In her poem Turntable Music, West Australian poet Rose Van Son writes:

three dimensional jars and jugs
play music just like glass, clusters
viewed as if to channel light
sounds of awe soaring from her throat
connecting her to music that she thought lost
of another time

My brain makes associative leaps from a Buddhist singing bowl to a glass harmonium to the composer Phillip Glass to the 12-tone textures of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto which, according to his biographer David Marr, Patrick White “played over and over again as he worked on (his novel) Voss”.

Berg’s manuscript included on its front page the inscription “To the Memory of an Angel”. The concerto is a memorial to a promising 18-year-old violinist, Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius. Manon, whom Berg had known since she was a little girl, had just died of polio.

The democratising and destructive nature of 12-tone music, whereby the selected tone row is both liberating and tyrannical, and its relationship to architecture, literature, and the visual arts, has long fascinated me. And, conceptually speaking, the Gesamtkunstwerk that is the Christian cathedral and its sonorous rites.

I once spent a couple of weeks in Wells, in Somerset. Awaking each day in my lodgings I could see, across the Green, Wells Cathedral, rising like an exhalation from the morning mist. How lovely it was, on one occasion, to proceed into the vast candle-lit interior of this more than 800-year-old cathedral with fellow music-lovers (for this was a concert, not a service) to hear the sounds of choir and organ rise to the vaulted ceilings and disperse like that same morning mist.

To recognise the form and understand the structural and symbolic functions of such architectural features as niches, piers, arches, ribs, spandrels, vaults, portals, sanctuaries, clerestories, triforiums, facades, porches, niches and so forth was to a greater or lesser degree already within my grasp; but to start to see how they all worked together harmoniously in a specific context – well, it was a bit like having learnt a foreign language for a time and suddenly understanding at least some parts of a real conversation when you hear it.

Such a revelation is akin to a miracle. It enriches one’s experience no end. One could liken it to knowing something of the technical aspects of any artform, such as painting or music or poetry. Ut pictura poesis. I used to think it didn’t really matter; that you could stand before a painting, for example, and appreciate its worth, unencumbered by specialist knowledge. I still believe that’s true in a formalist, as well as an instinctual, sense; otherwise very little of our art would be accessible to the layperson.

But to know something of a work’s iconography and iconology, of its social and historical context, of its maker’s motivations, of her artistic and technical processes – it’s another way of honouring our forebears and our own past. A way of opening our hearts and minds to them and preparing ourselves to listen to what they are trying to say to us in a truly informed fashion.

I suppose it’s a kind of respect. A kind of discipline. A kind of love. And bearing that in mind, there will always be degrees with which we should always be comfortable and not beat ourselves up for knowing too little. Or indeed too much. No one can ever know too much when it comes to their own craft. As for the rest: a little knowledge is hardly a dangerous thing; one should be free to flit from flower to flower, drinking the nectar of the moment, and return only if its taste is sweet enough to warrant it.

I wonder if that’s the same with people. That’s a different kind of devotion, the creative and empathetic engagement with what others tell us; that sincere desire to experience what they have, inasmuch as that is possible. To adopt their worldview, if only for a moment. To learn their language. Perhaps degrees of love are related to degrees of fluency?

Berg’s musical act of devotion ends with variations on the Lutheran chorale Es ist genug! (It is enough!) – by sheer coincidence, the first notes corresponded to the last notes of his tone row. The words of the chorale struck Berg as being particularly apt in relation to Manon’s forsaking her earthly form, all to young:

It is enough! Lord, if it pleases You, Unshackle me at last. My Jesus comes; I bid the world goodnight. I travel to the heavenly home. I surely travel there in peace, My troubles left below. It is enough! It is enough!