Ted Gioia continues to say musicology originated in the study of spells but his just-so tale would make more sense as a battle between highbrow and lowbrow art religions

I was reminded of the progress of a book by Bryan Townsend's blogging lately.

At this point on April 1, 2023 it’s not surprising Ted Gioia’s latest book Music to Raise the Dead: The Secret Origins of Musicology has been getting self-published by Gioia at his Substack. By now GIoia has reached chapter 5 of 11. Lately he has held forth along the following lines:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/where-did-musicology-come-from

…
That shouldn’t be possible. Magic and science are total opposites. They shouldn’t rub shoulders. But music is the place where that strange meeting actually happens—in fact, an aware musician is always operating at a kind of crossroads where the known world meets a mystical realm. And that happens constantly, not just in ancient times but even today.
This is no empty claim. You feel it when you listen to music—perhaps not everyday, but at least on a few transformative occasions, maybe at a memorable concert you still think about years later, or at a dance or party or ritual. That’s why musicology, esteemed as the science of music, must also learn to embrace the ecstasy of music.
 
Musicology really ought to be a science of ecstasy. But instead, this magical stuff is feared and censored. That’s why conventional musicology is at a loss when dealing with the mystical writings of Sun Ra (which we discussed in chapter one). That’s why scholars try to sanitize the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, whose mythos has such deep supernatural elements. That’s why they gape in disbelief when I point out that the oldest active jazz venue in San Francisco is the Church of John Coltrane.
 
It’s no coincidence that we find ourselves discussing churches at this stage. That’s because magic and religion also intersect—and their dialectical merging is a crucial part of understanding the true scope of musicology.
 
At a certain point in human history, magical spells turned into prayers and religious music. You might think that those two things are very different, but they’re almost the same. Sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish between a magic spell and a religious prayer. If you examine the history of witchcraft, you will learn that judges often made decisions of life or death on the basis of tiny word differences.
 
Sometimes inserting the name of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in the middle of a spell was enough to make it acceptable to authorities. But not always. As we shall see later in this book, many people were condemned as witches even though they thought they were aligned with formal Christian theology and practice.
 
This is a good juncture for us to look at how the hero’s journey—which is the central myth of musical magic—got turned into a religious concept. The oldest sources for musicology focus on this journey, which predates all organized religions but also permeates them. Sonatas and fugues and symphonies (and other formal structures) came later, but they retain these mythical and religious evocations.
 
That’s why the earliest theoretical commentaries on music—which are essentially guides to this journey—are permeated with metaphysics. The science of harmony didn’t exist at this early juncture. Or, to put it a better way, harmony was a much larger concept in this musicology than just the ways the notes fit together.
 
I could demonstrate this in many ways. For example, I could point to remarkable passages in Augustine’s Confessions where he describes ecstatic experiences, merging intense joy and painful hardship, that are almost like a Christianized shamanism—and they are initiated by singing or chanting the psalms. Or I could cite countless Pythagorean or Neo-Pythagorean texts on music that aspire to scientific accuracy, but keep on collapsing into the strangest mysticism. Or I could explore similar elements in Sufism and its whirling dances, or Tibetan Buddhism and its chanting and damaru drumming, or the ritualistic theurgy of the Neoplatonists.
…

Gioia breathlessly presents us with a declaration that “authorities” have accepted or rejected a magic spell based on what names were or weren’t mentioned in the spell. He keeps coming back to that concept of spell.  He can’t be bothered to get detailed about which authorities and why they would or wouldn’t accept or reject the invocation of this or that name as either acceptable or unacceptable.  Paradoxically this is the stage at which I start to cross reference to a bunch of stuff I’ve been reading about exorcism, exorcists, spiritual warfare and the debates connected to how and why diabologies developed and the geo-political interests they may or may not have served. Specifically, I’m going to go down a rabbit trail on scholarly work on Jesus as exorcist that’s been done in the last half century.

 

Graham Twelftree pointed out decades ago in Jesus the Exorcist that itinerant exorcists among Greek, Roman and Palestinian cultures were commonplace, so commonplace Twelftree proposed that was why in The Gospel of John there are no exorcisms.  The evangelist’s high, cosmic Christology was not going to be helped if Jesus was presented as the kind of exorcist who, across the Synoptics, is accused of casting out evil spirits because he was possessed by an unclean spirit himself.  Twelftree pointed out that it was typical for exorcists to use spells, amulets, potions and to invoke the names of other spirits and gods.  Jewish lore held that Solomon was a master exorcist and used his capacity to command spirits to expedite the building of the Temple. Twelftree pointed out that charismatic exorcists, those who could expel spirits by simple verbal command, were rare in Hellenstic, Roman and Jewish accounts. Typically propos and tools got used.

 

Traveling exorcists would not just use spells, they could also seek to be possessed by spirits. In Jesus, the Galilean Exorcist: His Exorcisms in Social and Political Context Amanda Witmer explore the customs of exorcists seeking to be possessed by/gain possession of a healing spirit as background for the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ adversaries questioning not his power to heal but its origin.

 

So it doesn’t just so happen I’m going through two books by Frances Young on the history of exorcism in the Catholic and Anglican traditions. I’ve also finished Brian Levack’s The Devil Within: Possession & Exorcism in the Christian West. Young has pointed out that the links between exorcism and ritual magic have been long-standing.

 

https://drfrancisyoung.com/2016/08/12/exorcism-and-the-history-of-magic/

Furthermore, it is well known that the English word ‘conjurer’ is derived from the Latin coniurator, a synonym for ‘exorcist’. Until the seventeenth century, church-sanctioned exorcists were interchangeably referred to as conjurers. Ironically, however, exorcism was seen by many in the church as a remedy against magic, and as a consequence the link between magic and exorcism has all but vanished from popular perception of exorcists. Popular culture tends to portray exorcists as akin to witchfinders and inquisitors; they are enforcers of spiritual order rather than transgressors of spiritual boundaries. Yet in Catholic countries, until the eighteenth century, the line between the exorcist and the magician was frequently blurred or non-existent.

 

Exorcism can with some justification be described as the foremost ‘Christian’ element within western magic, along with the ‘Arabic’ tradition of astral magic and the ‘Jewish’ tradition of Solomonic spirit conjuration. However, whereas the textual traditions of astral and Solomonic magic have been extensively studied by scholars of magic from the nineteenth century onwards, the textual tradition of exorcism has been neglected. The interconnections between official liturgies of exorcism and unofficial magical practices have consequently been missed. Yet in Catholic countries exorcism manuals were widely used in magic as soon as they became available in print, and Owen Davies has described them as ‘the most influential occult products of the print age’.

 

Now maybe Ted Gioia thinks musicologists have suppressed connections between magic and music but he doesn’t even bother to explain how that conspiracy works.  If the powers that be had truly suppressed all the “evidence” that musicology originated in sorcery how did Gioia find all his evidence?

 

Disagreement about how “magic” music was came up among the Reformers, for those who know their church history.  It doesn’t come up in my on the topics of exorcism, diabology, and spiritual warfare in Christian traditions, true. But Gioia’s blogging has given me a reason to connect these proverbial dots.  Calvin, Luther and Zwingli had different takes on just how powerful music was to drive out an afflicting spirit from King Saul. Let’s consult page 67 of Charles Garside Jr.’s Zwingli and the Arts.

 

… Calvin was later to comment on David’s harp-playing in a sermon on the First Book of Samuel. “Saul,” he explained, “had indeed been refreshed by David’s harp, but it was really by the Lord’s doing and inspiring that power with [David].” And Luther believed even more strongly that music was a means of divine revelation. Writing in 1538, he asserted that “the Holy Spirit honours music as a tool of His work, since He testifies in the Holy Scriptures, that through the medium of music His gifts have been put into the hands of Prophets (e.g. Elisha); again, through music the devil has been driven away, that is, he, who incites people to all vice, as was the case with Saul, the King of Israel.” What is instructive in both instances is that Calvin and Luther alike are agreed that it was not music per se which drove the devil from Saul, but rather the operation of God’s Holy Spirit through music.

 

Zwingli was not of the same mind. More musical than either of his great contemporaries, he speaks not at all of “the Lord’s doing” or of the Holy Spirit; David’s harp-playing alone freed Saul from the visitations of the devil. Zwingli the musician knows intimately the shattering psychological power of the art in which he is himself so adept. But unlike Luther or Calvin, he is also careful to note that David’s music by itself was powerful only “for a while.” Music for Zwingli thus exists without the additional theological dimension given it by Luther and Calvin; it is merely an art which for a little time is immensely affecting emotionally. And to music Zwingli will not accord the sanction of the Paraclete; he considered it, on the contrary, wholly secular. …

 

Zwingli contended that music and its effects, however emotionally powerful, are and were temporary.  Luther noted that music was used to spur Elisha into what scholars would call a mantic state from which the prophet would prophesy. Scholars of yore, even explicitly Christian scholars, no real problem granting that prophets used music as a catalyst for prophecy.  Post-Enlightenment scholars having problems with all the spirit language in the Bible?  You’re on firmer ground saying something like that, and if you want to read about that Reed Carlson has a dissertation on it.

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/40615596/CARLSON-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=7

 

See also (alternatively)

Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena
Reed Carlson
DeGruyter, 2022
ISBN 978-3-11-066934-3 

Carlson has pointed out that scholars shy away from how often the Hebrew Bible uses spirit language among the ostensibly secular academic disciplines but that the parallel difficulty among clergy and theologians has been a propensity to reduce all use of spirit terminology to refer to confessional dogmatics (i.e. the Holy Spirit and Trinitarian doctrinal concerns, which are not the same thing as exegeting texts in the Hebrew Bible). 

So, all that is to say that “if” Ted Gioia were merely insisting that in the post Enlightenment era scholars have been dismissive of the ways in which hermetic traditions and magic were intertwined with other pursuits he’d be right.  But in saying that he’d also have nothing to sell.  Gioia’s thesis needs for there to be this “suppressed” history of musicology coming from sorcery.  A lot hinges on what he defines as sorcery because if he weren’t so busy making Pythagoras out to be a bad guy who reduced music to “science” rather than “magic” Pythagoras would be his hero. There’s no secret that Pythagoreans thought that the cosmos had a tuning system and a harmony that, if you emulated it, could tune the human body and soul. It’s not even a secret that music scholars like Daniel K. L Chua or David Yearsley have mentioned that this has shown up in beliefs about music.  Belief in music as a kind of esoteric magic even showed up in the work of some Lutherans who were contemporaries of J. S. Bach. Two titles to consult at your leisure.

 

Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning by Daniel Chua

Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint by David Yearsley

 

Now Gioia puts a lot of stock in the idea that scholars have tried to banish magic and the implication is that scholars have tried to banish magic since the whole history of the West.  It is at this point I finally roll out a work I’ve been reading through that tackles just how disenchanted the West has actually been since Max Weber expostulated on the era of disenchantment.

 

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm published a book back in 2017 called The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences through the University of Chicago Press where he highlighted the ways in which the long 19^th century was full of occultists, esoteric mysticism and people who embraced the myth of disenchantment.  Storm has argued that the idea the world has been disenchanted is itself a myth and that the myth of disenchantment extends to Max Weber’s claim that we’ve disenchanted the world.  As an intra-scholastic bromide among Western academics Weber’s secularization thesis has been taken as given but if, as Storm has contended, the concept of “religion” is of modern coinage, then Western academics have retconned the demise of mysticism back on to the rest of history as though it were new or unique when fables and tales of the departure of the elves and faeries suffuse folklore.

 

Storm pointed out that there are few people specializing in James Frazer’s work and that The Golden Bough was a work that evolved and shifted as Frazer’s views on the distinctions between magic, religion and science shifted.  In Storm’s re-telling, Frazer placed magic and science together in opposition to religion on the basis of the surmise that magic and science have sought to compel nature to yield predictable results whereas religion evolved (in a Frazerian telling) as efforts to placate divinity and supernatural forces when earlier magics did not succeed.  Storm mentioned that Kurt Vonnegut summarized science as magic that works along the way.   Gioia may just not want to accept Vonnegut’s axiom for the sake of his argument.  But Gioia wants to say science proves music is magical … which may be a simple case of wanting to have his cake and eat it, too.

 

In Storm’s reading of the stages of Frazer’s development there’s not only no tension between science and magic but both share in common a hostile stance toward religion.  Storm pointed out that there were plenty of ideas that the West had been disenchanted during the Romantic era but that contemporary scholars have often ignored the part where what the Romantics thought their art could and would do is bring back the era of enchantment.  Now to the extent that Ted Gioia has picked up on that thread that Storm has said contemporary scholars avoid then, okay, there’s a point there but it seems as though Gioia arrived at that place by a mixture of accident and obstinacy.

 

Storm has been arguing our era isn’t disenchanted at all and that the idea that the West is disenchanted is both a myth within the mythologies of the West on the one hand and an intra-scholastic bromide on the other.  Secularization and pluralization have been happening, yes, but neither of these indicate a disenchanted world.  Not only am I inclined to agree I can’t help but note that some guy who used to be a preacher at a megachurch in Seattle has sold a book on spiritual warfare.

 

https://twitter.com/PastorMark/status/1641606583342845955

Sometimes it’s very hard to honor your parents when they act dishonorably. Forgiveness breaks the generational curse that would otherwise be passed to you through your bitterness. Unforgiveness is how you see people who hate their parents grow up to be just like their parents

6:01 PM · Mar 30, 2023

··

Generational curses?  How does Proverbs 26:2 fit into that? Are curses with cause effective?  If so, why?  How would that relate to generational curses? Never heard of those?  What else has he had to say about them?

 

Win Your War: Fight in the Realm You Don't See for Freedom in the One You Do 

Mark and Grace Driscoll 

Charisma House (2019) 

ISBNs 9781629996257 and  9781629996264

 

Page 86

Admittedly the position we hold on this issue is one that some other Bible-believing Jesus-loving Christians would disagree with. They would encourage you to identify generational curses and break them. We would simply state that once Jesus saved you, He identified and broke all generational curses by adopting you into the family of God fully, completely, and instantly. We do not believe you need to do anything more since Jesus did all that could be done; faith is simply trusting that any ancestral or generational curses were broken when God became your Father, and living that new life as a new person. If you are a Christian with generational curses in your family line, God is now your Father, and you have been “ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers. To be a Christian is to have a new Father and a new family that is blessed and not cursed. Therefore, be assured that your identity is totally new in Christ and you are blessed and not cursed. You may carry forth some bad concepts, habits, patterns, or problems from your family, but God is there to correct those things and not curse you for them. …

 

So just two days ago Mark Driscoll tweeted about how forgiveness is necessary to ensure your bitterness against your parents doesn’t place you or keep you under a generational curse. It’s hard to think of a more overt case of apotropaic magic then a preacher saying you need to forgive your parents to make sure their generational curses don’t impact you.  Now before you scoff at the idea that such a superstitious notion thrives in 2023 I do wonder now and then whether or not there is a social scientific/biological variation of what Pentecostals would call generational curses in the form of epigenetics.  It can be a bit too easy for people who scoff at an idea expressed in overtly religious terms (“generational curses”) who might take the idea seriously if it is couched in literally scientific jargon. 

 

Not an endorsement of generational curses, by the way. I’ve read at least one book by a pastor who has pointed out that defaulting to presumed generational curses is a quick-fix methodical problem in too many pastoral care cases.  The idea that someone may be cursed because an ancestor generations ago made a deal with an evil spirit comes up in pastoral care settings often enough that Esther Acolatse mentioned it in her book For Freedom or Bondage? A Critique of African Pastoral Practices. Bultmann may have said it’s impossible to believe in evil spirits in the days when we have electric lights but African pastors have noted that the peaceful co-existence of taking electric lights for granted and believing in evil spirits saturates African life and culture.  The Christian friends I made from Kenya did not necessarily talk about evil spirits, in fact they talked about them far less than my charismatic Christian relatives! 

 

Certainly that Christian writers in the apostolic period would want believers to avoid consulting the Temple of Artemis or relying on spells and amulets for protection can be taken as given. Clinton Arnold literally wrote a whole book proposing that the author of Ephesians was, among other things, giving instruction to Christians who might be tempted to draw on magic.  After all, the cult of Artemis was right there in Ephesus.

 

https://wipfandstock.com/9781579108359/power-and-magic/

 

Contemporary scholars who are not themselves religious may be assiduously sweeping under any available rug that people believe in evil spirits in the realm of musicology but that’s not the same thing as claiming that the real history of musicology is in sorcery and magic and that a cabal of rationalists or dogmatists who want to take all the magic out of music have destroyed all the evidence and that one man has bravely discovered all that previously suppressed evidence.

 

Gioia is still formidably informed on the history of jazz and blues but as he continues on his path of explaining all music in terms of his conspiracy theory that musicology comes from sorcery and magic and “they” suppress the facts it is sad to see him embrace a crackpot conspiracy theory variation of an idea that, with a few gentle modifications is utterly boilerplate. 

 

Let me put it this way, ever since the Romantics postulated that art could do for religion what religion could no longer do for itself the highbrow elites wanted a particular kind of art to achieve sublime effects.  Raymond Knapp has written about German Idealism and the kind of art-religion its partisans espoused.  That the art-religion tended to be elite, highbrow and white almost needs no explanation.  The trouble, though is that in the phenomenology of religious experiences highbrow art religion tends to be the presumed default. 

 

Frank Burch Brown wrote a book called Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning.  I’ve gotten through a pretty large chunk of it and Brown, being a musician, composer and theologian who has delved into philosophy and aesthetics over the last few decades, made an observation about the aesthete. The aesthete, as someone with a sinful disposition about the arts, presumes that consumption of the best kind of arts becomes a better person by dint of that consumption (not to be confused with the intolerant sort of person who only values the arts for their overtly didactic or moral purposes).  At the risk of nominating someone for the role of aesthete from the conservative wing the late Roger Scruton was probably an example of the high flyer Anglican Wagnerian art-religion advocate.

There’s a very recent book out about Scruton published by Palgrave Macmillan called Art and Politics in Roger Scruton's Conservative Philosophy.  Scruton’s bona fides as a highbrow elitist need no rehearsal for those who know of his work. 

 

But if Scruton championed the highbrow art-religion Ted Gioia can be taken as a kind of champion of the neo-shamanistic low-brow art-religion (not surprising coming from a jazz and blues fan).  If Scruton was an aesthete favoring white Anglo-Catholic conservativism Gioia is an aesthete of the sorcery/magic/rebel lowbrow stuff, as made clear not just in Music: A Subversive History (I’ve discussed that book already) but in the newer book he’s self-publishing via Substack. Frank Burch Brown’s proposal in Religious Aesthetics was that the sins of the aesthete are no less commonplace among fans of rock and jazz than in classical music. 

 

Now how could we describe these respective aesthetes?  Well, it’s pretty easy.  Roger Scruton was the kind of Anglican who could write as though God exists within the rituals we enact and preserve that express our longing for belonging that transcends our frail and inevitably short mortal lives, as though in response to Feuerbach’s riff on religion as wish fulfillment Scruton said that the wishing expresses something real about us so the wish-fulfillment is not as important as the wishing in bringing about a sense of the presence of the wished-for.  Ferenc Horcher was a bit more direct in saying that some people could construe the late Roger Scruton has having been a pantheist who felt obliged to couch his pantheism in conservative Anglican jargon. 

 

Ted Gioia wants magic. The more ancient the better.  For him art-religion is not some bespoke high liturgical sacrament but a crowd-driving spirit possession experience, and he favors those spirit possession moment that possess crowds at rock concerts or shamanistic rituals.  He might prefer the old Shaker custom recounted by Ronald (Leroy) Olson in which acolytes were dressed a certain way and the initiated sang songs for hours and hours until the shakes hit the acolyte.

 

Now I grew up Pentecostal and have spent the last fifteen years in Presbyterian and Anglican scenes.  I can understand that for some religiously observant folks they prefer the highbrow liturgical experience.  The high mass is the bee’s knees for these kinds of people, especially Christians (i.e. mass). For people who skew more storefront Pentecostal church the group possession thing is their preference.  Every time they feel the spirit they want to get up and dance and sing and shout and that is the kind of musical magic Ted Gioia never hesitates to celebrate.  But it’s not necessarily about sorcery and magic, even if Gioia keeps claiming it is, if you have spent any time on the study of religion and religious customs.  In a strange irony writers like Frank Burch Brown have argued that aesthetic pluralism is an ethical and aesthetic necessity for liturgists, theologians and church leaders.  The old notions among high church leaders that their high liturgical ways were the only acceptable options has been abandoned since Vatican II for Catholics and for Anglicans a comparably long period of time.  If there are hold-outs for the Old Time Art Religion in the highbrow sense it’s among musicologists

 

So it is here, finally, that I throw a bone to Gioia’s conspiracy-mongering.  From the jazz and blues side of music history he wouldn’t be wrong to sense that classical music partisans have had a highbrow/elitist contempt for the kinds of religious experiences that suffuse Baptist, Methodist or Pentecostal churches.  If Gioia’s grand conspiracy is gently recalibrated as a battle that has taken place since the birth of academic musicology in the West since the dawn of the 19^th century between partisans of highbrow art-religion and low-brow art religion then, sure, the thesis suddenly becomes not only plausible but boiler-plate.  Not just boilerplate but a thesis that has been made from within the halls of classical music academia. The late Richard Taruskin spent his entire academic life taking aim at the highbrow elitist aesthetes and their doctrine of aesthetic autonomy for classical music. In the posthumously published Musical Lives and Times Examined: Keynotes and Clippings, 2006–2019 he made an observation that fans of classical music who insisted on the dogma of aesthetic autonomy claimed that music can, should and must be “above” petty things like politics or religious conflicts or national or ethnic concerns and then, lo, here we’ve been in the early 21^st century and academics in musicology into classical music have bewailed the relevance of classical music and fear it will die.  Taruskin’s raspberry to fellow musicologists was to point out that the opportunity cost of such a lofty autonomy for classical music is to be so far above the flesh and blood concerns of people the music stops being relevant.  Taruskin threw in an interesting quip about how the Catholic Church absolved the Jews of deicide at Vatican II but the Lutherans had not. 

 

In The Ox, I think it was, Taruskin pointed out that there’s been some fruitful inter-faith conversation between Jewish and Christian scholars about the issue of anti-Semitism in Bach’s Passion settings. He pointed out that these issues didn’t emerge in the intra-confessional setting of Bach’s day because J. S. Bach was writing church music for actual use, it has been in the wake of Romantic art-religion and treating Bach’s music as “timeless” and “eternal” that openly discussing the anti-Semitic elements of Bach became scandalous.  The tacit irony Taruskin left in his observation was that for those who are observantly religious openly discussing sins to repent of and relationships to improve is part of religious discourse, but that for partisans of art-religion those conversations sully the sacralized art-objects of musical museum culture. 

 

Among Christian theologians and musicians, at least, the kind of tension Ted GIoia’s conspiracy-theory version of musicology depends on has largely been a non-starter. Anglican, Catholic and Reformed clergy and musicians have been discussing how to cultivate, defend and sustain aesthetic pluralism across the old highbrow and lowbrow divides that academic musicologists can’t seem to get over for generations.  Why?  If I have to speculate it’s because there are aesthetes and intolerants (to use terms Frank Burch Brown mentioned) and they exist within musicology.

 

I’m aware that scholars like Brian Levack and Francis Young and Graham Twelftree and Amanda Witmer have talked about how exorcism is a tricky and fraught topic and that views and methods changed over thousands of years.  You can go get an exorcism if you feel you need one in the Anglican church right now but clergy will advise you to not rule out psychological, psychiatric and other resources to get the help you need.  If you only ever read Ted Gioia’s stuff you might think the powers that be have always been skeptical about magic.  Francis Young has pointed out that the English have been skeptical about demon possession since the reign of Elizabeth I. 

 

But that’s not even remotely the same thing as saying that the Anglican clergy were suppressing all the signs that musicology really came from researching spells.  Gioia tips his hand at how paradoxically Eurocentric his conspiracy theory is be casting the history of musicology as research into spells.  But not all cultures have traditions that have terms to call music “music” as musicologists might think of it, an observation I think I read somewhere in Kofi Agawu’s The African Imagination in Music.

 

In her book The Demise of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic in Luke's Writings, Susan R Garrett pointed out that witchcraft has always been hard to define and it’s tended to be an accusatory category more than a coherent set of defined practices.  More recently, as I’ve noted earlier in this piece, Amanda Witmer pointed out that the Synoptic Gospels presented accounts of Jesus’ adversaries disputing not that he healed people but by what or whose power he healed.  Now’s not the time to get into spirit quests for guardian spirits and all that stuff that Gioia might find fun.  I’m getting back to a particular tossed off claim he made.

 

Gioia seems to get that which names were included in spells could make the difference between spells being “acceptable” or “not” but even that seems sloppy.  Clinton Arnold pointed out in his book Power and Magic that ancient magic spells could often call on as many spirits and gods as possible to make sure that of all the spirits or gods summoned at least one of them would take the hint and do what the spell-caster wanted. Ancient Hellenistic magic customs could be so eager to invoke any name that might have power over evil spirits that Greeks would use Jewish names such as Solomon or David or YHWH when they thought that invoking those names might get the desired magical results.

 

It’s hard to take him seriously when he claims that the wrong added name would get you trouble for a spell when the trouble would be that you were making a spell.  One of the many reasons Catholics and Anglicans have been so ambivalent about the legitimacy of exorcism is precisely because they know it’s a kind of magical rite if it were done by anyone who isn’t a Christian and an ambivalence about what they regard as magic co-exists with the confessional and scriptural obligation to recognize, as Graham Twelftree put it, that the three Synoptic Gospels in the Christian canon make it inescapably clear Jesus was an exorcist.  If Calvin, Luther and Zwingli all took for granted David’s music drove away a tormenting spirit that was afflicting King Saul Ted Gioia’s myth of the suppressed “real” history of music vanishes into thin air just on the basis of the Jewish and Christian canon and the history of scholarly discussion of just a few passages from the Books of Samuel and Kings. 

 

Gioia’s thesis would be more plausible if he postulated a battle between highbrow bespoke sacramentalism and downhome group possession, but he hasn’t gone that route.  He’s still committed to the conspiracy theory that musicology came from the study of spells and that “they” are suppressing all the evidence that this is the “real” history of musicology.  I suppose what may be most telling about Gioia’s newer work is that while Music: A Subversive History was published in a mainstream way with a mainstream book, the newest book about music to raise the dead finds GIoia self-publishing Substack.