John Ahern's Theses on Church Music and Economics, some semi-organized thoughts

https://theopolisinstitute.com/theses-on-church-music-and-economics/

There aren't 95, for those fearing an evocation of Luther, there are just 31!

I won't be mulling over all of them or in great deal since it's the weekend and this is the internet but I got to wondering something as early as Thesis 1.

1. American church music is in a slump. To get out of the slump, we need a 10-year plan, a 50-year plan, and a 100-year plan.

What kind of slump?  Did the Dove Awards get cancelled? What are the Dove Awards, you ask?  Here are the 2020 nominees for Christian and Gospel music. I pretty much stopped listening to CCM of any kind after Rich Mullis died. I mean if we define contemporary Christian music as Arvo Part, then, sure, I still listen to his work! I sometimes listen to Sofia Gubaidulina, too.  In fact if she is still interested in composing a work for guitar that only uses natural harmonics I've got stuff I'd be more than happy to send her way directly or by proxy.  But, getting back to the Thesis 1.

Wasn't the central punchline in the South Park episode "Christian Rock Hard" that Cartman was more successful playing CCM than his rivals were trying to be a "real" rock band?

If by "American church music is in a slump" we're saying that church music hasn't gotten and kept anyone's attention in generations, sure.  If I can think of any examples of church music or church-centric music from the last century that immediately springs to mind I think of Mahalia and Aretha singing Gospel music, Messiaen's choral music,  and Arvo Part's Berliner Mass (you know, the music played after some dude dies in Age of Ultron?)  Would Penderecki's Luke Passion count?  That's all stuff from the last century and, well, I suppose the point is that in the United States church music hasn't been very noteworthy in this century.  

Skipping ahead a bit:

5. Contra many traditionalists, the above thesis is true for both “contemporary” and “traditional” forms of worship music, at least in Protestantism. They are both manifestations of modern church music as a cultural practice. In their forms and conditions of possibility, if not in their content, they can’t be assumed to be Christian.

6. To clarify, I am not maintaining that music must be “Christianized” or that we must resist the “worldly” influences of “secular” music. This is a separate discussion, endlessly relitigated, and it’s imperative to bracket it when talking about this topic, which is music for Christian worship. Liturgical music will a priori be different from every non-liturgical music in its form, content, and conditions of possibility, because it is designed to serve different ends.

7. How are contemporary and traditional church music both species of the same genus, as I claimed in #5? Take contemporary music (say, Chris Tomlin or Matt Redman). In its musical form, it takes as its model 1980s and 1990s rock, pop rock, or alternative.

8. Now take traditional hymns. In their musical form, they appropriate the formal and harmonic features of 19th century symphonic and operatic practice. This latter fact is overlooked by traditionalists too often and too conveniently: the models for the hymn are the Classical common practice, which was a kind of music whose specific aim was the secularization of music (e.g., the Florentine camerata, E.T.A. Hoffman, Schopenhauer).

9. In its conditions of possibility, modern church music operates according to the economic and commercial strictures of a music industry. The primary goal of this industry is to commodify the listening experience of individual buyers. Formal musical decisions are made based on a predicted return on investment.

10. Under the current conditions of music’s possibility, to do music, “to musick,” is to listen to other people do it. Our music is always-already a vicarious experience and a professionalized experience. It cannot be otherwise without changing the conditions of music’s possibility in America, without changing the economics of music.

11. The previous two theses may feel to us like they are describing the way music has to be. (This is precisely why they are conditions of possibility. In other words, our ability to fathom what is possible is conditioned on just these assumptions.) Other cultures—in fact, most other cultures—have been primarily participatory in their music making. They have not shared with our culture sound reproduction, nor the desire to exclusively alienate music from ourselves onto professionals.

WellWell 

Well, that sure reads like a concern that Christian music is molded by cultural norms that Marxist thinkers would call "the means of production" and involve the base and the superstructure.  Ahern seems to inch toward a proposal that a set of worship wars that are constantly revolving around the nature of the musical arts themselves are battles about the superstructure that never (apparently even once?) gets around to discussing the base.  In Marxist analytical terms the crisis of contemporary Christian music may be a crisis inherent to its means of production.  Adorno scorned American pop songs as a sausage factory that was part of the culture industry that sold illusions of freedom that encouraged conformity.  CCM is going to remain CCM until the base from which the superstructure of Christian music or Christian art emerges changes might be a way to put things.  Or ... 

12. In order to change modern church music, the American church must first address the conditions of possibility for church music and then address its form. The reverse order will only leave us in a desert of half-ways. In other words, our 100-year plan must inform our 50-year plan and our 10-year plan.

Some of the theses seem to hinge on the assumption that the kind of musical literacy that needs to be cultivated will rely chiefly on the Western literate musical tradition.  Richard Taruskin's sprawling Oxford History of Western Music all by itself could establish that such norms and methods have always been elite and, in the earliest iterations of music notation, may have simply been memory aids to preserve a cultural memory of already-known liturgical music.  

To put it another way, we can't be sure that the early Christians had access to the equivalent of the kind of musical literacy that came to develop circa 800 to 1300 CE.  There's a shift Ahern takes that I'm not sure adds up, even when considering all the previous entries.  

27. Our inability to connect the church’s call to musical excellence with her call to serve the poor is owing in large part to our blithe acceptance of modern aesthetics, whose champions in continental philosophy have for centuries told us that art is a means of accessing transcendence and escaping worldly problems.

I have to make an educated guess here but "continental philosophy" defaults to "western Europe", which simultaneously seems like a problem and an opportunity.  Let me address the problem first, since I've read enough over twenty years to know that "continental philosophy" is a shorthand for Europe.

The reason I'm not so sure about this Thesis 27 is actually because I don't see a particularly straight or clear line between "modern aesthetics" and a failure of the church to establish musical excellence while serving the poor.  What kind of musical excellence?  What standards of musical excellence?  Are those standards derived by appealing to T. S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams, respectively appeals to founding American church music on explorations and expansions of what musics we have cultivated here or in attempts to carry on, preserve or emulate paradigms of church music established along European models?  Besides the simple problems of the thousand-year tradition of literate music that evolved from Catholic liturgical musical practice not having a corresponding length of activity here in the North American continent there is, of course, also the problem that a lot of the touchstones of church music in Europe came about through societies that had no formal separation of church and state as the United States has had since its creation. 

I don't think that the shape note tradition and the other American traditions of hymnody have left us so bereft of options that we can't draw on the shape note tradition and the "Dr Watts" traditions in African American churches but this gets to a point I've been mulling over at the blog for a few years, how the challenge of finding a synthesis between "high" and "low" liturgical music in the United States has a potential clash of grounding paradigms that some musicologists have called Eurological and Afrological.  There's no reason to assume these two approaches can't be successfully set in synergistic cooperation and a good deal of African American church music ranging from William Levi Dawson through to Thomas A Dorsey in the 1920s through 1940s shows this has, in fact, already been done ... but it may be that white churches haven't pulled it off.  

That the direction of church music is beholden to the norms of the music industry seems to be the larger theme Ahern is considering. Proposing that music education can solve a lot of problems could be true but when reading about Thomas A Dorsey's challenges to get Gospel blues a place in the black mainlines in the first half of the 20th century one of the obstacles actually has been the default settings of music education in the U.S., which is why I've read arguments made by Ethan Hein and Philip Ewell about the default white racial frame of music education with interest.  It could be that the conundrum of excellence in white American church music (since I don't think an especially serious case can be made that black American church music isn't a vibrant musical culture) has been a failure to attain any distinction even within the churches themselves, to say nothing of the outside world.  Now the outside world shouldn't have any reason to care whether church music is any good but that's where the "crisis" of recognizing that J. S. Bach was a Lutheran, William Byrd was a Catholic, and so on comes in.  Ahern seems to recognize that American church music will never reach those levels if it is predicated on the economics of CCM.  

There's cases made by Anthony Heilbut and Randall J Stephens that rock and roll and soul as we've come to know them evolved out of black Pentecostal churches with contributions from white Pentecostals along the way.  To put it crudely, white Episcopalians and Catholics in the United States know their music is terrible yet there's been some struggle in the last century to recognize that the most vibrant and influential forms of church music that developed came from Southern Pentecostal practices black and white.  There could be, since I've thrown in an observation about how Ahern's observations on the industry-tethered nature of contemporary Christian music could be examined in light of base and superstructure, an argument to be made that US CCM stinks so much because there has been little effort in the realm of music education in institutions to honestly tackle the (at least) two dividing lines that have permeated music history, music historiography, theory and practice and that have balkanized steadily since the dawn of the recording industry. There is the high and low distinction that is generally indicative of class and there is the equally obvious division along racial lines.  

Now for the opportunity.  Ahern moves on from 27 to 28 in a way that highlights that he considers the influence of continental European philosophy to be a basically negative influence on approaches to the arts in churches. In other words, however indirectly he's gone about it, Ahern has indicted what many of us recognize as the Romantic ideologies that revolved around art-religion, the sacralized work and the arts-as-sacrament stuff.  Let's keep in mind that even if people dissent from the idea that pop music traffics in the same Romantic ideas through which Beethoven has been made into a god comparable Romanticist problems have emerged in the veneration of jazz or the King of Pop.  So let's read Ahern as charitably as possible on the negative impact of the American commerical music industry that residually uses Romantic art-religious dogma for Thesis 28:

28. Modern aesthetics and art since the seventeenth century has glorified authorship, individual genius, self-expression and autonomy to such a perverse degree that beauty is almost exclusively the provenance of free artisans and opulent patrons. Popular music is the same game in a more democratic guise, dispersing the patronage across a wide demographic but resulting in the same zero-sum opulence coalescing in artists and producers.

29. The church should not idolize (though it need not always disdain) individual genius, self-expression, or autonomy. But a beauty that grows organically out of local communities and that is beholden to the needs of local communities is a beauty that invites participation from slaves, laborers, wage earners, domestic workers, and the unemployed.

30. Church music is the enemy of “aesthetics” as it is often understood. For, as soon as you think art (and church music particularly) is autonomous self-expression, or a subjective universality, or unmediated access to the noumenal, you implicitly make the end of all worldly life the toil of work, and beauty an escape for those privileged enough to enjoy it. The critics of Arnold and Scruton are entirely correct: high art is classist and elitist, but only because it is first Manichean, despising all things this-worldly as irredeemable.

31. The music of the church is the opposite of autonomous (that is, beholden only to its own laws); it is liturgy, or, etymologically, service. The music of the church is our service to God and it is God’s song nourishing our lives, spiritually and materially. Music in the church knocks down the idolatry of work perpetuated often in post-industrial societies, namely its insistence that our lives are made for work, to which the Western aesthetic tradition quietly whispers assent.

Now there are all sorts of ways in which the post-Herder Romantic essentialist could re-emerge in a new guise.  I've written in the past about my concern that Wesley Morris merely flipped the script of Romanticist ideology so that instead of the German symphonist in the Alps writing the transcendental symphony of the soul we're given a soul brother or soul sister in Chicago playing the music of freedom.  We're not going to chart a musical path forward together across race and class lines by constantly defining "authenticity" and "legitimacy" along Romanticist scripts.  

If Raymond Knapp's writing on Haydn invites a possible alternative it's that the antipode of Romanticism is some form of camp.  Knapp suggested something we should probably keep in mind, that post-Sontag working definitions of camp have presumed a default gay definition that we would not, as Knapp proposed, hear Haydn as one of the exemplars of straight camp in what we now call classical music.  Haydn was a joker who lets us in on the joke and hopes everyone has a good time by recognizing the artifice and recognizing that the artifice is not inimical to what Romantic writers would later regard as "expression" or "sincerity".  The problem isn't even that the music of Beethoven or Mozart is necessarily bad, it's more that contributors to The Imaginative Conservative tend to default to a veneration of Beethoven that not all conservatives might feel obliged to endorse (and IC sure is recycling Scruton a lot this year, even if for understandable reasons). 

Now if I were to, say, try to emulate the approach Beethoven took in terms of emulation I'd go back to Clementi and Haydn, because that was one of the things Beethoven did.  There are benefits to studying Haydn and Hummel for the work they did in the court musician and church music idioms.  There's plenty of options but I think Ahern has correctly closed with theses that point out that "modern aesthetics" can be roughly identified with seventeenth century Europe on through to the late, late Romanticism of the early 20th century avant gardists as a cumulative stream that venerated the Author and transformed the definition of Genius in ways that, if people tried to take those ideologies on, might not lend themselves to making church music that ordinary people can sing along with or easily participate in.  

Roger Scruton has a whole presentation called "In Defense of Elitism". He was also a confirmed Wagnerian.  Whether that meant the late Roger Scruton's approach was Manichean isn't something I'm willing to venture.  I will, however, venture to say that Scruton's opposition to Theodor Adorno's form of elitism meant taking a stand in favor of jazz and the American songbook as musical art from which classical music composers needed to learn.  If Roger Scruton could argue that in the last ten years of his life then I think that might be an argument in itself that nobody should plausibly bracket jazz into "pop music" now that jazz is about a century old! I like to think of the first Baroque era as an era of figured bass spanning roughly Monteverdi through J. S. Bach and perhaps I could float an idea for music historians and educators to debate that the age of jazz introduced an age of figured treble.  

Without intending to seem snarky, Ahern's theses cumulative seem to argue that there are two big obstacles to what I am guessing is a birth (not renaissance) of white American church music in the North American continent (if, in fact, that's what Ahern is actually arguing for and, if not, if he reads this it's an invitation to clarify): 1) the nature of the music industry itself which, having read a few Adorno books, is explicable in terms of a mixture of monopoly capitalism on the one hand and neoliberalism on the other and 2) the latent and not-yet-dispelled ideologies of Romanticism that have saturated music in the West, whether the "high" of classical or the "low" of popular.  

The last forty years of contemporary Christian music has given us a pretty vivid sonic landscape of what the market rewards.  Ahern wanting a more participatory approach to music in which non-elites can contribute musically sounds like a great idea.  I think the question that doesn't come up in theologically conservative circles is how and why music education as it has been defined since the Romantic era in the Anglo-American Western world is going to be a solution rather than an irritant/amplifier to that problem.