An evening with pianist Paul Barnes

Celebrating Annunciation with thoughts on the resurrected life of contemporary music

For me the abiding image from Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993), which I first saw in high school back in the nineties, was that of actor Colm Feore, portraying the famous pianist backstage before a performance, soaking his hands, wrists, and forearms in a sink of steaming hot water. I wondered, before I was to meet virtuoso pianist Paul Barnes, uh... do I shake his hand? I mean, probably. Glenn Gould was weird.

I got my answer when I came out a hallway and turned a corner at the Brenneman Music Hall at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio last Friday evening. There was Paul Barnes just about to go on. I recognized him and called his name. He was expecting me and immediately guessed who I was. It happened quick: before I knew it we were greeting each other warmly and instinctively shaking hands. His grip was much firmer than mine. These hands of his were not delicate instruments. I was touching talent of immense strength, such that it had nothing to fear from quotidian use. These hands overwhelm the mundane with spiritual force habitually and with ease.

Playing at Heidelberg was nearly a homecoming for Barnes, having grown up a little over an hour away in Lima, Ohio, where he began playing piano as an eight-year-old. Since 1995 he has been teaching the instrument at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The combination of his very attractive talent and his institutional position has given him the opportunity to commission new works from contemporary composers: friends of his like Philip Glass, Ron Warren, and Victoria Bond, all of whose names were on the program this evening. Barnes can play the classics of all varieties, certainly (Western European, jazz, the Great American Songbook), being linked especially with Franz Liszt, in whose tradition his playing is identified. His programming preferences, however, are decidedly current.

And what counts as current in the world of performance music these days can be especially spiritual and in tune with nature, even surprisingly so for those used to liturgizing according to the online daily news cycle. Humanism having died in the first decades of the twentieth century, quietly rose again under the cover of postmodernism in the final decades of the twentieth century. By “having died” I refer to a real death — a separation of mind and body. High art and pop art split and went in two different directions. For music, the dialectical rules of counterpoint, which by their very nature provoke transgression, after centuries of erosion finally gave way to the liquidity of atonality. Positively speaking, it was a rebellion against the confinement of industrial materialism in search of something infinite and free. Freedom from order and beauty, however, were the unfortunate results. The wisdom this abstract music offered the mind was really an image of ignorance, a disconnection with the patterns of physical nature. “Classical” music accordingly became unlistenable to the masses, who took carnal interest instead in mass-produced, corporate-controlled repetitive hooks forwarding rhythm and beat — jazz alone offering spiritual respite for those who were prepared to hear it, which wasn’t most. Twentieth-century pop music, a far cry from the traditional folk music it replaced, freed the lower passions of desire and anger to pursue their nature at the expense of the life of the mind (broadly speaking of course), a false image of freedom yielding an impassioned populace easily manipulated by the capitalistic oligarchs that hold the reins of power.

I present a negative critique. By it, I not at all intend to nullify the positive appreciations possible of either atonal or pop music. This separation is a very negative thing, and we need those positive appreciations in order to overcome it. But I wish to jump ahead in the narrative to humanism’s resurrection. Arvo Pärt had been a composer of limited success in his native Estonia, operating in modernist modes of atonal serialism, when in the 1970s he had a creative crisis and fell into a period of silence. He emerged from this silence (1) having converted to the Orthodox Church, (2) having married a Jewish woman, and (3) having created a new approach to music composition that amidst the dungeon of materialism yet satisfied the contemporary yearning for the infinite while also restoring full tonality. The immense power of the works that resulted bore the distinction of sounding at once very ancient and completely contemporary. After escaping the Soviet Union for the West, settling in Germany in 1981, his music gradually began filtering into global culture. For roughly the last decade and a half he has been the most performed living composer in the world.

I make special mention of Pärt for his popularity and his Orthodoxy — Paul Barnes is also Orthodox, having converted back in the nineties — and because Pärt is my unabashed favorite and has been ever since I was introduced to his music in college. But Pärt is just one member in the quietly resurrected body of humanism, which is largely not Orthodox or Christian. Paul Barnes’s friend and collaborator Philip Glass, last year ranked fifth most performed living composer, is another. Though having received classical training, Glass in his youth first thrived in the transgressive avant-garde Manhattan art scene in the 1960s. Heavily into Eastern religions, he made lengthy, repetitive minimalistic music for lofts full of drug users while himself not being on drugs. He never had a period of silence like Pärt, being a compulsive worker, but he eventually would use the austere liquidity of minimalism as a shoreline base upon which to build piers of harmony and symphonic structure that, while not sounding ancient like Pärt’s music, yet bore commitment to tonality and was widely accessible. No special education in abstraction is required in order to be enthused by this music; the general education in abstraction that we moderners all naturally receive is sufficient. (For an introduction, try the Koyaanisqatsi score, my own introduction to Glass once upon a time.)

The impassioned dehumanization effected by pop music of course continues apace, mass media being especially incentivized to use it for purposes of controlling its audience — indeed, to which control audiences have grown rather attached. But as pop’s digitized voices and quantized rhythms pull people ever harder towards the uncanny valley that the masters of AI themselves cannot cross, I believe a humanist reaction against pop music is due. If it comes, what I have been calling the quiet resurrection of humanism will become louder. Ever since 2000, when I saw the Béla Tarr–directed movie Werckmeister Harmonies, I have been waiting for people to start calling this movement the New Humanism. I was in college then, the age of Y2K, when a popular topic was the identity of postmodernism and questioning what comes after it. It seemed clear to me: a New Humanism. Werckmeister Harmonies is an allegorical movie about the violence of modernity, the last several hundred years of Western-led world history, crescendoing to a breaking point where it beholds the irreducible beauty in even the most pitiful human figure, desists its activity — and is reborn in a peace and security of dubious value.

Peter Fitz in Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).

For an ideology underpinning this transformation, the movie treats us to a music historian’s thoughts concerning musical temperament. He argues that the drive to contain all varieties of musical scales in one master tuning system, efforts which took hold in the West by the end of the Baroque era and of which the German theorist Andreas Werckmeister is an important figurehead, has corrupted all harmonies and diverted music from its humanist reason for being. Instead harmonies should be respected as the realm of the gods and should not in arrogance be gathered all together in a single grasp. Tunings should be heptatonic (tonal) and bespoke, designed for specific use. Insofar as his argument appears to be for what is called just intonation, the dialectical opposite of temperament, there are natural and obvious shortcomings to his theory with their own disastrous social analogues. But this is all to say that I’ve become fascinated with the question of musical temperament, which led me to reach out to Paul Barnes when I had the opportunity to.

For Paul Barnes is not only a virtuoso pianist, the modern piano being the very incarnation of twelve-tone temperament, raising all the relevant questions about tuning the continuous spectrum of pitch frequencies into cycles of twelve discrete notes. He is also a Byzantine chanter in his Greek Orthodox church. Byzantine chant entails what we Westerners have to call microtones — its melodies are not limited to the chromatic scale of Western music and cannot be played faithfully on a piano. The harmonization on which Western music is based is thus absent, but the melodies are immensely more expressive, requiring also that tonal quality be much more vivid (and vivifying). Indeed Paul Barnes is invested in the issue of temperament, as I discerned from afar and have confirmed through subsequent conversations. For his performances Barnes has begun incorporating interludes of chant, used to introduce pieces he has commissioned based on those chants. The pieces, by Philip Glass and Victoria Bond, are for piano and thus incorporate harmonization in place of microtonality. The cultural translation can render the original melody unrecognizable to the common ear, but the results are undeniably effective in their own right.

I hope very much my continued conversation with this artist and teacher can yield popularizing examinations of the symbolic meaning of musical temperament — but last Friday evening was chiefly about the live experience of his art. Not being a music critic, I struggle to express what I immediately intuit is the tremendous quality of his performance. Try listening to this short rendition of Arvo Pärt’s “Für Alina,” one of the first works Pärt premiered when emerging from his silence in the seventies. “Für Alina” is an exceptionally simple piece, purposefully elementary. I have no doubt that I myself could learn to play it, regardless of how brief my piano lessons were as a child. But I couldn’t play it like this:

Sensitivity to music in its every detail impresses my mind in every keystroke of those powerful hands. He does this at will, as someone who lives inside of the music and knows how to present it to others. And there is freedom present, as it is for Pärt in the composition. Barnes I’m sure could play this piece differently at separate times, altering perhaps the pace or the phrasing ever so slightly, freely approaching expression of the music from different directions that nonetheless appear always to be the right ones. Because he’s coming from inside the music.

This sensitivity also makes its presence known in his concert setlist. This night he started with selections from Orphée Suite for Piano, transcriptions he made (to popular acclaim) from a Philip Glass chamber opera. Rather than compose original works himself, Barnes’s authorial output centers on transcribing large pieces of music for solo piano, a skill at which his hero Liszt was particularly adept. Such transcriptions can be extremely challenging tasks, requiring one to hear the music separate from the means by which it is communicated, to perceive it in idea form so as then to give it a new, sparer incarnation. This pattern of going from matter to spirit to new matter is present also in what he commissioned Philip Glass to do with the piano quintet Annunciation, a piece that debuted in 2018 and takes for inspiration a Byzantine hymn from the service for the Annunciation. Actually it starts with the love theme from the Orphée Suite before transitioning to the Annunciation melody, so programming these pieces in this order is a very natural progression (again, what I heard Friday was a transcription of a bigger piece to solo piano). When I talk about the eminent accessibility of the music of the New Humanism to contemporary audiences, these Glass–Barnes collaborations are excellent examples. Listening to them does not take any disembodied intellectual effort, and yet they communicate to the listener authentic, full-souled human experience.

It’s about becoming human. I would expect Orthodox Christian readers to be skeptical of my description of the death and resurrection of humanism, the spirit of Antichrist that moves through history being ever the ape of Christ. New Humanism, as I’ve thought it should be called, indeed is antichristian, the prefix anti- meaning “in place of”. As Christ says in Matthew 24:24, “There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and they shall show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if it were possible, even the elect.” So why, such readers will ask, would you spend any time and attention on the art of the New Humanism? My word to them would be to call to mind how subhuman we’ve become by way of our devastating passions. Just as before we can be Orthodox, we have to be Christian, likewise before we can be Christian, we have to be human. Take it as an alternative phrasing of Patitsas’s Beauty–Goodness–Truth method: we must proceed in the order of human–Christian–Orthodox. There is no other path before us subhuman would-be Christians but to become human alongside those whose rebellious aim is to be nothing but, to whom we in our hypocrisy, I assure you, are much inferior. I word this like there is a lack of choice, but really, not to be scandalized by the Antichrist is a sign of true Christian freedom. Imagine Jesus’s reaction to Judas’s betrayal in Gethsemane. It was neither fight nor flight, as it would have been with a creature inflamed by the passions, either averse to pain (fight) or sold to pleasure (flight). Jesus was free to endure the embrace and kiss of Judas — and to call him friend when he did it. This reaction of the Lord is an image of Love unconquered, the sincere and devout appreciation of natural human beauty regardless of even the most dire modal shortcoming. As human beings and children of God, it is our natural will to recognize beauty when we see it, and to respond to it in our hearts with perfect love for God and neighbor, even if it leads us to the Cross. For the Cross of Christian love, we have faith, leads us inevitably to the Resurrection.

Glass’s unfolding of the Annunciation melody in the first half of Barnes’s concert recital was matched in the back half with Victoria Bond’s compositions for piano based on other Byzantine melodies. I had heard these pieces before and think they’re beautiful, but I want to finish my time here talking about the centerpiece of the program, Ron Warren’s The Way of Mountains and Desert, premiered just months ago and as yet unheard by me as of Friday. This series of pieces blew me away. Ron Warren is an Echota Cherokee Indian and Native flutist who is also an academically trained composer. He draws from all his wide and deep cultural influences to create music that responds to nature in the most edifying way. He has explained his interest in composing piano pieces for Paul Barnes thusly:

We like to play our flutes outdoors. When we do that, we get a response, a resonance from whatever ecosystem we are in, whether that be a slap back echo from a canyon wall or a more subtle and diffuse reverb from the trees in a forest.

Because I can bend pitches and slide between them, my flute can play many more frequencies (an infinity, really) than a piano, which is normally limited to 88 discretely tuned frequencies. But the piano has a much greater range than my flutes. Also, the piano can sound many frequencies at the same time. I think that those qualities along with the extended sustain times and resonances available on piano allow it to emulate what I hear when playing flute outdoors. So instruments with very different design features can approach a similar sound world.

Again, there’s this transcription-like process drawing together disparate physical and cultural elements through one natural sound world that informs them both. Of course, for what Ron Warren is trying to do, it matters who’s playing the piano. From Paul Barnes’s live performance of this music, it is clear to me: one cannot offer creation to God in sacrifice if one cannot attain communion with it first. These songs are ones of gratitude, offerings of thanksgiving. To listen to this music is to prepare oneself to receive the Eucharist, to prepare to become the Eucharist. Proper recordings of these Warren–Barnes collaborations have not yet been made, but you can hear the world premiere posted on YouTube here:

Played here at the end of the second movement (at 8:43), as it was last Friday, is “Song for Turtle.” It’s uniquely an improvisational piece with just six composed phrases, three above and three below, to be combined freely by the performer in an aural vision of the love story between heaven and earth.

Ron Warren, “Song for Turtle,” from The Way of Mountains and Desert (2022)

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that “Song for Turtle” is not performed in the video of the world premiere of The Way of Mountains and Desert. It is so performed, and the text above has been amended to reflect that.