Resounding Truth (Engaging Culture)

Christian Wisdom in the World of Music

Begbie, Jeremy S., Johnston, Robert K., Dyrness, William

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781441200716
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Christianity Today 2008 Book Award (Theology/Ethics) Even fallen humans compose beautiful symphonies, music that touches emotions as nothing else can. Resounding Truth shows Christians how to uncover the Gospel message found in the many melodies that surround us. Theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie believes our divinely-inspired imagination reveals opportunity for sincere, heartfelt praise. With practical examples, lucid explanations, and an accessible bibliography, this book will help music lovers discover how God's diversity shines through sound. Begbie helps readers see the Master of Song and experience the harmony of heavenly hope.

We are committed to pursuing Christian wisdom in the world of music. But what might we mean by “music”? At first glance, this might seem a tiresome and pedantic question. Music is surely a fairly straightforward thing to identify. It is what we play on a guitar, sing in the bath, hear on a CD. If we were pressed for a definition, we might say something to the effect that music is organized sound, or patterns of organized sounds, designed to produce certain effects, and as such, it is different from naturally or randomly occurring sound and from noise. Even if some composers deliberately blur the boundary between the musical and the nonmusical, most people, most of the time, know what music means.

Music and Musics

If we stop to think a little harder, however, we soon find matters are not quite so simple and that much is to be gained by being a little more self-conscious about how we are using this five-letter word. We begin with the plain observation that the English word “music” can be used to cover a huge and diverse range of phenomena across very different cultures. In the 1970s, I lived for a short spell on the Indonesian island of Bali, and there I had my first encounter with gamelan music. On a balmy evening on Kuta Beach, the air was filled with gentle, hovering, transparent sounds. Although I have since come to love this music, on my first hearing I wondered how I was going to endure it for more than a few minutes. None of the musical patterns on which I had been reared seemed to be present—clearly identifiable themes, tension and release, strong closure. It seemed to be little more than a haze of shimmering monotony. As more and more non-Western music is made accessible (so-called world music), we are becoming far more conscious of what anthropologists of music (ethnomusicologists) have long been telling us—that there is no such thing as music, only musics. Finding a definition of music that encompasses Indonesian gamelan and, say, J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion seems well-nigh impossible.[1] To talk generally of “music” is to turn a tone-deaf ear to the rich diversity of musical practices worldwide. Not only does applying our categories of musical appreciation to other musics often make little sense but the attempt to use even our concept of music in other cultural settings runs into grave difficulties. And, of course, behind the desire to speak globally and monolithically of music there often lies more than a whiff of Western conceit and hegemony: a presumption that our music represents the genuine and most advanced article and any other purported “music” is to be treated as inferior to it.

We need, therefore, to make clear that in this book we are restricting ourselves largely to the broad tradition known as Western “tonal music.” This emerged in the seventeenth century in Europe and has been predominant ever since in European culture and in societies shaped by modern Europe. It is the tradition of Beethoven and Bach, Rachmaninoff and the Grateful Dead, Zoltán Kodály and Girls Aloud. It embraces virtually all popular and so-called classical music[2] as well as most music in English-speaking Western churches, and it is spreading worldwide at a remarkable rate. It is constructed out of systems of notes (called keys) that revolve around certain clearly defined centers, and it unfolds in time through building patterns of tension and resolution. We are confining our discussion to this music because, given our limited space, it seems sensible to focus on the tradition of music that will be best known to readers of this book.

To qualify this, however, some points need to be made. First, to restrict ourselves in this way is not to assume that music of this kind is superior to all others; we are not presuming any particular value judgments about music outside the Western tonal tradition. Second, I am not suggesting that this music is the only kind worthy of theological attention. Different kinds of theological conversation are possible with different types of music. Third, Western tonal music cannot be treated as an isolated phenomenon. It has blurred boundaries—it can share many features characteristic of non-Western traditions,[3] and, as it happens, it is currently interacting with many of these traditions worldwide. Fourth, even if we do concentrate on one musical stream, this need not and should not prevent us from being alert to what we can learn from others. Even a minimal awareness of other musics will make us much more self-conscious about our own, of the assumptions we make about what authentic music really is, of the different uses to which music can be put in a society, and so forth. Not least, we will be made much more conscious of the variety of music within our own tradition and the very different ways in which people can think about music. We shall try to keep these perspectives in mind in what follows. Fifth, in chapters 2 and 3 we will be considering music that is not of this tradition (music as referred to in the biblical writings and Western music as it is theorized up until the end of the medieval era). We do this because Western tonal music grew out of a complex history that cannot be ignored if we are to understand it correctly and also because there is a huge amount to learn theologically from this history. In the case of the specifically scriptural material, focused attention will be given to it because any Christian account of music cannot ignore scriptural references to music, scattered and ambiguous as they may be.

Some Features of the Landscape

Attempting to be a little more self-conscious, then, let us draw attention to some key features of the current musical landscape as we experience it in the West and to some of the factors that have shaped it and made it what it is. I am concentrating on features that have a relatively recent history.

Differentiation

A notable feature is what is usually called “differentiation”—the way in which music has become a fairly specific, specialized, and clearly bounded activity, and with this, the way in which quite sharp demarcations between different types of music have developed.[4] As we shall see shortly, there are signs that these differentiations are in the process of breaking up, but they are by no means absent today, so it is worth at least highlighting some of them and the ways they have arisen.

Sociologist Peter Martin observes that so-called primitive music is typically an expression of a collective experience, an inextricable part of everyday social experience, not the work of a single individual. This is in contrast to Western modernity, where the composer emerges as an individual—in the nineteenth century for example, as the heroic, self-expressive artist, externalizing inner thoughts or feelings. Even here, however, composition happens within a social context—it is nourished in society and channeled in ways that acknowledge existing conventions. Martin writes: “We can glimpse here the two contrasting forces from which social order emerges: the active and creative impulse of individuals, and the limitations and constraints which the existing order imposes on them.” In the West, what has arisen from these forces is “the differentiation of music from other activities and the gradual emergence of specialised social roles.”[5] So, for example, we have become used to a tripartite division of composer, performer, and listener (often very sharply distinguished) and the emergence of “works” of music.

Unremarkable as all this may seem to us now, it is worth recalling that the attribution of pieces to individual composers is relatively recent. It dates from around the fourteenth century, though there are some scattered examples before then. Moreover, for centuries composers in the West were skilled practicing musicians; nowadays composers are often poor practitioners, and few performers are composers. A crucial factor in these differentiations was the development of notation. Again, we may barely stop to think about the fact that so much music is written down, but in the Christian West, notation only emerged around the ninth century and did not reach the level of thoroughness we are used to today until well into the seventeenth century. For most of human history, music has not been written down in any detail. But once it was, the implications were massive, and one of the most important was the emergence of the “work”—an identifiable written piece that could be transported from place to place and whose composer could be identified (and in due course, protected by copyright).[6]

As music came to be perceived increasingly as a distinct, even autonomous sphere of social activity, so the music itself also became increasingly differentiated—we find medieval church music set against folk traditions (i.e., sacred against secular, to use later terms), and so on. In time, this generated the conditions for “art” music (broadly, music to be listened to “for its own sake”) as distinct from “devotional” music (music for worship). In the modern age, the proliferation of musical genres was taken further. We witness the burgeoning of instrumental music, a feature that is taken for granted in the contemporary scene, but it generated much controversy when it began to emerge as a force to be reckoned with in the early modern period (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), not least because it had no words to stabilize its meaning. Even today, the general public shows a very marked preference for vocal music over instrumental music.

More musical differentiation took place in the nineteenth century. By the 1830s, a distinction between “serious” and “light” music emerged. As with many things, music more and more came to be treated as a commodity to be bought and sold, and the consumer took on a new power. The trio of composer/performer/listener is easily mapped onto the producer/distributor/consumer trio of an industrial economy—the “work” being the product. With the substantial growth in domestic music making and the demand for music that could be played and enjoyed quickly, the seeds of the modern music business were sown, and we find a sustained demand for music as entertainment (witness the proliferation of music halls in urban Britain). Further differentiation came with the imperialist period prior to World War I, when the music of other countries was transported to Europe; foreign musical instruments, scales, and rhythms challenged the extent to which Western music could be assumed to be “natural.” In the early twentieth century, the most profound differentiation in terms of global influence came from African-American styles—spirituals, ragtime, jazz, and the whole stream of “popular music” that emanated from them, often sharply distinguished from “classical” or “art” music.

I am not attempting any kind of general survey of what are immensely complex processes. But it is worth stressing that these differentiations have shaped not only the practice of music but also the way we think about it. Especially important to underline is the impact of these developments on published theoretical reflection on music. Until very recently, most academic musicology[7] has been largely built on ideas and assumptions that have arisen in the context of art music: the separation of music from life, the focus on a work embodied in a printed score, listening to a work for aesthetic pleasure, and so on. As will become clear later, if we look at tonal music more widely, as it is actually practiced, it is not at all obvious that these ideas and assumptions are always appropriate.

Many academics at work in the study of music are waking up to this. And part of what has shaken up their thinking has been other key developments that have taken place over the last hundred years or so. Again we are dealing with complex matters, and no comprehensive survey is possible. But we should perhaps mention two of these developments in particular: sound technology and the machinery of marketing.

The Technology of Sound

It is hard to overestimate the importance of that CD player on the shelf or iPod in your pocket. Technologies of sound have made music accessible as never before. Consider for a moment a composer of the stature of Hector Berlioz (1803–69), a giant of the nineteenth century. The only music he would have heard as a child would have been church music, songs sung in the fields, or occasionally a town band. Compare this with the typical experience of the modern teenager. Music is now available to more people, more of the time, than ever before. The music of virtually all times and places is usually as close as the nearest CD store, and for many of us no further away than our own computers, thanks to broadband and MP3 players. Many of the older differentiations are increasingly out of place. We can now create customized collections of radically different styles with ease: we can have opera buffa on our couches, David Bowie when cycling to work, Miles Davis on our lunchtime jog. We can enjoy the music of practically any culture, from Sri Lankan folk to South American siku.

The sharp separation of music from everyday life, at least as it is exemplified in the invention of the concert hall for classical music, has been dramatically affected. Through sound technology, music has come to surround us, some would say invade us, as never before, classical music included. Speaking of the arrival of sound technology in the West, F. A. Biocca writes:

Three aural technologies—the telephone, the phonograph, and the radio—were about to bombard the ear with more aural information than had ever been experienced in the history of man. A shift in the technological base was constructing a whole new environment of structured and meaningful sound. . . . Most noticeable to many was the sudden omnipresence of music.[8]

Far from having been pushed out by science and technology, “in advanced industrial societies [music] is all around us, a major element in our culture, in contrast to the situation in pre-electronic times when it was a much less pervasive medium, and a much smaller part of most people’s experience.”[9] To use what is now a cliché, music has become a soundtrack for life. We no longer need to search it out—music will search us out through walls, ceiling speakers, on United Airlines as Rhapsody in Blue, through that teenager’s earphones on the other side of the bus (which, in Garrison Keillor’s memorable words, “emitted a sound like tiny chain saws”).[10] The metaphor of “invasion” is not inapt, for our ability to protect ourselves from our aural environment is limited. We can shut our eyes or turn our heads away from the things we do not want to look at, but we cannot do the same with our ears. We have no earlids.

Paradoxically, along with the omnipresence of music, sound and reproductive technology have at the same time given people an unprecedented control over their musical environment, and this too has challenged some of the social roles that arose with differentiation (in particular, it relativizes composer and performer). We can turn the music down, skip tracks, fast-forward, move the speakers, compile our own collections of favorite tracks. We can retreat into our own private sound-world and exclude others, via earphones or headphones (a major innovation in musical history, for previously, any music you made or heard would be audible to others near you). But perhaps most important, the appearance of digital technology in the mid-1980s meant not only that sound could be stored and reproduced far more accurately than before but also that it could be sampled: a recorded sound or short musical passage could be extracted and inserted into another context quite effortlessly. Sampling has enabled the manipulation of sound on a scale never possible before and by anyone with a basic computer. The widespread availability of sound-processing software (and MIDI technology)[11] has meant that a burgeoning ...