But the musical shifts that happened in the Western European cultures from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries could also be described as speculative attempts to recover Greek ideals of beauty. That these Hellenistic ideals of beauty were not so much recovered as the basis for the invention of art forms might, at an abstract level, play into progressive concerns that white European arts cultures don't really reflect what we can discover was the case about ancient Greek art as they reflect the particulars of their time and place. To pick just one example of how these polemics and debates play out, the ways in which Greek statuary were painted has been brought up to point out that white marble statues from the Greek and Roman period defaults to "white" and ... you might be able to guess the rest. I'm not sure I find that entirely compelling ... but I bring it up to highlight the simple fact that Western arts are probably better thought of as a fusion of Hellenistic and Jewish/Christian influences.
There probably is a case to be made for how the West developed its musical art on the basis of Christian religious convictions and Wagner's argument was that music became the great art of Christendom because of the aniconic impulse in Judeo-Christian religion. Taken at that abstract level there's a kind of "sense" to it, and it could even potentially be a sweeping theory that classical musical styles across the world could have emerged and flourished in aniconic spiritualities. That's still speculation, but it's a speculation that doesn't confine itself to a proposal that Western classical music developed from Christendom. My hunch, for whatever it is or isn't worth, is that the aniconic impulse that Wagner attributed to Judaism as well as Christianity could be an explanation for how music developed.
But Borstlap doesn't necessarily emphasize that as one of the core ideas of Christianity that influenced and shaped Western classical music.
http://johnborstlap.com/classical-music-and-christianity/
....
classical music as a high art genre carried, right from the beginning, an important religious element at its centre, and although the meaning and position of this element changed over time, this element remained at the heart of the art form. The genre as we know it today, is the prodigious child of medieval, Christian religion, and – which is mostly the case with offspring – it always showed traits of its descendence, also when rebelling against its forebears. Apart from its obvious liturgical forms, classical music is not ‘a Christian art form’ but in its quasi-secular forms it shares important characteristics with religion and especially, because the art form is Western, with the Christian religion. In other words: there is an inherent Christian element in classical music, also in its obviously secular and pertinently non-religious forms; it is connected with the heart of the Christian religion with a couple of characteristic links.
Which are these links?
1) Suffering. Christianity teaches that suffering offers a trajectory from misery to getting in contact with the Divine and getting purified in the process which includes the possibility of redemption through sacrifice. In music, the cultivation of contrast between the positive and the negative forces (for instance, relationships between consonance and dissonance) provides not only interest but also dramatic rhetoric and varied narrative with which the listener can identify.
Some suffering is purgative and, certainly, James wrote to let endurance have its full effect. But in the wisdom literature there's a countervailing strain that there is suffering that is the result of folly and wickedness for which there is no redemptive or purgative function. There's a long litany of Jewish and Christian reflection on how to tell whether the suffering you're going through is character-forming on the one hand or an indication that you're an evil and/or stupid person on the other. In the Jewish wisdom literature there's a very unsubtle thread of writing that says drunks are in the evil/stupid side of things. The trouble isn't in the alcohol itself but in the person's use of it.
What any of that traditional literature has to do with consonance and dissonance in Western polyphonic idioms is left tantalizingly unexplained.
2) Individuality. In Christianity, the believer is not in the first place a member of a group but an individual with his/her special, unique personality. The church as a community is a community of individuals, each with his/her inviolable dignity. The bond between God and the human being is a very personal one, as symbolically expressed in Christ’s relationship with ‘the Father’, God. Christ himself regularly spoke about the intimacy of man’s relationship with God, as in his advice ‘to go into your private room and pray’. This type of relationship with the Divine is not found, at least not to the same degree, in other religions which mostly underline the importance of the collective. For the Christian however, the relationship with God is a very personal one. In music, this individuality is expressed in the many different and increasingly personal interpretations of a living tradition and the cultivation of individual, subjective life experience of the composer to be shared with and recognized by the audience, and presented as personal commentary on the universal human condition.
What any of that traditional literature has to do with consonance and dissonance in Western polyphonic idioms is left tantalizingly unexplained.
2) Individuality. In Christianity, the believer is not in the first place a member of a group but an individual with his/her special, unique personality. The church as a community is a community of individuals, each with his/her inviolable dignity. The bond between God and the human being is a very personal one, as symbolically expressed in Christ’s relationship with ‘the Father’, God. Christ himself regularly spoke about the intimacy of man’s relationship with God, as in his advice ‘to go into your private room and pray’. This type of relationship with the Divine is not found, at least not to the same degree, in other religions which mostly underline the importance of the collective. For the Christian however, the relationship with God is a very personal one. In music, this individuality is expressed in the many different and increasingly personal interpretations of a living tradition and the cultivation of individual, subjective life experience of the composer to be shared with and recognized by the audience, and presented as personal commentary on the universal human condition.
There are legions of ex-Christians who would insist on disagreeing with this point. That the idea of natural rights and natural law evolved within Christian thinking is possible to establish but natural law and natural rights didn't have to "only" emerge within the context of Christianity. It's not even strictly necessary, I suggest, to say that some form of natural rights springing from natural law even lead to an egalitarian conception of such laws and rights. That is, to be simple about it, what a lot of progressives and ex-Christians find troublesome about the Abrahamic religions in particular and religion more generally.
Individuality is a concept that can emerge within Christian traditions but I wonder if Borstlap doesn't oversell the extent to which the individual and individual salvation is unique to Christianity. Psalm 139 was Jewish literature before it became Christian literature, for instance.
The idea that music expressed the subjectivity of the composer seems more of a later 18th century onward development even in Western music. The doctrine of affections and passions in Baroque music suggests that there was a long stretch of time in Western music-making in which it was not imagined that composers and musicians were expressing their "own" emotional states. This is something early music specialists have written extensively about but I don't want to rabbit trail into that for this post. For those of us who compose music who do not subscribe to the idea that music is a direct expression of emotional life repeated assertions that it is simply don't hold up. Literary witness to a gap between the "is" of how "I" feel and the "ought" of how "I" should feel is pretty widely testified to in Jewish and Christian reflective literature. Why so downcast oh my soul ... . That music can reflect that psychological nuance and complexity I don't think anyone should contest, but to say that it is in some sense unique to Christianity or Christendom is to make a claim even a Christian could easily disagree with.
3) The idea of rebirth. Christianity teaches that one can be reborn through surrender to the ‘living faith’, i.e. believing in Christ and the message of redemption he brought for all humanity: a rebirth through being forgiven for one’s sins and hence being freed from the burden of guilt, and begin a new life. This is a very dynamic psychological concept, quite different from the static view of man in eastern religions. It is also an incredibly insightful understanding of human psychology and the workings of the subconscious with its suppressed, dark intimations. It claims that an individual can grow, develop, have drastic life changes and the capacity of creating a new personality. Rebirth includes the concept of redemption, which offers an emotional drive on the trajectory through the perils of life towards something better, with or without the help of Divine grace. In music, the idea that things can be created anew, was an important drive of development of the musical language into many directions which would have been impossible if there were not some utopian paradise at the horizon; as we know, the same drive was also fed by the inquisitive spirit of the ancient Greeks. In the course of the 19th and 20th century, this utopian drive became the main cause of the loosening of the ties with the art form’s soul and turned into an end in itself.
Individuality is a concept that can emerge within Christian traditions but I wonder if Borstlap doesn't oversell the extent to which the individual and individual salvation is unique to Christianity. Psalm 139 was Jewish literature before it became Christian literature, for instance.
The idea that music expressed the subjectivity of the composer seems more of a later 18th century onward development even in Western music. The doctrine of affections and passions in Baroque music suggests that there was a long stretch of time in Western music-making in which it was not imagined that composers and musicians were expressing their "own" emotional states. This is something early music specialists have written extensively about but I don't want to rabbit trail into that for this post. For those of us who compose music who do not subscribe to the idea that music is a direct expression of emotional life repeated assertions that it is simply don't hold up. Literary witness to a gap between the "is" of how "I" feel and the "ought" of how "I" should feel is pretty widely testified to in Jewish and Christian reflective literature. Why so downcast oh my soul ... . That music can reflect that psychological nuance and complexity I don't think anyone should contest, but to say that it is in some sense unique to Christianity or Christendom is to make a claim even a Christian could easily disagree with.
3) The idea of rebirth. Christianity teaches that one can be reborn through surrender to the ‘living faith’, i.e. believing in Christ and the message of redemption he brought for all humanity: a rebirth through being forgiven for one’s sins and hence being freed from the burden of guilt, and begin a new life. This is a very dynamic psychological concept, quite different from the static view of man in eastern religions. It is also an incredibly insightful understanding of human psychology and the workings of the subconscious with its suppressed, dark intimations. It claims that an individual can grow, develop, have drastic life changes and the capacity of creating a new personality. Rebirth includes the concept of redemption, which offers an emotional drive on the trajectory through the perils of life towards something better, with or without the help of Divine grace. In music, the idea that things can be created anew, was an important drive of development of the musical language into many directions which would have been impossible if there were not some utopian paradise at the horizon; as we know, the same drive was also fed by the inquisitive spirit of the ancient Greeks. In the course of the 19th and 20th century, this utopian drive became the main cause of the loosening of the ties with the art form’s soul and turned into an end in itself.
To this it might be said that one of the more famous statements by Paul was that if Christ is not risen your faith is vain.
Leonard B. Meyer's proposal in Music, the Arts and Ideas was that the revolutions in Western societies (with particular application to music) depended upon two drives in Western European cultures. The first element was an affirmation of the Christian doctrine of original sin, that humanity is born imperfect and in need of perfection. The second element was a humanist impulse that affirmed the ultimate perfectability of the human within history. Now this is, in a sense, simply an observation of what in Judeo-Christian idioms might just be called an eschatological component, but eschatology is not necessarily the same as a proposal that human perfectibility is achievable. It's not as though Pelagianism stopped being regarded as a heresy in Western Christian thought, for instance. Other factors come into consideration.
But Meyer's proposal, as I've schematically outlined it, was that the West needed both an affirmation of the fallen nature of humanity and a simultaneous affirmation of the real possibility for improvement as necessary precursors to revolutionary impulses. Where Meyer went with this observation was to propose that once the West abandoned the teleological conception of history within Judeo-Christian philosophies of history there was a corresponding death of what could be called the avant garde. I.e. if you don't have a philosophy of history in which there can be such a thing as progress there's no impulse toward progress. This leads back to the previously mentioned issue of eschatology. Without an eschatological conception of the human condition the idea of progress is not impossible but it might have to be arrived at in some other way.
Christianity itself could be thought of as emerging, depending on which accounts of it we read, as a development or dialectic of Hellenistic thought with the eschatological and apocalyptic literature of Judaism. Another way to play with that idea is to suggest that what makes Western classical music Western is its debts to the Abrahamic religions more generally. For those who study Spanish music and music from eastern Europe it's impossible to disentangle those musical cultures from Jewish and Christian interactions with Islamic traditions and idioms but that's its own topic and one that I'd generally leave to scholars who specialize in that.
"Rebirth" is so vaguely defined as to seem extraneous to anything specifically Christian or even Abrahamic, if we want to cast the net wider and including Judaism and Islam.
4) Aspiration. More so than in other religions, Christianity appealed to the best in man and tried to stimulate the individual believer to become a better human being, a more ethical, caring, responsible, knowing and loving one, someone capable of insight and altruistic sacrifice. This side of Christianity was a very important factor in civilizing the barbarian invaders of the Roman empire in the Dark Ages and in preserving what could be salvaged of the former civilization, knowing that the better achievements of a highly-developed culture were a source of development and learning. Compared with the Islamic invaders of Egypt in AD 642 who burned the famous library of Alexandria, this has to be considered an enlightened attitude. Later on, as we know, the Christian church fell into comparable destructive bigotry in her condemnation and suppression of texts and ideas which she thought incompatible with her doctrines.
Leonard B. Meyer's proposal in Music, the Arts and Ideas was that the revolutions in Western societies (with particular application to music) depended upon two drives in Western European cultures. The first element was an affirmation of the Christian doctrine of original sin, that humanity is born imperfect and in need of perfection. The second element was a humanist impulse that affirmed the ultimate perfectability of the human within history. Now this is, in a sense, simply an observation of what in Judeo-Christian idioms might just be called an eschatological component, but eschatology is not necessarily the same as a proposal that human perfectibility is achievable. It's not as though Pelagianism stopped being regarded as a heresy in Western Christian thought, for instance. Other factors come into consideration.
But Meyer's proposal, as I've schematically outlined it, was that the West needed both an affirmation of the fallen nature of humanity and a simultaneous affirmation of the real possibility for improvement as necessary precursors to revolutionary impulses. Where Meyer went with this observation was to propose that once the West abandoned the teleological conception of history within Judeo-Christian philosophies of history there was a corresponding death of what could be called the avant garde. I.e. if you don't have a philosophy of history in which there can be such a thing as progress there's no impulse toward progress. This leads back to the previously mentioned issue of eschatology. Without an eschatological conception of the human condition the idea of progress is not impossible but it might have to be arrived at in some other way.
Christianity itself could be thought of as emerging, depending on which accounts of it we read, as a development or dialectic of Hellenistic thought with the eschatological and apocalyptic literature of Judaism. Another way to play with that idea is to suggest that what makes Western classical music Western is its debts to the Abrahamic religions more generally. For those who study Spanish music and music from eastern Europe it's impossible to disentangle those musical cultures from Jewish and Christian interactions with Islamic traditions and idioms but that's its own topic and one that I'd generally leave to scholars who specialize in that.
"Rebirth" is so vaguely defined as to seem extraneous to anything specifically Christian or even Abrahamic, if we want to cast the net wider and including Judaism and Islam.
4) Aspiration. More so than in other religions, Christianity appealed to the best in man and tried to stimulate the individual believer to become a better human being, a more ethical, caring, responsible, knowing and loving one, someone capable of insight and altruistic sacrifice. This side of Christianity was a very important factor in civilizing the barbarian invaders of the Roman empire in the Dark Ages and in preserving what could be salvaged of the former civilization, knowing that the better achievements of a highly-developed culture were a source of development and learning. Compared with the Islamic invaders of Egypt in AD 642 who burned the famous library of Alexandria, this has to be considered an enlightened attitude. Later on, as we know, the Christian church fell into comparable destructive bigotry in her condemnation and suppression of texts and ideas which she thought incompatible with her doctrines.
5) Ritual. The organization of a congregation of a faithful community, celebrating a common spiritual experience in a specialized architectural space, served by a priesthood of professionals entrusted with the interpretations of canonical texts, shows striking similarities with the rituals and division of tasks in the concert halls of our own time. The resistance of people against the ‘stiff rituals’ surrounding classical music concerts can, apart from the usual populist irritation, also be explained by an inner resistance against the claims of an ‘all-knowing’ priesthood, invoking feelings of exclusion and inferiority instead of grateful involvement – an altogether immature reaction against the authority of some real, superior presence.
With religious music, the link with Christianity is obvious and does not need elucidation. But in classical non-religious music, the psychological / expressive dimension represents the numinous element stemming from its religious origins, the dimension which is immediately recognizable by listeners whose perceptive framework is developed enough to experience it. The ‘holistic nature of human perception’ *), which is hard-wired in our biology and psychology as resulting from millions of years of evolution, connects us with the life experiences of people who lived in past ages and thus makes it possible to experience universal values and aspirational impulses as lifted from their temporal context, and the opportunity of getting in touch with the roots of our Western civilization which lie deep in its Christian origins. The best music of the classical tradition reflects something real and profound and meaningful of the human condition, and reminds us of that part of our personality – which in former times was called ‘the soul’ – which is immaterial, and which therefore can be trusted to be immortal, – this is what the Christian religion always taught and still teaches. The awareness of this immaterial, inner essence was carried from religious liturgy into its music and, later-on, into secular music, and it will be this essence that garantees the art form’s survival as long as there are people seeking meaning and value during the journey from coast to coast which is our life.
"... by listeners whose perceptive framework is developed enough to experience it" might be the clincher. If there's a complain in the new musicology in American academics it's that this assertion is so fraught with racist, colonialist, imperialist white cisgendered heteropatriarchal animus it can't be trusted. That seems to be a problem of reaction, since I can't help but notice that headlines about R. Kelly and Michael Jackson's estate suggest that it's not just white guys who have been said to have harmed and abused people. Borstlap is committed to what he describes as the highest ideals of the Enlightenment but, as the philosopher John Gray has put it, the Enlightenment was the same era in which the modern forms of what we'd have to call ideological racism began to, well, evolve. The idea of universal human rights began to develop in Western European contexts alongside a plethora of exemption and exception clauses, which were often applied to blacks and Native Americans. Since half my lineage is Native American I got to hear a little bit about how these exemption and exception clauses to the otherwise "universal" human rights ideals that evolved from the Enlightenment played out. What I didn't hear from my Native American relatives, and had to learn about on my own, was about the region-wide practice of slavery the Pacific Northwest tribes had. The relatively recently disgraced Native American author Sherman Alexie had fun for decades pointing out that the caricature white progressives and liberals made of the American Indian was strictly as victim, not as someone who had interests in owning slaves or selling out fellow American Indians to white settlers to settle old disputes. That kept in mind, we might benefit from not being too eager to lionize either European or Native American legacies as unstained. That temptation seems to be a bit too strong across the board, whether it's impugning the Founding Fathers as though they had no positive legacies or treating them like marble statue saints. Similarly, we might benefit from not treating classical music as though it, in its entirety, is as lofty as the loftiest works that, for the time being, retain a place in the canon as taught in music programs.
Although I don't think of myself as particularly progressive I can grant that there are progressives who believe the sins of the Founding Fathers and the thinkers of the Enlightenment was that in their chauvinism and racism they failed to think through the truly universal implications of the ideals they espoused, or, to put it in a negative way, they did not, in fact, espouse those ideals beyond their application within their own coterie and a more truly universal conception of human rights has yet to be developed and implemented.
In that sense, for those kinds of progressives someone like Borstlap comes across as a reactionary of the worst sort, although Americans with progressive sympathies may misread what Borstlap has and has not said. I have not gotten the sense Borstlap rejects the idea of universal human rights as they began to emerge in the thinking of the 18th century onward. He's particularly committed to the idea that classical music has enlightening potential for those able to be enlightened by it.
... The best music of the classical tradition reflects something real and profound and meaningful of the human condition, and reminds us of that part of our personality – which in former times was called ‘the soul’ – which is immaterial, and which therefore can be trusted to be immortal, – this is what the Christian religion always taught and still teaches. The awareness of this immaterial, inner essence was carried from religious liturgy into its music and, later-on, into secular music, and it will be this essence that garantees the art form’s survival as long as there are people seeking meaning and value during the journey from coast to coast which is our life.
That's a pretty conditional form of "immortality". If this musical tradition can be thought of as preserving that which is immortal " ... as long as there are people seeking meaning and value during the journey from coast to coast which is our life" then everything hinges on maintaining this tradition so that "immortality" exists. But ... "timeless music" can get applied to Queen or Michael Jackson by fans of their music. The kind of immortality conferred by music being preserved and re-presented is not really unique to what is colloquially called classical music.
Let's put this another way, whose immortal soul, assuming nobody could even possibly dispute what a soul is or what immortality is, is preserved by the continued singing of the tract Veni Creator Spiritus? Anyone's?
Why would this "immortal" element be confined to classical music? Why couldn't it be present in songs that are not necessarily considered part of the classical tradition? What's the reason human immortality can't be conveyed in "Jingle Bells", for instance? If music is the medium of preserving what is immortal about us why is it classical music that does this or does this "most"? Why would "this immaterial, inner essence" be present in a work by Telemann but not, for instance, in a song by The Eagles? Whatever "this essence" is, there's no clear explanation why it doesn't exist in music across the world and not exclusively in the music that Borstlap regards as sufficiently elevated enough to express immortality, whatever that may be.
That Paul wrote "if the dead are not raised ... " could suggest an alternate history of interpretation in which Christian literature was suffused with a concern for what in contemporary academic jargon is thought of as a firmly "embodied cognition". I.e. what you do with your body matters because in Christian thought it is that body which will be raised to new life or a new death, an idea taken up from the eschatological and apocalyptic concerns of writers like Ezekiel and Daniel.
Not that I like The Eagles, by the way, I kind of hate the band, but they're a useful example of what people in my generation and my parent's generation can consider "timeless music". Very often what is considered "timeless" music is very much of its time.
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