on why AI has not changed everything when it comes to music, drawing upon arguments from Gordon Graham, Andrei Orlov, and Guy L Beck on the distinctions between statues and idols in cultic activity

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2024/06/friday-miscellanea_14.html
https://www.persuasion.community/p/music-just-changed-forever 

…
But look further down the corporate food-chain, and everyone else can see the benefits of AI clearly—mostly because they’re probably already routinely using ChatGPT on the sly to do their work.
For example, if your job involves boring admin tasks like reformatting address data to move it from one database to another, or building spreadsheets with complicated Excel formulas, or writing boilerplate legal disclaimers… then of course AI can make a big difference to how you work.
Even if AI was to develop no further than its capabilities today, it is already world-changing, as it represents billions of small, marginal gains in productivity. And I think this extends to AI-generated music. Even if AI music doesn’t improve any further, it already represents a profound change to the music industry.
Like the high status jobs I describe above, I don’t think it will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.
But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances where music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.
For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music” for the entire world, and it will have terrible consequences for many people working in the music industry today. Musicians who earn a living making adverts or taking commissions from el-cheapo outsourcing websites like Fiverr are basically fucked—just like “low-level” visual artists and copywriters are by Midjourney and ChatGPT.
Nevertheless, I feel deeply, deeply conflicted.
On the one hand, yes, I place a high value on the sense of “authenticity” in the music I listen to. That’s why I’m a bad-ass punk rocker: To me, the purest form of musical expression is a circle pit in front of a sweaty band who can barely play their instruments, in a small, dank venue, where the toilets should be considered a public health hazard.
And because I’m straight-edge it is only in settings like this, waving my fist in the air as we collectively stick it to The Man, that I ever really experience something like a feeling of “transcendence.”

That’s the thing about Art Religion, it still has to take place in a cultic setting with the appropriate rituals observed and the right kinds of fellow believers able to feel the spirit.  While there may be some religious fundamentalists and transhumanists who believe otherwise, spirit possession has not historically been auto-generated by bot scripts and the same goes for personal gnostic apotheosis.

 
Artificial intelligence can be relied upon to generate content that replicates the ambiance and mood of this or that art, these or those songs, and so on but arts writers and creatives want to believe deep in their souls that AI can’t replicate soul.  But even in the ancient world nobody believed that every carved statue had the function and powers ascribed to an idol.  Basically nobody believed that and I bring this up as a comparison case for what contemporary writers are calling the distinction between AI generated songs and “the real thing”.

A little idol was just a little carved statue until it is subjected to an inspiration ritual that imbues it with life, at least within the thoughts of those who participate in a given cult. How do I know this?  Well, I’m on a slow but I hope steady marathon of reading books by Andrei Orlov.
Andrei Orlov states in Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism that people who created statues that would become idols had rites and rituals that were believed to inspire the statues with the status of being idols. On page 30 he writes, “Similar to the Near Eastern traditions of cultic images that include the “ritual of activation” for cultic divine imagines, Adam’s introduction to the world also includes a ritual”. On page 36 Orlov continues his discussion of Jewish apocryphal writings in which Adam is described as bearing the divine image: 

… we must outline several important elements of this “activation” ritual that reoccur in the stories of Enoch, Jacob, and Moses being endowed with the divine image:
1.    The protagonist’s form resembles the deity’s form. Adam is first described as being created in the image of God and then later becomes understood as an icon of the deity—the image of God.
2.    The motif of angelic veneration
3.    The motif of angelic opposition /rejection
4.    The glorious rendition of the embodied image of God.

For those who don’t know of it, there is a tradition that holds that when Enoch ascended into Heaven he became like God and was transfigured into Metatron, a human who nevertheless bore and presented the divine image.  I’m also working through a book on The Transfiguration in Christian tradition by Patrick Schreiner that is, so far, pretty good.
 
I’m sparing you a lot of details but the point I am making is that distinguishing between which artworks (as we’d call them now) were real functioning idols and which were just things you’d have on your person is an old distinction.  Technocratic arts writing uses a different nomenclature but some of the concerns remain the same. 
 
The thing I notice more and more over the years is that advocates of Old Time Art Religion tend to not think at all about liturgy and sacrament. Nor do they think about how pervasively the arts were practiced as expressions of religious and cultic impulses and not as “art”.  Scholars have been pointing out in the last sixty years that “art” was an eighteenth century invention and innovation, along with the associated concept of aesthetics.  The idea that there were timeless and eternal works of art expressing the highest and deepest notions of humanity was a European and in some ways Eurocentric invention that can’t even be squared with the ways Europeans thought about music from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries of the common era, not least those that self-identified as Christians.
 
If you’re game for a door-stopper sized book on just Christians in the sixteenth century on music then Chiara Bertoglio has a book for you! 
 
But lately I finished a couple of books by scholars of religion and philosophy who have discussed art and religion and religion and musicology.  The books are as follows
 
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-re-enchantment-of-the-world-9780199265961?cc=us&lang=en&
The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion
Gordon Graham
Published: 20 December 2007
210 Pages
ISBN: 9780199265961
 
https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Musicology-of-Religion
 
Musicology of Religion
Theories, Methods, and Directions
By Guy L. Beck
Hardcover : 9781438493114, 368 pages, May 2023
Paperback : 9781438493107, 368 pages, November 2023
 
I’ll discuss the Gordon Graham book first because he concludes two things.  The first is that the arts have failed to be a viable surrogate for religion in Europe for a couple of simple reasons.  The first is perhaps the most insoluble problem and it was one that Theodor Adorno zeroed in on in Aesthetic Theory, the arts gained their autonomy from the doctrines of throne and altar at the price of a crisis of legitimacy and purpose from which the arts can never recover.  With the terseness of a Scottish Episcopalian cleric, Graham noted that you can’t simultaneously want your classical music liberated from the responsibilities of being at the center of a civic cult on the one hand, while, on the other, insisting that classical music be the centerpiece in such a new post-religious civic cult.  Either the art of music is severed from all social purposes or it has some civic and social function for which it can succeed or fail.  You can’t insist both that it be severed from social responsibility while insisting it be granted social prestige.  Though Graham did not write this I consider it an outworking of his observations, the royals and clergy of old had elevated status and they recognized that that status meant they had responsibilities of some kind to the people beneath them.  Art autonomists want the artist or poet to be some unaccountable seer-priest-prophet-king-mage who is accountable only to Art and should also get paid.
 
Richard Taruskin used to make fun of high modernists who would write “who cares if you listen?” There is a kind of mentality in the art for the sake of art types, whether high modernist or not, where if you boil down what they claim the arts “do” for the deeply artistic people you get something remarkably like ex opere operato!  As Chiara Bertoglio put it, plenty of Catholic clergy were sure that the sacrament of Eucharist, if it was validly administered, was legitimate even if there was no congregation of Christians to partake of it.  Now whether or not any Christians who did show up and partook of the sacrament was another matter still, because those who did not receive the sacrament with a proper disposition might not benefit from it.  And that, right there, is basically John Borstlap’s Art Religion sacramentology in a nutshell, which ironically resembles the eucharistic dogmatics of some European Catholics from the sixteenth century.  And also partisans of other kinds of art mysticism and art asceticism for that matter.  Borstlap can cast his arguments as “psychology” but his ideas about classical music and its capacity for spiritual empowerment bear a curious resemblance to straight up sacramental doctrine, whether he’s any kind of Christian or not.
 
Gordon Graham has written a bit about how European arts are reliant upon the religious concepts artists reject in order to make sense of what they think the arts are supposed to do.  Artists who don’t understand what the liturgy and sacraments were actually expected to do can hardly develop arts that can do “better” what those rites and rituals were believed to do.  This has been the problem of Art Religion in general.  More particularly, Graham pointed out that partisans of art as the new better-than-religion tend to be cognitive elites and yet nothing suggests religion that has no place for ordinary uneducated people is going to accomplish what religion once did. 
 
That’s another point to ponder, if so many of the partisans of Art Religion have been lapsed Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and high liturgical types then they won’t grasp the storefront Pentecostal church ethos.  Their art religion would be all Palestrina and no Blind Willie Johnson or it might be all Blind Willie Johnson and no Palestrina depending on what variation of art mysticism they were peddling, or both (what I would personally prefer). 
 
As a lecturer on Hindu and Buddhist thought Guy Beck has a new book in which he contends that musicology and religion scholarship should have a far more robust exchange going on than either field currently has.  He’s impressively up to speed on Christian theological aesthetics and musicological considerations, citing Jeremy Begbie, Frank Burch Brown, Philip Stoltzfus and has a great observation about how among the partisans of musical mysticism a huge number of them were either practicing or lapsed Lutherans.  I have been thinking for years that it seems significant that Germanophile art mysticism evolved in Germany and emphatically not in Switzerland.  Given the skepticism Bullinger, Zwingli and other Swiss Reformers had toward music (right down to rejecting the very idea that music in itself had any kind of apotropaic or anti-demonological capacity) this is not too surprising.  For the record I am more sympathetic to the Swiss Reformed approach to music than he German Lutheran one for reasons I won’t get into here.
But I am also ex-Pentecostal and I take Guy Beck’s observation that music always had a ritual and religious function and that the invention of music divorced from ritual and cultic function in Europe was a new and odd thing, something voiced by Gordon Graham in his earlier book.  Graham went so far as to contend that the whole idea of art for the sake of art was a European invention, a very modern one, and one that may have already functionally come and gone.  Art doesn’t replace religion and it hasn’t replaced religion, and it turns out to be wish-fulfillment of a very high order on the parts of art partisans who don’t know what religion “did” (or does) and so can’t create art that can replicate what it does.
 
Or can it?  This is where the Swifties come in, I suspect, because when cults form and you have a Church of Coltrane or Beatlemania or Swifties or venerators of The Eagles you’ve got a cultic practice that gets in the zone of religious devotion.
 
Even among the most heathen of heathen arts writers there is this vestigial desire to explain the appeal of the arts in terms of spirit possession.  Group participation rather than individual gnosis is the surest test that the arts have fulfilled a social function resembling the practice of a religion.  But if this is the case then the Swifties are more legitimately a religious cult formed around one woman’s musical career than anything proposed by the Foundation for the Future of Classical Music (formerly the Future Symphony Institute).  Do people sing along with Taylor Swift songs?  Yes, there’s a shared hymnody.  Do they dance to her music?  Sacred dance is an ancient art according to the Dutch Reformed philosopher of religion and art historian Gerardus van der Leeuw.  Van der Leeuw contended that in ancient societies dance, music, ritual veneration and religion were all fused.  It was the creation of the concept of the autonomy of the arts that sundered their capacities, respectively, to initiate us into things divine.  So if we take Gerardus van der Leeuw’s account into account, art for the sake of art robbed the arts of their capacity to contribute to the cultic life of a society. 
 
Sure, a Swiftian cult might be more Dionysian than Apollonian but was anyone going to expect otherwise?
 
Group possession turns out to be a motif that emerges in music criticsm.  I’ve looked at this quote from Greil Marcus in other settings and it’s a long quote:
https://yalereview.org/article/greil-marcus-why-i-write

…
I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called sanctified culture, and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but ought to be called everyday culture—the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music that we listen to, the movies that we see, the museum objects we pass by or are fixed by, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so moving—are false. Nearly every­thing I’ve written is based on that conviction, and on the learned belief that there are depths and satisfactions, shocks and revelations, in blues, rock ’n’ roll, detective stories, movies, and television as rich and profound as those that can be found anywhere else.
In 2015, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, I took part in a public conversation with the late conservative philosopher and musicologist Roger Scruton. In his book The Soul of the World, about the disappearance of the sacred in the modern world and how it might be retrieved and restored, he had defined music, in a passage I quoted back to him, as “a perceived resolution of the conflict between freedom and necessity made available in a space of its own…a reality that cannot be grasped from the ordinary cognitive standpoint.” I said I thought that the dimension of the sacred, of what could not be grasped by the everyday unthinking mind, could be present in any music—pop music, blues, rock n’ roll, jazz—where the listener, whether alone or face-to-face or a hundred rows back, can at any time be overcome with a sense of unlikeliness, of the listener’s own inability to account for what is happening—any music where the listener is struck with a sense of awe, a sense of impossibility, a sense that something is taking place beyond intention, that the composer’s or artist’s or performer’s intention cannot account for the sense one receives of the presence of some force outside the ordinary thinking mind, the intervention of some external intelligence or even gnosis.
…
Scruton demurred. “Let me be strictly honest,” he said. “I think that the classical tradition, as I understand it, is the greatest achievement of Western civilization and it contains within it a reflection on the human condition which has no match elsewhere. That is a heretical view from lots of standpoints, but that is what I think.”
…
Those occurrences, those tiny critical events, can generate a transformative power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person next to you, or even anyone else on earth, if it reaches any of them at all. Art produces revelations that you might be unable to explain or pass on to anyone else, but revelations that, if you are a writer, you might try desperately to share, in your own words, in your own work.
What is the impulse behind art? “I have to be moved in some way,” the guitarist Michael Bloomfield said in 1968, explaining why he didn’t like the San Francisco bands of the time. “They just don’t move me enough. The Who moves me, their madness moves me. I like to be moved, be it by spectacle, be it by kineticism, be it by some throbbing on ‘Papa ooh mau mau’ as a chorus, a million times over.” And that, he said, was why he played.
Bloomfield was saying, in his way, what I am trying to say: whatever language is the language of your work, if I can move any­one else as that work moved me—as “Gimme Shelter,” Al Pacino’s voice in The Godfather, that painting by Titian, moved me from one place to another, from this place on earth to one three steps away, where the world looks not the same—if I can move anyone even a fraction as much as that, if I can spark the same sense of mystery, and awe, and surprise, as that, then I’m not wasting my time.

Spirit possession by another name. I have literally said this before so let me literally repeat myself.
 
In the philosophy, anthropology or sociology of religion what Greil Marcus attempts to capture and convey is what it feels like and what thoughts come to mind when you are, as it were, caught up in the spirit of something.  The arts can introduce you to unfamiliar selves, to borrow a concept from the title of a fascinating book by Reed Carlson. Carlson wrote a dissertation on spirit possession in Jewish scriptures that I would commend to anyone who can actually get through a doctoral dissertation on a heady concept that is overlooked in much study of the Hebrew Bible (yeah, I know there are caveats about how singularly Hebrew the Jewish scriptures are because of Aramaic passages in Daniel but I'm a lowly blogger who never managed to go to seminary or divinity school but I hope I have readers of goodwill).  
 
The rupture that can be observed in debates about what artificial intelligence in the arts is used for may come down to deciding whether we favor a social role for the arts that is public, civic and cultic or whether it is for a personal mystical or ascetic form of apotheosis.  We don’t have to pick just one or the other, and it may be characteristic of an irrationalism in our age that writers about the arts insist on dualisms that do not even necessarily reflect what actually religious people of the past had to say about music.  For those who want music to lead to personal apotheosis then artificial intelligence could be anathema because it offloads the most artisanal aspects of artisanship to non-human production. For those who want to use music for some socially cohesive aim (hold music?) artificial intelligence might be useful and, well, getting all the way back to James O’Malley, you’ve got the concert cults that can’t be replicated by bot generated muzak.
 
If Greil Marcus emphasized that criticism should replicate the sense of sharing one spirit, group possession, other authors are committed to the idea of personal gnosis.  Old Time Art Religion comes in a variety of forms.  Thus William Deresiewicz:
https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/477-thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-art

…
Art, I have preached, is for bildung, self-development, especially within the context of an undergraduate education. Art helps you to become a deeper, freer version of yourself, etc., etc., blah blah blah, you’ve heard the song a thousand times. So what’s the difference between that and “art is good for us”? If there is one, it is this. The whole modern idea—the liberal idea—is that the group isn’t all. The state, the clan, the tribe: that within these we carve out space for the individual (think of the Bill of Rights, as it dwells within the Constitution); that carving out space for the individual (“to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men”) is indeed the whole point of the thing. But that space is always under siege, mainly by people who think they know what’s good for us: by the church ladies or, now, the progressive commissars, who are really just militant church ladies. The point of art-for-bildung, as I understand it, is to help you to become an individual—a cussed, wayward, stubborn individual, with your own ideas and purposes—not to fit you to the group. Is it contradictory to try to use the setting of an institution, a university, to teach young people to be individuals? It is. It would be better not to have to. But that is what we have
…
Art is for increasing life. That, I believe, after all the other purposes receive their due, is really what it’s for—why we revere it, why we give our hearts to it. What do I mean by increasing life? How can we live more, given that we can’t live longer? Through attention and intensity. Being fully present to the world, and feeling without reservation: the two things that making art requires and that experiencing it involves. “Being in love,” Tim Kreider writes, “is one of the only times when life is anything like art,” but the reverse is also true. Art is one of the only times when life is anything like being in love. Attention, intensity. It is also one of the only times when waking life is anything like dreaming. I awaken from a dream, from its saturation of meaning and feeling, its world of color and complete fulfillment, its crowd of presences, of distant friends, old lovers, dead parents, to the drabness of quotidian life, to the narrowness of my existence, to my same old dismal self. Oh yeah, it’s me again. How can I regain that paradise, which was here just a moment ago? Only through art: through music, through story, through the alchemy of verse. I was listening to Abbey Road the other day. Somewhere between “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Golden Slumbers,” I finally understood Nabokov’s definition of aesthetic bliss: “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” It is in this respect, and this one only, that art is utopian (and the reason that it gets dragooned for service to political utopias, which are a completely different kind of thing). Art connects us with another world, which has no place in ours. That world is, to use a term at which my reason recoils, the spirit world. Traditional societies did not feel the need to justify what we call art. Its purpose was obvious to them: to conjure spirits, to converse with divinity, to tap the source of being. Art is a fountain of spirit—that’s the closest I can come to it, though I’m thinking less of water than of magma. There is a crack, somewhere. Something flows, from somewhere. We gather around it; we build temples to it, which we call theaters and museums; we worship its earthly channels, whom we call geniuses; we talk about it endlessly. We may even posit that the thing that our existence is for is art.

In other words, your soul (if you have one) will be saved by deep reading, whether you pursue formal education or not.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/deep-reading-will-save-your-soul
 
But even the most socially conservative types of writers regard the arts as a source of epiphany.  Take Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative.

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2023/10/arts-sources-epiphany-michael-de-sapio.html
It is true that religiously conservative Christians need to be reminded that the human imagination has positive uses, and thus Wilfred McClay argues for “the baptism of the imagination”.

https://adfontesjournal.com/web-exclusives/in-search-of-the-baptism-of-the-imagination/
I’m enough of a Calvinist to know John Calvin regarded the human imagination as a factory of idols but we all have an imagination all the same. 
 
How the imagination God has given us as humans can be disciplined toward proper love of God and neighbor is a never-ending project.  To affirm that our imaginations are in many respects broken doesn’t mean we don’t attempt to discipline our imaginations.  In this respect various writers regarded as “woke” have a clearer understanding of those concepts than the reflexively anti-woke.  In a similar way socialist realism bit the bullet on the question of whether music needed to abide by codes establishing social responsibility.  That it became doctrinaire and stifling is not a surprise but Richard Taruskin relished pointing out that during the Cold War people on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain pined for what seemed to be the relative liberation promised by the ethos of the Other. Soviet composers yearned to play a bit with post-tonal serialist ideas that were suffocating orthodoxies in Western academic music programs. American composers thrilled to the idea of music having so big and important a role in the civic life of the Soviet Union who might have been liquidated in mere months for their social or political actions depending on who was in charge.  The grass was not greener on the other side but the two superpowers made it their business to spray-paint their lawns with particularly enticing emerald hues.
 
Spray-painting the grass green is what I believe is going on with artificial intelligence.  To say that AI relieves us of the tedium of translating data from tables to other tables makes a kind of sense.  I’ve done tedious database work in my lifetime.  Generating tedious reports that get read by a select few has no glamor.  Whether it’s the highbrow gnostic apotheosis form of art religion or the lowbrow group possession states of punk and pop, artificial intelligence may replicate the artisanship or artisanal aspects of art but it lacks the inspiring cultic rites through which humans have decided their idols are touched by divinity and in-breathed with the breath of gods. 
 
But when the idea is put that way this comes back around to the question of whether or not the arts (or Art) pulled off the feat of doing for Religion what Religion can no longer do to begin with.  If Art has not supplanted Religion then whatever made Religion distinctive(in a probably provincial 19^th century Eurocentric sense of the term “religion”, I’m afraid) was not successfully replicated by Art and thus would not be replicated by AI.  The carved statutes remain the carved statues without cultic transformations.  This may be the point that writers like O’Malley and Marcus and Deresiewicz have all attempted to make, though without recourse to such explicitly religious terminology.
 
I have not started into Bach Against Modernity because I’ve been reading Gordon Graham and Guy L Beck, but Gordon Graham posed a question in his book on art and religion that may reside in the newer book--why do we, who have been told that music is an autonomous art and Bach was among its greatest champions, declare that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach is the pinnacle of autonomous music when any and every church historian and scholar of religion could point out that this idea of autonomous music was not a criterion Bach subscribed to?  It is the height of anachronism to defend the greatness of J. S. Bach’s music on the basis of perfectly autonomous music that transcended the historical constraints of his time and place and sources of patronage when, as Gordon Graham pointed out, all of Bach’s music was occasional and functional.  This transmutation of Bach’s overtly functional music into something that transcended time and place and patronage was, in fact, the kind of argument musicologists and partisans in the Soviet Union used to separate Bach the Lutheran from Bach the canonized composer of classical music as documented by Pauline Fairclough in Classics for the Masses.  As the joke had it, perform the sacred work any time you want as long as it’s not on the designated holiday, creating the double bind of Soviet musicians and concert-givers having to know the Christian liturgical so well as to never stage The Matthew Passion of Bach on Good Friday lest it observe the Christian liturgical calendar.
 
To argue that classical music, for instance, is unstained by the blood of the despots and tyrants who bankrolled it is to argue that classical music has the function of a sacrament.  It was Catholic eucharistic doctrine that eventually proposed that if the sacrament were properly administered by a qualified person then even if that person was evil or insincere the proper administration was what counted.  It counted even if nobody partook of the bread and wine and the elements were elevated.  Doesn’t that sound at least a teensy bit like Art Religion, whether of the Milton Babbitt “Who cares if you listen?” variety or the cult of Beethoven variety?  If Nazis were not transformed by Schubert into better people then the dogma that says as such, that classical music should have made them better and purer people if only they had understood its true psychology and received its true spirit, is nothing short of a eucharistic doctrine, a theology of sacrament disguised behind a dogmas of autonomous art.
 
But if a person subscribes to such an approach to autonomous musical art then why can’t it be auto-generated by artificial intelligence?  It doesn’t just so happen debates about how “cyber” sacraments can actually be have been going on since the emergence of covid-19.  Guy Beck’s plea in The Musicology of Religion has been that musicologists and scholars of religion interact more and in more transdisciplinary ways. He proposes that the Window theory (that music is a window into a divine unseen realm) and the Mirror theory (beloved of sociologists and constructionists) don’t have to be viewed as opposed views, just as within religious traditions it has not really been the case that personal apotheosis in knowledge and group spirit possession have not actually been seen as opposing trends in religious traditions.  To take up Beck’s observations and walk one step further with them, it is probably because musicologists and music historians traffic in intra-scholastic dualisms that they think in the dualisms laid down by their academic forbears, dualisms that are in key respects moot and tedious within the study of religion.