I haven't put together my thoughts on John Borstlap's newest book to the point where I could write about it here, for instance, but I can say that if you want to read a book that takes traditions of spirituality seriously and makes a case against materialist reductionism in the arts more effectively than Borstlap has in his new book (and is much cheaper!) you could read Jeremy Begbie's newest book, which I finished reading this week.
Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World by Jeremy Begbie
I was disappointed that Begbie never once addresses ideas in The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps
Begbie's work is in the Anglican tradition and he has written several times that contemporary theological aesthetics will benefit from taking the positions of Calvin and Zwingli seriously. I happen to agree both because it's in the Swiss Reformed tradition (and, yes, Puritanism) that alternatives to post-Schleiermacher art-mysticism can be found and because Begbie is a trained musician and theologian, which means he's in a position to share what he thinks is good and bad about figures like Schleiermacher in pastoral and theological terms (in contrast to Borstlap's treatment of Schleiermacher as a "philosopher" and not the touchstone of liberal Protestant theology from the last two centuries).
Both Abundantly More and The Extravagance of Music are certainly cheaper than Regaining Classical Music's Relevance. Begbie's book is quite a bit cheaper than Borstlap's in fact, and better written and better-argued if I may say so at my own blog. ;)
I might have to write more detailed thoughts in the future but Begbie's book is a fairly easy read. He identifies a variety of reductionist pressures in contemporary thought and proposes that while many of them appear in reductionistic naturalism they also appear in other contexts.
Begbie brackets out four reductionist impulses:
1. evolutionary reductionism, this reductionist impulse attempts to explain the human condition (and/or the arts) in terms of evolutionary paradigms, whether in sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. It can be thought of as a bottom-up approach in which the arts are explained in terms of the hows and whys of "nature".
2. sociocultural reductionism, this is where we tend to find strictly constructivist accounts of the arts, in Begbie's reading, and he considers the proposal that the arts are socially constructed and strictly a reflection of socio-cultural construction to be a kind of photo-negative of evolutionary reductionism. If the evolutionary reductionist impulse chalks everything up to "nature" this reductionism chalks up the arts to cultural and social construction. Neither of these views need be strictly exclusive of each other.
3. linguistic reductionism posits that the arts are valuable to the extent that they convey propositionally verifiable statements and Begbie takes time to point out that while this reductionist impulse can happen in naturalistic thinking it is utterly rife in explicitly Christian confessional contexts. The linguistic reductionist impulse probably most accounts for why Reformed traditions have often been terrible at the arts. If the arts are prized or rejected based on how much propositional content is perceptible in the arts then music loses. This kind of reductionism dovetails all too often with ...
4. utilitarian reductionism is more or less what you might guess it is, and Zhdanov style Socialist Realism fits the bill, but then a utilitarian reductionism can fit almost any "on message" approach to the arts. Along the way Begbie notes that Christians in clerical roles have been historically particularly bad about embracing linguistic and utilitarian reductionist impulses and that we should not make the mistake of assuming that all reductionist impulses brought to bear on the arts come from materialistic naturalists. Amen.
When Begbie describes how the arts have capacities that resist these reductionists pressures he's less inspiring, honestly, because he doesn't come up with anything we haven't read in enconiums to the arts for the last century or so, not least among the Romantics. Yes, the arts can be more full of meanings intended and unintended than can be imputed in reductionistic approaches but as far as that goes David Brown and Gavin Hopps covered that in their book by way of the concepts of "epiphanic affordances" and "transitivity", the idea that an art work or experience can be a catalyst for a sense of the divine or the transcendent on the one hand and that the participation and cognition of the perceiver is active in bringing about this sensation. What Begbie and Brown and Hopps would all agree on is that what you bring to the music helps make the music powerful for you, the old T. S. Eliot axiom that "you are the music while the music lasts" from Four Quartets (if memory serves).
What all three Anglican theologians affirm is that it is simply not the case that this sense of the sublime only comes from classical music or highbrow arts. David Brown and Gavin Hopps go so far as to spell out that you can have a sense of the aspiration toward universal human fellowship just as much in John Coltrane's A Love Supreme as in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Begbie being Anglican he proposes that God the Holy Spirit can make use of the arts to work in the hearts and minds of people. That's the thing there, Begbie is an Anglican so he has a literally Trinitarian conception of how, when and why this or that artistic experience can be unusual. When you affirm the existence of spirits that communicate through the arts you are working with an ancient idea. It's one thing to make a generic case that the arts open up some opportunity for morphic resonance (Borstlap's invocation of Rupert Sheldrake) or to sort of rattle off a few phrases alluding to Schleiermacher and Schopenhauer, and another to say that whether or not this or that artistic moment changes you depends on an actual spiritual experience.
What's more, the Anglicans who propose that God can meet us in the arts don't restrict themselves to the notion that "only" God does this. Borstlap's latest pamphlet (his description of it in a few places) surmises that we need classical music more than ever in an era that is utterly materialistic and nihilistic. Maybe the Dutch are super heathen over there but here in the United States there's hardly a shortage of people who believe in supernatural or preternatural beings and forces.
If Borstlap's defense of the uniquely sacral nature of listening to classical music (or at least the serious kind of classical music) hinges on the belief that it is the art-religious alternative to materialism in days when the dogmas of organized religion are no longer taken seriously there's a potential problem, we have more people believing in more things like telepathy, demons, and past lives than ever before. If the disenchantment of the modern "West" is the basis for a defense of classical music runs into anything like a problem such as that more people in the United Kingdom have asked for exorcisms since the 1970s than at any previous point in the history of the Anglican Church (see works by Frances Young and Brian P Levack) then classical music isn't capable of being an alternative to a kind of inculturated disbelief in the spirits and forces of the beyond because people just don't disbelieve in those things and, what's more, they can listen to whatever music they want to that gives them a feeling of spiritual sublimity.
It doesn't just so happen that in the last year or so I finished a book that argues that the myth of the disenchantment of the West is exactly that, itself a myth. Moreover, if you trawl through the fables and myths of the fairies and sprites you find that the departure of magic is one of the oldest and most reliable tropes in the lore of magic. Conversely, any number of pioneers in the human sciences had a recurring interest in the occult that has been suppressed, and this is particularly the case for Jungian thought. Thus the long-form case in ...
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
Carl Jung was interested in occultism and it informed his work. That Jungians for a few generations sought to dismiss or sideline Jung's occult interests is just one of any number of things Jason Storm discussed in his book. His core thesis could be described as saying academics have misread Max Weber's disenchantment thesis by assuming it is a completed process rather than a continual and continuing process. Weber contended that the contrast is not between religion and non-religion because the people who most disenchanted the contemporary European landscape were Puritans and Calvinists, whose religious commitments we can hardly doubt.
Storm set up a triangular relationship between religion, magic and superstition. The first is hypothetically self-explanatory but Storm is doubtful, being a scholar of religion himself, that we should take as given that the concept of "religion" is pervasive in global human history across time and space. The second, magic, is a category that can describe a variety of not exactly mainstream but not forbidden practices that are not formally recognized religion but which are marginal. Numerological fixations and obsessions on the part of Lutherans composing music might fit into this "magic" category. Superstition describes practices and beliefs that are explicitly rejected within a cultural milieu of an established religious set of norms and this is where Catholic vs. Protestant exorcisms show up, each respectively being the illegitimate "superstition" to the tolerated "magic" of exorcisms that exist within the given milieu--in other words our exorcisms might be magic but they don't fly in the face of our religion whereas yours are superstitious symptoms of illegitimate superstition and superstition ain't the way (bear with me I couldn't not write that, being the Stevie Wonder fan that I am).
So if we live in an era in which belief in evil spirits and angels is rampant and there have been more requests for exorcisms in the Anglican communion than ever before the claim that all of humanity needs classical music as a stand-in for a loss of spirituality due to rampant materialism is, well, not much more than a bare assertion. Any and every Pentecostal Christian the world over listening to and singing songs waiting for the Spirit to descend and bestow an anointed church experience on the faithful doesn't need a Brahms piano sonata for that. This is where my being an Anglican who was once a Pentecostal has given me a kind of providential opportunity to know that spiritual experiences mediated by music happen every Sunday without relying so much on four notes of any work from what Borstlap calls "the central performance tradition", a dubious sleight of hand by which the canonized masterpieces of European classical music are simply works that have stood the test of time in the central performance tradition rather than being sacred texts bequeathed to humanity by the gods of the art of classical music in the long 19th century. I hope you didn't miss the sarcasm there. :)
Borstlap has lamented that too much of life is full of nihilism and a rejection of positive humanistic values. He seems to write as if he is a solitary figure taking a brave stand against nihilistic rejection of the values of civilization and Europe now and then. Well, it turns out there's someone who thinks generations of critical theory have failed to produce positive results because critical theorists only engage scholarship and the world negatively; someone who thinks that if you're going to be a humanist you should say what you are for and not just what you are against; and proposes that recalibrating the criticisms of critical theory with a revival of virtue ethics seems like a promising project for academics to embrace. This leads me to ...
Metamodernism: The Future of Theory by Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Storm spends quite a bit of time slamming what he regards as the self-consuming dead ends of scholars who took the linguistic turn in continental philosophy. He described how there are a surprisingly large number of European academics who pretend to themselves that languages are incommensurate and that translation is impossible. He contends that this is a dubious species-delimited canard. Any peter owner will have figured out within weeks your dog or cat can understand your verbal commands and obey them but we're supposed to believe that translating from French to English or Russian is "impossible" because of post-structuralist bloviating? No dice.
Borstlap can be as against sonic art being primary in European patronage systems as he wants but reading Storm reminded me that Borstlap is more focused on what he is against than what he is for. It's easy to say you want classical music to be more relevant and impactful on people and their lives in two books than to propose how this would actually be done. Education. Education. Education.
Education? Is that going to work? Has it worked? Treating classical music like a civic religious cult that will make people better is probably not going to happen. Now it's not that I don't love music and it's not that I don't love classical music, it's that I'm too steeped in Reformed low-church thought to take the highbrow high-flyer art mysticism position seriously. If Borstlap considers the success of classical music in Asia as partly the result of nations and cultures becoming wealthy enough to invest in the art that practically concedes scholars like Ewell are right! If you need a certain amount of wealth and social clout to even start playing the game at all there's an elitist element. Saying that the art is democratic in some nebulous way because anyone "could" get into it is going to run into the problem of, stretching this metaphor to its limit and invoking historical precedent, the fact that many voters were given "literacy tests" they couldn't even pass to ensure they could not vote. I trust I don't have to actually explain what that refers to and where it came from too much for readers in the United States. For that matter we're coming upon the centennial of Native Americans being given the status of citizens in June here.
Storm's proposal in Metamodernism is that a fusion of critical theory with virtue ethics should be tried, and he names Alasdair MacIntyre and other philosophers along the way. Storm puts his cards on the table and describes himself as a progressive Buddhist of Jewish descent interested in developing scholarship that has positive humanistic goals. He contends that scholars too often smuggle in values and ethics into their work while lying to themselves about this because the smuggling operation is done via methodologies and procedures. Scholars rip into other scholars for methodological problems when the real objection is ethical, that this or that scholar isn't making work that will yield this or that unstated political objective that the reviewing scholar is not quite admitting ought to be prioritized. Conversely, Storm contends that activist scholarship too often plays fast and loose with evidence for the sake of lofty goals. In earlier eras philosophers discussed what The Good Life was and how it ought to be cultivated, how to live a life in such a way where when you inevitably die you can look back on your life and be able to honestly tell yourself you lived a life worth living. This is an ancient preference that has been abjured in contemporary European scholarship and Storm suggests it is due for retrieval.
Okay, sounds fine.
Storm's concern with critical theory is that it is just that, the assessment of how societies fail to achieve parity, justice and the like for various marginalized groups. Absent a positive cultivation of the good life for societies and individuals critical theory is stuck in a self-consuming quest to point out how everyone fails to make the good life equally available to all. The problem is not a rejection of the ideals of the Enlightenment but a failure to get beyond pointing out failures.
Storm seems impatient with what he regards as the meta-academic fixation on etiological protologies. In that sense I suppose I share that frustration and my frustration with Borstlap is somewhat like a frustration I have in the wake of reading Philip Ewell's work, too--these are men who have written about what is wrong but developing a constructive, positive path forward is not on the table. Ewell, at least, affirms that such a goal is the long term aspiration--making music theory more accessible and equitable for everyone. Borstlap wants classical music to regain its relevance, a more quotidian goal that doesn't, I think, account for the possibility Richard Taruskin considered by the time he finished The Ox, his massive history of classical music in Europe and the United States, classical music isn't dying at all but is simply changing. Ewell wants it to keep changing and Borstlap wants it to change but in ways where, it seems, the symphony retains its prestige.
I think a revival of hausmusik is more probable at this stage but that's me being a guitarist.
I have written for years that I think the core problem in both pop music and classical music is that partisans have ignored, downplayed or overtly rejected the historical reality that all these genres interpenetrate and mutually inform each other. In the twenty-first century the fastest way to reduce pop and classical musics to self-perpetuating routines is to insist on their purities. If a value from the Enlightenment is questioning things and exploring things then questioning the nature of our cognitive responses to music and sight is worth exploring. It was unfortunate that after he formulated his philosophy of mind as a project of aesthetic judgment Roger Scruton didn't do much beyond refining the criteria of aesthetic judgment.
Aesthetic judgment is not the same thing as generative creativity. It's one thing to contend for "the great tradition" and another thing to understand, as Jaroslav Pelikan put it in The Vindication of Tradition that ardent criticism of tradition is itself part of tradition. Defenders of tradition can very often be idolators of an imaginary past who show they don't even understand the traditions they believe they are defending because the misconstrue the humanitarian and humanistic goals in attempting to preserve what they regard as sacred means. This could lead a man to decide that Kapustin's preludes and fugues are a mere vulgarization of Bach's 48 yet as David Yearsley pointed out in Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint, a recurring criticism of Johann Sebastian Bach within his own lifetime was he would make use of complex and esoteric musical techniques and use them on utterly trivial musical ideas. Bach was not, in Yearsley's reading of his life and work, worried about making music that was timeless and for the ages. He was making music to have fun and give fun and all the posthumous sacralization of Johann Sebastian Bach's music reveals plenty about "our" reception history of him but doesn't necessarily reflect what were, in the composer's actual lifetime, positive and negative appraisals of his music.
Borstlap's whole approach is predicated on what I think Jeremy Begbie would regard as a paradoxically reductionist conception of what counts as serious music and how humans came to make that music. Begbie had a simple counter-argument to what he regarded as a kind of evolutionary/biological/naturalistic reductionism, the idea that there is a kind of "floor" of knowledge from which all things can be explained such as proposing that humans make music because of some evolutionary advantage conferred upon us by the nexus of traits that allow us to make music--the problems are that the proverbial "floor" keeps dropping out from us as we find depths within depths and particles in particles; alternately, if consciousness emerged from a bottom-up evolutionary paradigm this simply doesn't escape the proposal that we are simply reflections of the universe. I.e. if you posit that humans evolved and reflect the universe then you are not actually claiming coherently that there is any transcendental at all. This would be where John Borstlap's claim that in the evolution of human intelligence the universe finally became self-aware is just, well, a claim that is a claim of faith. A fideistic confession that you think humans evolving means the Universe finally knows it exists is a claim, and it is not really so different a claim as anything in traditional Jewish, Christian or Buddhist teachings as such. If anything such a claim smacks into the problem of why art, or music, would suggest that the cosmos is self-aware only on account of the evolution of humanity. No matter where from the floor you start it is not a sign you will reach the ceiling, if the ceiling exists.
Jason Storm's proposal that we drop the idea that language use is unique to the human species begins to seem sensible by comparison. After all, we humans know dogs can sit when they are told to.
Yet for all that I have a different set of dissents from Borstlap's project. I write as a Christian with an interest in Christian dogmatics. I can potentially, in the future, riff on how perichoresis and circumincession in Orthodox and Catholic traditions can be interpreted in light of what we know about proprioception as metaphorical attempts to work backwards from the ways in which all our knowledge is somatically mediated to a way of reconceiving and recalibrating musical time and space in light of Trinitarian dogmatics to dismantle the idea of music having a sacramental function "only" if it is up to snuff for some art-mystic liturgy. the bad faith of a project like Borstlap's is not so much the part about wanting "serious" music to have serious and positive results in the lives of listeners but that he only grants this possibility to his preferred musical styles. Yet criticism of beautiful music as being a sign of guilt in the midst of injustice goes back to the prophets Amos and Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible.
If John Borstlap wants to develop a clearer "sacramentology" of why his favorite music bestows saving graces on his listeners he has more work to do. Does the sacrament have its special power in light of the right words being said in the right order in the right way? Couldn't that be construed as magic? Or does the sacrament have its power in light of the shared spirit in which it is received? See, Christians have thousands of years of thinking about issues like this. Partisans of art-religious mysticism generally don't impress me as the sorts of people who have any competency whatsoever in discussing, defining or considering the workings of sacraments.
Now for an atheist like Philip Ewell talking about sacraments is moot and yet, as I have written before, to read Ewell describe the atrocities of whiteness and anti-blackness against blacks is to read a man describing the harmful influence of what in Christian traditions would be called powers and principalities. It doesn't just so happen I've read African pastors and theologians discussing the powers and principalities. Having read Jason Storm a bit (just two books) in the last year or so what seems to me like a really interdisciplinary project is to interpret work by Philip Ewell via Charles W Mills and refract their observations on the racial contract through African and Native American theologians like Esther Acolatse, Robert Ewusie Moses, Richard Twiss and Randy Woodley to explore how Christians could contribute to an examination of the influence of powers and principalities on cultural enterprises like music. In a phrase, Eurocentric art-religion is precisely the kind of power and principality Christ overcame at the cross on Good Friday and Christians have the opportunity to explore how live out Christ's conquest of those kinds of powers in music-making life.
Jason Storm has suggested that it's better to put your cards on the able about what your metaphysical and ethical commitments are so that people don't misunderstand where you're coming from but also so you don't misrepresent to yourself what you want to do. I grew up with a family where spiritual warfare stuff was kind of foisted on me and I wanted to get a clearer sense of what (if any of it!) in Pentecostal spiritual warfare jargon had any plausible connection to biblical texts and how much of it was a post hoc kludge. As I have read Enoch studies and considered the ways Jewish demonologies evolved in response to imperial occupations I think contemporary social scientific appraisals of spiritual warfare movements are doomed to fail because they replicate scapegoating dynamics by just flipping the script. It's like saying the only kinds of people who should go to Hell are the kinds of people who believe Hell exists and that real people go there. To say that white evangelicals believe in demons and this is why they're threats to democracy is a bad faith assertion. As Brian Levack pointed out, plenty of Enlightenment figures had no problems affirming belief in demonization! Merely regarding white Christians as the demon of disorder flips the script without changing it.
Conversely, as I had trudged through books on theological aesthetics spanning a century of thought I see that there is plenty of room for aesthetic pluralism as an outworking of ecumenical Christian hospitality and inter-faith dialogue ranging from Gerardus van der Leeuw through to Hans Rookmaaker and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Christian theological aesthetics have questioned the art mysticism of the 19th century persistently in the last century. What's more, considering all my brothers and sisters in Christ across Africa and Asia I find it untenable, as a Christian, that the "central performance tradition" of a select few countries in Europe have some spiritual treasure that is inaccessible to black people in Africa and the United States if they don't partake of it. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, giver of life who gives life as freely to everyone in Africa and Asia as in Europe. If you don't believe in spirits don't pretend that music by mere flesh and blood mediates some divine presence if it is properly received like some kind of sacrament. Even old J. S. Bach supposedly said that he played the notes as they were written but God made the music. Bach, in this lore, was enough of a Lutheran to confess that the work of the Holy Spirit is the work of the Holy Spirit and not intrinsic to the notes on the page or even the executant.
Borstlap wrote over at his blog that genius alternately means to have a muse or spirit guide of a kind or to be notably better than average at something and that, either way, there aren't geniuses in our day and age. I have found this claim to be a bad faith one on both counts. It's not as though belief in guardian spirits and so on has vanished. Any Native American who goes on a spirit quest and finds a guardian spirit could have a genius regardless of questions of the metaphysical or ontological existence of such spirits. That such people with guardian spirits might have or make songs Borstlap would not consider good music is both moot and material to Borstlap's career as a writer. Having a genius in the old sense of a spirit was no guarantor that the spirit would give you "good" songs. Alternately, the definition of genius as referring to better-than-average skills ensures every age will have geniuses simply because some proportion of musicians will be above some form of "average". So in both senses of his usage of "genius" Borstlap's contention that there aren't geniuses in our day rests upon bad faith surmises built into the definitions. It's possible for a musical genius to exist and simply have what used to be called bad taste.
But, beyond all of this, to lament the state of classical music whether for its unconfronted racism or for its failure to attain the sublime is to stay in the realm of etiological protologies. I don't doubt that both Ewell and Borstlap want there to be a "forward" to embrace. I think Ewell's case is more persuasive even if I wish he had been a bit more like Charles Mills on some issues. Mills distinguished between the beneficiaries of the racial contract and its signatories. I think Ewell "almost" made a case that Schenker was one of the signatories of the racial contract in Mills' usage and that this can be established from Schenker's correspondence. But at the same time I don't think that music theory by itself can rectify the harms of the past. What we need is some kind of path forward that draws upon theories to explore new ways of thinking about the relationships between styles of music that theorists and historians have too often decided to keep separate.
One of the paradoxes of my reading in the last ten years is that it seems that social trinitarian reflections have easily established a foundation for aesthetic pluralism predicated on the Triune community while reflections on the ontological Trinity reveal questions about and rejection of the receptacle concept of space and time going far back as Thomas Torrance ... yet no attempt to apply these theological observations to aesthetics seems to have been attempted. My concern, writing as a low church Calvinist Anglican Christian is that it seems that theological aesthetics has been a bit inwardly curved, focused on solving problems that amount to the internal perception of problems of prestige. Why do Christians so often fail to contribute meaningfully to the life of the mind in the arts? Mark Noll covered that well in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind decades ago. In very real ways Edwards screwed us over by throwing his intellectual and philosophical weight behind defending revivalism. Revivalism in itself has not netted cultural productivity as many might understand it in the arts.
Or has it? Camp meeting songs can be really, really fun to sing. If we entertain some potentially caustic ideas we might say that highbrow white church cultures have produced relatively little of note in American settings where as ever since Anthony Heilbut's 1970s book scholars have largely accepted that black Pentecostalism profoundly shaped American popular music. I am not sure as much has been done as could be done to mediate Pentecostal and Anglican cultural idioms in music. I think it can actually be done and that there are more than enough resources in theological aesthetics for a synthesis of church music traditions to occur.
Musicology has seemed too disconnected from histories of religion to draw upon the range of theoretical possibilities offered by comparative study. I read Jason Yust's Organized Time and liked it quite a bit but I got to the end and thought of how Yust's different versions of musical time and space could be interpreted as parallel to Aquinas' distinctions between filiation, procession and spiration (and I could throw in Bavinck if I felt like it for building on that distinction in Trinitarian dogmatics).
What if I run with the idea that racial supremacist narratives and values can be interpreted, maybe in metaphorical ways a la Albert Kabiro wa Gatumu's work, as powers and principalities? Or Robert Ewusie Moses' work in Practices of Power, perhaps?
One of the great failures on both sides of the Iron Curtain was how power blocs dealt with African diaspora music. The US and USSR had ambivalent to tendentious relationships with jazz and alternately found it useful or harmful. Contemporary scholarship that ignores the connections between the black church traditions and black popular styles may miss a nexus from which explorations of musical fusion and inter-marriage may be not only feasible but relatively easy. I say this as someone whose father was Native American and mother was white. I know firsthand that inter-racial marriages have happened plenty in the Puget Sound area. If music scholarship is devoted to categorizing musics as white and black that may be an obstacle to the kind of synergistic all benefiting all ideal that I think many music scholars would swiftly affirm is a goal they want to promote. It's a goal I want to promote if it's possible for me to do so. I love Stevie Wonder songs and Duke Ellington pieces and Scott Joplin rags and Blind Willie Johnson recordings just as I love Haydn string quartets and guitar sonatas by Wenzel Thomas Matiegka and Angelo Gilardino and choral music by William Byrd and ballets by Stravinsky.
The crises in musicology seems to be the gap between the ideals many affirm at the level of political commitments and traditions of liberalism and the apparently abject failure to live those out. Highbrow art mysticism has shown itself in the last two centuries to make the situation worse rather than better. The problem with the music of dead white guys is not necessarily the music itself, as any number of scholars have already pointed out at some length, it's the canon of dead white guys has functionally been closed and there's no room for new revelation. The canonized dead white guys did not take that approach so far as I can tell, least of all Bach(s).
The reason I appreciate reading Jeremy Begbie's work is that he is a theologian and musician who has proposed that if music scholars and religion scholars compare ideas there can be mutual benefit. I agree. Perhaps the fastest and sturdiest way to demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of Eurocentric art-religion is to show how incompetent so many of its partisans are about the religions they think art is a suitable substitute for.
But that's not something I want to get into. Mostly this has been, I admit, been a sprawl of writing on a weekend.
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