Abstract
This section offers some summary reflections on what the foregoing chapters have in common and where they diverge. Although some of the differences between the approaches of Brown and Hopps can be put down to differences in background and style, a deeper reason is the contrasting subject matter with which they are engaged. Not only does popular music still need to be defended against the charge of superficiality, its stratagems for communicating the divine are quite different from those of classical music, and are typically more arch or oblique, involving ambiguities, intimations, and dislocation. The result of which is that there is much less specific content in what is communicated, hence the emphasis in Hopps’s chapters on ineffability and mystery. Nonetheless, two key elements are shared: the conviction that music can be the means of opening us up to divine reality but also a recognition that whether or not this is possible remains heavily dependent on context and prior conditions.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Images of Redemption in Art and Music,’ Redemption, ed. S. Davis, D. Kendall, and G. O’Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 295–319; God and Grace of Body, 61–119, 217–385; ‘From Elijah (1846) to The Kingdom (1906): Music and Scripture Interacting in the Nineteenth-Century English Oratorio,’ Music and Theology in Nineteenth Century Britain, ed. Martin Clarke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 181–95. Gavin Hopps , Morrissey : The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012).
- 2.
Adorno’s critique, first adumbrated in 1930s, is available in a number of places, including his Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), Chapters 1–2; for Bloom’s attack on popular music , see The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
- 3.
For a recent attempt to assess the spiritual power of that integration, Andrew McCarron, Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); for one of his strongest supporters for the Nobel Prize for Literature (awarded in 2016), Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (London: Viking, 2003).
- 4.
John Coltrane and Led Zeppelin .
- 5.
God and Grace of Body, 295–347.
- 6.
The lecture opens Nick Cave , Complete Lyrics 1978–2001 (London: Penguin, 2001), 2–19. For Al Green ’s views, see D. Ehrlich, Inside the Music: Conversations with Contemporary Musicians About Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1997), 172–9.
- 7.
Defined in the first section of Chapter 5.
- 8.
The objections began in response to my Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (Oxford University Press, 1999). I tried to clarify my position in ‘Experience, Symbol and Revelation : Continuing the Conversation,’ Theology, Aesthetics and Culture: Responses to the Work of David Brown , 265–96.
- 9.
Hart, ‘Conversation after Pentecost?’. Hart talks of a ‘willing suspension and the imaginative transcendence of the established boundaries of the self’ (168).
- 10.
The misbehaviour of eighteenth century audiences was notorious.
- 11.
While generally true in Britain, some continental countries may be different. The recently completed Elbphiharmonie in Hamburg is already fully booked by concert-goers for the whole of the coming year.
- 12.
The Glasgow shop closed first, the Edinburgh one (McAlister Mattheson) in 2017.
- 13.
A former principal conductor, Stéphane Denève, even used to break the ice by teasing the audience with gentle plays on his French origins, for example asking ‘Comment-allez vous?’
- 14.
The Red Priest Baroque quartet (named after Vivaldi) were an early pioneer of this kind of technique, with their general strategy even compared with that of the Rolling Stones.
- 15.
The examples were: Led Zeppelin ’s, ‘Stairway to Heaven ,’ which I suggested evokes a sense of transcendence , and John Coltrane ’s, A Love Supreme, which points towards universalism in divine love.
- 16.
- 17.
Although the relation between the two is far more complicated than might initially be supposed, as my discussion of famous settings of biblical encounters with the divine at the end of Chapter 2 was intended to indicate.
- 18.
Discussed in ‘Types of Aesthetic Experience and their Relation to Religion’ in Chapter 2.
- 19.
Treated in the second half of the same section.
- 20.
The content of Chapter 3.
- 21.
Noted near the beginning of Chapter 4. Aseity (lack of dependence on anything else) is suggested both by experiences of divine transcendence or otherness and by the sort of peace that seems incapable of dissolution.
- 22.
Modern Painters (London: George Allen, 1906), II, 3, v–x. See also DGHC, 26–9.
- 23.
This matter is discussed in the Chapter 1.
- 24.
I resisted in his case because it would have been all too easy to give him a chapter on his own.
- 25.
Of which there was not much evidence in the most recent version that I have seen. Although produced under David McVicar and with several complimentary reviews, Scottish Opera ’s 2017 version was to me quite disappointing. The underused water imagery failed to yield any deeper dimension.
- 26.
Although much work has now been done on the aesthetics of photography since Susan Sontag ’s pioneering volume On Photography (1977), surprising little attention has been given to the capacity of the camera to challenge what one supposes one sees, and thus provide an opening to another dimension.
- 27.
Classical architecture might be said to operate in a similar way to classical music in generating a sense of order and thereby also possibly mediating some sense of divine order ; whereas the gothic, by contrast, may be said to elicit a sense of transcendence , and so on. For some further thoughts, see DGHC, 153–77.
- 28.
The Glyndebourne production of 2014, which indeed received mixed reviews.
- 29.
The live cinema broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York in May 2017. The producer, Robert Carsen, did a quite brilliant job with the material, taking seriously its composition not long before the First World War in 1911. The sense of occasion was also helped by it being the last performance in the role of the Marschallin of René Fleming and of Elìna Garanča as Octavian.
- 30.
Two comments, both from 2010, provide some idea of his general position: ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it’ (radio interview with Jarvis Cocker, 12 September); ‘I am not religious, and I’m not a Christian, but I do reserve the right to believe in the possibility of a god. […] I think as an artist, particularly, it’s a necessary part of what I do, that there is some divine element going on within my songs’ (Los Angeles Times, 29 November).
- 31.
From Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 2001 album No More Shall We Part; and on the live DVD concert from Lyon God Is in the House.
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Brown, D., Hopps, G. (2018). Conclusion. In: The Extravagance of Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91818-1_7
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