Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We're continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality today and on the theology of art, and so we're going to speak of St. Francis as a troubadour, as God's musician. Music itself couldn't remain aloof and removed from a spirit like that of St. Francis, who was so sensible to the harmony of the universe.
Music is the highest human expression, and it's almost immaterial as well. It's the most universal expression, which knows how to speak about or communicate things which are often inexpressible. When Francis was still young and he had knighthood on his mind, he was the king in the life of the party, and he loved to sing and make music. And then when his love and his hopes and aspirations were turned towards God, Francis still expressed himself through song. The beauty of the universe, which filled him with love for the Creator, loosened his tongue in song. He became the herald of the great king, as he himself said to the brigands one day before they beat him and tossed him into the snow on the side of the road. That's typically how God's artists are treated anyway. Sometimes Francis sung his pure joy in French, which was the language of the troubadours, and also the native language of his mother. Francis would compete in singing with a nightingale, and he declared himself defeated in the competition. He competed with the birds from the Venetian island, which takes its name from him when he returned from the Orient with the friar Illuminato. He sang the Holy Gospel with a fiery accent in the mystical night at Greccio. His voice, which Thomas of Celano called robust, sweet, clear, and sonorous, spread through the woods and resonated among the cliffs as it filled the hearts of those simple farmers with wonder and joy. He was a new and original minstrel, who sang when love inspired him to do so.
“Tanto è bene che mi aspetto, che ogni pena mi è di letto,” he would chant, which is, “so much as the good that awaits me, that every suffering is delightful to me.” So songs of profane love became for Francis expressions of divine love and an encouragement to raise souls to God. 
Francis gave a specific spiritual and apostolic function to song. He even ordered his friars to have hymns and songs sung after their preaching. And when people were singing simple love songs, St. Francis sent his followers there to sing of the love of God. He said, we are the minstrels of the Lord, destined to raise the hearts of men to God. We're servants of God and heralds of the heavenly kingdom, he would say. 
And the Canticle of Brother Sun was put to music by Francis himself. And he also put together other instrumental themes to give comfort and encouragement to the poor ladies of San Damiano, the Poor Clares. Unfortunately, those hymns have actually been lost to us. The Canticle of the Sun does have its own grandiose and solemn music to it, a melody, which is also simple and lean, fresh and joyful, like water that comes from a spring and runs along the rock with a light whisper. On the background, which is ardent and devoted, the dominant note from which at times comes a more robust and stronger note, there runs a clear melody to raise the hearts of men and guide them to spiritual joy as the Mirror of Perfection relates. 
When St. Francis couldn't contain the musical wave that wrapped and invested him, Celano writes that he would pick up a string from the ground, a stick from the ground, and put it over his left arm while holding a bow bent with a string in his right hand, drawing it over the stick as if it were a viola, performing all the right movements, and in French would sing about the Lord. And in the moments of greatest divine intimacy or suffering, he would stop and listen to music and would desire it. 
The friar whom he requested to sing once was ashamed and refused to satisfy him because of an inopportune zeal, as Father Ciccarelli describes it. But during the night, God himself consoled his servant Francis, having him listen to a marvelous and most sweet harmony on the harp. 
And the following morning, Francis said to the brother, he said, I wasn't able to listen to the harps of those men, but I heard a harp which was sweeter than all of those. In the book on the Considerations of St. Francis' Stigmata, we read that when Francis wanted to taste a bit of the joy of heaven, it says immediately an angel appeared to him with a very great splendor and who had a viola in his left hand and a bow in his right, and Francis was stupefied at the appearance of the angel. The angel strung his bow once above the viola and immediately such sweetness of melody soothed the soul of Francis and so suspended him from every bodily feeling that he thought that if the angel had pulled the bow across the string again for the intolerable sweetness, his soul would have left his body, unquote. 
And in the last days of his wonderful life, even amidst physical sufferings, Francis sung hymns of praise and he invited his companions to unite themselves in his singing. At the coming of Sister Death, he commended Friar Angelo and Friar Leo to sing to him the Canticle of Brother Sun and then to intone the Psalm, “Voce mea ad Dominum clamavi,” “With all my voice, I cry to the Lord," Psalm 142:1. While a flock of larks circled around the humble cell and seemed to echo and accompany his last song. 
So in the life of our saint, really nothing was lacking, not even art, which found its root in its nourishments, in the simplicity of his faith and exalted itself in the incandescence of love. There is in St. Francis, the grace, the sensibility of temperament, the gusto of music, the admiration of nature, the harmony of peaceful qualities and an ardent aspiration to the things above, as one writer states.
Francis' life is a little human gospel, which reflects the divine gospel of Jesus. The gospel which is small and penetrating, warm with love, luminous with piety, sprinkled with tears, with poetry, with music, with song. To the ideal of such a saint, nothing can be denied and everything is given, body, soul, life. 
Let's ask Our Lady for the grace to have in our lives and in our hearts, a fulfillment of that divine and musical harmony, which was part of the life and the death and afterlife of our Seraphic Father, St. Francis of Assisi.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever