli. I sat through the whole mesmerizing performance feeling like I'd died and gone to heaven.
With a lot of nagging, my mother agreed to buy the album set, which I played over and over again on the console stereo.
When I heard this Mass on a pair of Klipschorns a few years later, I became an instant audiophile. What an improvement over our family stereo (that’s how audiophiles are created). They belonged to the father of a friend of mine who had a whole collection of classical music. He introduced me to the three Bs – Buxtehude, Bach and Beethoven.
Yes, Buxtehude is the third “B,” he insisted, not Berlioz or Brahms (both of whom aspired to the appellation). He was a decisive inspiration to Bach, which means Buxtehude can lay claim to being the immediate progenitor of the mainstream classical music tradition we enjoy today.
In college, I was able to secure a student loan sufficient to cover the cost of an excellent audio system. This was accomplished through the use of creative writing techniques learned in high school. As a result, my on-campus apartment became the central social center for my friends, who came to enjoy rock music several times per week. On Sunday mornings coming down, I played music like Palestrina’s Mass.
One day I heard a knock on the door halfway through the piece. It was Brian next door, who asked to sit in. We listened to the entire Mass. He didn’t say a word through the whole performance. I thought he might have fallen asleep, but noticed he had a tear in his eye. When it was over, he opened his eyes and said it was the most inspiring thing he’d ever experienced. He wanted to hear it again the following Sunday.
A week later, he returned with some mood-meliorating medication, which transformed the Mass into a transcendental experience. When it ended, we sat there silent and enraptured soaking up the afterglow.
Courtesy of Pexels.com/Saulo Leite.
He knocked on the door the following Sunday morning wanting to hear it again. “Not this time Brian, I’m playing Bach’s B Minor Mass today.” He’d never heard that either and it had a similar effect on him. In the weeks following, I played Charpentier’s Te Deum, Victoria’s Missa O Magnum Mysterium, Joseph Haydn’s The Creation, and so on. We called our listening sessions Sacred Sabbaths because we felt that they were more spiritual than many of the rote rituals practiced in conventional churches.
When I ran out of sacred music to play, I started shopping at a discount record store named Sam the Record Man in downtown Toronto. It wasn’t hard to find classical albums in the dollar bin as most everyone else was looking for rock music. That bin introduced me to a lot of new music. When I came across an album titled the Requiem, the person next to me said Mozart wrote it for his own funeral. The following Sacred Sabbath, both Brian and I fell in love with it.
He asked if he could bring a couple of friends to hear it the following week, which was fine by me. One of them was a neuroscience student, who also loved the Requiem. Afterwards, he explained that music stimulates dopamine (the feel-good hormone) in the brain, and buffers norepinephrine (the fight or flight hormone) – just like many addictive drugs.
Before long, our little group grew to six people. Fortunately, some of them brought their own classical albums, which took the pressure off me to come up with new material.
My rock and roll parties on Saturdays were great fun, but the Sacred Sabbaths were equally savored. It was the perfect way to decompress.
My current audio system is far more resolving than the one I had in college, and I use it primarily for classical music. With this setup, I don’t need mood-meliorating medication to enjoy a spiritual experience. All I need is a lack of distraction.
That’s why I ask my friends to contact me by text or e-mail, because when I’m listening, my phone is in Airplane Mode. Fortunately, I’m not a butler so I don’t have to respond to bells.
For rock music I use my garage system, often while I’m working on some project or another. This morning, I turned a partially non-functioning electronic keyboard into a fully non-functioning one by means of a soldering iron. I’m really good at that sort of thing.
Before I’m tempted to resolve the problem with carpentry tools, I’d better go into the house and meditate to Miserere by Allegri.
Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/Min An.
