The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

« Previous Entries in Category |

Music Theology - Christology: Jesus accepte le souffrance

In Messiaen’s sequence of nine organ pieces on La Nativite du Seigneur, the piece entitled “Jesus accepte le Souffrance” is the seventh, between “Les Anges” and “Les Mages.”  It seems to refer to the slaughter of innocents in Bethlehem, but Messiaen has apparently turned it into a moment of vicarious suffering for Jesus Himself.  Though He escapes, He begins already as an infant to bear our sorrows.

Music Theology - Liturgical: The Church’s Soundscape

I offer some reflections on contemporary worship music at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning.  As noted there, I owe most of my ideas to Ken Myers.

Music Theology - Liturgical: Liturgical Music

John Paul II wrote, “Today, as yesterday, musicians, composers, liturgical chapel cantors, church organists and instrumentalists must feel the necessity of serious and rigorous professional training. They should be especially conscious of the fact that each of their creations or interpretations cannot escape the requirement of being a work that is inspired, appropriate and attentive to aesthetic dignity, transformed into a prayer of worship when, in the course of the liturgy, it expresses the mystery of faith in sound.”

Another reason to like that Pope.

Music Theology - Liturgical: Resurrection of the voice

Page again: “For those who oped to rise in the flesh for the Millennium and then the general judgement, ritual singing was a way to celebrate the continuity of bodily existence on both sides of the grade.  The voice was one of the higher faculties of the body that Tertullian and others believed would survive in the blessed state where the lower would no longer be required. . . . It was an orthodox view opposed to most forms of Gnosticism, where the soul’s enclosure within a muddy garb of flesh was apt to be regarded as a disastrous accident.”

Music: Stave of conquest

Page again: “The musical stave was a Latin-Christian invention and was confined, for many centuries, to the Occidental lands where Latin was the exclusive language of liturgical singing.  It provided the means for an aggressively expansionist civilization to train singers relatively quickly so that the flag of the Latin liturgy could be planted in Spain, in Livonia, in the Holy Land, and in a  great many of the larger hospitals and chapels, often in rural or indeed wild locations.  There is something to lament here, but also something to laud.  The world has the Passions of J.S. Back, and the late quartets of Beethoven, because monks, clergy and knights of the central Middle Ages sought a form of life with a rigour to match their consciences, then drained marshes, took boats along uncharted rivers or attempted to reclaim, at huge cost to themselves and to others, new lands for Christendom.”

Music Theology - Liturgical: Liturgical time

Christopher Page observes (The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years) that the European-wide diffusion of plainsong created created for monks and clergy “a means to record contingent events so that they would be perceived, wherever the account was read, not just in terms of time measured by the hourglass or water-clock, but also sub specie aeternitas.  For those entrusted to relate the major events in the life of a pious magnate or churchman, the implications of the common liturgical culture for the art of giving depth to a narrative could be considerable.”

He cites the example of Abbot William of Eskill on the Eve of Easter:

Continue reading…

Music: Musical excess

A TLS reviewer says this about musical meaning: “The meaning of music is inexpressible because excessive, and it is excessive because music, like the world at large, eloquently affirms that it is, beyond any question of meaning.”

And add, “By becoming descriptive, music seems to give up its peculiar characteristic that, hitched to the world’s pure dynamism, consists of describing nothing in particular.”

History Music: Medieval therapies

In his encyclopedic and highly intelligent The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years, Christopher Page details how the “soundscape” of Christendom expanded through the establishment of hospitals, many of which were supplied with service books that included notation (a fairly late innovation).  He notes, “The statutes of hospitals were sometimes explicit about their musical provision.  The clerics serving the Hotel-Dieu in Pontoise from 1265 were to sing Matins a notte and touttes les heures canonniales et la messe . . . a notte, while at Tours in 1263 the singers were commanded to read and sing according to the custom of the Church of St. Stephen.  Foundation charters are usually more reticent, but there are occasional references to the provision that the founders or governors expected.  At Cammin, in Pomerania, one hospital was staffed by a priest and a scolaris who were required to sing Mass but allowed to say the Hours and vigils sine nota.”  He quotes a sketch of Dickens describing a 19th-century hospital scene, and adds, “The scene was perhaps not so different in many a larger medieval hospital as the sound of chant arose from the altar, the principal therapy available once urine had been tested, poultices applied and simples given out.”  Musical therapy, medieval style.

It’s not specifically to do with music, but he adds. . . .

Continue reading…

Music Theology - Trinity: Musical Perichoresis

Jeremy Begbie has pointed out that, though a physical phenomena, music has different spatial qualities than solid objects.  Music is present in a place, but it’s not localized in a way a visually perceptible object is.  I can give my attention to listening to the sound, but I can’t say it’s “here” or “there” or “not here.”  ”What I hear occupies the whole of my aural space,” so that the acoustic world, with very slight variations, stays the same no matter what direction I turn.  Aural space is a space, since I can eventually move far enough away from the sound source that I no longer hear it.  But it is a space where objects are not locatable, and therefore provides a neat set of illustrations of theological realities.

Begbie uses musical categories to speak of perichoresis:

Continue reading…

Music Politics: Orchestral Authority

In a Mars Hill Audio interview, Victor Lee Austin talks about his recent book, Up With Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings.  He uses the analogy of an orchestra to indicate how fundamental authority is to certain forms of human flourishing.

Orchestral music is one of many kinds of collective human activity that cannot be achieved without authority.  The reason, Austin argues, is that there is no single right answer to the question “What shall we play at the concert?” or “what shall we practice today?”  Reason can’t provide a firm answer to such questions; each individual player in the orchestra might have perfectly reasonable, and very different answers.  If the orchestra is going to play at all, somebody has to decide the question, and that is an exercise of authority.

Once that authority is exercised, the individual musicians are capable of achieving something they could never do individually, nor even as a collection of individual players.  They come into their own as musicians by following the authority of the conductor.  For the orchestra, authority is not at odds with freedom, but a vehicle for freedom and expression.

Music: Music, Ritual, Speech

In a Mars Hill Audio with Ken Myers, Christopher Page discusses teh ritualizing effects of music.  Speech is much more tonally and rhythmically complicated than music.  To reduce all the tones and variations in speech to a seven-note scale is a radical simplification of sound, and, Page thinks, moves toward ritual.

He immediately adds an observation about the difference between singing and talking to yourself.  If you find someone singing to himself, you’d think him uncommonly happy; if you find someone talking to himself, you’d find the number to the asylum.  Page tentatively suggests that the reason for this is that speech elicits counter-speech and expects conflict and response in a way that music does not.  Music has more of an end-in-itself quality, again drawing it close to ritual.

Music: Word made Song

Brian Brock begins his Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture by noting how foreign Augustine found the Bible.  Brock doesn’t want to familiarize the Bible: “It is as strange and eternally different from our common sense as is Christ himself.”  There is no “exegetical or devotional method [that] can overcome God’s proper otherness. . . . God is not foreign to us on some general criterion, but as another person. . . . The Psalms are foreign because they open into the manifold life of the trinitarian God.”

The point is not to smooth out the strangeness but to “thematize” it “in a theologically illuminating fashion.”  Even more, though, Brock’s intention is to explore how Scripture can be appropriated as morally formative, formative of affections and senses as much as of intellects.  We are not to make Scripture familiar but “to become attuned” to it.  Singing is a metaphor but not mere metaphor.  Praise is the proper form of exegesis, and praise is the morally transformative form that the Bible takes: “Praising God transforms the many rationalities and languages of this world.  Praise leads Christians out of conformity to this world by forming perception and knowledge so that we may discern what God intends for us, the good and acceptable and perfect.”

Such praise has a critical edge, more critical than critical theory can ever be.  Praise reveals “how this song of superabundance really does differ from other songs and languages, and so from other ways of life. . . . The loss of desire and ability to sing is the captivity of the community of faith, a captivity of thought to ideology, of action to futile pursuits.”

Music: Welsh Carol

A lovely carol that I came across in the old Oxford Book of Carols.  If I could sing, and if I could sing over my blog, I’d sing this.  The melody is haunting.

Awake were they only, those shepherds so lonely, On guard in that darkness profound.

When colour had faded, when nighttime had shaded their senses from sight and from sound.

Lo, then broke a wonder, then drifted asunder, the veils from the splendour of God.

When light from the Holy came down to the lowly, and heav’n to the earth that they trod.

Continue reading…

Music: Moderation

“Do all in moderation” can sound ascetic, life-denying.  Me genoito!

Moderation is an aesthetic term, and as an ethical standard combines aesthetic and moral criteria.  It’s a musical ideal.  Moderatus is linked to modus, measure, limit, rhythm, song.

Epieikes in Philippians 4:5 is “suitable, fitting,” built from eikos, reasonable, that is, what is a proper eikon, what conforms to the pattern on the mountain.

“Be moderate” means “modulate.”  It means doing things in the right mode.  It means harmonizing this and that so that life is not dominated by one note, chord, or key.

Music: Why music?

Listen to the first four minutes of the first movement (Andante grave) of Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata in C Major, and ask yourself: Woudln’t you be content if these four minutes summed up the story of your life?

Music: Buxtehude

“O Sacred Head Now Wounded” is only a portion of a much longer poem by Bernard of Clairvaux, a blason on the crucified Jesus.  The Baroque composer Dieterich Buxtehude set the whole poem to music in Membra Jesu Nostri, and there’s a wonderful performance by the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis available on YouTube.

Music: Prokofiev

I’ve been listening to Prokofiev’s third Piano Concerto almost non-stop since my friend Joshua Appel pointed me to the video of Yuja Wang’s stunning performance on YouTube.  How did I live a half-century without this music?

What’s so fascinating about this piece?  For me, two things: One, this is what life is like.  Two, I want to preach like this.

Music: Music and modernity

Andrew Bowie (Aesthetics and Subjectivity : From Kant to Nietzsche) challenges the typical postmodern characterization of modern philosophy by highlighting music.  Heidegger views “the growth of the importance of music in modernity as grounded in an attitude to art based just upon feeling ‘which has been left to itself,’ and he links this to the notion that modern culture is the result of a decline from something greater.”  In contrast to poetry and thinking, music “lacks the seriousness of earlier art.”

Bowie thinks this is nonsense: “Anyone familiar with modern music must find this position highly questionable.  The idea that the production – and even the reception – of music is based solely on feelings in the narrow sense is untenable: we would not even hear music as music if that were the case.”

He adds,

Continue reading…

Music: Overhearing

Collingwood: “The reason why gramophone music is so unsatisfactory to any one accustomed to real music is not because the mechanical reproduction is bad – that would be easily compensated by the hearer’s imagination – but because the performers and the audience are out of touch.  The audience is not collaborating; it is only overhearing.”

Music: Exhortation

I’m drawing on Jim Jordan’s Biblical Horizons lectures from this summer.

“Be filled with the Spirit,” Paul writes, “speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”

The Spirit is the music of the Trinity, the breath that gives melody to the Word of the Father. When we’re filled with the Spirit, we sing.

Just like David.

Continue reading…

« Previous Entries in Category |