In the Beginning, God Sang Us Into Being. God & Music

Añadido: 2026-05-23

[00:00:16]This is about music and God. If the relationship within the two of them fascinates you as much as it fascinates me, then stick around. You might enjoy this. If it doesn't interest you much, this is the moment to stop.

[00:00:29]I remember exactly the moment when I first encountered music as a gateway to the presence of God.

[00:00:36]I was nine. I was a young chorister in a parish church choir, just learning to sing.

[00:00:42]I can even remember remember the anthem.

[00:00:45]It was called with the voice of singing.

[00:00:52]It produced in me a skin-tingling, joy-flowing ecstasy. It wasn't directed inward, it was directed outward in praise. I didn't know the object of my praise, but I did know I was returning to him what he had given to me.

[00:01:07]Turned out I would spend the rest of my life singing.

[00:01:10]In fact, I find it impossible not to sing.

[00:01:15]Singing only makes proper sense though when it's directed and praise is given to him who gave the music and for whom music becomes an act of mutual love.

[00:01:25]So, since I was a child, I've been wondering about the relationship between music and God. Obviously, there is one.

[00:01:32]What I mean is the way in which music belongs to God and only really works in relation to God rather than an end in itself.

[00:01:41]How can we use music as a form of evangelization and a means of reaching out to our culture to explain why it is captured by music, hardwired for the love of melody, and hungry for beauty and home?

[00:01:55]There are moments when the argument for God comes not through reasoning but through sound.

[00:02:01]You yourself will have had one of these sensations, one of these experiences.

[00:02:08]Maybe you're in a concert hall or alone with headphones or sitting in a church when you hear a chord you weren't expecting, a progression you hadn't heard before, a melody you didn't know, and something happens your rational mind can't quite account for. A door opens.

[00:02:25]Or perhaps more accurately, something that's always been there suddenly becomes audible.

[00:02:30]Tears arrive before we've decided to cry. A longing surfaces from somewhere beneath language, but for what exactly we can't say.

[00:02:41]For something we've never quite had and yet somehow recognize.

[00:02:45]For home, perhaps, though not any home we've lived in.

[00:02:50]Music does this to us.

[00:02:53]It does it reliably across every human culture without exception, across every century we have a record of it.

[00:02:59]It's arguably the most universal, the most immediate of all the ways the human soul finds itself soul finds itself ambushed by transcendence.

[00:03:09]And it's worth asking why.

[00:03:11]Not to dissolve the mystery into explanations, but because the question itself takes us somewhere quite well, I think unexpected and certainly extraordinary.

[00:03:22]Part of the answer is that music bypasses the defenses we erect around our rational mind.

[00:03:28]Words can be argued with.

[00:03:30]Propositions can be resisted resisted.

[00:03:32]Doctrine can be held at arm's length, examined, disputed, set aside.

[00:03:38]But a melody in the right key at the right moment goes straight past all of that, doesn't ask permission, it simply arrives.

[00:03:46]And this is why C.S. Lewis describes his first serious intimations of what he called joy, that piercing, bittersweet longing that eventually led him to faith. He uses a German romantic term, "Sehnsucht".

[00:04:00]Not through reading theology, but through music and myth.

[00:04:05]The rational mind is a gift. It's part of our being made the image of God, and we have to return to it. But there are things which the spirit communicates that require, at least initially, the suspension of our need to manage and explain and contain experience.

[00:04:22]Music is one of the most primary languages of that suspension, and yet music ultimately calls us back to the word.

[00:04:31]Because we're not only souls, we are also minds. We are creatures made both to be moved and to understand.

[00:04:39]The same God who, in Tolkien's great myth, set the Silmarillion, sings the world into being. Also speaks the Logos, the word, Jesus, the rational principle at the heart of all things, the light that enlightens every mind, the light, the word through whom everything was made that was made.

[00:05:00]When we both a song, we also need a word, the lyrics, the poetry.

[00:05:06]I want to try here to make a clearer link, at least for myself, perhaps for you, too, to do exactly that, to move between music and theology, between wonder and understanding. To ask what the structure of sound might teach us about the structure of God and the structure of our longing.

[00:05:28]Because music is not just emotionally powerful. It is, as it turns out, theologically and scientifically precise.

[00:05:37]It obeys physics.

[00:05:39]It obeys mathematics.

[00:05:41]Its rules are not arbitrary conventions.

[00:05:44]They are discovered, given structures, features of physical reality that no one invented and no one can revoke. All we can do is discover them.

[00:05:54]And when we follow or engage with them far enough, with honesty and attention, they begin to sound less like the grammar of sound and more like the grammar of our soul.

[00:06:05]For beauty, its need for resolution, its ache for the home we've never quite had, but never quite forgotten.

[00:06:15]It's no accident that when talking, Oxford scholar, Catholic Christian, the most careful of myth-makers, sat down to write write the creation of his fictional universe in his extraordinary work, The Silmarillion, he reached instinctively for music. He knew what music was doing.

[00:06:34]If you haven't read the first chapter of The Silmarillion, it's amazing.

[00:06:39]He knew it was the nearest thing in human experience to the language of origin.

[00:06:44]We begin as all music begins with a single sound and what it turns out to contain.

[00:06:50]Let me introduce you for a moment to Jacob Collier. I've learned so much from him.

[00:06:55]It's been listening to this extraordinary young genius, which has been the stimulus for my revisiting the relationship between music and God.

[00:07:02]Whenever he talks about the rules of music and harmony, I go, "Oh no, my goodness, that's theology, that's spirituality.

[00:07:10]That's the Holy Spirit."

[00:07:12]If you know about Jacob already, please forgive me, but if you don't hear know who he is, here's a very brief summary.

[00:07:24]Jacob's a charismatic genius born in 1994.

[00:07:28]It doesn't seem very long ago. He's a composer. He's a a multi-instrumentalist arranger who captivates audience with his unconventional spontaneity and extraordinary depth of musical understanding and skill.

[00:07:42]If haven't come across him yet, you might start with this Sydney masterclass. There's a link in the text or down below.

[00:07:52]There's a moment in Jacob Collier Jacob Collier's masterclass when he strikes a single note on the piano and he asks his audience to listen not to the note but to what it carries when he vocalizes it.

[00:08:04]Because no note, it turns out, exists alone. Each one has overtones.

[00:08:09]The moment a string or a vocal chord vibrates it generates a cascade of harmonics above itself, the overtone series. Each frequency a national a natural mathematical consequence of the one below. And it's in the form of a major chord.

[00:08:28]The major chord is not a human invention, not a cultural preference, not even a Western imposition on neutral acoustic material. It's already there, embedded in maths, embedded in physics, embedded in the universe, folded into the physics of a vibrating string. We didn't create it, we discover it.

[00:08:48]If we sit that for that with that for a moment we begin to see it matters more than it might first appear.

[00:08:55]The implications are explosive.

[00:08:57]If beauty and order and relationship are not values we project onto a silent universe but structural features of matter itself.

[00:09:11]And we're not talking just about matter with music, are we?

[00:09:16]Then we're living in a very different kind of place than the modern imagination and above all the secular imagination tends to assume.

[00:09:25]We're not in a machine we've learned to navigate and manipulate. We're not in a void we've learned to decorate.

[00:09:31]Something more like a piece of music we bought been born into the middle of we're both performing and listening and trying to listen to it properly.

[00:09:42]There is something almost irresistibly Trinitarian in the image of that single note singing its family into being.

[00:09:49]One source naturally and necessarily generating relationship not as an afterthought, not by decision, by virtue of what it is.

[00:09:59]The note doesn't choose to produce overtones. It does it because it's it's nature.

[00:10:05]A major chord.

[00:10:07]To exist in this universe is already to be in relation. This solitary self-contained thing turns out, on closer inspection, not to exist. It's single and multiple at the same time.

[00:10:20]Now, for anyone shaped by Christian theology, this is not a surprise. It's a confirmation that God reveals in the Christian faith.

[00:10:28]He's not a solitary absolute, he's a communion. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in eternal loving relationship. What the early church fathers, particularly in the East, called perichoresis.

[00:10:40]It's one of my favorite theological words and ideas [clears throat] rooted in the early church fathers. A kind of divine dance in which each person exists only in and through the others it's dancing with.

[00:10:53]The overtone [clears throat] series doesn't prove the Trinity, but it suddenly, well, you might say, rhymes with it.

[00:10:59]It suggests a universe made by such a God would naturally bear, at the level of most basic physics, the signature of its maker, reaching always outward into relationship, always generating harmony with a single source.

[00:11:15]Tolkien understood all of this with the rigor of a scholar and the instinct of a myth-maker.

[00:11:20]In the Ainulindalë, Ainulindalë, the creation myth that opens the Silmarillion, he gives us a cosmology that is entirely deliberately musical.

[00:11:32]Eru the one, brings melody.

[00:11:36]And he in the one brings the Ainur into being.

[00:11:42]These angelic powers, each carrying a particular gift of theme and melody, and he invites them to make music together.

[00:11:50]In In Christian theology, this is God and the angels.

[00:11:54]They weave their individual voices into a great and growing harmony. And then Tolkien makes his most audacious move.

[00:12:01]This music doesn't merely accompany or celebrate creation, it becomes creation.

[00:12:08]It's both the means and the end. Matter is not built or manufactured or spoken into neutral existence.

[00:12:16]It is sung.

[00:12:18]The physical world in Tolkien's vision is a sounding of the first great theme made visible. And the overtone series, the harmonics, folded into everything vibrating, every vibrating string, is the universe still remembering at its most fundamental level what it was made of.

[00:12:38]This isn't decorative myth.

[00:12:40]Tolkien was a devout Catholic who thought with great seriousness about creation and sub-creation and the relationship between human art and divine making. He chooses music because he understands that music, unlike visual art, unlike architecture, exists only in time.

[00:12:59]There it is. Now it's not.

[00:13:03]Only in relationship between notes, only in the movement from one movement to the next. It can't be static. It can't be hoarded or or kept or controlled, though recording music's interfered with that a bit. It requires by its very nature both a giver and a receiver, both a sound and a silence in which the sound can be heard. It was for Tolkien the closest analogy available to the act of a God who creates not from necessity, but from love.

[00:13:32]Whose making is inherently relational, inherently generous, inherently dynamic.

[00:13:40]But now, the bad angel turns up. Melkor enters.

[00:13:45]Tolkien's great adversary, his Satan figure.

[00:13:49]He doesn't attack creation with brute force. He corrupts the music.

[00:13:54]He introduces his own themes into the great harmony, but they clash.

[00:14:00]They're prideful.

[00:14:02]They're driven by the desire to create from himself alone, rather than within the gift that's been making to him.

[00:14:08]Discord enters.

[00:14:10]It's horrid.

[00:14:13]The music becomes turbulent, wounded, unresolved.

[00:14:17]At this point, you and I would just switch it off and start again.

[00:14:23]This is where Tolkien's theological nerve is most clearly visible. Ilúvatar does not stop him. He doesn't switch it off.

[00:14:32]He lets the discord play.

[00:14:34]And now, this is wonderful.

[00:14:36]He lets it swell and clash and wound the harmony. And then with calm of infinite depth, he folds it into a new theme, a new music, one that's richer, more complex, more moving than anything the original harmony, undisturbed, could have ever reached. The very attempt at destruction becomes the material for a deeper beauty into which it is woven, disarmed, and deepened.

[00:15:06]And Ilúvatar declares, in words that deserve deserve to stop the reader cold, "No theme may be played that has not its uttermost source in me. Even rebellion, in the end, cannot accept what we might call the grammar of the original love. The despoiler finds too late he's only been adding to a texture he's only been adding texture to a glory he never understood. I can't comprehend.

[00:15:38]This isn't optimism. Optimism is cheap really and Tolkien knew it. This is something far harder. The claim that the love at the foundation of all things is not merely strong enough to survive corruption but this is the miracle and the mystery patient and deep enough to use it to make from the wound something that could not have existed without the wounding wounding something even better.

[00:16:09]Which takes us to the minor key and Schubert and pain of a major chord.

[00:16:18]Our western ears have been brought and trained to associate major keys with joy and minor keys with sadness and this is generally true as far as it goes but Jacob Collier points to something more unsettling and more wonderful.

[00:16:32]The minor key is not a separate or opposing system.

[00:16:37]It's an inversion of the major.

[00:16:40]It doesn't exist separately or as an opposite concept as I think I always thought.

[00:16:47]Rather it's the inversion of the major.

[00:16:52]Reflect the major scale across its central axis and you arrive at the minor.

[00:16:58]Shadow is not the opposite of light.

[00:17:00]It's what happens to light. The minor key is the world heard from underneath.

[00:17:05]It's genuinely achingly beautiful not despite its sadness but because sadness honestly expressed is its own form of truth. Lament in this light is not the absence of worship.

[00:17:17]It's worships him on the other side, but there's a farther and a harder insight still, and I found it most fully in Schubert.

[00:17:26]We tend to assume instinctively the movement from minor to major is a movement from pain to relief, from tension to resolution, the clouds parting, the weight lifting.

[00:17:38]Phew, it's okay again, we think and feel.

[00:17:42]And usually it is.

[00:17:45]But it was when I was learning to sing Schubert that my singing teacher showed me there was something deeper here that I hadn't seen.

[00:17:54]It was Schubert who more than any other composer perhaps discovered this movement can mean almost the opposite in his late works, particularly the song cycles Winterreise and Schwanengesang written in the shadow of his very early death. It The arrival of a major key doesn't bring release, it brings something more devastating, a tenderness so unexpected, hidden in the minor, a brightness gentle and hard-won that actually it pierces more deeply than the minor key ever did.

[00:18:27]It's like warmth from remembered from within the cold. It's the face of someone glimpsed across an unbridgeable difference. The shift to major in Schubert carries within it the full weight of everything that came before.

[00:18:43]The resolution knows what it cost.

[00:18:46]And this points to truths that sit at the heart of our Christian experience.

[00:18:50]There are joys so deep they feel indistinguishable from grief, arrivals so longed for that they arrive already shadowed by loss, moments of grace so unexpected they break the heart open rather than closing it.

[00:19:07]The resurrection doesn't cancel the crucifixion, it redeems it.

[00:19:13]It makes it possible.

[00:19:15]Which is different and the most more costly thing altogether. The major key and its most profound doesn't erase the minor, it holds it transformed within itself.

[00:19:28]Notes want to go home and so do we.

[00:19:33]Jacob Collier makes a point that sounds almost too simple until you sit with it for a bit then find it has no bottom. In any scale, the notes are not equal in the sense of what we might call belonging.

[00:19:46]The tonic is the home.

[00:19:49]The dominant leads towards it with a powerful gravitational pull. The leading tone, the seventh, just a half a step beneath the tonic, is almost unbearable in its need to rise that small distance and resolve and arrive.

[00:20:05]Every melody, Collier reminds us, is a journey that needs The notes need to go somewhere.

[00:20:12]They long, they wander. We long, we wander with them.

[00:20:17]They resist the pull homeward, exploring chromatically, modulating, drifting into foreign keys, finding strange and beautiful harmonies far from where they started, but the return has to come.

[00:20:31]And when it finally does come, it's heard as returned precisely become because home was established at the beginning and never, not even in the farthest wandering, entirely forgotten. The tonic is the tonic. We have to go back to it.

[00:20:48]To the place we left. Remember that wonderful phrase of Eliot's? To know it for the first time.

[00:20:56]This is not a metaphor we impose on the music from outside, it's what the music is doing at the level of its own internal logic. And if the universe is, as Tolkien supposed, as the overtone series suggests, sung into being by a god who is himself the ground of all harmony, then this longing built into every scale is not accidental. It is structural.

[00:21:18]The notes need to return to the tonic is a musical form of our need to return to God.

[00:21:26]St. Augustine heard this before any of us in words so precise they've never been improved on.

[00:21:33]Thou made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it reposes in thee. He is describing the phenomenology of the human soul, but he was also, without quite knowing it, describing the leading tones' ache for resolution.

[00:21:49]We are creatures made in a particular key, you might say. We wander into dissonance. We get lost in foreign harmonies, into passages of such complexity and such beauty as we can forget for long stretches where home is, but the tonic is never truly lost.

[00:22:07]The restlessness itself is the evidence.

[00:22:10]You can't long for for what you've never, in some sense, always known.

[00:22:15]Music doesn't illustrate this journey, it enacts it.

[00:22:19]When we give ourselves to a great piece of music, we're not watching the journey of more safe distance. We make it ourselves. We feel the tension of the unresolved chord in our bodies. The release of the cadence is something almost physical. Well, it is physical.

[00:22:34]And this perhaps is music's most extraordinary gift to the spiritual life.

[00:22:38]It can describe the journey home with a precision that language struggles to match. It can mirror the journey, showing us the shape of our own longing reflected back. It can help us to understand the journey, make sense, in fact, of suffering and hopelessness and despair, make sense of wandering and delay in ways that ideas alone sometimes can't reach. and most mysteriously of all it can make the journey bearable when we're still in the middle of it because music by its very form promises resolution.

[00:23:12]The dissonance is held within a structure that is always and has to move towards home. The minor key is not the end of the story.

[00:23:21]The form itself is a kind of faith.

[00:23:28]So let's go back to this note on his piano.

[00:23:34]He strikes the string and immediately we discover it's not alone. It sings its harmonics and overtones into being a major chord. It reaches by its very nature beyond itself into relationship and complexity and beauty. It did not manufacture but just is.

[00:23:49]In that single physical event, a string vibrating, a room filling with sound, something is disclosed about the nature of the universe and about the nature of its maker.

[00:24:02]Tolkien uses myth to describe it.

[00:24:05]Augustine heard it as longing. Schubert heard it as the grief inside joy.

[00:24:10]Collier hears it as physics and mathematics and wonder all at once.

[00:24:16]And the extraordinary thing is there's no disagreement between these viewpoints. They are harmonics of the same note. Each one a natural consequence of the same source. Each one adding depth and complexity to what a single struck string listen to with enough attention, love, and I have to say understanding I think now turns out to contain.

[00:24:38]Music is the language you were given before we had words for God. It is a form that longing takes when longing is most honest and it is perhaps the clearest sign available to us we're not strangers in an indifferent universe. We are creatures made in the image of God who is at his deepest not silence, but song.

[00:25:01]No wonder he likes it when we sing to him.

[00:25:06]Next, I'm going to try and write about the circle of fifths, why relationship is the ground state of reality.

[00:25:15]Thank you for joining me.

[00:25:17]You'll find the text of this on my Substack.