Abstract
The chapter is in four sections. The first provides various reasons for rejecting theological accounts which insist significant divine communication should be seen as confined to the Bible alone, a point that is elaborated in the second section as the argument is developed in the opposite direction against non-believers who deny any cognitive possibility for religion. A longer section then considers the various types of aesthetic theory currently applied to music and how religious experience through music may be analysed as a further distinct element which may or may not supervene on a purely aesthetic experience: a generous excess, as it were. The final section examines the relation between words and music in five examples of musical settings of famous biblical encounters between an individual and God.
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Notes
- 1.
Its academic version is found most conspicuously in followers of the theology of Karl Barth .
- 2.
Most strongly advocated in the writings of Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (hereafter TMT); Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (London: SPCK, 2008), hereafter RT; and Music, Modernity and God (hereafter MMG). For his objections to my own position, see his ‘Openness and Specificity: A Conversation with David Brown on Theology and Classical Music,’ Theology, Aesthetics and Culture: Responses to the Work of David Brown , ed. Robert MacSwain and Taylor Worley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 145–56; ‘Natural Theology and Music,’ The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology , ed. Russell Re Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 566–80; and MMG, 93. As his views are extensively critiqued by Gavin Hopps in the second part of this book, I will leave them to one side in my own contribution here.
- 3.
To give only a few examples, there is the burning bush (Ex. 3.2), darkness on Mount Sinai (Ex. 20.21), and light at the Transfiguration (Mark 9.2).
- 4.
We know from his markings on his own copy of the Calov Bible Commentary that Bach particularly liked this passage.
- 5.
Hence the title of my recent book Divine Generosity and Human Creativity: Theology Through Symbol, Art and Architecture , ed. Christopher R. Brewer and Robert MacSwain (London: Routledge, 2017), hereafter DGHC.
- 6.
God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); God and Grace of Body; God and Mystery in Words: Experience Through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 7.
Religion (seen as human aspiration rather than divine grace) has been a common theological term of abuse in Protestant theology, not least in the writings of Karl Barth .
- 8.
For an excellent concise statement of this argument, see Christopher R. Brewer, Editor’s ‘Introduction’ to DGHC, vii–xiii.
- 9.
It is often forgotten that Protestant denominations were also once opposed. The 1920 Anglican Lambeth conference expressed absolute opposition. Although such hostility was modified in 1930, the issue still evoked stiff opposition from some bishops, among them Charles Gore.
- 10.
For my own attempt to include change on this matter under some wider principle, see Discipleship and Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12–31.
- 11.
In the most influential Christian text on aesthetics of the twentieth century, Maritain required acceptable composers not only to follow the classical style but also to be Christian. Although the 1927 edition relented on his criticism of Stravinsky in the first edition (1920), this was only modified in 1927 because by this time Stravinsky was a Christian and conforming to classical principles: Art and Scholasticism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952), 57.
- 12.
Frank Burch Brown , Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 20, 165. Note also his insistence on not automatically assuming a Christian perspective: xiii.
- 13.
Even reading through the score entails some sort of envisaged performance.
- 14.
‘The Musician,’ R. S. Thomas , Collected Poems 1945–90 (London: Phoenix, 1993), 104.
- 15.
For a mediating role for architecture , see my God and Enchantment of Place, 245–403; DGHC, Part IV.
- 16.
Von Musikalisch-Schönen (1854); translated as The Beautiful in Music (1891). A more comprehensive account of the various debates in which he took part can be found in Hanslick, Music Criticisms 1846–99, trans. H. Pleasants (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).
- 17.
Examples would include E. T. Lawson and R. N. McCauley , Rethinking Religion (1990) and S. E. Guthrie , Faces in the Clouds (1993).
- 18.
The term was apparently first applied by J. L. Barrett , ‘Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,’ in Trends in Cognitive Science , 4 (2000), 29–34. Since 2006 there has been an International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion .
- 19.
Hence the title of one of the most popular books in this area, which is also representative of the type of faults mentioned in the main body of the text: Pascal Boyer , Religion Explained (London: Vintage Books, 2002).
- 20.
Something Boyer admits but attributes to social pressures of various kinds.
- 21.
For the point developed at greater length, see DGHC, 24–6.
- 22.
Contrast Boyer: ‘Metaphysical religions that will not dirty their hands with such human purposes and concerns are about as marketable as a car without an engine’ (369).
- 23.
2 Chronicles 5. For its importance, see J. W. Kleinig , The Lord’s Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles (Sheffield: JOST Press, 1993), esp. 164.
- 24.
The classic argument for the same origins is to be found in Sacred and Profane Beauty : The Holy in Art by Gerardus van der Leeuw , republished by Oxford University Press in 2006.
- 25.
Really three phonemes (a-u-m), it can also be used to evoke Brahman.
- 26.
For the matter pursued with great technical detail, Guy L. Beck , Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993).
- 27.
Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005). See also his earlier The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996). The priority of music over language is also supported by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and the Emissary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 102–5.
- 28.
The ape-like and brutish ‘reconstruction’ created by the palaeontologist Marcellin Boule (1861–1942) is now known to have been based on a skeleton showing the effects of arthritis.
- 29.
E.g. burial in a foetal position.
- 30.
From Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams . See the latter’s book, The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002).
- 31.
Lewis-Williams, 223–6, 265–6.
- 32.
See Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, ed. Ian Hodder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 332–8.
- 33.
See A. A. Donohue , Xoana and the Origins of Greek Sculpture (Atlantic: Scholars Press, 1988), esp. 225–31.
- 34.
Indeed, the fact that the language of immanence is found no less a secure place than that of transcendence might seem to fit Hinduism no less well, if not better, than Christianity.
- 35.
Even within Islam Wahabi hostility to music is countered by Sufi enthusiasm.
- 36.
- 37.
The range of possibilities and the ability of one type to merge into another is well illustrated in Alf Gabrielsson ’s empirical study, Strong Experiences with Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 38.
E.g. Wilfrid Mellers , Celestial Music? (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002), xi.
- 39.
See Religious Aesthetics, 85, 147.
- 40.
For Frank Burch Brown ’s comments, see Good Taste , Bad Taste , and Christian Taste : Aesthetics in Religious Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 68–9, hereafter GTBT.
- 41.
In 1846 in his programme notes for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
- 42.
A connection argued at length by Bonds in Absolute Music . See e.g. the quotation from Clive Bell, 279–80.
- 43.
Writing in the 1970s on Scottish common-sense philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson and Thomas Reid, it was with his The Corded Shell of 1980 that he established his reputation in this new area. Since then, more than a dozen books have appeared on the topic.
- 44.
Peter Kivy , Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 245–55.
- 45.
Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Chapter 6; ‘Another Go at Musical Profundity: Stephen Davies and the Game of Chess,’ British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (2003), 401–11.
- 46.
For ‘doggy’ Kivy, ‘Critical Study: Deeper Than Reason,’ British Journal of Aesthetics , 46 (2006), 300–1.
- 47.
Sound Sentiment: An Essay on Musical Emotions (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 77. For challenges to the necessary equation of major with happy and minor with sad, see John Powell , Why We Love Music (London: John Murray, 2016), 44–7. A recent paper in Nature (13 July, 2016), from MIT neuroscientist Josh McDermott , observes from a study of a remote Amazonian tribe that even a preference for harmony over dissonance may be learnt rather than innate.
- 48.
Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 47.
- 49.
Critique of Pure Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 26–34. Kivy is his main object of attack throughout.
- 50.
E.g. loud noise generating anxiety.
- 51.
Critique of Pure Music, 58–66.
- 52.
Kivy, Osmin’s Rage: Philosophical Reflections on Opera , Drama, and Text (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Young, 125–32.
- 53.
‘Formalists are not completely mistaken […] they have identified a way in which at least some listeners find the experience of music aesthetically valuable’ (Critique, 151). While the terms deployed by some ill-educated readers might well be vague, this does not mean that the structure of the music is not an important factor.
- 54.
Ibid., 177.
- 55.
Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 143. Scruton was knighted on the recommendation of David Cameron in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list (10 June, 2016). As well as Britain’s pre-eminent philosophical defender of conservative values, his writing on the aesthetics of music and architecture is also extensive.
- 56.
For Young’s objections, Critique of Pure Music, 132–7.
- 57.
Argued at greatest length in his definitive The Aesthetics of Music.
- 58.
For instance, Messaien used palindromes of perfect symmetry to prevent any sense of retracing one’s steps and so any sense of time . An obvious example of the horizontal firmly subordinate to the vertical in his music would be his famous Quatuor pour la fin du temps.
- 59.
There is roughly ten minutes of music without any obvious harmonic strongpoint that represents ‘the earth was without form and void’ (Gen. 1.2) before finally the chorus provides its magnificent sense of arrival with ‘Let there be light’ (1.3).
- 60.
So, unlike dance music, there is no strong beat while the rhythm is strictly a function of the words. But perhaps most important of all is the monophonic structure, with a single repeated melody.
- 61.
In Retractions (Book 10) he summarized Book 6 of his De Musica as arguing that ‘from corporeal and spiritual but changeable numbers one comes to the knowledge of unchangeable numbers, which are already in unchangeable truth itself, and how in this way the invisible attributes of God being understood through the things that are made are clearly seen.’ Fathers of the Church series, trans. Sr. Mary Bogan (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), vol. 60.
- 62.
Aesthetics and Music, 57–8, 103–8.
- 63.
Scruton, Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 7–8.
- 64.
Scruton, The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 156–9. Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem (Op. 29) dates from 1909.
- 65.
It is based on Arnold Böcklin ’s painting of the same name of 1880 (Kunstmuseum, Basel).
- 66.
This is not to claim that the listener will get the point in the absence of any access to Beethoven’s intended programme, but equally appreciation of something formal like sonata form requires repeated hearing of examples and usually some teaching as well.
- 67.
For an amusing example involving the removal of a gall bladder, see Powell, Why We Love Music, 21.
- 68.
For an exposition of Liszt’s position, see Bonds, Absolute Music , 210–18.
- 69.
Reflected in quotations from the Troparion of the Cross from the Russian Liturgy, the use of a popular folk song, and the national anthem of the time .
- 70.
Quoted from a review in Neue Zeitschrift in Jonathan Kregor , Program Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 85. Kregor offers an excellent survey of various alternative approaches to the possibility of programmatic music .
- 71.
Ibid., 100–1.
- 72.
Ibid., 138.
- 73.
Two characteristic features of his argument in The Soul of the World.
- 74.
Dryden envisages the Jubal of Gen. 4.21 using a strung shell to create a ‘celestial sound’ that makes his audience fall down in worship .
- 75.
Kivy, Sounding Off: Eleven Essays in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 131.
- 76.
Ibid., 144.
- 77.
Murdoch is someone to whom I will also return in Chapter 4.
- 78.
For my comments on landscape painting, see God and Enchantment of Place, 84–152.
- 79.
The Barberini Faun is a Roman copy of c. AD220 of a Greek original, and now in the Glyptothek (sculpture museum) in Munich.
- 80.
Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950) is in Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Crucifixion (1965) in Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich.
- 81.
Rina Arya , Francis Bacon : Painting in a Godless World (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2012), 83.
- 82.
Partly under Greek influence, beauty was linked with truth and goodness as a divine transcendental throughout the patristic and medieval period.
- 83.
Seen in early hymn writers such as Venantius Fortunatus, as well as the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood. The tradition lives on in quite a number of contemporary Christian writers.
- 84.
Woman I is now exhibited in MoMa in New York. De Kooning died in 1997.
- 85.
Tilley was happy to pose in front of the painting, which went on to sell for £35.8 million. In Rubens’ day fat on women was taken as indicative of good health.
- 86.
Although beauty could be the goal. Certainly, that seems to have been the aim of Marc Quinn in his 2005 depiction of his friend Alison Lapper, where comparison was drawn with sculptures of Greek nudes likewise missing certain limbs.
- 87.
The Isenheim Altarpiece is now in a museum in Colmar in France. Raphael ’s Mond Crucifixion is in the National Gallery in London.
- 88.
The angels in the Mond Crucifixion may be dancing , but it is still blood that they are collecting as it drips from the cross. Equally, the presence of the long-dead John the Baptist in the Isenheim Altarpiece leaves us in no doubt that Christ’s suffering is of more than transient significance.
- 89.
Grünewald makes more effort to engage the viewer, not least in his portrayal of the representative penitent, Mary Magdalene , as of a similar, smaller size to the typical donor, and so in effect as one of us.
- 90.
The music seemed altogether too happy and joyful for an incident set at the foot of Christ’s cross.
- 91.
On the Warner Classics label (2010) conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano, and with soloists Anna Netrebko, Joyce DiDonato and Lawrence Brownlee.
- 92.
The form of service was a late seventeenth century Jesuit invention. In the nineteenth century it also became very popular in the Church of England. A standard order was followed in the use of the seven ‘words’: Luke 23.34; Luke 23.39–43; John 19.26–7; Mat. 27.45–6 (paralleled in Mark); John 19.28–9; John 19.30; Luke 23.46.
- 93.
Nine rather than seven movements, because there is an introduction and also the earthquake movement at the end. The difficulty of the challenge is stressed in Calvin Stapert , Playing Before the Lord: The Life and Work of Joseph Haydn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 164–6.
- 94.
For an impressive range of discussion of the music and its intended impact, see Richard Young, Echoes from Calvary: Meditations on Franz Joseph Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Young is a violinist in the Vermeer Quartet.
- 95.
Even so, Haydn is fully alive to the positive intention behind these words, and the music is therefore allowed to acquire a certain lightness that is new, just as in the final sonata based on Luke’s last word two violins marching in step seem used to conjure the notion of God and believer walking confidently in step.
- 96.
See (5) Specifics: Coltrane on generosity; Schubert on suffering; Massenet on suicide .
- 97.
Had Haydn wanted to focus on Jewish responsibility, he could easily have had a musical quotation such as the sound of a Jewish shofar or trumpet.
- 98.
Perhaps most evident where the words are in a language not known to the listener.
- 99.
Composed by Richard G. Jones (b. 1926), and included in 100 Hymns for Today (1969) and Hymns Ancient and Modern New Standard (1983), no. 366.
- 100.
Carter (1915–2004) composed his hymn with a specific Shaker tune in mind which is one major reason for its popularity: Hymns Ancient and Modern, no. 375.
- 101.
From his song ‘The Servant King.’ For full text: G. Kendrick, Behind the Songs (Stowmarket: Kevin Mayhew, 2001), 87. For another, thoughtful example: God is watching us now/through a baby’s eyes’ (109).
- 102.
Here I am taking up a suggestion made by T. Hone, ‘When in Our Music God Is Glorified,’ in Creative Chords: Studies in Music, Theology and Christian Formation, ed. J. Astley et al. (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000), esp. 156–7. It is an illustration which I have used once before in my chapter-long discussion of hymns in my God and Mystery in Words, 73–109.
- 103.
The Ordinary is the unchanging parts of the liturgy, with the seasonal variants known as Propers.
- 104.
The fact that the Sanctus and Benedictus are placed immediately before the consecration prayer means that a certain solemnity is already in place, while with the Agnus Dei communion is immediately in prospect.
- 105.
An obvious example of such later art would be Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850, now in Tate Britain), in which Mary appears to pull back at the angel’s approach.
- 106.
The historical Mary was almost certainly illiterate. In Orthodox icons Mary at the annunciation is found either (more commonly) spinning or else drawing water at a well.
- 107.
‘The Annunciation as True Fiction,’ in my DGHC, 105–12.
- 108.
Significantly different issues would of course be raised with settings of the annunciation in the absence of words, such as in the opening movement of Biber’s, Rosary Sonatas (1676).
- 109.
The poem can be found both in Helen Gardner’s Faber Book of Religious Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 207 and in Donald Davie’s New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 167. It is also available with some commentary in J. R. Watson, An Annotated Anthology of Hymns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 182–5.
- 110.
Watson mentions the influence of the six-volume commentary of Matthew Henry (d. 1714) but the christological emphasis seems to have come from elsewhere.
- 111.
Familiar examples include: ‘Blessed Be the God and Father’; ‘Thou Wilt Keep Him in Perfect Peace’; ‘Wash Me Thoroughly’; and ‘The Wilderness.’
- 112.
‘Yahweh’ is track 11 on U2 ’s 2004 album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
- 113.
Popularised by among others St Gregory of Nyssa .
- 114.
There are some videos of the Coptic Al O’laikka hymn on Youtube, among them a particularly fine one from St Mark’s church, Cedar Grove, New Jersey: https://youtube/aZOattnUOpQ?t=581, accessed 30 January 2017.
- 115.
SATB—soprano, alto, tenor and bass, the four main parts of any choir.
- 116.
For more about the poet and this poem, J. B. Pickard, John Greenleaf Whittier (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961). For the poem in full, J. G. Whittier, Complete Poetical Works (Cambridge, MA: Harrap, 1911).
- 117.
The title of the hymn tune Repton is misleading. It stems from the fact that a former pupil and friend was Director of Music at Repton School, and he it was who suggested a borrowing of music written by Parry for this oratorio.
- 118.
For details of the origin of the plot, see Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 264–70.
- 119.
The comparison with Vaughan Williams is appropriate, as he was musical editor for The English Hymnal and produced some of its best-loved hymns , e.g. Down Ampney for Bianco da Siena’s, ‘Come down, O Love Divine’ and Sine Nomine for William Walsham How’s ‘For All the Saints.’
- 120.
A Head Full of Dreams (2015). Some of the lines are sung by Beyoncé .
- 121.
Nor has it ever been. Medieval masses, known as parody masses , were once common whereby a secular tune was adapted for religious use.
- 122.
The text derives most directly from a translation of a text from the Orthodox Liturgy of St James, which is itself a combination of the imagery of Isaiah 6 and the opening words drawn from Habakkuk 2.20.
- 123.
Although first published in 1925, it was in fact written a couple of decades earlier.
- 124.
For some reflections of my own on the limitations and potential of art galleries, see ‘Context and Experiencing the Sacred,’ Philosophy and Museums: Essays on the Philosophy of Museums, ed. Victoria S. Harrison et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 117–32.
- 125.
By no stretch of the imagination could either words or music be praised as of high quality. Stanfield’s hymn first appeared in The Westminster Hymnal of 1912 and quickly became a firm favourite among Roman and Anglican Catholics.
- 126.
The full text is as follows: ‘Locus iste a Deo factus est, inaestimabile sacramentum, irreprehensibilis est.’
- 127.
The instruction ‘da capo’ entails ‘back to the beginning,’ while melisma is the phenomenon of extending a single verbal sound over more than one note.
- 128.
‘O seamless robe, Lantern of stone unbroken’: words of the Scottish poet, Peter Davidson.
- 129.
No. 2 on the 2012 Decca recording of his music.
- 130.
ITIA (the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts) at St Andrews began the process in 2016 under the direction of Dr. George Corbett , with the general title of TheoArtistry. See www.theoartistry.com.
- 131.
Three of the theophanies correspond with those discussed above (Gen. 32, Ex. 3, and I Kings 19), while three are different (Gen. 3, I Sam. 3, and Song of Songs 3). These six new works are featured on the CD recording of the project Annunciations: Sacred Music for the 21st Century, which also includes five works by Sir James MacMillan . See www.stsalvatorschapelchoir.co.uk.
- 132.
Two of the texts employ Hebrew, and two use poets (Milton and Emily Dickinson ). The anthem on Ex. 3 leaves us with the question, ‘What is his name?’ while that on I Kings 19 expands the whisper to ‘sounding solitude.’
- 133.
For a discussion of the TheoArtistry Composers’ Scheme, see George Corbett , ‘TheoArtistry, and a Contemporary Perspective on Composing Sacred Choral Music ,’ Religions 9, 7 (2018), Special Issue, ed. Edward Foley, Music: Its Theologies and Spiritualities—A Global Perspective.
- 134.
A notion more fully developed in Chapter 3.
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Brown, D., Hopps, G. (2018). A Generous Excess. In: The Extravagance of Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91818-1_2
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