Conducting & Theology: An Interview with Felix Kirkby

This interview was produced by Claire MacLeod who sat down with Felix Kirkby to discuss the connections between his role as a conductor and professional musician with his studies in theology. It can also be viewed on our Faculty YouTube channel (see below) 

Felix: Hello! My name is Felix. I am currently studying for an MSt in Theology (Philosophy and Religion) and I am also the Chief Conductor and President of the Oxford Festival Orchestra. I'm here today to talk about the intersections between what I do in music and what I do with theology. There are more of them, I think, than I ever expected there would be.

Claire: When was the first time that you encountered music?

Felix: It has been a constant since before I can remember. I started playing the piano properly when I was four and I did a fair bit of work as a concert pianist when I was a kid. And then I ended up studying theology. The reasons for that are only just becoming clear to me.

Claire: What first brought you to theology?

Felix: I think I must have been about 14 when I, rather embarrassingly in retrospect, came across the complete works of Carl Jung lying around somewhere. I devoured them as quickly as I could and from there started getting more and more interested in the philosophical study of religion and how you can relate these grand and sweeping abstractions to the concrete in particular elements of faith.

Now, I think I was planning to do A-level politics until about two weeks before my course started but a last-minute intervention changed my choice entirely. And within only a matter of days, I realized almost immediately that this was what I wanted to do at university. That theology, as a discipline has the power to connect different faculties, to unite different subfields, to encourage you to take those elements of your work that normally would be insulated from your personal life and to live them in some way that I don't think you get anywhere else at the university.

Claire: What was the connection between your work in music and work study of theology?

Felix: Well, I think, in the first instance, it was a very practical connection, a connection, as it were, between music and liturgy. I worked as a chorister from the age of 7 to 13 or so, and because of that, I was very used to—although I didn't particularly have any concrete belief at the time—the rhythms and routines of the Church of England.

Now, it's started to occur to me when I got older that I'm really not sure you can disambiguate, at least in the Western tradition, the specific elements of musical performance from the structure of the liturgy. Both a concert and, say, a Eucharist involve a division between the audience and musicians, between the congregation and the clergy. Both of them unfold in accordance with some predetermined structure. Both of them contain also elements of improvisation. Both of them are defined by a kind of hierarchy: priests, clergy, laity, conductor, orchestra, audience. But at the best of times, that hierarchy finds itself broken down and dissolved, such that there are no divisions between any particular person and the wider phenomenon in which they're participating. It also strikes me that there are some pretty noticeable connections between music on the one hand and religious language on the other.

I'm convinced, for one, that it's very difficult to frame the way that people come to classical music as anything other than some form of epiphany. If you want to understand, for instance, why Arts Council England has insisted that some English National Opera's funding is contingent on moving to Manchester, then I think you've got to look to the trend which has been active in the 1990s to promote music as a good insofar as it enhances people's mental health, sense of community, togetherness, and so on, which of course in some narrow sense is true.

But if music is good only as an instrument, as it were, good only insofar as it has positive effects on the people who encounter it, then of course it follows that music must be in as many places as it can be, from the north to the south, from small villages to the biggest towns. Whereas if you speak to people who love classical music with a kind of burning intensity, people who live it as much as enjoy it, then you'll find that that's very often caused by some kind of conversion, some encounter with something special on the radio or a recommended playlists.

There's also the fact that the acts of musical performance presuppose some kind of doctrine of revelation. While maybe not something so formal as a doctrine. at the very least you get the sense that in rehearsals and performances, the greatest conductors, Carlos Kleiber, Wilhelm Furtwängler, are aiming towards some kind of truth that lies just over the horizon. The truth that never itself gets revealed but that reveals itself in moments of transcendence, the ‘improvisatory togetherness.’

When a conductor is able to say to an orchestra, ‘You know exactly how this is supposed to go. I do not need to stand up in front of you doing anything, so let's make it happen.’

Claire: Can you tell us more about the program for your upcoming concert?

Felix: Well, it's a program of Beethoven and Max Bruch and I think the program is, in a sense, a provocative one. Much effort is being expended in the current world of classical music to champion the work of composers who previously have been underappreciated, and quite rightly! But with that comes a worrying tendency to deny one of what is, in my mind, the most essential truths about making music, which is that every performance represents a completely new reading of a work.

There is no one ‘Beethoven Seven.’ There is no platonic form of the music that runs like a thread through different recordings and renditions of it. There are only moments of performance. And in my mind, at least, the works that we've chosen correlate Bruch’s Violin Concerto. Beethoven's Seventh are so common in the world of classical music, so often performed on Radio Three and classical, that they've lost some of their bite.

The program we have chosen is a program of the works that got me into conducting in the first place. It's a program of the things I've wanted to stand up in front of an orchestra and do since I was 14 or 15. I cannot imagine anything more exciting than the end of Beethoven's Seventh, one of the greatest pieces of music ever written where what feels like a climactic moment blurs into another one and another one until the whole thing takes on a whirring momentum that splits itself apart at the very end. What I want to do with the concert is partially to propose some way that we could view them differently. I want to infuse every single moment of the music with some sense of narrative, not merely form or structure and correlate. I want the audience to be able to hear Coriolano's rage and his mother's pleading and his desperate, spasming close.

Whatever the musical intention may be, we are also raising money for the Davis and Young Musicians Award, which gives grants and scholarships to children from some of the poorest areas in Oxfordshire and Cambridgeshire. Every single penny from tickets is being donated to charity, thanks to a very generous sponsorship agreement. So we are basically very keen to incorporate as many different elements into this concert as possible. It's absolutely thrilling, and I am very, very excited to get started on it.

Claire: Final thoughts?

Felix: I suppose to cut a long story short, it reinforces to me the degree to which, in one Balthasar's words, truth is symphonic. I was always slightly cagey about the idea of studying music as an academic discipline, basically because I worried that examining the nuts and bolts of its dismantling is in much the same way that you might a mathematical equation would make me lose my love for it.

But when combined with theology, it seems to encourage a mindset of open-mindedness (I hope) and curiosity. And certainly I've managed to study Dostoyevsky in a fair bit of detail,  Hindu nationalism, Henri de Lubac, Pseudo-Dionysius, Nietzsche’s reading of faith in light of muddled  Christian reading of the genealogy. And I like to think that that diversity, that mixture of different topics is something that also reflects itself in the dual-identify of musician and theologian.

If I can convincingly take up either of those labels at all.