God the Pianist: Bach, Process Theology, and Piano Playing

God the Pianist

Bach, Process Theology, and Piano Playing

One of the basic techniques of keyboard playing is to make your hands to separate things simultaneously. In open and relational (process) theology this activity is a metaphor for divine activity in the world. God lures all creatures in different ways simultaneously by providing each with fresh possibilities, fresh callings, so that the creatures might make music together. The callings are for love and wisdom, joy and courage. In process theology they are called 'initial aims.' Their overall aim is to bring about beauty.

However, there is one big difference between God and a human pianist. The callings we receive from God for love and wisdom cannot strike the keys by themselves. God needs our hands for the music to be made. We must partner with God, not unlike the way Simone Dinnerstein partners with Bach in the video below. Just as Bach invites Dinnerstein to play three "inventions," so God invites us to play our own "inventions."

And what kinds of music might God wish us to play? Bach's music is filled with spiritual and emotional depth: "the joyousness of the Branderburg Concertos, the nobility of the Cello Suites or the glowing splendour of the B minor Mass," to quote the BBC in its essay "What's so great about Bach." And also a "pure compassion which, in the St. Matthew Passion, makes possible the hearbreaking drama of Peter's denial of Christ, or the tender song of farewell that is the final chorus." *

Joy, nobility, splendor, compassion, sorrow -- these are the kinds of music we,too, can play when we respond to the callings from the Holy One. We are inwardly beckoned to make music together than is beautiful and true to life. And, yes, we are inwardly beckoned to experiment, to explore, to survey the range of possibilities available to us. The divine pianist, like the human Bach, is an explorer. We partner with God when we explore, too.

- Jay McDaniel, Sept. 2, 2021

Planet Bach

Every minute of every day a musician somewhere is playing Bach's music somewhere on the planet.

From NPR Tiny Desk Concerts
Published on June 4, 2014

Almost any pianist, from a budding beginner to a pro like Simone Dinnerstein, will tell you that one of the basic techniques of keyboard playing is also the toughest to master: making your hands to do separate things simultaneously.

The great Johann Sebastian Bach knew this to be true. That's the primary reason he composed his Two-Part Inventions. On one hand (pardon the metaphor) they are rigorous exercises he wrote in the 1720s for the musical education of his children and students. On the other hand, as Dinnerstein told the audience at this Tiny Desk Concert, they are "an endless well of musical knowledge and imagination." Some of the Inventions zing with the speed of a sewing machine. Others dance and some unfold like a gentle aria.

Dinnerstein learned a number of Bach's Two-Part Inventions as a youngster. Later she used them to teach her own students how to divide their brains. And now, as an adult musician with a major career, she has returned to these deceptively simple pieces, finding their complexity especially satisfying.

She also likes the way the inventions force the player to make the piano sing. That's not easy when you consider the piano is actually a percussion instrument of wires and hammers concealed inside a box. Bach himself noted that they are good not only for playing "neatly in two parts" but also "to achieve a cantabile style of playing." That's musical jargon for playing the music in a singable style. And oh how poetically Ms. Dinnerstein makes our Tiny Desk piano sing.--TOM HUIZENGA

Set List

J.S. Bach: Inventions Nos. 1, 6, 8
J.S. Bach: Inventions Nos. 9, 10
J.S. Bach: Inventions Nos. 12, 13, 14

Credits

Producers: Denise DeBelius, Tom Huizenga; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Olivia Merrion; Production Assistant: Faith Masi; photo by Jim Tuttle/NPR

Process Theology and
Hand Separation

But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,
so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

-- Matthew 6:3

In playing the piano our hands are together but separate. The left hand and the right hand play different notes at the same time in different ways. It takes practice to separate the hands so that they can have lives of their own. They must each grow in self-confidence, accepting their independence from the other, so that they can play together.

And so it is with life. The Spirit of God at work in the world is not simply something that connects us with others, it is something that separates us from others so that we can find ourselves and then, in freedom, make music together. The right hand must have its secrets. We must practice being alone.

Admittedly the two hands belong to one body. In process theology this body is the universe as a whole: the stars and galaxies, the hills and rivers, the molecules and atoms, the people and the porpoises. Whatever music we play affects the whole of it. Thus independence is not isolation; solitude is not self-enclosed. The left hand may not know what the right hand is doing, but the stars know.

Moreover, says process theology, this larger whole -- this body -- is gathered into the unity of a Life in whose heart all lives unfold. This life is God, the Piano Player. We ourselves are the hands of this Player and the Player cannot make music without us. We cannot see the Player with our eyes but we can feel the Player in our hearts. The Player is inside us as well as beyond us. The Player is our own innermost lure to find our true selves and make music with the world.

Faith, then, is not blind belief. It is trust in the availability of fresh possibilities offered by the spirit of the Piano Player at work in the world. This is the way the lure of God is felt in human life. Yes, God is an encircling embrace who comforts us; but God is also a perpetual source of novelty through whose spirit we explore new melodies.

Some might think that the music we are to play has a predetermined and precisely defined score written by the Piano Player, but process theologians disagree. They believe that score in the mind of the Piano Player is under-determined and very general, captured in ideals such as Love and Wisdom and Beauty and Creativity. Our task is to make music and thus make love, which itself is a joy to the Player. The Player responds by offering fresh possibilities for more music. This means that the Player is not fixed or rigid. Always the Player is responding to what we have played by offering ideas for new melodies.

None of this is easy. It is a serious mistake to think that the music can be made spontaneously, without practice. The grace of the Pianist works with and through the agency of the hands. It takes practice to have faith and it takes faith to practice. Ultimately, the practice is life itself, lived moment by moment, sometimes in community and sometimes in solitude, but always drawn toward a music that is more beautiful than any sounds yet heard, yet somehow present in all that is played. Such is the theology of piano playing.

-- Jay McDaniel

The Fingers can be Inspired, Too

Athletes know it; musicians know it; and small children learning to walk know it, too. Inspiration is not a matter of the psyche alone; it is also a matter of the body. Our hands can be inspired by God when we play the piano if our minds don't get in the way. Whoever thinks that inspiration is merely psychic has not looked long at the piano.

This does not mean that the inspiration comes easily. Often it takes very hard work, sometimes for many years, to prepare the fingers for inspiration. And during this process it can help if there is some intellectual understanding. But if the inspiration is to be complete, the mind must be in service to the body, to the fingers. We must come to our senses.

This homecoming is one way that God becomes flesh in human life. It is true that music can glorify God, and it is also true that God can glorify fingers. When the fingers are glorified the Melody becomes flesh. Christians call it incarnation; others call it love. Wisdom and compassion, kindness and creativity, courage and determination, trust and beauty -- they are various expressions of love. When we see them around us, and when they unfold within us, the fingers are dancing, no matter how awkward the sounds.

-- Jay McDaniel

The Mind Can be Inspired

A writer may find that sometimes the words "just flow." A composer may feel that the music "comes to her." Inspiration in this sense is rare enough to be greatly prized, but it is common enough that many of us experience it to some extent. Indeed, it is not altogether discontinuous from quite ordinary experience.

Process thought affirms that at a very basic level all life is inspired. That is, there is no life at all except as God's Spirit participates in constituting us. It is that participation of the Spirit that leads to our being, in each moment, something more than the deterministic outcome of the forces from the past that also play so large a role in shaping us. The times when we think of ourselves as inspired are those when this creative novelty contributed by God's Spirit plays a particularly strong and effective role and is less inhibited than usual by the other causal factors in our lives. So process theology affirms not only that the common use of the language of inspiration is meaningful but that the inspiration is truly the work of God.

-- John B. Cobb, Jr.