The Tuning Room

When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. (Job 38:7)

Tolkien begins everything with music.

Before there is a world, before there is light or land or anything alive, there is Eru, the One, and there are the Ainur, the holy ones He has made out of His own thought. He gives them a theme and bids them sing, and they make a Great Music before Him, deep and wide and beautiful. Then one of them, the mightiest, begins to weave in matters of his own, a discord, louder and prouder, straining to drown the theme and make a music of himself. And here is the thing Tolkien wants us to see. The One does not stop the song. He rises, and lifts His hand, and into the very confusion He begins a new theme, and gathers up the discord, and works it into a pattern more beautiful and more solemn than anything the rebel could have dreamed. In the end, no note can be sounded that does not serve a music greater than itself.

He did not invent that idea. He inherited it.

Long before him, Scripture said that when the foundations of the world were laid, the morning stars sang together. The old philosophers heard it too. Pythagoras taught that the intervals we find beautiful are simple whole numbers, that beauty is ratio, that the cosmos itself is strung and sounding. Plato built his universe out of harmonic proportion and set eight singing Sirens on the turning spheres, each holding a single note, the eight of them together making one chord. Boethius gathered all of it into one word, musica, and said there are three musics: the music of the turning world, the music of the human person, and the small, audible music we can actually hear. The first two make no sound at all. They are simply the order of things, in tune or out.

Which is why the most important thing an orchestra does together makes no sound either.

Before the first note, the room goes quiet and the oboe gives an A. It is the least glamorous moment of the evening. No one applauds it. And yet everything that follows is settled right here, in the silence, before a single phrase is played. We tend to think of tuning as preparation for the music. It is closer to the truth to call it the first act of the music itself, the part made entirely of listening. Faith, an old letter says, comes by hearing. Boethius said the true musician is not the one whose fingers move fastest, but the one who has learned to hear, who can tell whether a thing is in tune. Before we are players we are listeners, or we are nothing at all.

Notice that no one in the room invents the note.

The oboist does not choose an A that happens to suit her. She receives it, and offers it, and everyone else bends towards it. This is a strange reversal of nearly everything we are taught. We are told to find our own pitch and sound our own truth. But an instrument that insists on its own pitch cannot play with anyone. To make music with others you have to be conformed to something you did not write and cannot hold, something you can only hear. Augustine knew that restlessness from the inside. You have made us for Yourself, he prayed, and our heart is restless until it rests in You. The heart is an instrument tuned to a note outside itself, and until it finds that note it cannot settle. Athanasius pictured the eternal Word of God as a musician who holds the whole universe like a lyre, drawing the high things and the low things, the heavens and the earth, into one harmony. Clement of Alexandria went further still, and called Christ Himself the New Song, and called you and me beautiful breathing instruments, made to be played by the hand that made us.

And the tuning is never finished.

A string goes flat the moment you begin to play it. The warmth of the room, the breath, the friction of the bow, the slow loosening of the wood. Drift is not failure. It is simply what happens to anything alive that is being used. So tuning is not an event but a discipline, a returning you make at the start of every rehearsal, for as long as you play. His mercies, says the prophet, are new every morning. No one is ashamed to pray again. The violin is not ashamed to be tuned again.

There is a moment in tuning you can actually hear.

When two pitches are close but not yet one, the air itself seems to wobble, a roughness, a beating, a pulse. As the two draw together the beating slows, and then it stops, and the tone goes suddenly pure and still and somehow larger than before. And neither note wins. That is the part worth catching. Both move towards the true pitch, and in yielding to a third thing they find each other. Heraclitus, the most difficult of the Greeks, said the world is fitted together out of opposing tensions, like a bow or a lyre, and that the hidden harmony is better than the obvious one. The string only sings because it is pulled tight from both ends. Real unity between people works the same way. It is not one of us conquering the other. It is both of us turning towards the note that was sounding all along, and finding, in the turning, that we have come into the same room. Ignatius of Antioch wrote to a frightened young church that when its people are tuned together like strings on a lyre, then Jesus Christ is the song the world hears them sing.

And this is the part we so easily forget. The aim is not unison. It is harmony.

Being in tune does not mean we all play the same note. It means we are all true to the same reference, so that our different parts ring together instead of clashing. The A does not flatten the orchestra into one voice. It is the very thing that lets the violins and the cellos and the back row of the choir be gloriously different and still belong to one sound. Paul, who was no musician, reached for music anyway. If the flute and the harp do not give distinct notes, he asked, how will anyone know the tune, and if the trumpet sounds an uncertain call, who will get ready for battle? The oldest word for what we are reaching for is concord, which means, at its root, with one heart. A Catholic and a Pentecostal, an Anglican and a Baptist, a first violin and a back-row alto, not made identical, but tuned to one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and so able at last to sing in parts.

There is a hard mercy hidden in the craft as well.

On this side of heaven you cannot be perfectly in tune in every direction at once. The mathematics simply will not allow it. A circle of perfect intervals never quite closes on itself. So musicians accept what they beautifully call temperament, a small, shared, deliberate imperfection, spread evenly through the whole, so that nothing is unbearable and every key can be played. There is a kind of love in that. The perfectionist demands a purity that no living ensemble can give, and so ends up refusing to play at all. Paul said it plainly. Without love, the most dazzling sound is only a clanging cymbal, a gong with nothing behind it. Temperament is charity in the strings, a willingness to carry a little roughness for the sake of making music together at all. Most of what we call grace, and most of what we call community, is tempered like this.

Which means the hard season may not have been what it felt like.

George Herbert, stretched thin and afraid, wrote a poem to God that ends, take thy way, for sure thy way is best, stretch or contract me thy poor debtor, this is but tuning of my breast, to make the music better. A string is brought to its true note by being tightened. The peg turns, the tension rises, and what felt like strain was simply the instrument being drawn up to the pitch it was made to sound. The old Easter song dares to call even the worst fault a happy one, for the greater rescue it drew down. And Paul promised that all things work together, woven, for the good of those who love God. So it is at least possible that the long, hard stretch you have come through was not God setting the instrument down. It may have been His hand on the peg.

And none of this, not one moment of it, is the concert.

That is the last and best thing to say. The tuning is not the performance. It is what you do at the door, before you go in. John Donne, dying, called this whole life exactly that. Since I am coming to that holy room, where I shall be made thy music, I tune the instrument here at the door, and what I must do then, think here before. We are not yet the music. We are being tuned for it. And the strangest, most tender turn in the whole story is this. The One we are straining to hear is not silent and far off, listening to check whether we get it right. The prophet says He is in our midst, and that He will rejoice over us with singing. The very note we are tuning to is being sung over us, in love.

So the silence we are standing in is not emptiness. It is the held breath before the downbeat. The morning stars are still sounding the note. And we are almost ready to play.