some thoughts on readings in music theory in 2023 and theological arguments against Germanophile art mysticism within Christian traditions (updated 12-30-23)

I had planned to blog about Matiegka's Grand Sonata I by now but, eh, life happens. There's still time between now and the end of the year to tackle that but I'm not sure I'm going to.  I may try to write a bit about some of the reading I've done this year. Normally I don't do list posts but I read a specific set of books that stuck with me this year

Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms (2022)

L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions (2020)

James Hepokoski's A Sonata Theory Handbook (December 2020)

Jason Yust's Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality and Form (2018)

Philip Ewell's On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (April 2023)

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton  (2016)

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton's Conservative Philosophy (December 2022)

Frank Burch Brown's books Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (1993); 

Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (2003); 

and Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (2009)

Chiara Bertoglio's Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien (August 2021)

Ferdia J Stone-Davis' Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (2011)

John W Kleinig's The Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles

Philip E. Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Modern Theology (2006)

Kwame Bediako's Jesus and the Gospel in Africa

I'm also half-way through The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps

That's not counting other books I've been reading by Emil Brunner or John Neville Figgis or any entries in the sprawling reading list on exorcism, diabology, spiritual warfare, and scholarship on the development of Enochic traditions and demonologies evolving within contexts of imperial occupation(s) in the Yehud.  These are books that I've read that I hope to draw upon as I work toward Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space as a follow up to the  ragtime series.

A good number of these books got published since I wrote the blog series Ragtime and Sonata Forms back in 2020.  Each book, in some way or another, added ideas and insights into conceptions of musical time and space that I have found useful.  I've been intrigued by writings from the neo-Calvinist tradition advocating aesthetic pluralism.  The short version is that these kinds of arguments are, I think correctly, adduced from the economic Trinity but the relevance of the immanent Trinity to discussions of overlapping forms of musical timespace varying with dimensions of musical time and space don't come up.  I guess I'm trying to say that Christian theologians have been doing a great job of drawing upon the Trinity in its social/economic form to advocate for aesthetic pluralism grounded in confessional unity whether it's a case presented by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Frank Burch Brown, Hans Rookmaaker, Maeve Louise Heaney, David Brown or others.  

But direct reflection on musical time and space and dealing with the dogmas of aesthetics that evolved in the era of Romanticism is more sparse.  I've mentioned this briefly in the past but when Christians can draw upon John of Damascus' discussion of perichoresis in Christology and Trinitarian dogmatics; or when Thomas Aquinas distinguished between filiation, spiration and procession within the Trinity it seems like the simplest thing in the world to transpose these theological-philosophical concepts onto the nature of musical time and space in ways that discard Romanticist notions of musical material having some "essential" nature.  If we consider the biblical prophets and their criticism of music as not being a denigration of music itself but of investment in music that overlooked injustice, we have a viable alternative to what Stoltzfus described as the problematic dualism of Orpheus and Pythagoras derived musical ontologies or mysticisms.  

One of the ironies of conservatives (such as the late Roger Scruton) who attempted to defend a form of highbrow culture that was purportedly grounded in some kind of Christendom is that Scruton was, to be blunt, so lazy regarding Christian dogmatics it would be more apt to say he embraced a kind of post Schleiermacher and post Rudolf Otto art mysticism.  Gerardus van  der Leeuw had a "kind" of art mysticism but his version included African diaspora music as well as the old canonized Western touchstones from the long 19th century.  Scruton's version of Anglicanism outlined in Our Church was (and is) so relentlessly, ethnically "English" with its "loyal indifference" that it cannot account for the probability that there are more Anglicans (and more orthodox Anglicans) in Africa than in the entirety of England. Because Kenyan Christians were some of the first friends I made in my early college years and some other friends were Christians from Japan I have not defaulted to any surmise that "Christendom" is either Western or Eastern or necessarily a really Christian conception of fellowship.  

The Scrutonian highbrow elite Anglican art mysticism is something that has been dismantled by the neo-orthodox theologians via Barth and Brunner a century ago.  Scruton was more committed to being a culturally conservative Anglican than a doctrinally attentive Anglican. Jeremy Begbie has been writing about theology and music as a musician and Anglican theologian since before the dawn of this century.  It wouldn't seem to have been too hard for Scruton to have compared notes with Begbie on a confessional basis for aesthetic pluralism as reflecting the Anglican commitment to a middle path.  Scruton, famously, was committed to his highbrow elitist art mysticism and regarded Calvin as having harmed "civilization" by not counting marriage as a sacrament the way Catholics do. Never mind Zwingli or Bullinger, Scruton's Anglicanism saved Catholicism from the evil Puritans.

But Aquinas' exposition on intra-Trinitarian relationships suggests to me that if such multi-dimensional timespaces can coexist in the Trinity and if Victor Zuckerkandl or George Rochberg or, on point, Jason Yust can imagine that timespaces for rhythm, tonality and form can co-exist, then just on the basis of Christian dogmatics alone the neo-gnostic elitist art religions of Eurocentrists can't even be plausibly defended on the basis of the purported "Christendom" that is invoked to defend the standard canonized works.  As Jaroslav Pelikan put it in The Vindication of Tradition, intra-tradition criticism of traditions that harm rather than help are the well-spring of Jewish prophetic literature. 

So when I read Ewell's book I read it as making a contribution within that kind of intra-traditional critique of the poisonous impulses within a tradition. Ewell may be an atheist and that just makes it more paradoxical and amusing that when he writes about what anti-whiteness has done to blackness that it sounds remarkably similar to what African biblical scholars and theologians have described as the influence of powers and principalities.  For that matter, Ewell's working definitions of whiteness and anti-blackness could fit with ease into Walter Wink's working definition of powers, give or take a few caveats.

I'm entertaining quite seriously a proposal that Western art religion represents a power and principality in terms of writings on Ephesians interpretation from Esther Acolatse, Daniel K Darko, Robert Ewusie MOses, and even Clinton Arnold.  If contemporary anti-racists tend to be both secular and progressive they will likely not have bothered to read theologians and biblical scholars grappling with the Pauline concepts of powers and principalities because, eh, religion.  Yet both Jewish and Christian writings in the first few centuries of the common era grappled with shared identity amidst contrasting points of origin.  I'm working through Jacob L Wright's new book on why the Bible began, for instance.  

And all that is to say that I think it is possible to chart out a practical program within which vernacular and popular musical vocabularies can be fairly easily used as the building blocks of 18th century variants of large-scale form, thus Ragtime and Sonata Forms from 2020.  But I want to try to get more practical and map out ways in which ragtime and other popular musical vocabularies can be woven into different kinds of sonata forms.  I had no idea all the above books had been published around the time I was blogging my passion project in 2020.  Now that I have gotten a bit more up to speed on the range of theoretical/analytical options and tools at hand in United States scholarship on music theory and the intersections of "pop" and "classical" I think it would be benificial to draw upon that scholarship to synthesize a theoretical as well as a practical approach to making, well, ragtime and blues based sonata forms.  Maybe I"ll write a bit more about that next week when I have some time.  Meanwhile, that's a sampling of my reading from 2023 and some semi-organized thoughts on directions I'd like Wenatchee The Hatchet to move into in 2024. 

Plus blogging through Matiegka's guitar sonatas.  If none of that happens, happy holidays.  If it turns into blog posts between now and New Year's you'll know.  

UPDATED 12-30-2023

I figured I shouldn't have just put the title names in the post.  So here's an updated/expanded list of reading from the last two years with links to the books at their publication sites:

Johannes Quasten’s Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity

Yoel Greenberg's How Sonata Forms (2022)

L Poundie Burstein's Journeys Through Galant Expositions (2020)

James Hepokoski's A Sonata Theory Handbook (December 2020)

Jason Yust's Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality and Form (2018)

Philip Ewell's On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (April 2023)

The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton  (2016)

Art and Politics in Roger Scruton's Conservative Philosophy (December 2022)

Frank Burch Brown's books 

Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (1993); 

Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (2003); 

Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (2009)

Chiara Bertoglio's Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien (August 2021)

Ferdia J Stone-Davis' Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (2011)

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (1987)

                                    Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (2017)

John W Kleinig's The Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles

Philip E. Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Modern Theology (2006)

Jaroslav Pelikan’s Bach Among the Theologians

John Neubauer’s The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

Rob C Wegman’s The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470--1530

Percy Scholes’ The Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations

Kwame Bediako's Jesus and the Gospel in Africa

Richard Taruskin's Musical Times and Lives Examined (2023)

The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism

Spencer Klavan's Music in Ancient Greece: Melody, Rhythm and Life

The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps

This addition doubles up as the bibliographic background to the new Appendix for Ragtime and Sonata Forms, too.