Alan Jacobs on Wagner with a passing reference to Roger Scruton--some observations on the Scrutonian engagement with Anglican theological aesthetics that never was

https://blog.ayjay.org/on-wagner/

I don't need to rehearse that Wagnerians venerate Wagner as a genius and Wagner's detractors regard him as a repulsive human being.  Alan Jacobs doesn't need to do that either but he seems savvy enough to realize what he volunteers about Wagner is not informed by steeping himself in Wagnerian criticism.  Then again, the following observation wouldn't depend on being caught up with the sea of statements about Wagner. Get ready for an amusing little story about W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten discussing the exigencies of setting verses to a fugue:

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Wagner trusts overmuch in the power of his own verse, or is simply overly attached to it — which is a reminder that often it’s good to divide the labor of the librettist and the poet. When Auden was writing his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, he did so hoping that his friend Benjamin Britten would set it to music. But when he gave to Britten the magnificent fugal chorus on Caesar he had written, Britten couldn’t help laughing. He told Auden that if he wanted an actual fugue to be written, and a figure that would set a single scene in an oratorio with many scenes, then he should have written three lines, not seventy. So Auden kept the poem as written and gave up on the idea of having it set to music. By contrast, Wagner never had anyone to remind him of the necessary constraints; so he ignored them. 

And there’s another problem as well. Recently I read Walter Murch’s famous meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and was taken by his articulation of one of his chief rules: “You want to do only what is necessary to engage the imagination of the audience — suggestion is always more effective than exposition.” It’s interesting that Wagner understands this principle so well in his music, which often is rich and deep with suggestion, without understanding it at all in his writing. Exposition often dominates. I think his addiction to detailed exposition has something to do with his belief in himself as a sage and a mythographer. 

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So there's that but the conclusion of the post is what has stuck with me:

I may have more to say as I move through this extraordinary work of art — though maybe not, because the experience is tiring. Right now I feel about it much as Virginia Woolf felt about Joyce’s Ulysses, which she called “a memorable catastrophe — immense in daring, terrific in disaster.” But it fascinates me as a myth, especially as a humanist myth — a myth about the ending of the gods and what Bonhoeffer would later call the “coming of age” of humanity. I think that is why Roger Scruton — a man convinced of the absolute necessity of religion to humans but without any firm faith in Christianity — loves the Ring cycle so much. His book about it is magnificent, I think, but also somewhat depressing, because as a Christian I certainly don’t think that a humanist myth has the power to sustain us. But Wagner put an enormous charge into his effort to make it do so. 

Since Scruton's passing I have read a couple of  books published before and after his death regarding his legacy as a conservative and the philosophy of aesthetics and the philosophy of religion.  A short version would be to say that Scruton was fond of what he called the English trait of being "loyally indifferent" within Anglicanism.  He regarded the feat of Anglicanism as rescuing the Church of England from the evil Calvinists so it could be English-ly Catholic in Our Church.  My take-away was that in 2023 there are probably more Anglicans in Africa than all of the United Kingdom and probably more orthodox Anglicans, too.  There was hardly anything in Scruton's version of transcendentalist personalism you couldn't get from neo-orthodox or dialectical theologians like Bultmann or Brunner who had a vastly great command of biblical texts and dogmatics.  Scruton seemed to be a kind of smells and bells Anglican who put stock in the rituals themselves and if they were opaque that was what made them profound.

And here I am gearing up to tackle Thomas Aquinas and Herman Bavinck on Trinitarian dogmatics in 2024, I who have the complete works of Richard Sibbes and am sympathetic to Zwingli's take on David's harp music rather than Luther's.  

That Scruton was a loyal Anglican I don't doubt, that he was fond of "loyally indifferent" Anglicanism was one of his failings as a public churchman.  There, I suppose there's no watering it down.  When I consider what the Anglican theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie has published in the last thirty years it kind of puzzles me that Scruton didn't think to interact with any of Begbie's work, or the work of David Brown so far as I could tell.  Scruton recognized that a chasm had come to exist between popular music and music from "the great tradition" but he did not seem as interested in finding ways to bridge those gaps or consider how they were sustained by journalists, music historians, and even performing and recording musicians (I don't say "constructed because Scruton read just enough Theodor Adorno to know who claimed popular song and dance from the United States was and is not "serious music").  

What is more, if Scruton was committed to a kind of Rudolf Otto variation of The Idea of the Holy for his art mysticism he didn't even manage the generously pluralist moments achieved by the Dutch Reformed anthropologist/art historian Gerardus van der Leeuw, whether in Religion in Essence and Manifestation or Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art.  One of the ironies of Roger Scruton the philosopher who was so loyally indifferent to dogmatics and theology was that he didn't engage with theology much and yet it was Dutch Reformed theologians and art historians who made a case for aesthetic pluralism grounded in Christian confessionalism while Scruton was defending a nebulous post-Wagnerian post-Otto kind of mysticism.  

Scruton was, to go by his collected writings, more an English Anglican than a confessional Anglican, for want of a better way to put it.  I read Puritans for fun and edification, though, so I'm precisely the kind of Christian Scruton thought the Anglican church probably needed to be kept safe from.  But, seeing as I got into the work of John Neville Figgis in the last year, Figgis had a question which goes like this--why do people believe that the greatest dangers come from believing too much and not too little?  No one would have expected the late Roger Scruton to become a liberation theologian, for instance, and yet Jacobs' post has reminded me that Scruton may have accomplished more as a churchman who happened to be a public philosopher if he had taken his Anglicanism more seriously in the sense of engaging with and interacting with other currents within Anglican thought in his own lifetime.  I just merely name-dropped Jeremy Begbie and David Brown and I don't feel like wading into the waters of either of those theologians.  That might be something to save for 2024.

As I have been reading theological aesthetics within Reformed and Anglican and Catholic traditions I have begun to suspect that one of the crises of contemporary liberalism is catholicity.  Pluralism is presented by conservatives and reactionaries as predicated on relativism but this is not necessarily so.  The scholars who published a monograph with Brill on John Neville Figgis identified him as a formerly liberal Anglican who became more evangelical and yet was known in his lifetime for championing a secular and pluralist state.  Scruton was not unaware of Figgis, but he seems to have read Figgis the historian of political ideas rather than Figgis the priest.  

I guess I am trying to put this another way, merely discrediting people in the left or new left is not the same thing as coming up with ideas that might potentially ameliorate problems or offer solutions to aesthetic problems of the sort that Roger Scruton could recognize but did not seem particular eager to solve.  Since he has died he obviously can't solve any aesthetic problems now but, as Gavin Hopps has written of Scruton, we can be critical of his elitism and snobbery precisely because if we take those elements out Scruton still had some salvageable ideas that can be worked with.  One of those ideas was the observation that we need take pop music more seriously, at least more seriously than Adorno did, as a way to consider a potential future path for a rapprochement between classical and popular idioms. 

In that sense Philip Ewell has been right to say that loyalty to highbrow art religion is unyielding ... but the same can be said of the alternate art religion of rockists and poptimists.  Coming at all this from a Reformed Christian position (Swiss, Dutch, Calvinist, etc) I come at this realizing that I don't subscribe to either the highflyer Anglican Scrutonian art religion or Ted Gioia's "magic" jazz-centric ethos.  Philip Stoltzfus would potentially guess that I reject both the Orphic and Pythagorean paradigms to explain what music can do.  Maybe ... but Roger Scruton has been dead a couple of years and an appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the Scrutonian music project is going to be a work in progress for a while. 

Still, if Scruton were alive today and had read Philip Ewell's book he would likely say that it is a shame Schenker has had so much influence on North American music theory education and there's nothing wrong with Ewell registering that complaint in itself.  Scruton was almost glibly dismissive of Schenker's legacy, though.  He could get like that.

Anyway, soe semi-organized thoughts for a post on a Saturday night.  

a new appendix to Ragtime and Sonata Forms, some practical approaches to ragtime/sonata synthesis

Over the years I have written about my fondness for ragtime and my interest in synthesizing ragtime with 18^th century galant approaches to large-scale form.  I wrote Ragtime and Sonata Forms back in 2020.  Since that time I have read a fairly big pile of books discussing musical time and space; concepts of form; and scholarly reconsiderations and renegotiations of what theorists would call sonata forms.  It has become clearer among scholars over the last two centuries that the whole idea of “sonata form” and “sonata forms” was and is a post hoc description of a very flexible set of practices that were never as schematic or rigid as 19^th century theorists made them out to be. 

 

As Leonard Meyer put it, in the eighteenth century sonata movements were conceived of and written as a flexible set of scripts, but in the nineteenth century they became works written according to plans.  I was telling a friend of mine that this distinction between a sonata as a “script” and a sonata as a “plan” has profound implications.  You can go “off script” any time you want and get back on script.  If you change significant parts of your plan then you may just need a whole new plan.  I enjoy Haydn more than Mozart or Beethoven and I have a fondness for thinking of sonata forms (since the term and the heuristic is still useful and unavoidable now that we’ve had it for two centuries), so I have been thinking of ways to play with sonata forms in a way that treats sonata forms as flexible scripts.  I have also attempted to cross reference approaches to the “punctuation” of musical themes in ways that allow for establishing temporal-spatial correspondences between ragtime and sonata forms. 

 

Ironically I have been helped not just by reading music theory treatises by Jason Yust, Yoel Greenberg, James Hepokoski and L. Poundie Burstein, I have particularly benefited from reading Charles Twombly on John of Damascus; Thomas Torrance on Trinitarian dogmatics; Roger Scruton on the philosophy of music; and then Ferdia Stone-Davis and David Brown’s respective critiques of Scruton.  In other words I dove into theology and philosophy.  Torrance argued that we need to drop the Newtonian conception of time and space in light of patristic witness that time and space are not absolute but are relationally contingent and part of the created order. 

 

So when Jason Yust proposes that we think of musical time and space overlapping in multiple dimensions that just strikes me as a conceptual transposition of the kinds of distinctions that, when Thomas Aquinas reflected on the Trinity, were explicable as filiation, procession and spiration in intra-Trinitarian relationships.  In other words, Christian theology going back to the patristic era and medieval theologies from Aquinas and John of Damascus dispensed with a conception of time and space as some absolute “receptacle”.  L Poundie Burstein’s advice that we avoid getting too rigid in thinking about musical blocks of space and time as fixed “containers”.  Christian theologians agreed with that concern centuries ago and Thomas Torrance was overt in advising us to drop that conception of time and space in the last century.