Peter Serracino Inglott

It’s been three years, this week, since Fr Peter Serracino Inglott passed away. Three years and several celebrations of his life and work: at least two sets of lectures associated with his name; a prize named after him to reward social and cultural creativity; a festschrift by senior members of Malta’s community of philosophers; and, now, the belated publication (thanks to an initiative of Fr Mark Montebello op) of a 1978 manuscript, The Creative Use of Noise, about the place of music in history and society.

All these celebrations, each in its own way, underline something authentic about Fr Peter. For example, the festschrift, A Philosopher at Large, brings together 17 contributors writing from the perspective of widely diverging convictions and interests – from the spirit of capitalism to the philosophy of humour, from Augustine to Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, from the philosophy of law to the philosophy of beauty. Reading the essays is a bit like seeing Fr Peter reflected in a kaleidoscope.

Although Fr Peter would have disagreed with some of the arguments made, he would have been delighted with it. His idea of a good teacher – and almost all the contributors were once his students – was someone who gave his students a pinch: the pinch of knowledge, an open appetite for philosophy, enough to start them on their own path. He wasn’t interested in slavish disciples; he wanted to awaken originality.

But precisely because he was, at once, so influential while encouraging students to pursue their originality, it’s important not to lose sight of what he himself believed and thought. It’s important both to those who don’t want to lose sight of his ideas and also to those who want to exorcise them.

Here is where the importance of this short book (100 small pages) on music comes in.

It was co-written with composer Charles Camilleri and, although the writing style and range of reference (from Marx to Freud, from ancient Greek musicologists to Adorno, from animal behaviourists to communication theorists) are clearly Fr Peter’s, Camilleri had long been in conversation and collaboration withFr Peter before this book was finalised.

It’s worth braving the typos and reading the book if you have an interest in Fr Peter himself, in the history of music, or in the relation of aesthetics to ethics and politics.

First, the place of the book in Fr Peter’s life and thought.

The book’s blurb about Fr Peter is misleading in two ways. It suggests that he studied philosophy throughout his university career, from his Malta days. Actually, he studied modern and classical literature as an undergraduate; while he studied philosophy alongside economics and politics at Oxford, and alongsidetheology at Paris and Milan.

It’s relevant here because all these interests come into play in the book. At Paris, studying with Paul Ricoeur, he was interested in the logic of history. At the same time he studied the theological implications of the speculative evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin, who was a great influence on him.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott wasn’t interested in slavish disciples; he wanted to awaken originality

While in Malta he had studied Greek aesthetics, in Milan he witnessed (and participated in) the ferment of liturgical renewal, as the Greek (and subsequent European) heritage was interpreted anew at the onset of Vatican Council II.

This book has an answer to all those people who thought Fr Peter’s academic interests were too disjointed.

In offering an original interpretation of the history of music, he links up the insights of Marx (music must be seen as a social product developed within a wider history of production) with evolutionary thinking on the place of sound in the creation of space.

He recreates what music meant to the ancient Greeks: they did not think about it in the same way, not even having a special word for it. He suggests that the Arabs, in the classical age of Islam, were even more the heirs of the Greeks than the Europeans were.

The account is full of arresting details (such as how Freud’s concept of libido is not too different from St Paul’s notion of love) but there is also a sketch of the history of silence in music.

In medieval sacred music, silence pierced through the musical notes like light (or grace) through lace. As the world became secularised, silence was displaced by sound, and, with the noisy industrial age, a taste for ever-louder crescendos entered compositions. Silence becomes prominent in 20th-century composition once more, but often it is the ironic silence of a musical shrugof impotence.

Fr Peter and Camilleri gave over the manuscript to be published in 1990. It’s clear that, were he alive today, Fr Peter would have been reluctant to publish it without revising it considerably in the light of scholarship in various fields (although I’m convinced his basic argument would have remained the same).

What’s really interesting, though, is that he ever came to finish the manuscript. Fr Peter was notorious for never considering his work finished.

His two published books had to be torn out of his hands by a God-sent demon of a secretary. Yet, he considered The Creative Use of Noise to be finished enough to mention it among his works in self-written blurbs in the late 1980s.

I think it’s no great coincidence that the work was finished in 1978 – the year that the then prime minister, Dom Mintoff, effectively abolished the Faculty of Arts (of which Fr Peter was dean). Fr Peter resigned from the university – the blurb in this book, which states that he was head of the philosophy department continuously from 1971-96 is seriously misleading – to return only in 1987.

We probably owe it to Mintoff thatFr Peter felt it urgent enough to finish the manuscript. He might have had more time on his hands.

But, in the philistinism of those times, he clearly felt it was urgent to write a focused argument on the place of music in the formation of a good society.

The book, in effect, is the lengthiest piece of published writing by Fr Peter that outlines his understanding of humanity. He didn’t think of the arts as a finishing school, just some spit and polish on the nuts and bolts of society. He considered them essential to a society that wants an ecological politics.

As the uglification of Malta continues apace in our day, it’s an essay worth returning to.

ranierfsadni@europe.com