How To Be An Agnostic
the sense that, when you know a piece really well, you don’t
play it, so much as it plays you. I suppose professionals have
that experience all the time. It comes after all the practice, when
the piece is not just learnt but internalised; it wholly and utterly
makes sense. This is why you no longer need the notes written
down in front of you: it’s not that they are memorised so much
as that they could go in no other place. The music can speak
through you, which is to say that it’s as if the music has come
from elsewhere. Quite where that ‘elsewhere’ is – the right-side
of the brain, some link between composer and player, a Platonic
realm, heaven – is one for debate. But I wanted to have that
debate and not foreclose it.
Again, an answer determined by the human sciences alone
seems too parochial. It would ask the question what music is
for, as if its effect can be summed up by saying it binds people
together, like a nationalistic hymn. Or it might adopt a psy-
chological explanation, saying it evokes some altered state of
consciousness, as if the altered state were all. However, such
understandings alone, while illuminating to a degree, seem to
necessitate certain ‘no-go’ areas of thought – those that invoke
the spiritual. Again, this is not necessarily to say that only
believers can fully appreciate the perfection of Bach’s B minor
mass or Mozart’s Requiem, for clearly believers do not gain some
extra musical faculty upon turning to God. There is no divine
hearing aid – though as an aid to hearing the divine it might
mean more. And that’s the point: the atheist mindset appears
forced to put a cap on the appreciation of such things. At the
very least, a degree of agnosticism in relation to the value of
spiritual yearning would seem to be necessary to be open to the
music that speaks of divinity.
The gift of creation
Turner’s advice to atheists on how best not to believe in God
adds to this sense of the imaginative poverty that conviction
atheism seems to entail. Turner has shown that, contrary to