This is probably going to be the last post of 2024 and so it's going to be a relatively short and practical one and focused just on practical ways to develop an approach to sonata forms that draws upon ragtime and blues vocabularies, with an eye toward blurring the boundaries between sonata forms and continuous variation forms (single and double themes)
Saturday, December 28, 2024
Monday, December 23, 2024
Paul Kingsnorth at First Things "Against Christian Civilization"
A HT to From
Bitter Waters to Sweet for this one.
Paul Kingsnorth has a piece at First Things called “Against
Christian Civilization”. He mentions Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa) a
Native American man who trained in medicine and became a Christian and spread
the Gospel. Eastman recounted sharing
stories about Jesus with an older Native American man who, reflecting on those
stories, said that Jesus sounded like an Indian and not a white man. So, dear readers, when James Cone suggested
Jesus was Black this observation that the Jesus of the Gospels was not a
middle-class or well-heeled white American man was not exactly daring or innovative.
It’s a sentiment that has run through American thought for centuries. Kingsnorth quotes Eastman as reaching a
radical conclusion late in his life:
It is my personal belief, after
thirty-five years experience of it, that there is no such thing as “Christian
civilization.” I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed
and irreconcilable, and the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion
is essentially the same.
Now I do wonder about that, to be honest, and while I’ve
seen cases made that the Jesus Way and Native American traditions have a lot of
overlap a la Randy Woodley I could grant the point was made by Paul at Athens
when he saw the altar to the unknown god.
I still hesitate to say that overlap is the same as identity. Nevertheless, I am curious to read
Eastman. Skepticism about “Christian civilization”
is something I can register agreement with even if I have some doubts about
other things.
I had managed to go my whole life having not heard of
Eastman but a few of his books are available at Project Gutenberg. One of his relatives was a Presbyterian
minister and now seems good a time as any to point out that there have been
Native American Presbyterians just as there have been black Presbyterian
ministers such as Frances Grimke (HT to Daniel Kleven who
has blogged about the minister). I
have said and written this a few times but, as I get older, I have become more
and more grateful my exposure to the Reformed traditions of Christianity came
from my Native American dad rather than my white mom (of Okie stock). Kingsnorth
has done me the favor of introducing me to someone I’m going to have to
read. I still have a couple of Richard
Twiss books I’ve started but not finished yet.
Moving along ..
Kingsnorth mentions several approaches to Christianity and
one of them is what he describes as civilizational Christianity, which we could
probably as easily call “Christendom”. Christianity is like cultural broccoli
and is good for you and there are even types of atheists who are persuaded that
what is best about the West has in some way descended from Christian
traditions. There are also men who have
books to sell about being grown-up who extoll the wisdom of the Bible from a
Jungian approach. No surprise who swiftly
shows up when this topic is broached:
…
The best-known current proponent of
civilizational Christianity is the psychologist and pundit Jordan Peterson. For
Peterson, Christianity is a Joseph Campbell–style hero’s journey, one specially
designed for young men. In his short film “Message to the Christian Churches,”
Peterson lays out his civilizational program and challenges the faith to keep
up. Christianity, he tells us, in an echo of Ali’s argument, offers “a
psychological approach to our ancient stories” that can help us oppose what he
calls “an extremely damaging ideology.”
This ideology, predictably referred
to elsewhere as “cultural Marxism,” tells us that Western culture is an
“oppressive patriarchy,” that “human activity is fundamentally a
planet-destroying exercise,” and that “damnable male ambition” is the root of
the problem. Some of these fanatics, he tells us, believe that there should be
“extreme limits on our wants, even on our needs.”
Extreme limits on our wants!
Whatever would the Desert Fathers say?
Peterson goes on to lay out his
case for the defense of civilization, which he defines as “a society centered
on the encouraging, adventurous, masculine spirit.” The Christian Church, it
turns out, exists to encourage this spirit. It is, he states,
there to remind people, young
men included, and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to
find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to
conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter, terrible catastrophe of
life to face stalwartly in truth, devoted to love, and without fear.
Do you see anything missing in this
list of what the Church ought to be doing? That’s right. It is Christ. It is
Jesus. He gets not one mention. Not in the entire video. Neither does God the
Father. Neither does the Holy Spirit. Instead, Peterson’s civilizational Church
is to be a self-help club for young men. It is to be a cultural institution,
fighting back against the woke and the “bloody Gaia worshippers” and the
feminists and the life-sapping cultural Marxists. It sees life as a
catastrophe, and the correct response to that catastrophe as masculine
conquest. What Jordan Peterson wants, in other words, is a church that looks
like Jordan Peterson. “You’re churches, for God’s sake!” he exclaims at one
point, in the only mention of God in the entire film. “Quit fighting for social
justice! Quit saving the bloody planet! Attend to some souls! That’s what
you’re supposed to do!”
…
It was brought to my attention a while back that Jordan
Peterson’s daughter apparently took a shine to the preaching of Mark Driscoll,
which got mentioned by Aaron Renn at his Substack. Renn seems to not have
an entirely cohesive or coherent take on Driscoll. Maybe Renn doesn’t know that Josh McPherson
has been in Mark Driscoll’s orbit for a decade? To say this:
… Howerton’s missiology sounded a
lot like the old Mark Driscoll, and it struck me that Driscoll had a ministry
similarly named the Resurgence. While Driscoll is out of favor with many today,
he was undeniably successful in center city Seattle in an environment that was
probably negative world avant la lattre.
In a post called “Negative World
Missiology” invites the question of how successful Driscoll ultimately was
here in Seattle. He resigned amid controversy in disgrace. 41 former Mars Hill elders have publicly
agreed he is not fit for pastoral ministry. He was accused of plagiarism by
Janet Mefferd on air and Warren Throckmorton chronicled the case for how and
why those allegations had substance.
Driscoll decided to quit rather than comply with a restoration plan he
was offered by his Board of Advisors and Accountability. Seattle has gone on in the last ten years as
if Mars Hill never happened. The man who
boasted that Mars Hill was gunning to take over Christian radio left Seattle
behind and the influence of Mars Hill on Seattle musical culture is probably negligible
at best.
What men like Driscoll and Peterson have in common is they
are selling scripts of adulthood, manhood particularly. Act Like a Man: 9 Ways to Punch Life in the
Mouth got published earlier this year, after all. Renn has
noted that Dalrock and others from the manosphere have lambasted Mark Driscoll
for, of all things, pandering to feminists.
Decades ago Driscoll would have been likely to joke that
VeggieTales isn’t exactly cutting edge cultural production. Now he’s stoked to show off hanging out with his
buddy Eric Metaxas. He’s been on the train of “Have kids. One of
the best ways to affect the culture is to overwhelm the future with who you're
sending into it. The rainbow people don't multiply much (besides STDs) with
their Romans 1 lifestyle.” Renn
seemed to grasp that figures like Driscoll tell men to “man up” but that
doesn’t bring with it any power to do so.
Chris Rosebrough, Lutheran that he is, said that Mark preaches Law
rather than Gospel. The older the man
gets the more his message seems to be of a piece with what Kingsnorth calls
civilizational Christianity. When Pastor
Mark joked he started a fertility cult ten years ago I couldn’t laugh because
it seemed like maybe he was really serious behind his joke.
This kind of civilizational Christianity is Christendom
2.000 and its Gospel is a flipped script.
The script can be thought of in terms of a bromide, no single snowflake
feels responsibility for the storm. The admonition of men like Peterson and
Driscoll before him and probably Douglas Wilson before them is to take up the
claim and tell each snowflake “Be the storm!”
Men, you are not the problem...
rather, God intends for you to be a
part of the solution. This book will teach you how to architect your life to be
the leader God intends you to be. It doesn’t matter where you are starting –
single, married, father, husband, or grandpa – "Act Like a Man" will
show you how to use the Father’s instruction to build a life that’s a blessing
to your family and legacy.
The obvious nature of simple script-flipping could be more
obvious than in “How
Toxic Masculinity Can Save the World” from December 6, 2024.
If young men can “activate” they can change the world, eh? Maybe
these men are supposed to be the activated charcoal which absorb poisons in the
stomach of the body of “civilization”? Well, Driscoll tweets out the big pep
talk soundbites via X but among leaders and church planters back in 2007 he had
a notoriously different appraisal:
https://joyfulexiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/preaching-paul_edits1.mp3
Here’s what I’ve learned, you, you
cast vision for your mission and, if people don’t sign up, you move on. You
move on. There are people who are gonna die in the wilders and there are people
who are gonna take the hill. That’s just how it is.
I’ve observed this guy for decades and the difference
between the pep talk he shares on X and what he has been known to say to a
group of leader-insiders behind closed doors is stark indeed. I’ve known men
who Driscoll threw off the bus and ran over with the bus that used to be called
Mars Hill Church. Even if he hadn’t said and done all those things that got him
in trouble, there is a foundational lie at the core of his pep talk about how
toxic masculinity will save the world and it’s not necessarily anything to do
with what is toxic or what counts as masculinity. It’s something more mundane observed by the
author of Ecclesiastes about how the race is not to the swift nor victory to
the strong nor riches to the wise but time and chance happen to them all. Most
guys are not gonna take that hill, whatever be the hills Mark Driscoll wants
taken. The social psychologist Roy
Baumeister wrote in his book Is There Anything Good About Men that the
foundational aspect of men and manhood with respect to societies is that men
are disposable. Men can be (and are) sacrificed for the sake of grand causes
and legacies. I
had some thoughts about that back in 2011.
The guys spouting off about “civilization” aren’t talking about the
oracle to the eunuchs in Isaiah 56. The mimetic desire cultivation industry
goes hard when saving civilization is what is at stake.
In my own reading from my sprawling list on the development of demonology in Western Europe I noticed a convergence of stringent cessationism with postmillennialist eschatologies seemed to be the seedbed for super-apostasy across four centuries. In other words if you want to look at where a nexus of cessationism and postmillennialism has gone over the centuries since the Puritans New England and England hardly look like paragons of piety in 2024. Doug Wilson types have to rely on a surmise of revivalism but how many revivals and Great Awakenings have we had in the US since Edwards? Right, and how pious are those regions a few burned over districts later? The trouble is that people who are for "Christian Civilization" now in 2024 seem to have given away the nature of their game in terms of the cultural renewal they keep beating the drum about rather than something like how discipleship in the teachings of Christ is important whether or not America ever becomes great again.
Sunday, December 22, 2024
Thoughts on Art Religion by way of Article 26 of the 39 Articles from the Anglican Communion--debates in the wake of Philip Ewell's book can be seen as debates about what elements can be regarded as acceptable for music that becomes Music as designated by a priesthood of music scholars and composers
Thoughts on
Art Religion by way of a reflection on Article 26 of the 39 Articles, regarding
priestly moral character and the administration of a sacrament
https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/109014/Thirty-Nine-Articles-of-Religion.pdf
...
26. Of the Unworthiness
of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacraments. Although in
the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the
evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet
forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ's, and do
minister by his commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in
hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the Sacraments. Neither is the effect
of Christ's ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God's
gifts diminished from such as by faith, and rightly, do receive the Sacraments
ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ's institution and
promise, although they be ministered by evil men. Nevertheless, it appertaineth
to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil Ministers, and
that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and
finally, being found guilty, by just judgment be deposed.
Ministerial Character,
Intention, and the Sacraments [Commentary on Browne: Article XXVI]
James Clark
November 18, 2024
It is generally agreed
among commentators that Anabaptists are the primary target of Article
XXVI: “Whatever may have been the popular feeling on this subject among the
advocates of reformation in general, there is no doubt that the Anabaptists (in
conformity with their general principle, that the whole Church should be pure
and sincere) held the impropriety of receiving Sacraments from ungodly
ministers,”[1] which
notion the Article rejects. The issue did not originate with them, however, but
goes back to the controversy in the early church over whether baptisms
performed by heretics are valid. Whereas “Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage…and the
African bishops who were with him, denied the validity of baptism by heretics
and schismatics…. Stephen, Bishop of Rome, took the directly opposite view,
admitting all baptism, whether by schismatics or heretics, so it was with water
in the name of the Trinity; and such has been the rule of the Latin Church ever
since.” This principle remains a source of comfort even now, for churches today
are no less plagued by heretical ministers than they were in the first
centuries of Christianity. Yet because the power of the sacraments does not
depend on the personal character or doctrinal soundness of those who administer
them, the laity do not have to fear on the minister’s account that the washing
away of their sins in baptism was but an external sprinkling of water, or that
the Body and Blood of Christ are but mere bread and wine.
…
One of the things I have said in the past is that defenders
of Art Religion can come across as people who are not very conversant in topics
that show up in the the observance of religion.
It’s a bit glib to put it this way but partisans of Eurocentric Art
Religion, whether in its highbrow or lowbrow formulations, tend to not think
much about sacraments, and why would they?
They don’t believe in religion … but … the liberal arts make you better
people than people who don’t imbibe from the Great Well of Well-Being that is
Art for the sake of Art.
Gordon Graham has written about how art religions can come
in the form of highbrow asceticism and in lowerbrow forms. Graham has contended that Art is never going
to replace Religion because all the partisans of art religion are artists who
know they are artists and are making things for artists and art consumers. In other words, Art is not a viable civic
religious cult. Since the art for art’s
sake people dismiss any art that has a social utility of any kind as “propaganda”
Art Religion will crash and burn on the island of autonomy. This was what Theodor Adorno said was the
problem with the liberation of art from theology all the way back in the 1960s
in Aesthetic Theory:
Aesthetic Theory
Theodore Adorno
Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents
of the University of Minnesota
Continuum
ISBN 0-8264-6757-1
page 1
It is self-evident that nothing
concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to
the world, not even its right to exist. ...
page 2
...
As a result of its inevitable
withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation,
a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned
to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that—shorn of any hope of
a world beyond—strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art
wants to free itself. ...
If an artwork should attain (or be granted) the lofty
status of “autonomy” for the partisans of art for the sake of art then the
artwork has been (and has to be) divested of any social utility.
And what is that if not the consecration of chosen elements
for a sacrament? Adorno wrote plenty of
tortured and opaque prose but this is an element of Art Religion lurking in his
observation that:
Page 271
… The aesthetic principle of form is in itself, through the
synthesis of what is formed, the positing of meaning even when meaning is
substantively rejected. To this extent, whatever it wills or states, art
remains theology; its claim to truth and its affinity to untruth are one and
the same. This emerged specifically in Jugendstil. The situation
culminates in the question of whether, after the fall of theology and in its
total absence, art is still possible. But if, as in Hegel—who was the first to
express historicophilosophical doubts as to this possibility—this necessity
subsists, art retains an oracular quality; it is ambiguous whether the
possibility of art is a genuine witness to what endures of theology or if it is
the reflection of an enduring spell.
The aesthetic principle in Art Religion is the rite of
designating something as adhering to the aesthetic principle (whatever that is)
in such a way that the bread and wine are no longer just bread and wine. If something has not been designated as “art”
it is not imputed with the capacity to sanctify the recipient of the Art
Religion sacrament to those who are willing and able to receive it with the
proper Intention.
Speaking of which, let’s get back to James Clark’s series
on Browne on the Thirty-Nine Articles:
Another topic commonly
raised in connection with this Article is the Church of Rome’s so-called
doctrine of Intention, which Browne characterizes as the belief that “no
Sacrament is valid, unless the priest intends that it should be so.” More
fully, “If…in outwardly ministering a Sacrament, [the minister] does not intend
to confer the benefits of the Sacrament, they will not be conferred.” Browne
does not think it “probable”[2] that
the framers of the Article had this doctrine in view, but he believes the
Article “virtually and in effect meets it.” The consequences of the doctrine,
as Browne expounds them, are dire: “If no Sacrament is valid, unless the priest
intends that it should be so; then we know not whether our children be
baptized, our wives married, our communions received, or our bishops
consecrated.”[3] Implicit
in this critique is an understanding of the intention in question as being
mental or internal. However, it is disputed within the Church of Rome whether
the intention said to be required of the minister is indeed internal, or merely
external:
Generally speaking,
the principle of the Roman Church is that this Intention is necessary. Thus,
Aquinas says that if a man does not intend to minister the Sacrament and only
does it in mockery the validity is at an end. The Council of Trent anathematises
those who say that the intention of the minister to do what the Church does is
not required. Subsequently a subtle distinction arose between internal and
external Intention. The external Intention is the intention of the priest to
administer the Sacrament in the customary form; the internal Intention is the
intention to administer it in the sense of the Church. The only vital
difference is as to the internal intention, and on this there is a difference
in the Roman Church itself. The Ultramontane party has maintained the necessity
of the internal intention, while the Gallican school have denied this.[4]
…
If the internal intention to minister the sacrament is faulty
or absent but the external intention to minister the sacrament is effected then
we’ve got a sacrament. There are those
who are set on a version of Art Religion in which the internal intent is so
paramount nothing else matters. If the
Artist intends to make Art that is all that matters and whether that manifests
as an external expression of some kind that “connects” with an audience who is
not emotionally touched by the resultant music, well, so much the worse for
those people in the audience who have some notion about music that its purpose
is to “make me feel something”. Theodor
Adorno poured scorn on those kinds of listeners who seek out music to function
as some kind of mood-altering opiate in his Introduction to the
Sociology of Music. The kinds of people who listened to music to feel
something were not listening for the unfolding of musical structures, they were
also usually the kinds of women or Slavs who sought out Tchaikovsky and other
composers who dispensed intense emotions like melancholy and “joy” like candy
from a dispenser. No, real and serious art was not going to do the listening
for the listener.
On the other hand, by the 1950s Adorno was damning both
Stockhausen and Cage at a stroke in “The Aging of
the New Music” because he regarded the likes of Pierre Boulez and John Cage
as having embraced systems of composition that relieved composers of ever being
decision-making subjects. Whether
through Boulez and his integral serialism or Cage and his aleatoric music both
men embraced approaches to music where there was no personal agency exercised, in
Adorno’s damning appraisal. There were
composers Adorno didn’t rip into like Edgar Varese and Gyorgy Ligeti (whom he
said were still using their actual ears to guide them in their composing and
making actual artistic decisions) but his vitriol for the post-Webern approach
to integral serialism was unstinting. So
the lofty intent to make Art wasn’t sufficient even for Adorno, there had to be
a finished result he could still regard as music and he lamented bitterly that
the post-Webern serialists seemed to believe that by merely arranging the
paints on the palette they had already made actual paintings, but it was not
so!
But what about the external intention to make Art? Maybe that is to express something.
The trouble, in a post-Adorno trans-Atlantic academic world, is that Adorno
claimed tonality was “used up” and that no one could “legitimately” use tonal
materials without being some kind of fraud or sentimental twerp. Maybe Bartok could still use tonal materials
because he wasn’t a sell-out but nobody in Western Europe could wield the tonal
materials of even a Debussy or Wagner with any legitimacy. There was still what
Richard Taruskin described as the “rush
to the patent office” ethos and praxis of originality. Mere expression was
no good. When George Rochberg turned
away from serialism back to Mahler and late Beethoven he was scorned as a
sell-out. Who could “legitimately”
attempt to have external expression as a goal in music? This is where the second half of
intentionality and the ministration of the Art Religion sacrament of Music
stays a hot topic. Is originality
important? John Borstlap has posed this
question very directly with respect to his own music over at The
Subterranean Review this December 22, 2024.
I was tidying-up
some old papers, and came across a couple of assessments that had been
submitted during the court case I had initiated in 2012 against the Netherlands
national funding foundation which had consistently refused to fund commissions
I got from music life, on the grounds that my music lacked all forms of
originality and was mere pastiche and thus, irrelevant and thus, should not be
paid for, even if orchestras or ensembles had chosen to commission me.
Assessments of the music at the foundation were done by comitees of experts,
drawn from the circles of the new music network: composers and performers
active in the ensemble circuit of the country, who themselves were clients of
the foundation (grants, commission fees) and thus knew exactly into which
direction state subsidies for new music had to go.
…
Western serious concert
music up till 20C modernism, has two layers of meaning: the musical language
(as described by Scruton), and the layer of expression: that which is being
conveyed in terms of musical meaning. This concept has been pushed to the margins
or even completely out of sight when modernism in the last century became some
kind of 'standard view' of new music: the language as such is the only thing
that counts because there is nothing else. And in a culturally-provincial
country like the Netherlands, deviations from what is considered by circles of
ignorant people as 'the norm', are not tolerated. So, of course since 2012 I
have focussed on the world outside the country where I have no place. Therefore
I am very grateful to Jaap van Zweden who commissioned and premiered my music
with his orchestras in Dallas and Hong Kong and thereby proved, by its audience
success and enthusiastic press, how miserable the 'new music establishment' in
the Netherlands was, and still is, thinking of the fragments I occasionally
hear of what is currently being produced.
This would be the point where it’s possible to be sympathetic
to a composer who was denied payment by bureaucrats and yet also consider that
many a “timeless” work of choral music written by practicing Christians in the
18th century was written as liturgical music and not as Art. Johann
Sebastian Bach’s Passions and cantatas were liturgical music performed in
churches. Joseph (or Michael) Haydn’s
masses were liturgical music. When
Schutz set every last verse of Psalm 119 to music for double choir it was as
liturgical music and not as Art. Sweelinck
made settings of texts from every Psalm in the Psalter drawing on melodies from
the Genevan Psalter and that was liturgical music with a clear social function
and it is only retroactively that Romantic era writers might designate it as
Art.
The thing that contemporary scholars debate or even openly
resent is that dead white guys were posthumously credited as having made Art
who, in their actual lifetimes might have not just denied the credit but
objected to it. The elephant in the room
might be that for Christians their objection would have been an actually
religious objection. The arts may
beautifully adorn the sacraments but the arts are not themselves sacraments.
The hat trick of Art Religion has been to transubstantiate debates and
discussions of sacraments from what people used to call Christendom into terms
that have been putatively secularized.
Philip Ewell isn’t a crank or a fake or a fraud for picking up on the
highly parasitic nature of this Eurocentric Art Religion discourse and
explicitly rejecting the terms of presentation.
As a Christian I differ with Ewell the atheist on a few metaphysical
points but because I come at religious life as a low-church Calvinist Anglican
with Presbyterian history and a real sympathy for Puritans as well as Swiss and
Dutch Reformed theologians I am probably about as skeptical of Germanophile Art
Religion mysticism as Philip Ewell is for ostensibly “opposite” reasons.
I have made my thoughts on the problems of Art Religion
plain enough over the years and I have even written a piece called “John
Borstlap and the theodicies of art religion”. What makes art religion such
a bad faith enterprise is its partisans take up every theodicy for Art that
they often implicitly or even explicitly reject for Religion but what’s bad for
the goose of Christendom in the “West” is no better for the gander of an Art
Religion that is, I say, parasitically dependent upon the Christendom it was
alleged to replace and surpass. Yet here
we are in 2024 and Norman Lebrecht could, in all earnestness, write about the
death of Dmitri Shostakovich as the day the symphony died. Forgive us guitarists who love the music of
Shostakovich but have never seen the “death of the symphony” as any kind of
death of classical music. Palestrina
masses and Byrd’s Gradualia are still around to be heard and admired, after all. Anyone who has read about William
Byrd knows he was obstinately set on not becoming the kind of Anglican who
turned away from Catholic doctrine. He was so good at what he did he was
granted forms of clemency others were not, a recusant Catholic who was not
arrested or jailed for saying and doing the kinds of things other men were
jailed for. If Byrd were alive today he
would not, likely, be the kind of man who would think of his music as a
sacrament when he could go attend mass.
That the questions about the proper and legitimate
ministrations of sacraments in trans-Atlantic academic contexts may be debates
that have “migrated’ from what were originally religious debates is part of the
things music scholarship can address. I
think Ewell’s points are tendentious in some ways and understandable in
others. If he were more conversant in
the kinds of literally religious debates that have happened about liturgy and
sacrament he might be more able to articulate why he believes a sacramental
view of Beethoven’s Ninth is not good for people nor good for Beethoven’s
Ninth. I am partial to the Dutch Reformed
Gerardus van der Leeuw’s complaint that the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony is a “crude deistic frenzy”. I
actually hate a lot of Beethoven’s choral music whereas I think Haydn and
Mozart are fine (I even love Haydn’s music, for that matter).
And here may be the thing about Religion that makes it
particularly relevant to Art. In
Religion innovation for its own sake has no intrinsic value and you’re not
supposed to come up with the newest way to “express” liturgy. There are reasons a bunch of Catholics
despise what they regard as the dubious innovations of Vatican II. There are reasons people want the oldest and
most venerable forms of ministering sacraments.
There are Anglicans who want the older or oldest version of the Book of
Common Prayer because it is ancient and because they consider it to be not “original”
in the sense of some rush to the patent office.
It is also the case that there are people who want liturgy and sacrament
that expresses the truths of the true faith and are not looking for someone to
work “personal expression” into things. Palestrina may have expressed himself
as a “person” in his liturgical music but that was a fringe benefit to writing
music as a Catholic. Art Religion, seen in these kinds of terms, has put the
cart before the horse and by the 21st century has its partisans
wondering why we can’t get back to the Old Time Art Religion of “expression”
when that kind of “expression” was an innovation of Romantics whose art
mysticism tried to pick up what was allegedly spent or opaque in Christendom.
But who was one of the most far-out avant gardists of the
mid-20th century? Olivier
Messiaen, that’s who. O sacrum convivium
is weird but in a gorgeous way. It was the kind of sincere and sugary religious
piety that Dmitri Shostakovich found insufferable and infuriating but he was,
after all, a Soviet composer.
I have been a fan of Richard Taruskin for years now and
even when I sharply disagree with things he’s written I have found him a helpful
interlocutor. His arguments against Art Religion are trenchant and I consider
one of his lasting achievements as a historian and a scholar is to have
expressed a
love of classical music while simultaneously arguing passionately against
viewing music in sacramental terms. It may be one of the paradoxes of this
world we live in that a Christian who has respect for Puritans and Zwingli and
Calvin could agree with a secular Jew who was a big fan of Adlai
Stevenson. Well, hey, I have come around
to consider myself a Mark Hatfield Republican and Richard Taruskin was
certainly old enough to have known who the Oregon Senator was. There was a time
in the early 1980s where two of the most famous evangelical Christians holding
political office in the United States were President Jimmy Carter and Oregon
Senator Mark Hatfield. The Religious
Right was taking shape but it had not yet risen to prominence in the era of
Nixon and Carter. That would come later. During those years the trendy thing in
academic musicology was being certain that tonality was still “used up” and
that the intentions of composers to make serious music that didn’t pander to
the desire of audiences to be made to “feel” was a thing. Ex opere
operato indeed!
Richard Taruskin’s writing against what he called the
poietic fallacy can’t even be the least bit mysterious if we approach his
point from the perspective of someone who has any inkling of what a sacrament
is. Schoenberg intended his music to be
Art and therefore for partisans of Art Religion in its highest of highbrow
forms that Intention would be sufficient to make the artwork a proper sacrament
provided the artwork was produced in the appropriate way.
One of the simplest problems with any claim that if an
artist intends to create Art that this is sufficient to make the thing so is
the matter of craft. Roger Scruton
claimed for years that John Cage was a charlatan. Now I am not really a fan of Cage overall but
I don’t regard him as a charlatan. What I do think can be said about Cage was
he took an approach to making music that highlighted the problem of the poietic
fallacy, as Taruskin discussed it, and which highlights the core problem with
Romantic conceptions of the Artists making Art, that if intention is all that
matters everyone is the greatest Artist on earth.
Christopher Hitchens is said to have quipped that just
about everyone has a book in him which is usually where that book should stay
and the same could be said about other arts.
Everyone can have an idea for a
story but the skill is in the execution.
Good or bad execution has been the historically observable difference
between whether or not something has been called Art. But …
In an era in which scholars have questioned the criteria by
which Beethoven symphonies were declared sacred and not albums by James Brown
it can be easy to overlook that in the debates about whether the elements have
been properly set aside and rendered suitably sacramental that the process of
officiating the sacrament itself can be more or less the same in the Art
Religion of Michael Jackson sons as Beethoven symphonies. In this respect
poptimists and rockists are debating not about their Art Religion sacrament
being a sacrament or not but about what elements are acceptable for
presentation via rite as fit to be sacramental elements. Is this wine and that bread acceptable? Is this song or that piece acceptable? Does that album not count?
My own stance is that however much the arts may adorn
sacraments the arts are not sacraments. When I want to partake of
Eucharist I make sure I attend church in person rather than just livestream
attend (we live in such an age, after all, though priests and pastors can bring
the sacramental elements to you if you’re a shut-in). Because I am not a
partisan of any form of Art Religion as it has been developed in European writings
and American spin-offs I don’t think listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in
the spirit in which Beethoven meant it actually makes you a better person
relative even to yourself, let alone to other people. I am “that” kind of low church Calvinist type
and for people who don’t know about how Christians who have read any Zwingli or
Calvin or Bullinger on the arts, we don’t regard the liberal arts as
sacraments. Nothing against the beautiful
art (formerly science) of music but Zwingli pointed out that David’s harp did
not in and of itself cast out King Saul’s evil spirit tormenter and that the
Holy Spirit’s use of music in this or that providential setting is not to be
construed as (or conflated with) some mystical power of music. Many partisans of Eurocentric Art Religion
obviously disagree!
That’s the nature of the conundrum or controversy that has
come up with Philip Ewell’s book, indirectly though the matter comes up. Ewell has mentioned that partisans of
European canonized music treat it like a religion and he is right about
that. I have been noticing over the
years that when partisans of art religion go on about their preferred Artists
and Art they tend to be bad at talking about sacraments. They are, to be blunt, incompetent in the
liturgical and sacramental aspects that should be clearest and simplest about
the ordinances and sacraments of their art asceticism or mysticism. The trouble
is, as I have noted elsewhere, the
role of music in epiclesis doesn’t automatically change because some people
say “that isn’t music” or “I don’t recognize the spirit that is moving these
people”.
I grew up Pentecostal and am now Anglican so I get that for
Pentecostals music is a way that God inhabits the praises of His People and
this is a belief you can find in Pentecostal churches of any color. It’s no coincidence to me that many battles
about aesthetic value come from partisans of the highest of highbrow Art
Religion who have not set foot in Pentecostal churches and it’s interesting to
me as I get older to consider, as I have mentioned in the past, that early rock
musicians hailed from Pentecostal churches.
Many a debate about the musical merits and demerits of musical genres
and styles have implicitly and explicitly religious roots. I don’t expect people to be Pentecostal or
Anglican but I do think that the debates about modes and forms of liturgy and
sacrament can be brought in to illuminate and maybe even elucidate aspects of
debates about Art and Music that Philip Ewell’s writing has sparked in the last
few years. It’s actually because I try to take my Christian faith seriously
that I take Ewell’s complaint about music theory and Eurocentric art religion
in musicology seriously whether or not I agree with everything he’s said or
written. Partisans of Art can have a
nasty habit of being dishonest about how recent their dogmatic innovation
actually is.
Through the ages guilds of actual liturgists, theologians
and musicians do (past, present and future) have defined what counts as good
and bad art and what counts as legitimate and illegitimate sacrament and
liturgy. Eurocentric Art Religion has
tended to be formulated and defended by men who, I’m afraid, couldn’t even
start to explain what is involved in a sacrament and don’t even care to (I’m
thinking particularly of the late Roger Scruton who claimed that there was more
and better theology of Eucharist in Wagner’s Parsifal than in books
written by theologians). And Scruton was
an Anglican. So surely he should have
been familiar with the Thirty-Nine Articles about things like what I have been
touching on here, that in the administration of sacraments debates about inner
and outer intention come up. If Scruton
thought John Cage was a charlatan and not a musician the least Scruton could
have done was to articulate his claim in terms of sacramentology. Cage was the kind of man who imputed so much
potency to the act of attentive listening that “it” became the sacrament rather
than the music that a highbrow highflyer like Scruton regarded as the necessary
precondition for the art religion sacrament.
Beethoven’s Ninth and not 4’33”. The Intention of Cage to make Art and the
Intention of his fans to hear his music as Art may not make 4’33” Art but would
that be the case for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Mozart’s Requiem or
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony? For a Dutch Reformed anthropologist of religion
like Gerardus van der Leeuw African American spirituals were as sacred as a
Palestrina mass or a Mozart opera. Guy
Beck has pointed out that van der Leeuw and Rudolf Otto had conceptions of the
holy expressed in music that reached out well beyond Eurocentric concerns but
it is precisely the most Eurocentric conception of the numinous Roger Scruton
kept coming back to in spite of explicitly invoking the influence of Rudolf
Otto. The trouble was that Scruton was the kind of Anglican who saw Anglicanism
as English Christianity and not necessarily as a global expression of Christian
faith. Whether he’d have found much
common cause with Kenyan Anglicans I am not so sure. But it is in Anglican discussion of liturgy
and sacrament that I find all sorts of ways in which partisans of Art Religion
in the Wagnerian mold show themselves to be parasitically dependent on
literally religious discourse that, in the last century and a half, has had
more room for non-European musics to contribute to liturgy and sacrament than
defenders of the Great Tradition of European Art.
Saturday, December 21, 2024
VIZ Media has Hayao Miyazaki compendiums in ebook format now, and Eric Reinders and Susan Napier have books out on his filmography
This month last year the only two films that got me to bother going out to theaters were Godzilla Minus One and Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron.
VIZ Media has been busy re-issuing older publications. Hayao Miyazaki's writings on his films have been compiled in the past but in 2021 VIZ Media made the books available in ebook formats for those who have limited shelf space (They also issued a magnificent new English language translation of Rumiko Takahashi's slice-of-life romantic dramedy masterpiece Maison Ikkoku).
So if you have wanted to read Hayao Miyazaki's own written thoughts about his films check these out.
Starting
Point: 1979-1996
https://www.viz.com/manga-books/book/starting-point-1979-1996/product/3464/digital
Turning Point: 1997-2008
https://www.viz.com/manga-books/book/turning-point-1997-2008-hardcover/product/3463/digital
https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/the-moral-narratives-of-hayao-miyazaki/
The Moral Narratives of Hayao Miyazaki
Eric Reinders
Copyright Date: 2016
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6452-1
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2679-6
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248593/miyazakiworld/
Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art
Susan Napier
Paperback ISBN 9780300248593
eBook ISBN 9780300240962
It's not too surprising, for instance, to read that the director was a Marxist and a leftist like many of his contemporaries but he had an existential crisis of faith in socialism and Marxism when the Cold War ended. He turned toward animistic ideas in the wake of the demise of the Soviet bloc. Reinders notes what just about any Miyazaki fan discovers about him, that he has a flair for creating memorable female characters and has antagonists who can be morally ambivalent rather than outright evil. I'm not what I'd ever call a cinephile but I have liked Kurosawa, Christopher Nolan, Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon and simple broad-brush characters are not particularly the jame of any of these directors.
I'm also a fan of Rumiko Takahashi and if you know her work she revels in wildly flawed protagonists. It's a pattern, I guess.
I was thinking I hadn't blogged about anime in a while and yet I enjoyed The Boy and the Heron and might have to write at least something about it at some point.
holiday song title mash-ups
Picking up where we left off, there's holiday variations
Save the Best for Last Christmas
Happy
Christmas (War is Over the
Hills and Far Away)
Idiot Wind Beneath My Wings (I just has to throw this one in despite it not fitting the theme)
All I
want for Christmas is You Midnight Rambler
one of my siblings came up with these two
Rick Beato has a video on "The Death of Music Genres" which reminds me that as the loss of mono-genre dominance goes Leonard Meyer called it back in 1967 with classical music
The Death
of Music Genres
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-h_OHhtvPU
As Kyle
Gann put it, back in 1967 when Leonard Meyer published a book proposing the
death of any single genre in music being the norm (in classical music) it was
greeted with controversy. Gann
quoted Meyer saying the following:
I should like to
suggest - and, considering the rapidity and frequency with which styles have
followed one another in recent years, the suggestion will probably seem a rash
one - that the coming epoch (if, indeed, we are not already in it) will be a
period of stylistic stasis, a period characterized not by the linear,
cumulative development of a single fundamental style, but by the coexistence of
a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic
steady-state.
That was in 1967.
Gann noted a bit dryly that while this was a revolutionary suggestion
that the “present” of music indicated a post-genre “future” academic musicology
did not get together and hail Meyer’s idea as prescient or accurate. Gann said that what actually happened was
stuff like playing Handel on 200-year-old woodwinds and looking at Fanny Mendelssohn
and looking at the influence of minstrelsy on Broadway musicals. In other words, academics stuck to their ruts
and lanes and did not think through the implications of every style and form of
music the world over being able to exist simultaneously in a potentially
synergistic poly-stylistic steady-state.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3629352.html
Music, the Arts, and
Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture
Leonard B. Meyer
ISBN: 9780226521435
ISBN: 9780226521442
ISBN: 9780226521442
But suppose the
paradigm which posits cumulative change and the discovery of a common style is
no longer pertinent and viable? Perhaps none of the "revolutions"
will be definitive; then astonishment would disappear. Suppose, too, that there
are no "imperatives" of the sort that Boulez assumes (Whose
imperatives? What is "our time" but the totality of actions,
including art works, that take place in it?), and, consequently, that no style
is necessarily superfluous. Suppose, in short, that the present pluralism of
coexisting styles (each with its particular premises and even its attendant
ideology) represents not an anomalous, transient state of affairs, but a
relatively stable and enduring one.
I am suggesting not
only that such a hypothesis is neither theoretically absurd no empirically
impossible but that, once it is adopted, seemingly incompatible pieces of the
puzzling present begins to form an intelligible pattern. If our time appears to
be one of "crisis," it does so largely because we have misunderstood
the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm
has led us to expect a monolithic, all-encompassing style, the cultural
situation has seemed bizarre and perplexing. The "crisis" dissolves
when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and
the delights of diversity are admitted. The question then becomes not is this
style going to be THE STYLE, but is this particular work well-made,
challenging, and enjoyable. pages 171-172
Kyle Gann has elsewhere noted (back in 2007) that it seemed
after the mid-1980s the collective academic narrative stalled. Whereas
composers and musicologists were holding forth on what was probably going to
happen or “ought” to happen in the horizons of music by the 1990s and early
2000s there was not much of anything by way of sweeping histories or
manifestoes.
https://www.kylegann.com/PC070425-NarrativeInterrupted.html
Okay, maybe, but Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of
Western Music was (and is) pretty sweeping. Of course it began as a
funereal observance that mutated into a more chastened observation that
classical music isn’t dying, just changing.
Rick Beato’s video lingers in my mind as a rock (though not
necessarily rockist) variation on an observation about the “death” of genre Leonard
Meyer observed in what’s colloquially called classical music back in 1967.
Bryan Townsend had some thoughts about Beato’s recent video
and, among other things, wrote “I think
it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated
for us.” Sure, but as I hear Beato’s
thoughts I think he’s coming at this more from the angle of exposure and not
the angle of curation. As William
Deresiewicz put it in The
Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of
Billionaires and Big Tech it’s easier than ever to get published and
harder and harder to get monetized for publication. In yet another nod to the notion that artists
are the prophet-priest-seer-king-moral-legislators of civilization we got an account
of how part of the crisis in the humanities is that the writers and poets and
artists who could tell us like it is and help us be those cussed individuals upon
which free societies rely can’t make ends meet enough to keep doing what they
do.
Part of me was sympathetic and part of me was curious
enough to pick up Excellent
Sheep but a big part of me thinks “Well, cry me a river.” Larry Shiner has pointed out that the whole
notion of fine arts as defined in art history is a recent innovation and
invention that can’t even square with how the arts were actually practiced in, say,
the Renaissance. If the Artist as
imagined since the Romantic era wasn’t even how Leonardo worked with other
artists then the “death” of such an artist maybe isn’t as catastrophic or
significant as vocational arts scholars and literary theorists make it out to
be. Sure, someone like Norman Lebrecht
has been bewailing the death of criticism but Jacques Ellul pointed out in The Empire of
Non-Sense that most of human history rolled along just fine with no
arts critics to serve as brokers for patrons.
Who were the critics at newspapers who made Bach and Haydn and Mozart
that musical touchstones they became in chamber music? Well, hey, if autonomous art transcends
constraints and all who needs to cheer for new music? The good stuff will be found out and we could
just gut music education and patronage systems and just trust all the
hard-working musicians will just somehow get heard, right?
The reductio ad absurdum speaks for itself, and yet the
death of genre hardly seems like it is necessarily a problem. My own conviction has been that if there has
been a death of genre over the last century in pop music there has been a
diffusion of “focus” in classical music, too.
The simultaneous co-existence of every style and form is hardly a
problem. Richard Taruskin made a passing
comment in The Ox about how back in the 18th century there were tons
of musical forms and styles and genres and yet nobody thought of the Baroque
era as a rat’s nest of musical incoherence because every genre and form and
style existed within and for a clearly socially articulated social use.
Social use, you say?
Isn’t that reducing art to mere servitude? Adorno contended in Aesthetic
Theory that the “liberation” of art from theology and from service to
throne and altar created a crisis of purpose from which and to which “art” has
zero answers. Jacques Ellul, for his
part, wrote that Adorno correctly grasp the aporia of modern arts, that they
are either reduced to being propaganda on behalf of a state or cultural norm on
the one hand or devolving into hermetically isolated technocratic
experimentation for its own sake that can only ever appeal to insular coteries
on the other. “Pop”, however we define
it, has always been music created in the sausage factory for writers like
Adorno. But Adorno created a double bind
in which tonality was “used up” but pop music had no capacity for large-scale forms
and yet the large-scale forms that had been the domain of “classical music”
were obsolete because in the wake of the presumed death of tonality (and with
the advent of the equal tempered tuning system) nobody could legitimately write
rondos any longer.
As I was saying earlier, Rick Beato’s concern is that
nothing can become a big enough of a hit to create social cohesion if nothing
is big enough to catch on. I take Bryan
Townsend’s point that Taylor Swift is popular and well-known and that a crack
team of pop-meisters from Sweden tend to dominate. This has been taking shape since the Clinton
administration and got discussed a bit in John Seabrook’s The Song
Machine.
Leonard Meyer floated a few ideas about what might happen
moving on from 1967 in Music, the Arts, and Ideas:
The ideal of
individualism and the goal of intense personal expression have now been
repudiated by two of the important ideologies of our time and have been
derogated by some traditional artists. In their place has been substituted the
concept of the work of art as an objective construct. Originality is no longer
tied to the discovery of means expressive of an artist's inner experience, but
to the ordering of materials; and creativity is seen not as an act of
self-revelation, but as a species of problem-solving. Since any style can
constitute a basis for objective construction and for the presentation of
principles of order, such views are not incompatible with the use of past art
works as sources for materials, relational patterns, and syntactic procedures
and norms. Form and technique have thus superseded inspiration and expression.
Logically, all modes of organization and all styles become equally available
and viable. page 188
Well, to that I’d say Meyer was wrong. Ted Gioia has called for Romanticism 2.0 and
the emergence of a new counterculture. I
say we don’t need Romanticism 2.0 because Meyer correctly said we never got out
of Romanticism 1.0! Meyer suggested that
the kinds of artists he called formalists were most likely to become the heroes
of their day but what would that entail?
I think inspiration and expression are not going to go out of style but
I do think Meyer was on to something noting the loss of a shared vocabulary
within which “expression” could be taken as given. If we look at this next
suggestion by Meyer it could be read, here in 2024, as an anticipation of
mash-up culture, sampling, pastiche and other recombinant approaches to genre:
If a work of art is an
impersonal construct, and creation a kind of problem-solving, then experiments
with mixtures of means and materials, either within or between works, need not
constitute an imperfection. On the contrary, the skillful and elegant combinations
of disparate styles (or of ideas borrowed from different works and different
composers) within a single work may become a challenging and attractive
problem. pages 190-191
... if earlier styles
and materials are employed in contemporary art, music and literature, it will
most likely be done by those inclined toward formalism, rather than by those
who still consider works of art to be vehicles for personal expression. One cannot
"use" the expressive quality of a Bach, a Rembrandt, or a Donne. ...
In like manner, it will probably be the formalist rather than the expressionist
who delights in the possibilities of mixing styles and materials from different
epochs within a work or in employing different stylistic models in successive
works.
...
That this is indeed the
case is shown by the fact that it has been avowed and explicit formalists, such
as Eliot and Stravinsky, who have employed past procedures, models, and
materials most patently and most extensively. And we are thus confronted with an
amusing paradox: the end of the Renaissance--of belief in teleology,
individualism, expression, and so forth--has made possible a return to the
styles and materials originally fostered by those beliefs. ... page
191
... If this analysis is correct, it should follow
that in the future a particular past will be favored and explored because of
the specifically artistic problems it poses rather than because of the
ideological position it represents. page
193
Star Wars hadn’t even happened yet and certainly not
steampunk as a subgenre within manga. Meyer’s
examples of T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky as the arch-formalists of the 20th
century in poetry and music were well-chosen because they were both fond of
formal explorations and genre blurring gestures.
My personal interest has been in looking at the ways in
which “pop” and “classical” reception histories among academics have tended to
balkanize. Poptimist and rockist
approaches exist in pop and classical.
The “back to roots” types want their pet genre “redeemed” by being
purged of extraneous or defiling elements.
We don’t have to look too far within classical music for the
formerly-named Future Symphony Institute.
Among fans of rock the back-to-basic guys tend to announce
themselves.
The death of music genres that Rick Beato has observed can
certainly be a real thing but he noticed (I suspect) that this has been
happening for a while. Leonard Meyer
noticed it had been happening in the mid-20th century.
We’re better off if we allow genres and styles to be
treated as flexible realms of the possible.
The demise of grunge doesn’t see me shedding any tears. I actually hated most grunge but I’m not
going to hold it against Rick Beato if he loves the style. He loves Stevie Wonder so we can agree on
that. And here we are half a century
from Innervisions and people still love “Superstition” and if people are
even listening to Cornelius Cardew or Stockhausen, well, okay.
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