The TRUSTY
SERVANT
NO.121
M AY 2 0 1 6
The Headmaster writes:
A Parting Word:
‘When you ain’t got nothin’/ You got
nothin’ to lose’, sang Bob Dylan. When I
first heard those words (I was about 16),
they felt dangerous and radical. They also
seemed utterly true. When I finally heard
the song ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, I was
captivated by the powerful honesty of the
singer’s voice.
Dylan claimed me at that time; he
seemed to be a pilgrim completely alive to
the world. At a time in my life when my
capacity to feel far outstripped my abilities
to understand and articulate, his songs
and his voice not only spoke to me; in a
way it spoke for me. Like many of my
friends, I became a disciple.
The songs spoke of hope:
Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they’ll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.
(from ‘When the ship comes in’).
been a cathedral chorister, I now realise
that my first real religious experience
came through this music. I had a sense
that through Dylan’s songs I was able to
catch some refracted ray of truth –
something universal that can be hinted at
only in great works of art.
Dylan had the voice of the prophet,
the musical poet who sang, like Isaiah, of
the joys, hopes, griefs and anxieties of the
men of his age. ‘Surely they are my
people,’ writes Isaiah, ‘and they rebel and
know affliction and grief.’ It’s as if Isaiah
and Dylan had caught the haunting tune
of the human story.
To listen seriously to music, and to
perform it, are among our most potent
ways of learning what it is to live with the
divine. In listening and following, we are
stretched and deepened, physically
challenged as players, imaginatively
challenged as listeners. The time we give
They talked of love:
Well, if you go when the snowflakes storm,
When the rivers freeze and summer ends,
Please see if she’s wearing a coat so warm,
To keep her from the howlin’ winds.
(from ‘Girl from the North Country’).
In retrospect, although I was brought
up a conventional Anglican, indeed had
1
up for listening to music is given back to
us as a time in which we have become
more human, more real, even when we
can’t say what we have learned, only that
we have changed.
I still listen to Dylan from time to
time, and he is still singing in his 60s with
that strange, cracked voice. I heard him in
Italy one summer a few years back. As life
has gone on I have moved more into the
world of classical music, the flip-side of
Dylan’s modernism. Modern classical
music presents a counter-cultural
challenge to the mindless anti-religious
spirit of our age. The boundless vision of
composers through the ages points to the
realisation of ourselves as something
greater than we are. This is why lovers of
music, ordinary people, believers and
sceptics, refer to it as the most spiritual of
the arts. Many of the major modern
composers in the last hundred years were