Pursuit of transcendence

Why have you allowed yourself to get more than marginally involved in the concluding performance of this year’s Evenings on Campus on Friday?

The performance is bringing together three diverse elements which in synthesis express the contemporary spiritual thirst accompanying dissatisfaction with institutional religion as with all fixed structures.

The first element is John Coltrane’s Meditation 1, a masterpiece of 20th century music recognised as such well beyond the jazz sphere. It will be performed by Massimo de Majo leading an international quartet of world celebrities and promising local talent.

The second is a series of ‘canticles’ drawn by Biancamaria Stanzini Ghedini out of the letters of Catherine of Siena, patron saint of Europe.

The third is a visual installation by Vince Briffa, the ‘master’ of digital arts in Communication Studies at the University.

Coltrane and Catherine, although very distant from each other in space and time, are revealed in this performance to be kindred spirits in several respects.

Both are to begin with signal exceptions to the dicho­tomy alleged by Peguy to separate mysticism and politics.

In terms of mysticism, there are both affinities and differences between the two. Coltrane’s always retains a psychedelic tinge, probably originating from his marijuana experiences.

Catherine’s yearning for peace is paradoxically marked by a crusading militantism nowadays recognised by psychologists as a typical symptom of anorexia. Anorexia implies abstention from food most often with the intention of destroying the femininity of one’s body.

Why do you speak of Coltrane’s mysticism when he is generally known as a saxophonist who played with such revolutionaries in the jazz world as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk?

As is said in a book with which philosophy students will be familiar, on Deleuze and Music, “Coltrane’s music stands out in 20th century Western music – with Berg’s Wozzeck is perhaps its only equal – in its production of a substantive ethical voice from the most highly developed interaction with musical materials”.

Coltrane is here being praised for having developed an extremely original musical language out of the Afro-American tradition that, despite its apparently purely aesthetic motivation, was still felt to convey a political message.

“Though many traditionalists reacted violently to his innovations, a vast community of listeners from white jazz critics and club-goers to a large section of the African American vernacular community conversant with the language of jazz and the blues understood Coltrane’s music” to constitute quite clearly a symbolic expression.

It epitomised the spiritual freedom and self-creation that is possible for somebody who is not really politically free, even although legally not slave or serf.

Such a human condition is admirably expressed by the very form of Coltrane’s so-called ‘free’ jazz created, however, within received musical rigorously structured forms.

The analogy of Coltrane’s modal music with Catherine’s expression of her political ideology (including the role of women) struck Massimo de Majo when he set out to complement in music the thought woven into the life-story of Catherine of Siena, although it is unlikely to have occurred to anyone less familiar with the works of both than him.

Another strange similarity between Coltrane and Catherine is that, although both of them are deeply rooted in their local culture, yet both rise above it to operate in a global perspective.

As Shipp, a founder of the so-called School of ‘Ecstatic Jazz’ has written: “Coltrane plays universal music… with spiritual overtones influenced by rhythms from all over the world (notably India)… and synthesises them into endemic jazz sensibility.”

Likewise, Catherine begins by stopping the democratic comune of her native city from degenerating, because of fanatic partisanship, into a Signoria; but it is her precocious awareness that we all inhabit one small planet that drives her, among other moves, to enjoin the Pope to return to Rome as the seat which could most easily be understood to signify his universal responsibility.

Can you explain somewhat more fully the way in which Catherine figures in Friday’s performance?

The experience I am myself most looking forward to is to hear the key phrases of Catherine ringing in my ears in a female voice instead of just seeing them on the printed page.

Actually, Catherine dictated these letters because she was at the time of their writing illiterate, but it is clear they were both formalised in style by her ‘secretaries’ at the time of writing and even more by the editors who undertook to print them after her premature death at the age of 33.

Evidently, one can feel much more directly addressed by Catherine by listening to her words in sound than through taking in visually the abstract signs codified in a printed text. Coltrane’s music can similarly enhance the sense of universality so present in Catherine’s message.

Catherine was the 21st child, daughter of a father who was a poor dyer of wool. She was a twin and her mother could not breast feed both prematurely-born daughters. She chose Catherine to feed herself while her sister Giovanna was given out to a wet nurse.

The sister soon died, while Catherine survived. She seems to have been made aware that all life is not only engendered by love but also accompanied by painful sacrifice.

She remained a lay woman, although living in a Dominican- inspired community. She overcame the prejudice against women speaking out in a leadership role that came from misreading St Paul by claiming that one night she was divinely inspired to write a book, which the next day she began doing, although she had been previously illiterate.

She interpreted this quasi-miraculous gift as authorisation from the highest possible authority to speak out to both the Church and civil society.

Her message has been articulated in five ‘song-poems’ corresponding to the five movements of Coltrane’s quartet.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.