One of the risks of the artistic life is that it can lead to just such a deepening of the life of the artist. Accounts of religious conversion are in fact common among twentieth-century writers and artists. But it is the musicians who most dramatically em­body the shift because their work directly serves the spiritual cult itself. One of the astonishing recent developments has been the enormous popularity and success of explicitly liturgical works performed in the concert hall. This does not mean that they could not be performed in churches, but indicates that they have found a wider transparence that renders them accessible even in the nonliturgical setting. The pioneer of this kind of music is undoubtedly Olivier Messiaen, whose output is largely centered on a meditative unfolding of Catholic mystical theology. But more recently a new generation of composers led by Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki, John Tavener, and others have exploded on the public scene with works that are grounded in the musical traditions of their respective faiths. This is music that is different from the pre­ceding exploration of the established musical forms. It is not a mere borrowing of spiritual elements in the service of music. This is the real thing. Whatever the final judgment of artistic-merits, there can be no doubt that this is music that is seriously and unreservedly in the service of spiritual meaning.

That, it turns out, is the secret of its appeal. A work of such unprepossessing character as Part's Passion of Our Lord According to St. John derives most of its effect from the unwavering faith with which it is sung. The music itself is minimal, consisting only of variations on short sung phrases, thus virtually requiring the weight to be placed on the spiritual meaning itself. Something similar is the case with Gorecki's enormously popular Third Sym­phony, subtitled a Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The long first movement consists of a disarmingly simple canon that is never­theless varied profoundly to maintain our interest in the long meditative arc it unfolds. That leads us into the sorrowful songs themselves, which include a prayer scribbled on a Gestapo prison cell wall, a lamentation of Mary at the foot of the Cross, and a traditional Polish song about the loss of a child. It is music that probes the limit of human suffering but without a hint of protest at the injustice of the fate endured. What makes it a work of pow­erful spirituality is that the suffering, which is real, has been ut­terly transfigured through its redemptive surrender to God. It is faith in the divine mystery beyond it all that renders what would otherwise be a mere complaint into a work of transcendent se­renity. Its resonance goes directly to the human heart.

As with a work like Tavener's Protecting Veil, which powerfully evokes the protection of Mary by means of a cello voice and a string orchestra, it is difficult not to conclude that something new is in evidence here. The supposedly opaque traditions, previously perceived as the major obstacle to the transparence of meaning, now turn out to possess a depth beyond our imagination. By yielding to their promptings, by entering into the order they con­stitute, they disclose their riches to us. What could be no more than an object of admiration when viewed from the outside turns out to contain the fullness of reality once we yield to its ex­istential force. By thinking we could make the elements of tradi­tions serve our construction of meaning we had lost the only meaning available to us. But now the great discovery has been made that the opening of publicly authoritative meaning is pos­sible once we submit to its ordering influence in our lives.