The Extravagance of Music

David Brown, Gavin Hopps

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319918174
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319918181
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Music

This book explores the ways in which music can engender religious experience, by virtue of its ability to evoke the ineffable and affect how the world is open to us. Arguing against approaches that limit the religious significance of music to an illustrative function, The Extravagance of Music sets out a more expansive and optimistic vision, which suggests that there is an 'excess' or 'extravagance' in both music and the divine that can open up revelatory and transformative possibilities. In Part I, David Brown argues that even in the absence of words, classical instrumental music can disclose something of the divine nature that allows us to speak of an experience analogous to contemplative prayer. In Part II, Gavin Hopps contends that, far from being a wasteland of mind-closing triviality, popular music frequently aspires to elicit the imaginative engagement of the listener and is capable of evoking intimations of transcendence. Filled with fresh and accessible discussions of diverse examples and forms of music, this ground-breaking book affirms the disclosive and affective capacities of music, and shows how it can help to awaken, vivify, and sustain a sense of the divine in everyday life.

© The Author(s) 2018

David Brown and Gavin HoppsThe Extravagance of Musichttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91818-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: An Art Open to the Divine

David Brown¹ and Gavin Hopps¹

(1)

University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, UK

David Brown

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This book is concerned with the ways in which music, both classical and popular, may be able to engender religious experience . What is meant by religious experience will be clarified over the course of the chapters that follow, as will the diverse forms , features, and effects of music that can help to precipitate this. It may be useful, however, to anticipate these more detailed discussions with some general reflections: first, on why music might be characterized as ‘extravagant,’ and why, despite the protests of some musicologists, this extravagance may be conducive to experiences of transcendence ; second, on the extent to which such contentions are congruent with two historical metaphors about the power of music (associated with the figures of Pythagoras and Orpheus ); and, finally, on why music’s ‘straying beyond limits’ may be related to what we might call the ‘extravagance ’ of the divine .

The Extravagance of Music

One thing on which it seems many critics and lovers of music agree is that music exceeds or ‘wanders beyond’ our customary linguistic and conceptual categories. As Vladimir Jankélévitch phrases it, there is a ‘scandalous disproportion between the incantatory power of music, and the fundamental inevidence of musical beauty .’¹ Thus, even the simplest and briefest of musical phrases can move us unaccountably and mean more than we can say. In Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, for example, Swann is haunted by five notes, from the ‘lily-white’ Sonata in F# by the imaginary composer Venteuil, which he first hears by chance at an evening party, and whose ‘petite phrase’ subsequently ‘opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils.’² This ‘airy and perfumed phrase’ isn’t just the cause of a momentary expansion of vision or feeling though; for according to his later reflections, it has a transformative potential, in that it opens up the possibility of ‘a sort of rejuvenation’:

like a confirmed invalid who, all of a sudden […] seems to have so far recovered from his malady that he begins to envisage the possibility, hitherto beyond all hope, of starting to lead […] a wholly different life, Swann found in himself, in the memory of the phrase that he had heard […] the presence of one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe, but to which, as though the music had had upon the moral barrenness from which he was suffering a sort of recreative influence, he was conscious once again of a desire, almost, indeed, of the power to consecrate his life.³

It is on account of these sorts of ‘excessive’ effects and the art-form’s unpredictable, inexhaustible generativity that we shall speak in this volume of music’s ‘extravagance ,’ which comes from the medieval Latin, extrā vagārī, meaning ‘to wander or stray outside limits.’

Such ‘extravagant’ conceptions of music are of course by no means uncommon. For E. T. A. Hoffmann , writing in his famous 1810 review of Beethoven’s work, ‘music unlocks for mankind an unknown realm,’ ‘just as Orpheus ’ lyre opened the gates of the underworld,’ and Beethoven’s music in particular ‘transport[s] the listener through ever-growing climaxes into the spiritual realm of the infinite.’⁴ For Thomas Carlyle , in his 1840 lecture on Dante and Shakespeare , music is a ‘kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that.’⁵ And for Richard Wagner , writing in his 1841 novella, Ein Glücklicher Abend, music expresses the ‘eternal, infinite and ideal […] in such infinitely varied phrases as belong uniquely to music and which are foreign and unknown to any other tongue.’⁶ Nor were such sentiments confined to the nineteenth century. In the words of George Steiner , music ‘puts our being as men and women in touch with that which transcends the sayable, which outstrips the analysable.’⁷ Such views are, finally, also common within a therapeutic context ; according to the neurologist Macdonald Critchley , for example: ‘Music can bring about a veritable perceptual spectrum ranging from the simple reception of auditory sense -data to impressions which […] well-nigh baffle description. So evocative, overwhelming and transcendental may these be as to defy description.’⁸

Nevertheless, such claims about music’s ineffability and its capacity to elicit experiences of transcendence have been vigorously challenged in recent years by a number of prominent musicologists, among them Lawrence Kramer , who is one of the most articulate and pioneering advocates of ‘new,’ ‘postmodern,’ or ‘critical’ musicology.⁹ Although Kramer’s influential ‘postmodern’ approach purports to defend the value of ‘situated’ subjective responses to music and ‘context -related meanings,’¹⁰ he chooses to associate any talk of its ‘ineffable’ character with reactionary claims to music’s autonomy , thereby failing to acknowledge the possibility that such language might equally spring from concretely situated subjective experiences.¹¹ Instead, such talk is derided as a ‘fable’ and the ‘relic of a certain nineteenth-century-vogue for sentimental metaphysics.’¹² As a result, listening experiences involving a sense of transcendence or enchantment are set over against ‘the realities of the social world’¹³—as though such experiences took place somewhere outside the real.¹⁴

Yet surely it is possible for a listener to have ‘situated’ religious experiences—even if these are experiences of transcendence —and for music’s ‘context -related meanings’ to be inflected by faith or theistic concerns? One might also ask whether contemplative rapture in listening—even when it is an enchanted tarrying with aesthetic forms —is really so bad?¹⁵ Surely, as the practices of music therapy have shown, there are all sorts of psychological, emotional, and social benefits to be gained from experiences of musical transcendence .¹⁶ And yet, like Leppert and McClary, Kramer positions experiences of ‘rapture’ and ‘sublime transcendence ’ on the same side of the fence as aesthetic autonomy, which is set over against ‘“real-world” concerns’ and the ‘actual’ conditions of ‘life and thought.’¹⁷ In other words, what we find in Kramer’s reading of music is an ideological privileging of certain kinds of ‘social utility’ and contextual meanings along with an un-argued-for suppression of others. Of course, it might be objected that Kramer is entitled to hold whatever beliefs he wishes about religion.¹⁸ However, the problem is that he seeks to delegitimate certain possibilities on the basis of unaired presuppositions, and in doing so performs something of a vanishing trick on music’s transcendental significance.¹⁹ Against such taken-for-granted assumptions, the essays in the current volume argue that these possibilities were never entirely effaced and that music may still serve as ‘a venue for transcendence .’

Given that in such discussions terms like transcendence and ineffability are often used interchangeably, it is perhaps important to emphasize at this point what...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: An Art Open to the Divine
• Part I. God and Classical Sounds
• Part II. Popular Music and the Opening up of Religious Experience
• Back Matter