Can music teach us how to live? In this interview Evan Rosa invites Daniel Chua—a musicologist, composer at heart, and Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong—to discuss his latest book, Music & Joy: Lessons on the Good Life. Together they discuss the vastly different ancient and modern approaches to music; the problem with seeing music for consumption and entertainment; the ways different cultures conceive of music and wisdom: from Jewish to Greek to Christian; seeing the disciplined spontaneity of jazz improvisation fitting with both a Confucian perspective on virtue, and Christian newness of incarnation; and finally St. Augustine, the worshipful jubilance of singing in the midst of one’s work to find rhythm and joy that is beyond suffering; and a final benediction and blessing for every music lover. Throughout the interview, we’ll offer a few segments of the music Daniel discusses, including Beethoven’s Opus 132 and the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and John Cage’s controversial 4’33”—which Daniel recommends we listen to every single day, and which we’re going to play during this episode toward the end.
Can music teach us how to live? In this interview Evan Rosa invites Daniel Chua—a musicologist, composer at heart, and Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong—to discuss his latest book, Music & Joy: Lessons on the Good Life.
Together they discuss the vastly different ancient and modern approaches to music; the problem with seeing music for consumption and entertainment; the ways different cultures conceive of music and wisdom: from Jewish to Greek to Christian; seeing the disciplined spontaneity of jazz improvisation fitting with both a Confucian perspective on virtue, and Christian newness of incarnation; and finally St. Augustine, the worshipful jubilance of singing in the midst of one’s work to find rhythm and joy that is beyond suffering; and a final benediction and blessing for every music lover.
Throughout the interview, we’ll offer a few segments of the music Daniel discusses, including Beethoven’s Opus 132 and the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and John Cage’s controversial 4’33”—which Daniel recommends we listen to every single day, and which we’re going to play during this episode toward the end.
Show Notes
About Daniel Chua
Daniel K. L. Chua is the Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining Hong Kong University to head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow and the Director of Studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, an Honorary Fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He served as the President of the International Musicological Society 2017-2022. He has written widely on music, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, but is particularly known for his work on Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, philosophy and theology. His publications include The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale 2024), ‘Rioting With Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring’ (2007), and ‘Listening to the Self: The Shawshank Redemption and the Technology of Music’ (2011).
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Daniel Chua: Composer at heart. So when I hear something that is incredibly moving or incredibly beautiful or incredibly well put together, I'm always asking, how does that happen? How does that work? Why is this world so extraordinary that this thing can exist? And then of course when I play it, I'm playing that pleasure in trying to understand how this piece is even possible.
I think that's the key for me as a kind of composerly kind of thinker. That, oh my gosh, this piece of music. has occurred, has happened in the world, and it is so, so wonderful. How does it work? How do I even replicate that in my life? Not necessarily as a piece of music, but as a way of living, as a way of performing a life.
And if we understand the world, The creative order is music in some way, then we can begin to understand our place in it and to have some wisdom about where we fit in the world. And the whole point about music is it is both rational, at least it's something that is ordered, and something that is aesthetic.
Uh, it is something that is very, very beautiful. And that combination makes it very special because it seems to say something about why gold is good. If we can understand that before we can understand, you know, the music today. And I think we have a much better basis for appreciating music and seeing where it fits in the world.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Music
teach us how to live. What
is music that it could make us feel like we do? Whether it's Beethoven, which is what you're listening to right now, Or whatever your heart music is, how could that beat, those chord progressions, that voice, lift us into the inexpressible and ineffable and transcendent and yet also ground us and center us?
Why do the dynamics of a symphony take our breath away? Why do we cry when the right song is played at the right volume, at the right time, in the right room, with the right lighting, with the right people? Music, listening to it, making it, loving it. Music is, you might say, instrumental to my own personal sense of meaning and purpose.
It gives my experience color and accent, draws me together with my family and my close friends, brings me closer to God. Music is powerful and beautiful. And my guest today, musicologist Daniel Chua, argues that music is most fundamentally rhythm. It's not melody. Because melody, the notes we sing or play, Can all be broken down into the vibrational frequencies of physical objects that our ears are tuned to detect.
That one pulse of rhythm, when vibrating in the right way, becomes melody, becomes harmony. And further, for Daniel, music most definitely isn't a product of human consumption or entertainment. Rather, it's a gift, a generous gift, a grace, that exists before and outside of us. In a created, ordered, harmonious cosmos that we inhabit and enjoy.
Daniel is a musicologist, but a composer at heart. And he's professor of music at the University of Hong Kong. He's the author of several books on music and historical and philosophical and theological perspective. He's also one of the original members of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture's Life Worth Living Network.
He's been teaching his own version of life worth living at the University of Hong Kong for many years. And his latest book is called Music and Joy. It's a super fascinating exploration of the human encounter with and experience of music and all its cosmic mystery and grandeur. And here's Daniel describing some of what he's trying to do in the book.
Daniel Chua: And what I'm trying to do in the book. It's to recover something very different and very ancient. And one of the problems, I think, with our modern view of joy, is that it's basically too human. And our view of music is also too human. So when we think about music today, it's really about me, myself, and I. I want to enjoy it.
It's about my individual life. about my emotions. And so we have our greatest hits, which are only very tiny pieces of music. Right? If you think about it, we're now very fearful about AI because it can produce all this kind of human music very easily because it's tiny and puny and easily replicable. But the view of music that I want to bring to our attention is a view of music that is far more cosmic.
And it goes back way, way back to the ancient world with Confucius, with Pythagoras and with Augustine and Clement of Alexandria and so on. This is a completely different view of music and a completely different view of joy that is actually beyond the human. In fact, it doesn't even need humans to be there, but it is a gift for us to enjoy.
Evan Rosa: The title might mislead you because music, he says, is not joy. Instead, music is disclosure, revelation. Mystery revealed, even if it's just minor glances through a glass darkly, that might teach us how to live. In this conversation, Daniel and I discuss the vastly different ancient and modern approaches to music.
A problem with seeing music for consumption and entertainment. The ways different cultures conceive of music and wisdom, from Jewish to Greek to Christian, seeing how the disciplined spontaneity of jazz improvisation fits with both a Chinese Confucian perspective on virtue and Christian newness of incarnation.
Throughout the interview, we'll offer a few segments of the music Daniel discusses, including Beethoven's Opus 132, one of Daniel's favorites, And of course, the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And here, his comments totally change the way I understand this familiar piece. He's got an absolutely wonderful take on John Cage's controversial 4 minutes and 33 seconds, which Daniel recommends we listen to every single day, and which we're going to play during this episode toward the end.
Don't miss it. Finally, we explore St. Augustine and the worshipful jubilance of singing in the midst of one's work to find rhythm and joy. that is beyond suffering. Ultimately, Daniel offers compelling and insightful and just plain enjoyable reflections on music, joy, and how it all fits into a life that's worthy of our humanity.
Thanks for listening.
Daniel, it's such a delight to have you on part of the Life of the World. Thank you for joining me.
Daniel Chua: It's a
Evan Rosa: pleasure. I'm so excited about this new book, Music Joy. I do want to start with your personal investment in music. How were you introduced to it? And in what sense do you love it?
Daniel Chua: Well, I'm a musicologist.
I better love music because I spent my whole life doing it. But actually, as a kid, I think I grew up with the sound of music. And that was a record that I used to put on my LP all the time. And then some, Lovely soul donated his entire collection of LPs to my dad when I was about six years old or something, and I just started playing all this music and it was Bach and Beethoven and so on.
And so I got into music really early on. And there's even a photograph of me on my sixth birthday and I requested A bust of Beethoven, a biography of Beethoven. In fact, there's a bust of Beethoven behind me right now on this piano. And so I was absolutely enthralled by music as a kid. And I've always, actually, I wanted at the age of six to be Beethoven and to compose.
It didn't quite work out that way, but I became a musicologist instead.
Evan Rosa: What about Beethoven in particular spoke to you? Do you have memories of what feelings were there or what thoughts? What challenges, you might say ambitions were there?
Daniel Chua: Well, with Beethoven, I remember as a kid trying to listen to Beethoven.
I mean, I listened to Bach and Tchaikovsky and all that, and it was kind of easy, but Beethoven was hard, which is surprising, right? But it's actually very difficult, uh, to listen to and sit through because there's a lot of things going on that is quite disruptive and quite intellectual in many ways. And so later on in my teens, I discovered the late quartets and I was kind of hooked on Beethoven because that to me was like the greatest music ever written.
And I decided even then, I must write a dissertation on this, which I did actually came out as my dissertation book.
Evan Rosa: We're on Beethoven. That resonated so early with you. Give us a little bit more about what pieces in particular, or what about Beethoven's composition was particularly moving to you.
Daniel Chua: You know, the pieces that really struck me are the pieces that are a little bit arcane and these are the very final string quartets that he wrote.
He only wrote string quartets at the end of his life and he just decided to write them. I think they began with a commission but he just kept going. So it felt like he was trying to say something and in these pieces, Things get very weird, but also things get very simple at the same time. It's very strange.
It's like the most complex and the most simple music, and somehow they speak very deeply to, I guess, my soul and my heart. Uh, and you just want to listen to them all the time. There's some bits of this where you think, no, this is not possible. Nobody could have composed this kind of music. There's a wonderful piece, you In the A minor string quartet, Opus 132, it's right in the middle, it's called, um, the Heilige Dankgesang, it's a sort of a prayer of thanksgiving to God after this illness that Beethoven had.
And it's the most extraordinary piece, it's so long, it's unbelievably long, it's about 15 minutes, and basically, things moving at an extremely slow pace,
and you're thinking, this is not the early 19th century, where am I, what is happening in this music? It's amazing. Why is it so peculiar and so beautiful at the same time? I just could not imagine that somebody could have composed something like that. So that's my Beethoven, the Beethoven of Wow, that's extraordinary.
How did that happen? And why is that so beautiful?
Evan Rosa: Tell us a little bit about the kind of messages that music sends to a young person. A child can identify that there's something in, in the physicality. Of these things coming together to produce sound, to be perceived where there there's messaging in it, there's content in it, it's doing something creative in a person almost, right?
It's, it's interacting with us in an important way.
Daniel Chua: So I grew up with the classical music tradition. I played the piano as a kid. And so for me, that kind of music speaks to me, that kind of music speaks to me because I'm a composer at heart. So when I hear something that is incredibly moving or incredibly beautiful or incredibly well put together, I'm always asking, how does that happen?
How does that work? Why is this world so extraordinary that this thing can exist? And then of course, when I play it, I'm playing that pleasure in sort of trying to understand how this piece is even possible. I think that's the key for me as a kind of composerly kind of thinker that, Oh my gosh, you know, this piece of music has occurred, has happened in the world and it is so, so wonderful.
How does it work? How? Do I even replicate that in my life? Not necessarily as a piece of music, but as a way of living, as a way of performing a life in that sense.
Evan Rosa: The book that you've just put together is Music and Joy, and we can't leave Beethoven without talking about Ode to Joy. And so I wonder if you can take us into that as a way of making the point, as you do, that music is not joy.
Talk about your own, uh, Your own experience of Beethoven and move us toward what you want to do with Ode to Joy to be able to unpack some of the fundamental themes in the book.
Daniel Chua: So we always say that music is joy. We all enjoy music. And that's great. I enjoy music. You enjoy music. We just talked about that.
But sometimes I don't know whether we really think about this in a very deep way. And so writing a book on music and joy seems to be a little bit superficial because yeah, duh, you know, yes, music is joy. But actually, is it really? Joy. Because at the moment, it seems to me that we take music to be something like entertainment and Steven Pinker talks about.
Music is auditory cheesecake. It's like, yeah, it's kind of full fat thrill. It's nice for the moment. It's like eating cheesecake, but what does it really do? So I think the bigger question is if music is joy, then what is it? What kind of joy is that? And the point with that point of view is that it does touch on modern sensibility and it does trivialize music in a way.
Basically it's entertainment. And why should we even study music? I think A lot of the parents taking their kids to university to study music ask the same question, at least in Hong Kong. Why is my kid studying music here? They can't get a real job, that kind of thing. It's because music is just entertainment.
It's just something that you consume and that's it. The
interesting thing about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy, is that it really reveals to us a modern take on joy. And the really weird thing about that symphony is that if you look in detail at what's happening at the very end, when the chorus comes in, It's a little bit disturbing. So it begins at what we call Svante of Cherup.
This is the most terrifying chord that Beethoven could imagine. In fact, at one point, it includes all the notes of the chromatic scale. It's very, very dissonant. At that moment, The voices come in, and this tenor voice comes in and says, Friends, not these tones. Let's have something different. Now let's talk about joy.
Right, so they're going to talk about joy and the choruses. Yes, let's talk about joy. But what happens? First, there is a march, a long march. The solo tenor sings, and this is the kind of music where people just join in. And the march from one person becomes bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until there's a huge army.
And that army becomes bigger So the cavalry charge is a stampede that basically tramples over everything. Wagner actually called this battle music. This is a war that's going on. Joy is trampling over the world towards victory. And at the very end of the piece, it's the same thing. You know, there's the huge military campaign.
So joy is extremely violent in Beethoven because it's just an exuberant sense of victory where you overcome the other.
And this is a very modern, I think, notion of joy. The idea that joy is something that has to be victorious. And that's fine. That's absolutely fine. But the problem is, it depends which side you're on. So you could be victorious, as you could be a Russian and you're victorious over Ukraine. You can sing the Ode to Joy because you are victorious.
It's exuberant, right? Or you could be Ukrainian, and maybe you had a victory over Russia. And then you could sing that too. And that happened, of course, Uh, in the Second World War, you had Beethoven's Ninth in, you know, Hitler's Germany. You can have Beethoven's Ninth for the fall of the Berlin Wall, right?
It doesn't mean that the music is necessarily bad, but it expresses a kind of joy that is about an exuberant victory. And that's usually what we want to take out in music, that kind of joy where we get, yes, this is, you know, the kind of, uh, euphoria that I want from music. But that really isn't what joy is about in music at all.
Evan Rosa: It's fascinating that you can. Invest the same song with such differing intentions. Joy is one of those things, right? It takes a, like a, an intentional object, so to speak, where it can be directed at all these different things for different people and asking the question of like, well, what are you taking joy in?
Daniel Chua: Yeah. Humans are strange. I mean, you know, we are very sinful creatures, so we tend to weaponize whatever we have and we weaponize. Music too. We can make music and do pretty bad things, but of course, music is a gift that exists, I would say before humanity. So it's not something that we can completely destroy.
And that's the key thing on my book, where whatever we do with music as humans, there is something more in music that speaks beyond our humans, our little puny human point of view of music.
I think the Ninth Symphony tells us something about the current condition of joy and what I'm trying to do in the book. is to recover something very different and very ancient. And one of the problems, I think, with our modern view of joy is that it's basically Too human. And our view of music is also too human.
So when we think about music today, it's really about me, myself, and I, I want to enjoy it. It's about my individual expressivity, about my emotions. And so we have our greatest hits, which are only very tiny pieces of music, right? If you think about it, we're now very fearful about AI because it can produce all this kind of human music very easily because it's tiny and puny and easily replicable.
But the view of music that I want to bring to our attention is a view of music that is far more cosmic. And it goes back way, way back, you know, to the ancient world with Confucius, with Pythagoras, and with Augustine and Clement of Alexandria and so on. This is a completely different view of music and a completely different view of joy that is actually beyond the human.
In fact, it doesn't even need humans to be there, but it is a gift for us to enjoy.
Evan Rosa: Throughout the book, you can see that this alternation between ancient perspectives and modern perspectives is quite important. I wonder if you can walk us through some of those. I mean, one that I think is tied here is the fact that you said modern music is actually quite tragic.
Apart from being joy, music is quite the opposite. It's sad. Yeah. How do you hope to get that point across around, like, these different perspectives on music between Ancient and modern.
Daniel Chua: So the modern perspective is tragic because basically if you think about Beethoven's Ninth, it's founded on a kind of, well, it's founded on death.
You know, it's the hero that has to defend, you know, the society and that would sacrifice his life, that kind of idea. So death is at the heart of it. And it goes all the way, in fact, in our modern Western thinking. Uh, to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, where things get very, very dark and music then becomes a representation of some cosmic will, which is not basically in our favor.
We basically get absorbed into that and that's where all the suffering and so on comes from. So music takes on this very, very tragic view and a very serious view, which is why classical music became what we called serious music for much of the 19th and 20th. And so music became both too serious and too trivial at the same time, I think, in modernity.
If you go back in time, I mean, a long way back, you know, 2, 500 years, let's say we're going to meet Confucius.
He would have a completely different view. He would say, yes, music is joy. And that's because in Chinese, the character joy is joy. is the same as the character for music. So you pronounce it differently. So joy is le and music is ye, but actually it's the same Chinese character. And so they had a whole philosophy on music and joy.
I know it was an accident of language, but it became a really big issue. And so in Chinese philosophy, music is literally joy, but by that they meant that the universe is music. The whole universe is harmonious and that is the order of joy. So in order to be joyful, we have to be at least in tune with the universe.
We need to tune our wisdom, our virtues with the universe in order to know our place in the universe and how to live in the universe and calibrate our lives to a tuneful order. And so that was an ancient view in China. It's the same in ancient Greece. Pythagoras was the same. It's about the tuning of the universe and how we fit into that.
And if we are out of tune with it, we're in big trouble. And that gets taken up in the Christian world, the early Christian thought. The particularly interesting is Clement of Alexandria. It talks about the Logos, the Word of God as the singing Logos. It's a musical order. And Augustine is the same. The first book that he wrote after his conversion is the book De Musica on Music.
And again, it's about rhythm, and it's about the rhythm of the universe. as the poetry of the universe. That's how we are to understand the universe and how we fit in. So joy is a kind of well tuned order that we belong in. It's not this kind of exuberance. It's something we obey. It's something that we listen to, and it's something that is there before us.
It's not really human in that sense. Music isn't human. Music is actually creation.
Evan Rosa: Yes. This is getting us into some really good territory that I wanted to ask you about. And it does surround both. I think we could maybe appreciate both the Confucian tradition and the Christian tradition in looking at music.
as a possible metaphor for wisdom. And you do a lot of work in the book and trying to look at just that the logos, the word and wisdom. And, and insofar as the Confucian tradition is also deeply concerned with wisdom and, and, um, your goal is to help us see music and attend to it and pay attention in a different way.
But you take us into what you call weird and fabulous things about the world and about music and. And these things are surprising and full of wonder, and I want to hear you wax about this.
Daniel Chua: To wax lyrical? Yes. So does music teach us how to live? That's really my question. In order to do that, we have to move out of our current understanding of music, which is very consumer based.
And as I said, understand it in terms of creation. Is music really part of the created order? And do other animals make music? Just do the stars make music and so on, right? Of course, that is a very ancient view, but it had a lot of wisdom in it. And even if you read the Jewish scriptures, wisdom is there at the beginning of the universe.
Wisdom is there, and wisdom is having a lot of joy, and wisdom is taking delight. This is the Book of Job. It's taking a lot of delight, uh, in the universe as God is making it, and it's a kind of construct, you know, it's a kind of construction project. And somehow wisdom is just there, all the time, taking delight.
And this is also music, because then it talks about how the stars sang and so on, right? So, you know, in the, in the Jewish scripture, the understanding of music is also one of And if we understand the world, the creative order is music in some way, then we can begin to understand our place in it and to have some wisdom about where we fit in the world.
And the whole point about music is it is both rational, that is, it's something that really beautifully ordered and or something that is aesthetic. Uh, it is something that is very, very beautiful. And that combination makes it very special because it seems to say something about why the world is good.
And if you can understand that before we can understand, you know, the music today, then I think we have a much better basis for appreciating music and seeing where it fits in the world and how we should think about it.
Evan Rosa: Unpack that a little bit more, particularly around rationality and the element of truth.
beauty and the element of the aesthetic, and then how that kind of combines into, you know, the third element of goodness, um, the transcendentals of truth and goodness and beauty. And of course you are saying that in this exploration of music and joy, it is for a lesson in the good life. It's a lesson in flourishing and it's going to guide us toward that.
Daniel Chua: So music in the ancient world is about tuning. It's about calculating ratios and numbers. It's about harmony. So in that sense, It's a very rational order. In order to tune your instrument, you need some kind of reasoning in order to get the right scale and to make sure that it is in tune. And the thing that Pythagoras discovered was that this also seems to work on a very universal scale.
And so he had this whole transcendental idea of the harmony of the spheres. But then the Chinese also came up with something similar. They didn't interact, but it was a similar idea. where, you know, the whole universe is musical and that affects the calendar and everything, right? So here we are then with this very rational idea of music.
But the thing about this is, it then sounds beautiful. You can play this, uh, on your instrument, on your, uh, on your string instrument or your flute or whatever. And that sense in which, wow, the universe is musical in this, as something beautiful and truthful, uh, and rational became a kind of paradigm for how the world works.
And that's a very nice idea of the world. I call it an aesthetic fittingness. You know, everything just fits so beautifully together. How can it be that the world is designed like this, right? And so people wanted to be in that fit. You know, if you were the emperor in ancient China, Confucius you, you need to find the right tone.
If you don't have the right tone, you cannot govern because the mandate of heaven will not be given to you. You'll be tone deaf. You'll be mute. And you will, uh, create an out of tune society and everything will be dissonant. So finding that tone, literally finding that tone, because it was a real tone, was fundamental for Chinese thinking at that time.
And it's really the same, I think, in the theology of Clement of Alexandria or of Augustine. You've got to Be in tune with the Logos. And with Clematis, it's particularly interesting because, you know, the incarnation of Christ, Christ coming into the world, then brings Christ, not as this kind of, you know, abstract patterning of the Logos, but as an instrument.
Christ comes as an instrument, and he's playing a new tune for our salvation, and we get to join in that tune. In other words, we are kind of in a co creative process, you know, with Jesus, we're playing together in ordering the world. And that's an extraordinarily beautiful theological way which you know what music can do if we think of it in terms of our relation to creation and what the future of our planet can be like if we are working with the logos rather than trying to be as it were reason itself, you know, manipulating the world.
We are actually working with Christ in the world.
Evan Rosa: I mean, one interesting analogy that we might consider here is the difference between sheet music, which is the sort of theory or the idea, and then the playing the performance of it. You can behold. the Ninth Symphony that way. You can hand me a copy of the Ninth Symphony, but it has a different feeling once it's performed, once it's incarnated.
Perhaps that is a fitting analogy for the incarnation of the Logos taking on flesh.
Daniel Chua: Ah, yes. Yeah. It's a little bit like music theory, if you like, or notation where, you know, you have this very abstract idea of the universe. But once that incarnation happens, it's like there's a performance and the music is happening.
It becomes an event. So the Christ event is music king. And when that happens, it changes everything, right? It's some, which is actually not possible normally in the Pythagorean order. Yeah. So this is the interesting thing about Christian thought. So the Pythagorean universe, which cannot change because it's already perfect.
is changed by something even more perfect, where something enters or rather someone enters into that world and changes the song and how we perform music. And I like the idea there between theory or notation and the actual performance because Christ comes and hey, there's this new concert of praise and we need to join in and we participate then in the kind of co creative music with Christ.
Uh, that sort of is a kind of doxological concepts of the whole of creation.
Evan Rosa: I'm thinking of the Confucian approach to harmony as a virtue, not just a musical concept. And I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about the relational wisdom that might be on offer by thinking about music as this metaphor for how we might come together.
Daniel Chua: But the Confucian tradition is very ordered.
I mean, you know, Confucius is. Uh, a person that's thinking about governance and thinking about how things are placed in the world. So his idea of harmony is one where people should be who they are. So, you know, if you're a son, you should be a son. If you're a father, you should be a father and so on. And this is how the cosmos is ordered.
It is in tune in that sense. And finding your place in that is very important in the Confucian system. Otherwise things would get out of order and then it will be a big jangly dissonance. And of course, it's not as fixed as you think. It sounds very hierarchical and very authoritarian. But actually, what Confucius is saying is that we have to find that order.
We have to seek it out. The whole point of finding the right note for the emperor isn't just, you know, then the emperor is in charge and everybody listens to me and resonates with me. Rather, it's No, Emperor, you need to go and find that tone. What is the right tone that will resonate wisely in the rest of your kingdom?
So it is not just something that is pre ordered. It's something you should seek. And of course, there's another tradition that sort of feeds into the Confucian tradition, which is the Taoist tradition. They're usually quite different. It's just a bit more free and goes with the flow, but actually in Chinese thought, they kind of belong together.
And there's this tradition then in music, which is much more about that. Going with the flow. Where is the universe going and how is it being ordered? Can we move with it and be more flexible, more balanced in our approach to wisdom?
Evan Rosa: Yeah. This has ties for me to modern jazz. Yes. And the kind of improvisation that's required and the kind of practice, that's why you say in Confucian, uh, practice makes perfect, right? You make the way by, by a series of actions that are searching for that to them. Yeah. And jazz offers this fantastic expression of a different kind of wisdom and obviously it's a wisdom born through suffering and born through grief.
And yet, if you listen to Coltrane, right, if you listen to a Love Supreme, even if it is born out of grief and sorrow and suffering, it comes out as exuberance. And of course, in the very playing of it, when you look at the level of play, that spontaneity and the ability to improvise and have such control over one's instrument.
Such that it melds and creates pitch harmony, keeping in time. There's this incredible beauty that comes from the wisdom of jazz.
Daniel Chua: I love that analogy with jazz and ancient Chinese musical thought, because this is true. I mean, you know, jazz. is a kind of disciplined spontaneity, which is what ancient Chinese musical thought is.
You know, with Confucius, yes, we have to keep practicing. We have to keep following these rituals and jazz does that. You know, a jazz musician doesn't just improvise. No, he or she is practicing, learning the riffs, you know, getting into these different patterns so that it is almost immediate when you come to improvisation.
So there's that learning process, but at some point it becomes so natural to you. that is just part of your life. It becomes spontaneous. So a kind of disciplined spontaneity then becomes the core of joy in ancient Chinese thought in a combination of Confucius and Daoist ideas. And then you can just follow that way and it can lead into very surprising places that are extremely beautiful and that are new.
And that's the possibility of the new, which is not possible if the order of music is simply set in stone. I think the Pythagorean order, I think the Pythagorean order is a little bit limited in that sense. Nothing new can actually happen in it. But with Chinese thought, there's more wiggle room and you can begin, as it were, this kind of jazz like improvisation.
But I think it comes much more in the fore with theological thought, with the idea of the incarnation, and then something completely new. The new song happening in creation.
Evan Rosa: And I think that kind of creative capacity of music, it does so well approximate the meaning of a flourishing life, exploring the cosmic newness, ultimately weird and fabulous and surprising discovery of the incarnation. And that level of creativity and that level of musicality that comes through the cosmos is like true, like swings wide.
Yeah,
Daniel Chua: I mean, I think the question is, you know, what does it mean to really flourish? What does freedom mean in that? What does obedience mean in that? How does it mean, what does it mean to have a world that is already given to you prior to your existence and living in that world? And I think these are the key questions that this kind of music theoretical framework brings in.
I should add, however, How, you know, harmony in itself, the order of the universe in terms of tuning and ratios, is a bit limiting because it has to be perfect. The idea here of this aesthetic fittingness is that it's really very precarious because it has to be absolutely just right. And the problem with tuning, once you get into the nitty gritty of tuning, is that it's not just right.
Somehow God has created tuning so that it's Just missed it. There's a little dissonance in there that makes it totally imperfect. It's like the fly in the soup kind of thing. And so that was a problem that the ancient world had to deal with. And in fact, led to the whole collapse of the musical cosmos, you know, by the time we reach later modernity.
But that's another story. But what I wanted to bring out is that we need to think of music slightly differently in terms of rhythm. which is what both Augustine does, but also when we're talking about Daoism and Confucianism, the idea of a certain flexibility there, it really comes out of a rhythmic understanding of music.
And my question in the book is, which comes first, you know, rhythm or harmony? So can you think of any music that has no harmony? No tune, no pitches, right? And the answer is yes. You know, you can be rapping or you can just have African drumming, right? There's music that is purely rhythmic, but you can't think of music without rhythm.
So to me, rhythm comes first. And in fact, harmony is based on rhythm because every pitch is just basically repetitive patterns that are so fast that our ears hear it as a pitch, but actually it's rhythm. So the whole of music is a kind of rhythmic, complex, rhythmic structure. And once we get to rhythm. as a basis of music.
We can think of music not as a such a perfect aesthetic fit, but something that is far more elastic, more giving. And the idea in the book is that music actually is something that is extremely generous. It's not just an aesthetic fit. It is always more than enough. So going back to jazz, In jazz, there are no wrong notes, right?
Because rhythmically speaking, if you play a wrong note, you can always, you know, reassess it rhythmically. In time, you can sort of incorporate that and make it meaningful, right? Uh, and that's exactly what rhythm does. There's nothing you can do to rhythm to break it. Whereas if you have a harmonic universe, You can smash it extremely easily with a tiny little bit of dissonance.
Yes,
Evan Rosa: yeah. And in that sense, there are forms of music that are more fragile than, say, jazz, where it's so adaptive. You could always adapt from there and turn it into something new and different and
Daniel Chua: good. Yes, that's right.
Evan Rosa: I would love to have you take us into the modern period Talking about the important link between sadness and joy. The music gives us opportunities for joy. It gives us opportunities for very uplifting and motivating feelings. And yet it also gives us opportunities for sadness to grieve through it. I do want to understand the sadness side of things that
Daniel Chua: you're trying to communicate.
Yeah, I think the modern world, the understanding of music, at least in the West currently, is a tragic view of music. And it doesn't mean that music doesn't sound joyful. It just means that underlying music, the order of the cosmos is basically tragic. It's a bad world and music is kind of consolation. And that, so whether it's a kind of hedonistic pleasure that we get, like taking a kind of drug, you know, music is a kind of escapism and you just consume it, or whether it's a very, or whether it's very serious philosophical thought, you know, from Schopenhauer onwards, that music is kind of, just describes a tragic universe.
And somehow we have to make the best of our lives in trying to order this music so that we can get through this chaotic world. It's a very serious and tragic view. It's the world. But I don't think that's how most people experience music. I think, you know, something deep down inside us wants to say, actually, there's something much more to music than this particular view.
So how do we get to this peculiar cul de sac? And I think the one way to understand music is that if music is something that exists already as part of creation, and it makes the world so extraordinarily coherent and so abundant, Then life isn't really about the survival of the fittest. It's about the survival of the fitting, if you like.
It's about people who flourish, right? And music helps describe that. So sometimes when we're really, really sad, we play music and we say, Oh gosh, you know, this music is sad. But my point is actually this music is joy. In the ancient sense, because when we play sad music, I mean, when we lament, actually what's happening is that the music is making sense of our sadness.
What could just fall apart? What could be just total meaninglessness and despair becomes somehow meaningful because music can't help that. But be meaningful. It is always going to be coherent when you put it together. And the craziest moment when this happens is John Cage's four minutes and 33 seconds.
Evan Rosa: John Cage was a 20th century music theorist and composer whose work seems to generate as much confusion as it does insight. Espousing ridicule when played before popular audiences in the 60s, whose ears simply weren't tuned to the frequency Cage was working on. But fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg considered him a genius.
John Cage was particularly interested in sound and silence.
Does sound have meaning? Is true silence possible? Can you hear silence? Is silence music? Whatever it is, John Cage said in his book entitled Silence, you won't actually find it because, and I'm quoting Daniel here, there is no escape from the rhythms of life.
John Cage: I love sounds just as they are and I have no need for them to be anything more.
And
Evan Rosa: Cage's most infamous and important work might be 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds.
Daniel Chua: 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds is a piece of music by John Cage, where John Cage basically doesn't compose. All that he does is to put a score, a frame, let's say the piano version, and says, you know, you can lift the piano lid. The pianist is sitting there, and he or she doesn't play anything.
And the audience is just listening to four minutes and 33 seconds of whatever happens in that frame of time. That's the piece. And it's not listening to nothing. The point isn't nihilism. You're listening to something, but that something, whatever it is, whether it's the air conditioning or a cough in the audience is music because actually it's coherent.
And in a way he's making a statement about the fact that the universe, everywhere, wherever we are, music. is there if we really attend to it because everything actually is rhythm. You know, he put himself in an anechoic chamber, which is a place where there's supposed to be no sound. And then he hurt himself, his heartbeat, his nervous system and says, you know, I can't run away from sound, you know, or from rhythm.
In fact, you know, it's just there all the time. And so music is always in the background and our own human music. It's just a foregrounding of the amazing temporality of the universe.
Evan Rosa: I think it does draw Our attention and yet it's avant garde. It's important contextually to make a point about what it is to listen and what it is to attend.
And so far as we are always trying to make sense of things, you know, we're listening to music to make sense as you just had made that point about the way that it makes sense of our grief or sadness. It makes sense of the promise of, of our hopes. Music has this other capacity to help us learn to pay attention and listen.
You make a suggestion that's at one point, you know, everyone should have a daily four minutes and 33 seconds of listening.
Daniel Chua: If we really listen, I think we will understand the world around us a little bit better because our problem is that all we want to do is to consume the world around us or to control the world around us rather than be attentive.
I think music at its best, can help us to do that. And I think that's what all these ancient writers and the best modern writers on music are trying to get us to do, to really attend to the world, because it is actually harmonious and rhythmically ordered. And if you can hear that, you can hear our place in it too.
You
Evan Rosa: say, you make the point there really is no silence, you know, and It is to de center the human perspective and see ourselves as caught up in a much larger cosmos.
Daniel Chua: Yeah, if we see the world around us, whether it's a little environment or the larger environments as a place where we need to be musical, we need to be, as you were, either in tune or in rhythm.
Uh, with that network of people or systems around us, then we can begin to do what music does, which is to improvise around that to make it a flourishing place. It will change it, but it'll change it as it were for good.
Evan Rosa: And now let's take Daniel's advice and listen to 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Of course, if you don't like this song, just skip ahead by about that much time and get on with the rest of the interview.
But if you're interested in listening, truly attending, To the music that's already given to you, all around you, in just this moment, then enjoy. I give you 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
And we're back. Let's move now from the practice of attention and listening to the enactment of jubilation and joy. In the moral and spiritual and intellectual turmoil of St. Augustine's youth, marked by his famous restless heart and sensual desire, Augustine hears a song, recounted in his Confessions, he's paralyzed and in despair until he hears small children singing nearby, pick up and read, pick up and read.
And following his conversion, he'd weep openly during hymns and canticles. As Daniel mentioned earlier, his first treatise following his newfound faith was De Musica, a six volume exploration of music as a quote, science of measuring well. That ascends from time to eternity, from motion to rest, and from mere pleasure to a divine symphony of jubilation.
God, Augustine says in De Musica, is music.
Daniel Chua: Augustine on music is very interesting because, you know, he has this whole book on music where it's about a very ordered life of a well proportioned rhythms and the whole universe is based on this.
Evan Rosa: As a student of rhetoric, Augustine is. I mean, he's captivated by beauty.
He's captivated by entertainment as he writes and confessions. He's restless. His heart is so restless. He's a sensual person. Uh, it's fascinating to me that he turns to music as in an effort to understand it and see the world through it.
Daniel Chua: Yeah, Augustine, he loves music, uh, sensually and intellectually. He has an interesting time with it.
He, he sort of struggles with music. His conversion was very musical. You know, he talks about his conversion, they were singing hymns and everything, and it was very emotive. And so when he's writing the musical, you know, he's coming from that rhetorical tradition, you And he also inherits from sort of his ancient Greek and Roman thinking.
And, and so he, he talks about this very ordered universe, very mathematical. Everything is a number it's based on that. And so in a way, it's a very controlling kind of order he has, but you know, he sometimes for Augustine, you know, he loves music so much. that he can fall in love with it and that can distract him, you know, from God and his opinion.
Some people are like that because they're very touched by music, you know, and they get into it. And of course it was also essential music was associated with, you know, the seedier part of life in those days. And so in a way it's about order and discipline and spontaneity. The same sort of Confucian system that we talked about, um, in the music.
But what is interesting about Augustine is that, you know, in his, commentary on the Psalms, he begins reading about, you know, singing a new song to the Lord and all the sort of joyful, you know, music making that's taking place there. And then he suddenly understands that actually there's a different way of thinking about music, that it's not just this Pythagorean sort of order.
of the universe, a different rhythm. And he gets this from looking at workers in the fields in North Africa. So he's imagine him preaching in Carthage and he can see in the distance of these people sort of at harvest time and they're swinging harvesting tools
John Cage: and
Daniel Chua: in that swing, that creates a kind of rhythm. And then they begin to sing, and then they begin to shout, and they begin to improvise.
And Augustine says, and this thing, which he calls the jubilus, this jubilus is actually what's happening in the Psalms. It's like this in the Psalms. It's a kind of spontaneous, rhythmic music. That happens in the fields. And this is what we need to bring in our worship. So it's the same system, if you like, the same order of the universe, but now it's totally spontaneous and it's totally bodily because now we talk about harvesting in the fields, right?
And it's a lot of hard work. Because, you know, you're sweating and you're just singing because you're very, you're expectant about the joy that is to come was the abundant harvest. That's what it's about. And so this becomes a newer thinking about rhythm and music that is really embedded in the heart of African concepts of musical life.
And of course, that jubilus then moves all the way to the Americas in the slave trade, to the slave culture, all the way deep south into the cotton fields. But the same Rhythmic music, that jubilus is still happening. And so what Augustin is really trying to say is, you know, there is a music, there's a rhythm.
There's a joy that is beyond suffering. And it is lived out, I think, in the slave culture, uh, here's where, you know, the rhythm becomes this defiant joy that will not be crushed, a joy that looks beyond the immediates and calls down, as it were, the justice of heaven on earth. And this is what we see as the beginning, if you like, of blues and jazz.
That is the fundamental core, really, of American musical identity, I think. And that's a very powerful testimony to what a more cosmic, rhythmic view of music is, and a more robust understanding of joy that isn't just for the moment, just to be consumed, or just a kind of victory. It's something that simply is something that is a fundamental ethos that orientates our life towards what is good.
And that's what I mean by music teaching us something about the good life.
Evan Rosa: I wonder if you might close with a benediction of sorts for the listener. Based on what you've learned to this point, studying music so closely and looking at its place in the cosmos, what kind of blessing would you offer the listener in this moment?
Daniel Chua: Since music exists. And we love it. We enjoy it. It shows us something about what the world is like and the Logos, the word who made this world.
So in attending to music, we should be celebrating our life in this world, the celebration of creation. And to know that whatever is happening, however bad it may be, there is a fundamental, unchanging joy that music articulates. It reflects the order, not only of the universe, the heart. of God. And that's my blessing.
Evan Rosa: Daniel, thank you so much for your time. It's a pleasure.
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Daniel Chua. Production assistance by Kacie Barrett. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith. yale. edu, where you can find past episodes, articles, books, and other educational resources, That help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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