https://www.bu.edu/cfa/about/contact-directions/directory/jason-yust/
Ethan Hein has recently blogged about Jason Yust’s April
2024 article, if memory serves, on tonality as a term that came into usage in
musicology in the 19th century. Yust has argued that the term “tonality”
is so freighted with racist and white supremacist baggage, we should reconsider
the ways in which it is used. I didn’t get to read Yust’s piece but I did read Ewell’s
response back in April this year.
Ethan Hein describes Yust’s essay after establishing Yust’s
credentials in writing about music. I
found Organized
Time to be a remarkably dense but also a remarkably rewarding read.
It’s worth reading just for the passing observation that in 18th
century sonata forms it was actually not uncommon for secondary themes to start
on non-tonic chords in the newly arrived-at key. This alone constituted a conceptual
breakthrough for me. After all, if a
non-tonic chord from the new key in a sonata movement can be used, in theory,
then the second theme of a sonata can begin with the kind of IV-I7 alternating
vamp that is common in blues. Let’s say you are writing a blues sonata in B
minor. Your modulating transition can
close with a big half-cadence preparation for the arrive of the tonic of the
relative major key (D major, naturally) but then when the moment comes your new
theme is a G and D7 alternating pattern.
That’s the kind of vamp that shows up in John Lee Hooker and Blind
Willie Johnson verses for those who don’t already know. Yust’s observation gave me a clear and simple
way to think through a practical step towards creating a blues-based approach
to sonata forms.
Furthermore, I recently wrote about how if we look at the
guitar sonatas of Matiegka, specifically Grand Sonata II and his Op. 31 No. 3
we can see that the
Bohemian guitarist composer made use of V7/V to V to IV progressions
in two of his solo guitar sonatas, published in 1808 and 1811. Somehow none of the editors, engravers and
other folks at Artaria screamed “No” and stopped the publication of Grand
Sonata II in 1808. So if Yust has
argued that the whole concept of “tonality” as developed in the 19th
century comes off as racist there’s another angle to consider, based on my
study of Bohemian guitarist composers who published works in Vienna in the
first 12 years of the 19th century, conspicuous use of V-IV
regressions happened in published scores. I was taught that the dominant is never
followed by the subdominant. For
classical guitarists, at least, it turns out that claim is falsifiable.
Maybe we’ve had a
centuries long process of reckoning with all the ways the European music
theorist guild was steering us wrong on brute facts about what was actually
happening in published music on the one hand and rationalizing that
cumulatively selective cultural memory on what have been, arguably, white
supremacist grounds to boot.
So, let me get to Ethan Hein’s summation of Yust’s work.
…
Yust argues that the word
“tonality” is too culturally and historically specific to be applied outside of
its Western European canonical-era context, and wants us to use other,
more specific terms instead. For example, very often when we say “tonality”, we
mean the Western major-minor key system. (That is what NYU teaches in its tonal
theory classes.) But Western Europe also has its medieval modal system, its
atonal systems, and various folk systems. The United States inherited all the
European systems, along with a blues system and related jazz and rock systems
and more. Other world cultures have a huge variety of other systems. Rather
than ask whether music is tonal or not, we could more accurately ask whether it
uses the major-minor key system.
Yust isn’t just arguing that
“tonality” is imprecise; he wants us to reconsider the word because of its ugly
origins. He cites 19th century European theorists like Alexandre-Étienne
Choron and François-Joseph
Fétis, who used tonality as an organizing system for a linear, teleogical
theory of music history. Their idea was that tonality represents the
culmination of a long growth process, from the primitive music of the “savages”
up to the harmonically complex music of “civilized” people.
This history is entangled with a
major intellectual project of nineteenth century Europe, the pseudoscientific
defense of colonialism and white supremacy. Fétis adopted one of the main
explanatory formulas of white supremacist thinkers, a teleological evolution
narrative in which non-Europeans occupied the earlier stages in a process
that culminated with contemporaneous white Europeans. Though largely forgotten
by theorists for much of the twentieth century, Fétis’s racist ideas are
perpetuated by the conceptual architecture of tonality and the institutional
structures built on it (p. 60).
Fétis believed that for most people
in the world, music is the “primitive satisfaction of an instinctive,
sentimental or traditional need”, but that only “modern” (19th century)
Europeans have raised it to an art form.
The inhabitants of Europe and
those of the colonies founded by them have, in general, the necessary aptitude
for grasping the tonal relations [rapports de tonalité] of certain series of
sounds; an aptitude which develops by the habit of hearing music and which is
perfected by study, because the law of progress is inherent in the nature of
this race. It is through it that they possess the ability to sing in tonal
accuracy and to vary the forms of their songs. Savage populations also have the
physiological organization by which we perceive the sensation of sound and
which allows us to grasp the relationships between sounds, so as not to confuse
the intonations and to be aware of their differences, but these sentimental and
intellectual operations take place in them within narrower limits, owing to the
inferiority of their cerebral conformation. Like the peoples of other races,
they also have the memory of sounds and the faculty of reproducing them by the
singing voice as they do by the spoken voice, but always imperfectly. Hence it
is that their songs are only composed of a small number of determined sounds,
which rarely rise above four, and that the sterility of their imagination does
not allow them to vary the successions; beyond, finally, the remarkable
monotony of the songs of all the savage peoples of the earth, particularly
those who are cannibals. There is no doubt that the primitive race whose
remains have been found in the cave of Chauvaux, on the banks of the Meuse . .
. , and whose cerebral conformation was analogous to that of certain tribes of
Oceania, has sung in the same formulas as these, and there is also no doubt
that if, in a few centuries, there are still savage tribes that will not have
been modified by contact with white people, their songs will still be what they
are today; for, among these unfortunate races, there is no progress possible by
intuition (Fétis 1869; Yust’s translation).
So… that’s not great. Aside from
his obvious racism, Fétis also has a misguided belief that musical evolution
has a direction and a goal, from low to high, from simple to complex. Yust
points out that while we may have backed of the overt racism, we continue to
share the unspoken assumption that music evolves toward the goal of greater
complexity or sophistication. You can see it in music history curricula that
tell a linear story of evolution from church modes to tonality to extended
tonality to atonality. Historians of jazz and rock have tended to uncritically
echo this evolutionary narrative. It has been very difficult for me to break
myself of this mental habit, to think of Louis Armstrong as simply different
from Miles Davis, rather than as a “primitive” version of Miles Davis.
…
So far, so racist. I get it.
I do think the pragmatic response of suggesting we expand our definition
of what counts as “tonality” is a plausible path forward. Gordon Graham made an observation in The
Re-enchantment of the World: Art vs Religion that philosophers must
study the changes in the meanings and usages of concepts in philosophy because
they can (and do) dramatically change over centuries. To pick a very not-random case study, when
Greek Stoic philosophers developed the concept of perichoresis none of them
would have imagined that the tenth century CE Christian theologian John of
Damascus would present it as a doctrine for describing intra-Trinitarian
ontology and the nature of the being of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as one
God in three persons. If you want to
read about that you can, of course, go read John of Damascus or, if you balk at
that, there’s Charles Twombly’s Perichoresis
and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus.
Jason Yust’s reflections on the overlapping and
interpenetrating forms of musical time and space inside any and every musical
work at the end of Organized Time might seem profound to people who
haven’t thought about it before but for anyone who was bothering to pay
attention in catechism or has a hobby of reading about Christian reflections on
Trinitarian dogmatics rejecting a crude receptacle concept of space and time
has been literally Orthodox/orthodox Christian dogmatic reflection for roughly
1,500 years. Thomas Torrance advised
against the receptacle conception of time and space in Space, Time and
Incarnation back in 1969 in Space,
Time and Incarnation.
That perichoresis could so dramatically change meanings
from Stoic philosophy to Christian Trinitarian jargon over the course of a
millennium suggests that terms can change meaning. What’s more, proposing that we take 18th
century conceptions of tonality as mediated by 19th century
theorists and simply include the big caveat that it’s a very small subset of
the ways we can define “tonality” was proposed by Ben Johnston way, way back in
the 20th century. "Maximum
Clarity" and Other Writings on Music is the book you’re looking
for where he made that case. Thanks to
Kyle Gann for writing about Johnson’s life, music and work at PostClassic. I know I’ve belabored this point but the fact
that words change meanings and get redefined dramatically is a case in favor of
not dispensing with “tonality” but recognizing that we can and should change
what it means and how we use it. As
George Rochberg put it, we are not slaves to history. Knowing how terms have been used in the past
can help us decide that we want to come up with an expanded usage.
Now whether that means D major can refer to D major as used
in 18th century practice or whether it includes D major in
mixolydian terms, that’s something we can hash out as we go. If we followed Paul Hindemith’s loose
practical definition of tonality then if we started on a D major chord and
ended on a D major chord then it was probably some version of D major no matter
how far out things got between those two chords, including any eruptions of
chromaticism, microtonality or quartal vocabulary. A Ben Johnston style
revision of “tonality” seems like a good move.
I have meant to write down thoughts on two books diagnosing
what ails classical music and music theory respectively for much of 2024. I read Philip Ewell’s On
Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone with a lot
of interest and sympathy.
Ewell is a self-described atheist so I don’t necessarily
take his point that perhaps scholars could explore the ways in which
Christianity has bolstered white supremacist dogmas over the centuries. Not that I don’t take that proposal
seriously, it’s that I am not getting the sense that Ewell is the kind of
atheist who would read James H Cone’s Black
Theology and Black Power.
There’s also no way he’s read Robert Ewusie Moses’ Practices
of Power: Revisiting the Principalities and Powers in the Pauline Letters,
or Esther Acolatse’s Powers,
Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism in Africa and the West,
or Kabiro wa Gatumu’s The
Pauline Concept of Supernatural Powers: A Reading from the African Worldview.
I mention those three books because they are all magnificent works by biblical
scholars and clergy from Ghana and Kenya whose work explores the ways African
pastoral practice interacts with New Testament literature in light of African
spirit cosmologies. Cone’s exousiology
was pretty schematic and amounted to the claim (with which I entirely agree!)
that Christ conquered the powers and principalities that enslave and destroy
and that this included powers and principalities of white supremacist and
racial supremacist views. That said, I
take his point that music theory has not reckoned with the influence of white
supremacist ideas in its reception history precisely because one of my pet
fields of hobbyist study has been the development of Christian and Jewish
demonologies in the wake of serial imperial occupations during what’s
colloquially known as the Second Temple period.
One of the things that jumps out in Fetis is a shorthand
variation of a concept that “primitive” races were and are benighted with
forces that control them. In pop
Christianese jargon it gets at those bromides about how the music of non-whites
is “devil music”. Music in those
primitive societies was used to induce mantic states and even if European
scholars could find plenty of evidence that musically catalyzed divinatory
practices showed up in Greek cultures this was in the past and civilized people
weren’t supposed to believe in that stuff.
I have legions of disagreements with Ted Gioia’s history of music but
he's not wrong to contend that in the “official” musicological narratives the
nexus of religious practices and musical practices has been erased. He’s partly right about that. In the anthropology of religion and the
history of religions fields Gioia couldn’t be more wrong. If you want an extravagantly detailed
exegetical examination of the connection between choral music and prophetic
proclamation of the name of the Lord go read John W Kleinig's The
Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles. That Elisha asked for a musician before
issuing a prophetic oracle is reminder enough that within the biblical
literature itself there is testimony that music was used to catalyze mantic
states. Europeans in the long 19th
century may have decided to “erase” those references but that can be part of
the points that have been made by Philip Ewell and Ted Gioia alike.
The thing about
that narrative Fetis appealed to is that it was commonplace in the 19th
century. What is more, scholars of
Romanticism have written whole books about the parasitically dependent
relationship of Art Religion on German and English efforts to retain the
cultural benefits of Christendom while explicitly rejecting the doctrinal
foundations of the Christian faith. M H
Abrams, for instance, made that the point of his book Natural Supernaturalism,
yet it is also a prominent theme in his even more famous book The
Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition.
Abrams noted that there were Englishmen who decided that Native Americans were
primitives but in the best kind of way, the way in which everything they spoke
was poetry and song. This is, to me,
primitivism of the worst kind and I admit being half Native-American is a part
of why I regard this kind of Romantic primitivism as insulting idiotic and
dishonest. Abrams, nevertheless, discusses such Romantic sentimental bromides
and how Romantic era literary theorists attempted to adapt ideas from
Christendom into a new and explicitly post-Christian Art mysticism. This art religion could take highbrow and
lowbrow forms but, as Gordon Graham has explicitly argued, Eurocentric Art
Religion has pretty obviously failed to work as a surrogate for any actual
religion. Why? Because religions have highbrow and lowbrow
forms; because religions for “everybody” who wants to participate in them. The artifice of the arts is precisely why
they cannot re-enchant a disenchanted cosmos.
And it’s hardly a secret if Yust or Ewell or Hein have pointed out that
these Eurocentric white bros were also generally white supremacist.
The point I
have been making at my blog for years is that one of the worst aspects of
Eurocentric Art Religion in its highbrow and lowbrow forms is that it not only
hasn’t supplanted the doctrines of Christianity for which it was supposedly
going to be a more enlightened substitute, it’s arguable that if we consider
Christianity as a truly global religious community theologians, liturgists,
musicians, clergy and laity have had no problems arguing for and exemplifying
aesthetic pluralism in ways that are impossible (it seems) for arbiters of
“civilization” and “culture”. Art
Religion in its Eurocentric form depended on a dramatic redefinition of what
Christians call the doctrine of Providence.
A doctrine historically invoked for consolation in times of suffering
has also been invoked as a dogma rationalizing individual and cultural and,
yes, racial entitlement.
Matt R
Jantzen’s recent book God,
Race, and History: Liberating Providence explored how European
Christian theology looked askance on the doctrine of Providence in the wake of
World War II and the Holocaust. The
Dutch Reformed Christian theologian Gerrit Berkouwer wrote one of the standard
works on the crisis of Providence in European theology, The
Providence of God. Jantzen’s argument was that European theologians
since Hegel tended to assimilate Hegels’s dramatic revision of the doctrine of
Providence into an explicitly post-Christian but, worse, explicitly Eurocentric
and white supremacist cast. Theologians
ranging from the Swiss Reformed neo-orthodox Karl Barth to the American black
theologian James H Cone dedicated their theologian efforts to, among other
things, repudiating Hegelian white supremacist revisions of the Christian
doctrine of providence (it would probably be necessary to say special
providence as distinct to general providence, with the former being reference
to divine activity within human history and the latter a more general doctrine
of how God sustains the cosmos through divine power and mercy). In other words, James Cone was writing
against white supremacist principalities and powers back in 1969 during the
same period Torrance was advising that we jettison the receptacle concept of
time.
As much as I
liked Ewell’s book I did have a few caveats.
I found it interesting he referenced Charles W Mills’ The
Racial Contract but I am not sure On Music Theory is to music
theory what Mills’ work is to political theory. If anything I wish Ewell had
also drawn, if this were possible, on Mills’ later work Black Rights/White Wrongs: The
Critique of Racial Liberalism.
This lacerating assessment of the abject failure of the entire Rawlsian
tradition is worth reading and it culminated in a case that for all the abject
failures of Rawlsian liberalism (John Rawls, for those who need the reference)
it is a project that “can” be salvaged if it is corrected by ideas drawn from
black Marxist and other streams of thought.
Mills even went so far as to point out that Rawlsian liberalism can’t
even make as coherent a case for, say, reparations as the theories of Robert
Nozick, but Mills pointed out that black academics avoid Nozick like the plague
and so generally won’t realize his theory of pursuing justice of rectifying
past wrongs is a more cogent and coherent case for reparations than relying on
an unexamined hegemonic John Rawls style liberalism.
So there are those who have complained that Ewell’s book
doesn’t offer a lot of positive paths forward.
I might share those concerns but I think my own caveat is just this,
Ewell comes across like the kind of atheist who has never bothered to read
Black theology or biblical scholarship from non-Western perspectives and maybe
doesn’t realize that, atheist though he is, when he has written as passionately
and clearly as he has about the negative effects of white supremacist ideas and
policies on music theory he might as well be writing about powers and
principalities by another name. There’s
no shortage of Christian reflection on the nature of what powers and
principalities are and how we should live lives to demonstrate their
defeat. There’s James Cone, most
obviously, in Black Theology and Black Power but there’s also Walter
Wink’s work (which could be construed as a variation on ideas formulated
earlier by Hendrik Berkhof or maybe G. B. Caird). Black churches have been dealing with
questions and policies of aesthetic pluralism for generations, ever since
worship wars about whether Mozart and/or Gospel blues could or should
peacefully co-exist bubbled up about a century ago.
Music theorists may be a bit of a heathen lot but now would
seem like a time for scholars of music and scholars of religion to actually
compare notes. This was the plea of Guy
Beck in his recent Musicology of
Religion: Theories, Methods, and Directions. For those who can think of white clergy
referring to rock as devil music Beck has a handy reminder that in most
cultures music has had an apotropaic function, and has been used to ward off or
defend against evil spirits. In other
words, even in those ostensibly “primitive” and “savage” societies the power of
music was believed to play a vital role in warding off demons. This was a point that was boilerplate in Johannes
Quasten’s Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity. Beck’s work reminded me that I haven’t read
Rudolf Otto yet and I should try to fix that.
Beck pointed out that one of the ironies of Romantic era theories about
the power of music in classical music history is that Europeans invoked the
supremacy of German music without seeming to notice (or care?) that if you went
back and actually read the self-identified disciples of Friedrich
Schleiermacher on aesthetic values Rudolf Otto and Gerardus van der Leeuw were
aesthetic pluralists and theologians.
Even Johann Gottfried Herder, pastor, theologian and translator that he
was, was an aesthetic pluralist who advised people to stop doing increasingly
tedious and lame knock-offs of “classic” art from Greco-Roman antiquity and put
more faith in the vitality of their own regional folk traditions.
But if I were confined to reading John Borstlap of the
one-time Future Symphony Institute I’d have to surmise that Herder was awful
for catalyzing chauvinistic nationalism and objecting to reason. This is the other polarity I have been
considering. I haven’t just read Philip
Ewell’s book On Music Theory in some kind of vacuum. I have also read John Borstlap’s recent book Regaining
Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World. The
book is a spiritual sequel to The
Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century Revised and
Expanded Edition. For those who read (or try to, at least) Slipped
Disc, it won’t take long to discover what John Borstlap’s take on Philip
Ewell has been.
October 29, 2024
Disgusting &
stupid.
“…… institutions like
opera houses, orchestras and conservatoires still tend to serve as places of
“highbrow” culture, where access to both consumption and production is often
mediated through race and class..” A pure lie as there never was. Opera houses,
orchestral concerts and conservatories are accessible to anyone capable of
paying a ticket or school fee (for which there are, by the way, scholarships).
Classical music is also entirely accessible through the media: radio, internet,
and through CD’s. In concert halls and opera houses, nobody is refused entrance
on the basis of class or race – this is a woke fantasy. That ‘highbrow’ is put
in inverted commas reveals the motivation behind this woke nonsense; it is
taboo to consider an art form as high art, because this excludes people not
willing to try a bit of effort. Referring to Ewell gives away another thing:
ignorance, Ewell is a fake, as any serious professional in the field knows all
too well.
...
Yet when I read Borstlap refer to Johann Gottfried Herder
and Friedrich Schleiermacher as “philosophers” I can’t help but wonder why he
thinks he can pass off two of the most important theologians in the German
liberal Protestant tradition as “philosophers”.
He valorizes Schleiermacher and scapegoats Herder as the godparent of
the worst kind of jingoistic nationalism.
Take this paragraph from Borstlap’s “Classical
Music and Christianity”:
…
When in the 19th
century public music life began to develop as part of bourgeois culture, under
the influence of romanticism the religious impulse began to play-up again but
outside organized religion: it became a concern of poets and philosophers, and
among artists the idea circulated that organized religion was getting
‘outdated’ and ‘stiffled’, and that for that reason the essence of religion –
the inner connection with the Divine – had to be ‘rescued’ from forms and
rituals which had become ‘meaningless’. This essence should from now onwards be
located in art, which would then become something like an ‘art religion’,
taking-over the role of the churches. Kunstreligion (art religion) has been an
established term since German philosopher Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion
(1799). However, the origin of the concept is not to be found in the theology
of Schleiermacher but rather in its cultural-philosophical sources, which
likens aesthetic beauty to the numinous, which is another term for the felt
presence of the Divine. Of course such ideas could only be possible if the
religious essence had already been there in the art forms themselves, and
music, with its immaterial character, was a natural ‘vessel’ for a ‘religion of
art’. Richard Wagner considered his operas (‘music dramas’) as an alternative
to organized religion and he hoped that his theatre in Bayreuth would become
some sort of ‘holy shrine’ of a new religion of which he would be the founder
and the prophet. His last music drama ‘Parsifal’ was especially composed with
this idea in mind, and the work is full of religious references both in the
plot and in the noble, numinous music. (Ironically, Bayreuth indeed became a
shrine but of something quite the opposite of religion.) The numinous character
of much of Wagner’s music was and still is recognized by many listeners as
something of a ‘religious’ nature, and hence the fundamentalist touch of so
many ‘Wagnerians’ in the 2nd half of the 19th century (up till WW II); it can
be shown that much of the numinous traits of Wagner’s music can already be
found in the music of Beethoven, which exercised (as it still does) a
comparable fascination on music audiences.
…
It would be at this point that M H Abrams’ books The
Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism would actually
explain what was happening in the Romantic era.
What was happening? English and
German Romantics wanted to take the elements of Christian thought they liked,
particularly some version of progress, and divest it of Christian thought. Now depending on who you read even the dogma
of Progress has no actual connection to Christian theology. The Siws Reformed lay theologian and pastor
Emil Brunner contended in Faith, Hope
and Love that the dogma of Progress didn’t exactly come from
Christianity but it came from the Enlightenment. Borstlap could complain about the myth
of progress in the arts all he wants but its modern form does have
Enlightenment roots. He seemed to want the “benefit” of art religion that
snubbed Christian dogmatics but not the relentless teleological view of history
that Romanticism retained from the Enlightenment. But where did this idea of the necessity of
“progress” develop? M H Abrams pointed
out that what the Romantics in England and Germany did was to redefine
Providence as a dogma of progress and it was not hard to see that white guys in
Europe regarded themselves as the vanguard of progress in racial terms. But this was not traditional Christian
providence. As Matt R Jantzen pointed
out in his book on white supremacist uses of the Christian doctrine of
providence since Hegel, you could not actually get such a doctrine of
“progress” from John Calvin or the sixteenth century Reformers. This is a point that was made earlier by Emil
Brunner, who pointed out that no Christian theologians in the sixteenth century
subscribed to providence. That dogma had
not yet been invented.
If we go by Matt Jantzen’s account, the person most
responsible for transmuting Providence from Christian dogmatics into a racial
destiny was Hegel. But if we go by the
account of Leszek Kolakowski in Main Currents of Marxism, what Hegel
actually did was secularize the strand of Christian thought known as
eschatology, specifically its millennialist utopian strand. For some Christians
the reference in Revelation to Christians reigning with Christ for a thousand
years is to be taken literally (I’m not one of those, I’m an amillennial
partial preterist!) From the seventeenth
century onward there developed in British Christian theology an idea that Jesus
would come back only after there was a one-thousand year reign (or two or
three!) of good Christian governance and, naturally, good proper Englishmen
among the clergy (and Puritans) thought they would be the ones to usher in the
benevolent reign across the world. If
you want to read about that I heartily commend multiple books by Crawford
Gribben, who has written books on the evolution of millennialist eschatologies
in the trans-Atlantic world over the last four centuries with titles you can’t
really misunderstand.
The short version is that when Borstlap talks as if
Schleiermacher, one of the most famous theologians of the liberal German
Protestant tradition, was a “philosopher” I don’t take him seriously when he
says Ewell is a fake. Guy Beck has
pointed out that the irony of classical
music partisans invoking Schleiermacher is that the disciples of
Schleiermacher (most famously Rudolf Otto and Gerardus van der Leeuw) were
aesthetic pluralists and they were aesthetic pluralists on explicitly Christian
confessionalist grounds. This means that
when writers like John Borstlap or the late Roger Scruton invoke Rudolf Otto’s
concept of the numinous they load the dice and stack the deck by implying (and
outright saying) that the “numinous” comes through music they like. But Gerardus van der Leeuw was clear that
black American congregational singing was just as much holy as masses by
Palestrina and if you don’t believe me go read Sacred
and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art.
As much as Borstlap has gibly scapegoated Johann Gottfried
Herder as a seminal figure in jingoistic nationalism if you go read Herder for
yourself you’ll discover he was a nationalist but he was also an aesthetic
pluralist, and scholars have been debating and discussing his ambivalent legacy
for a few generations. There’s some bad,
yes, but also some good. Yet Borstlap’s
glib dismissal of Herder the pastor, theologian, translator and aesthetic
pluralist who was also a nationalist seems even more pat and lazy than Philip
Ewell’s case that Heinrich Schenker should be considered a white supremacist.
To be sure it has only been recently Herder’s
writings on music have been translated and compiled into a single
English-language volume, but it is worth slogging through so as to
understand that Borstlap is not someone whose word we should just take as given
about someone like Herder, let alone Schleiermacher.
If anything Borstlap seems even more committed to a
simplistic process of valorizing and scapegoating historical figures than
Ewell.
Borstlap wants a revival of classical music, he wants “the
muse” to be rescued but no one who takes any variation of spirit cosmology
seriously would be likely to think the matter is urgent. As Esther Hamori put it in God’s
Monsters, in ancient southwestern Asian religions you didn’t waste your
time offering worship to gods who weren’t powerful enough to help you. They might be terrifying and even, to our
human minds, monstrously evil, but you petitioned them to help you because the
world is full of terrors.
No muse that has to be rescued by the efforts of humans is
a muse worth saving.
In some Native American spiritual traditions if you were a
man (more rarely a woman) you might go on a quest to attain a guardian
spirit. If you found such a guardian
spirit it might teach you a song. This
was something that was held to be the case in Native American tribes in the
Puget Sound area. The caveat was that
you could go on such a spiritual pilgrimage and no spirits would take a shine
to you. One of them might even decide to
kill you. So a spirit could give you a
song or kill you. Not a big stretch to
note that this approach to spirit cosmology doesn’t depend on affirming a deity
as such. Spirits could give you songs
but you had to go out and find them.
These were muses that didn’t need to be saved by people, they could be
muses that people might need to be protected from.
Borstlap has contended that we live in an era in which
there are no geniuses because a genius either had a spiritual being patronizing
them with genius or because a genius is someone better than average. The bad faith of these definitions almost
speaks for themselves. It’s not hard to
go find people who believe in the reality of spirit possession. France Young has pointed out in his books on
the history of Catholic and Anglican exorcism that more people believe in and
ask for exorcism now than at perhaps any point in history, with both Catholic
and Anglican clergy reluctant to oblige and preferring that people get
psychological help first (and maybe only).
Maybe that’s proof for Borstlap’s contention that there are no
geniuses.
But couldn’t it take a genius to recognize a genius? If the
history of music has as its foundation the one-off geniuses who can’t be
bothered to be bound by post hoc rules devised by theorists what are music
theory educators even for? This could
count as an argument against music education. Now I know better than
this because divinatory trade secrets were guarded very closely. Priestcraft was also a closely guarded
secret. In his recent book Why
the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins
Jacob L Wright has contended that one of the great innovations of Judaism was
to take the kinds of trade secrets that were restricted to literate priestly
classes and make them scripture and publicly required by the priests to teach
to everyone. Israel was to be a
nation of priests, not simply a nation ruled by priests or kings. Wright’s work won’t be to everyone’s taste
but I mention it because he shows that within contemporary Jewish scholarship
there are theories that the very development of Judaism entailed a struggle to
accommodate and assimilate groups of people who had conflicting and competing
claims to legitimacy and that the Northern and Southern kingdoms had
conflicting traditions which the makers of what is now the Bible attempted to
grapple with. In Wright’s telling the
emergence of the Bible was a nation-building project and an attempt to make one
of many. It was an effort to ensure that what priests knew and taught was not a
hermetic trade secret.
But Borstlap doesn’t seem to be up to the task of engaging
with Herder or Schleiermacher’s ideas except as shorthands for valorizing or
scapegoating them as paragons of Big Ideas that he has conclusions about. In this he is worse than Ewell. Ewell has simply taken aim at one man,
Heinrich Schenker, and laid out a case for why his influence in North American
music education should be regarded as particularly pernicious. Borstlap’s view seems to be that aesthetic
pluralism comes hand in hand with moral relativism. This simply isn’t the case. I didn’t get the sense that when Hans
Rookmaaker celebrated New Orleans jazz and Mahalia Jackson that he stopped
being a pretty conservative Dutch Reformed friend of Francis Schaeffer (a
by-now legendary figure in the Anglo-American Christian right). If anything the last fifty years have seen a
flourishing of explicitly Christian defenses of and celebrations of aesthetic
pluralism as an outworking of Christian hospitality and liturgical reform
whether we’re talking about Jeremy Begbie, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Frank Burch
Brown, Maeve Louise Heaney, Chiara Bertoglio, David Brown or others. You can even make a case for the need for
aesthetic pluralism from the writings of Benedict XVI if you actually bother to
read him. These are not moral
relativists but Christian thinkers have had no problem embracing aesthetic
pluralism on confessional grounds for several generations. It seems, if anything, that the people who
feel obliged to collapse aesthetic pluralism into moral relativism are figures
like the late Roger Scruton who was more a conservative English philosopher
than a doctrinally savvy Anglican. As
Chiara Bertoglio has put it in her magisterial survey of sixteenth century Christian
debates about music in Europe, many Anglicans since the 18th century
have been proud of the royal chapel choral traditions and treat metical
psalmody as if it were trash as both music and poetry but that was the
norm in local parish music. William T
Dargan’s work on black lining out traditions name-checked precisely those ultra
lowbrow liturgical norms as the ones within which black American congregational
singing emerged.
One of the problems I sense in both the work of Ewell and
Borstlap is they both seem too illiterate about the basics of liturgical norms
and Christian doctrines to have anything to say about them. Ewell, at least, seems honest enough to admit
he’s an atheist and that he hasn’t looked into these matters too much. He also leaves it more or less at that. Borstlap, by contrast, seems to think he has
to described giants of German liberal Protestant theology such as Herder and
Schleiermacher as “philosophers’ yet calls Ewell a fake. Who’s more fake here, the black American atheist
who admits religion doesn’t interest him or the Dutch cultural pundit who keeps
writing as if two of the most legendary figures in the liberal Protestant
Christian tradition are “philosophers”? I
mean, I “could” go oof on a rabbit trail about how dialectical theologians like
Emil Brunner and Karl Barth blowtorched the liberal German Protestant tradition
for its problems or pointed out how it didn’t forestall World War I, let alone
World War II. Borstlap writes as if the
crisis of faith in Europe came with World War II. The rejection of the failures of the German
liberal Protestant tradition on which Art Religion has been parasitically
dependent was beginning even before the 20th century began.
Philip Ewell has said that the Eurocentric and white bias
in music theory is tantamount to religious dogma. Ewell has, so far, struck me as the kind of
atheist who tends to leave things as simple as that. The trouble I have with that is personal, I
grew up Pentecostal (Assemblies of God), eventually became Presbyterian and am
currently Anglican (I had a lengthy stint at a one-time megachurch in Seattle,
too, but I am trying to merely mention that in passing here). One of the core
problems in advocates and opponents of Eurocentric Art Religion is there tends
to be a failure to consider varieties of religious experience. To put the matter more practically, many
advocates of highbrow Art Religion don’t distinguish between what Gordon Graham
described as traditions of asceticism and mysticism. There are a variety of
unexamined dualisms or dualities that are conjoined without examination. I suggest a number of polarities should be
considered and, where possible, disentangled by scholarly work
Ewell has,
obviously, mentioned a dualism in which music theory can be construed as white
and non-white, but in art religion there are additional variables:
·
High liturgical and low liturgical (highbrow vs
lowbrow)
·
Personal knowledge and group spirit possession
·
Professional presentation and congregational
participation
·
Technical vs ecstatic divinatory practices
·
Pythagorean vs Orphic traditions (not
automatically the same as the previous dualism)
·
Top down and bottom up
·
Authentic and contrived
Ever since the dawn of Romanticism these dualisms have
tended to be bundled together. What we should try to do is decouple all of
these dualisms from each other because, I think, they have been needlessly and
harmfully conjoined since the Romantic era.
Advocates of highbrow art tend to be the likes of Theodor
Adorno on the left and Roger Scruton on the right. That men of culture have a
long history of being too busy judging what counts as culture to actually make significant
cultural artifacts is probably too easy a quip to make but it is a truism that
has at least some truth. Tastemakers
have been good at paying people to make things we now call art but artisans are
not generally themselves patrons. For a
more recent explicitly Catholic advocate for high liturgical norms Peter
Kwasniewski has insisted that Roman rites need to get back to plainchant and
the legacy of the best music as he hears it. In Good Music, Sacred Music and Silence: Three
Gifts of God for Liturgy and Life Kwasniewski asserts that profane
music profanes the sacred liturgy. You could have the most sacred liturgy
available (the Tridentine Roman rite, of course) but jazzy chords and pop music
confections will desecrate the liturgical text and rob it of its power to make you
a better person.
Partisans of Art Religion tend to have a sacramental view
of their favored arts. A properly administered sacrament is effective whether
or not anyone is even around to receive it but someone who doesn’t receive the
sacrament in the appropriate spirit doesn’t benefit from it. Guy Beck has pointed out that when it comes
to religion and musicology the two guiding metaphors are that music is a window
into a numinous realm or a mirror that reflects back to us the times and
cultures of its makers. Unsurprisingly many
musicologists and music historians are committed to the mirror paradigm while liturgists and art
mystics prefer to speak of music as a window.
Roger Scruton literally invoked the window into the infinite over the
course of his writing career, though whether or not there is any “there” to
which the window lets us look was a matter he often punted on.
But these defaults are high liturgical defaults. They are the shorthand of the highest of
highflyer Anglicans and Catholics. They
are not the jargon of Pentecostals and Baptists or Methodists who have a more
storefront congregational participatory model.
The highbrow liturgical aesthetic and praxis tends to present the arts
as liturgical rites offered on behalf of the congregation, a priestly sacrifice
on behalf of those who lack the knowledge and skills and qualifications to
suitably perform a legitimate rite and sacrament. But among a more low church
Protestant tradition the priesthood of all believers suggests that the nation
of priests described in the Hebrew Bible (and also in the New Testament) means
that anyone can participate in proper worship.
This would be the authenticity of the lowbrow working class person.
That in actual religious practice both the highbrow and
lowbrow norms are acceptable liturgy is a point that maybe only specialists in
theology, liturgy and music may easily remember. Chiara
Bertoglio has pointed out that too many self-identified Anglicans only think of
“real” Anglicanism as being the royal courtly tradition of mensural polyphony
from the likes of Tallis and Byrd and that metrical psalmody and lining out
among illiterate parishes doesn’t count.
This is a huge mistake and it is a mistaken notion that began to take
hold in the eighteenth century, of which Roger Scruton is merely one example.
But if music historians are not the sort to actively
participate in religious life they may not grasp these simple truths, that in
religious practice the highest of highbrow and the lowest of lowbrow arts have
always co-existed (if often uneasily) for centuries. Bertoglio has pointed out that this trend was
particularly true of nascent Lutheranism.
But since the Romantic era, I suggest, a whole set of syndromes evolved. Mark Evans Bonds has written about The
Beethoven Syndrome eloquently already and there has been work on how
throughout the 19th century a polarity was established in which
Beethoven and Rossini were construed as opposing tendencies in European musical
life. As ideas about authenticity developed in literary theory and ideas about
innovation against mere convention evolved it became popular to regard
innovation as necessary to prove one wasn’t beholden to mere tradition or
antiquated dogmas.
The trouble was that there is no automatic connection
between “authenticity” and “contrivance” or between the other polarity of “highbrow”
and “lowbrow”.
The most dubious pairing of dualisms, though, would be to
insist that arguments for aesthetic pluralism are arguments for moral
relativism. It is also dubious to
conflate aesthetic pluralism with aesthetic relativism. A person can be an aesthetic absolutist or an
aesthetic relativist, saying that there exist somewhere aesthetic absolutes or
ideals to which artists can aspire or that there are no such ideals and things
are socially constructed. But this is
not the same as contending for aesthetic plurality as distinct from the ideal
of a monoculture. Roger Scruton
contended that aesthetic judgment is vital because the judgments you pass on
the arts are proof of your morality. To
like bad art is to prove yourself a bad person so it is vital to not like
whatever is bad art.
Now, to be blunt, I remain unconvinced Roger Scruton was
competent enough an Anglican to adjudicate matters of liturgy and sacrament or
even music. Being a music snob of the
kind Scruton was is not the same thing as actually being able to make music (he
was a parish organist, though, so he reportedly did participate in local
Anglican church life and I’ve got no problem with that).Just because I have
ended up in Anglican circles doesn’t mean I turned my back on everything about
Pentecostal music. If anything a way to
translate what the Romantics in England and Germany aspired to was a kind of
post-Christian artistic synthesis in which some work could have the visceral
impact of low church congregational singing that could withstand the highest of
highbrow artistic analysis from some highflyer Anglican. The Romantics seemed to want a fusion and
reconciliation of opposites (Abrams has written at extravagant length on this
aspiration within Romantic literary theory and philosophy).
The trouble was that all of that yearning for
reconciliation of opposites had no real imagination for not-European
people. Charles Rosen claimed that
during the lives of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven there was a brief moment where
music combined learned technique with the virtues of street song. Maybe so, but “if” this was so why should we
imagine that such a direct synergistic synthesis couldn’t happen again? Why can’t it happen, say, in the United
States? This is what, I believe, lurks
in Ethan Hein’s advocacy that music theory account for both pop and classical
elements. And the thing is I agree
entirely with this advocacy if I understand him correctly. The Baroque era had the old practice and the
new practice. How is it fans of “classical
music” forget the history of the 18th century? If the ancient ecclesiastical style could
co-exist with then-contemporary dance music and if the era of the Baroque was
considered a high point in the history of European music then why should we
surmise that such a synergistic synthesis can’t be arrived at within, say, the
United States by allowing pop and classical to be two separate practices which
are both required of people seeking to be vocational musicians?
Frank Bruch Brown has contended that African American
church music in the 20th century and European Baroque era liturgical
music constitute two pinnacles in Western music informed by Christian doctrines
and practices and that we should regard these two traditions as equally
valuable to the liturgical life of churches.
I certainly don’t disagree. It
seems to be among, dare I be so blunt, the kinds of heathens whose Religion is
Art that have already made up their minds on what authentically counts as Art
who want everything to be segregated. Does Stevie Wonder vamp continually over
a single chord in much of “Superstition”? Sure but then so does William Byrd in “The Bells”. The idea that one of these is “art” or “serious
music” and the other isn’t on the basis of some taxonomy of transcendence begs
the question of the criteria being brought to bear in the appraisal. I can love Stevie Wonder and William Byrd and
note that both these composers lived and work on either side of “common
practice” as defined by 19th century music theorists about what they
claimed was going on in the 18th century. Even John Borstlap
concedes that 19th century music pedagogy was stifling and an
inaccurate presentation of what was going on in music.
So why regard Philip Ewell as a fake? Borstlap has simple
assertion and does not really bother to present evidence. It may be Ewell is wrong about things but if
you read his book he said he welcomed getting corrections if he was or is wrong
about things. He even said he has never
been against the idea that there are real hierarchies of pitch organization in music. He’s been pretty clear what he’s against and
I don’t need to repeat the claims in his book for him. Of the two I would say Ewell has the more
coherent and persuasive case that we can and should move past Schenkerian
analysis as a kind of gold standard of study.
I mention this because I have gone my whole musical life without ever
needing to make use of Heinrich Schenker’s work. I’ve got way more use for the sermons of Heinrich
Bullinger than Schenker.
Yet while I find Ewell’s case the more persuasive my
concern with both books is finally the same, they are presenting etiological
narratives that tell us how and why things have gotten to such an unhealthy
state. Borstlap seems to see the
apotheosis of the stagnation of classical music in the state of the
symphony. Why this should be is asserted
and never proven. If classical music
really emerged in some kind of relationship with Christian liturgy then wouldn’t
the drop in the prestige of the mensural polyphonic mass be a sign of “demise”? Maybe not.
Maybe the symphony has had its day in the sun and classical music has
simply been changing in ways that John Borstlap is unable to accept. Richard Taruskin sheepishly conceded that
when he began “The Ox” he thought classical music was dying off but by the time
he finished the book series he concluded that it wasn’t dying so much as
changing.
Ewell does not seem to have a clear sense of what a path
forward might look like. I have a
suggestion, that we work together to create a new approach to sonata and fugue
based on the vocabularies of blues and ragtime.
We already know that a V-IV progression was a standard option within
guitar sonatas in the early 19th century. Edward Berlin and other
ragtime historians have pointed to the rich history of “ragging the classics”. A simple way to ensure the continuing relevance
of classical music would be to show that transforming the beloved tunes and
riffs of yore into newer styles is practical and even fun. I would personally
suggest that among guitarists reworking the sonatas and etudes of the usual
suspect guitarist composers be taken up.
It’s not difficult, in principle, to take an etude by the Spanish
guitarist composer Fernando Sor and rework it as a ragtime sonata.
What neither Ewell nor Borstlap manage to do is demonstrate
any competency in religion. Ewell’s
atheism is self-attested and Borstlap’s rote reference to famous Christian
Protestants as “philosophers” speaks against his intellectual precision even if
he didn’t try to introduce Jungian concepts or the work of Rupert Sheldrake.
The reason I come back to this is because I have seen a parallel failure within
scholars of religion. It seems obvious
to me that when Jason Yust refers to kinds of musical space this maps easily
onto Aquinas discussing filiation, spiration and procession in intra-Trinitarian
relationships or John of Damascus discussing perichoresis. The categories for interpenetrating and
interlocking conceptions of time and space and being are part of Christian
dogmatics East and West. Yet theologians
and liturgists tend to focus on a narrow set of topics about the nature of time
and eternity as mediated by theological discussion. It gets me thinking about the Swiss lay theologian
Emil Brunner remarking that the questions that trouble and vex the layman are generally
more difficult and more interesting than those favored by the theological
academy.
So here’s my layman’s question, why don’t theologians gain
enough musical literacy to explore how the history of reflection on the
immanent Trinity could help us recalibrate and reconceive concepts of musical time
and space toward the end of writing blues and ragtime based sonatas and fugues? What if, to take up an idea suggested by
Robert Ewusie Moses that Christians must consider what powers and principalities
are harmful to people in each age that James Cone identified white supremacism
as one such power or principality?
Philip Ewell might disagree with the religious impetus and motivation
for such an appraisal but the fact is that James Cone made his appraisal back
in 1969 and I take his point.
Theologians, liturgists and scholars of religion tend to
focus (unsurprisingly) on the relevance of topics for their guild.
Musicologists do the same but Guy Beck’s proposal in The Musicology of
Religion is that scholars do more interdisciplinary work across these
fields. In Christian theological writing
I see a robust case for aesthetic pluralism predicated on the doctrine of the
social Trinity but it is in reflection on the ontological Trinity in writers
like Colin Gunton and Thomas Torrance that I see seeds of an approach to
musical time and space that could catalyze a blues-based approach to sonatas
and fugues by rejecting a Newtonian receptacle concept of time and space. Dutch
Reformed theological aesthetics has made a case for aesthetic pluralism on
Christian confessional grounds but similar ideas have been proposed by the
Anglican David Brown. I’m confining myself
largely to Christian writers not because I couldn’t mention Jewish or Buddhist
writings but because I think it’s necessary to dispel a canard from writers at
the formerly labeled Future Symphony Institute that claims that aesthetic pluralism
rejects “standards” or entails a kind of relativism. Frank Burch Brown
dispensed with that kind of canard decades ago by pointing out that communities
can decide what standards they want.
Yes, this invites the potential for charges of cultural appropriation
but this is precisely the kind of charge communities should be able to make.
But that is why religion needs to be considered in
discussing variations of Art Religion.
After all, if scholars only define the emergence of rock `n roll as if
it were an issue of race the pervasive presence of Pentecostals among nascent
rock can get ignored. Randall J Stephens
has argued that once we factor in their Pentecostalism the careers of Ray
Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and
Johnny Cash can all be seen as emerging from the same musical wellspring,
Pentecostal musical norms. Partisans of
highbrow art asceticism who are too theologically illiterate to identify
Pentecostal musical norms or too committed to seeing the emergence of rock `n
roll only in racialized terms will miss this aspect of the music’s history but
it is this convergence of white and black Pentecostalism that may yield some
promise toward a convergence of musical interests. In other words, what scholarship attentive to
race would segregate on the grounds of race doesn’t have to be regarded as a
strictly racial history if Pentecostalism is taken seriously. This is why, I suggest, it is important to
engage with the anthropology and doctrinal and liturgical study of religions.
William T
Dargan’s landmark book on the evolution of lining out in black American
churches did precisely this kind of work by looking back to low Anglican
parish liturgical norms that advised that liturgists sing the first lines of
metrical psalms which the congregation would then sing back in response. Dargan noted that this was so commonplace in
poor white and black churches that when shape-note hymnody began to emerge some
bishops urged white churches to abandon metrical psalmody and lining out
precisely because black churches were still using it! In a beautiful providential irony black
American churches easily assimilated the repertoire of shape-note hymnody into
the body of music available for lining out. There have been points of convergence
in musical life in churches white and black but we won’t now about them if we
never look to see if they are there. This is the kind of thing that neither
Ewell nor Borstlap attend to. Ewell is
writing about classical music and music theory and so I understand what I’m talking
about is not his wheelhouse. Borstlap is
also not interested in this kind of thing because whatever it will take to “revive
the muse” of classical music there can be nothing “not classical” that is used
to energize the field. Even if there’s
centuries of history of popular songs being re-appropriated into Lutheran
hymnody or of improvised liturgical music these are not Borstlap’s
concern. His aim seems to be a revival
of symphonic repertoire as a kind of special recipient of all the perks and
benefits of a civic religious (and European) cult of the public but without any
of the obligations that were imposed upon all music in, say, Socialist Realist
dogma during the Zhdanov era of the Soviet Union.
Borstlap wants his favored art to received as if it were a
sacrament without a coherent or consistent sacramentology. Instead he leverages Jungian archetypes and
Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic resonance” as a kind of species specific or
community bounded memory. The trouble
with this idea, setting aside whether it is plausible as science, is that it
does nothing to preclude the kinds of racist essentialist canards embraced by
vitalists one and two centuries ago.
This is not to say Borstlap is any kind of racist but that his vision of
a revitalized Europe is parochially Eurocentric. There is no reason anyone in the United
States or Canada or Mexico needs to take his ideas seriously. Manuel Ponce’s five guitar sonatas are not as
popular as they once were but they reflect a cultural milieu within which the
boundaries between “pop” and “classical” were more permeable than someone like
Borstlap would want them to be.
And since Ewell has mentioned that Spanish music has been
effectively erased from music history and theory books I suggest the time has
been overdue for English language scholarship to engage with Ponce’s guitar
sonatas. There’s really no shortage of
guitar sonatas that could be studied from the 20th century to show
that guitarist composers have had a more open-ended approach to the boundaries
between pop and classical and avant garde music whether we’re looking at Angelo
Gilardino, Dusan Bogdanovic, Carlos Guastavino, Ferdinand Rebay, Guido Santorsola,
Manuel Ponce Heinrich Albert or Antonio Jose.
We can also look back to Sor, Giuliani, and Matiegka to see that
guitarists took a more flexible approach to things like the V-IV
regression. Yes, I’m blatantly stumping
for my instrument and its repertoire to be seriously considered. Classical music has not been in any real
crisis just because the prestige and cachet of the symphony has been on a
century long decline.
I agree with Ewell that Germanophile art religion is a net
negative. This is why I have so much
sympathy for the Swiss Reformed and Puritan traditions of Christian
thought. If we want to contend against
what we regard as a harmful form of elitist Eurocentric art snobbery then we
should be conversant in traditions that directly attacked art
sacramentalism. We should be familiar
not simply with the historical fact that Zwingli banned music from church
services but that he confided to a friend that he made more music than anyone
else he knew in the privacy of his own home and that the rejection of
liturgical music was informed by a rejection of the patronage system within
which votive masses for the dead got commissioned via indulgences.
It’s easy for art religious types to slam the Zwinglian and
Calvinist rejection of what we now call highbrow arts as if they were just
against the arts. Calvin, in his
commentary on The Book of Amos, said the prophet was not against the science of
music but against those who bankrolled lavish musical improvisational jamborees
while oppressing the poor. There’s a
world of difference between reading music historians talking about Reformed
Christians and reading their works. Charles
W Mills pointed out that even within Europe and America there have been whites
who rejected what he called The Racial Contract. I suggest we familiarize ourselves with those
strands of Christian thought that rejected the paradigm of Wagnerian Art
Religion. The bad faith of the art
religion of Eurocentric highbrows is that they generally can’t demonstrate that
they are even competent on matters of the Christian doctrines, liturgies or
sacraments which they spuriously claim Art is a suitable and even superior
replacement for. This isn’t the
case. At the risk of being
autobiographical I made friends with Christians from Kenya and Japan in my
college years and am half Native-American through my dad. I eventually learned there has been a
Presbyterian contingent among the Nez Perce since roughly the time of Chief
Joseph so I don’t have to take as given implications that to be Presbyterian
entails being either white or a resident of the American South. I also don’t take it as given when people
claim that “the West” benefited from Christendom. The East is also a thing, eastern Orthodoxy. The kinds of European mean who blather on
about the alleged connection between Christianity and the evolution of
classical music may not even be conversant enough in the Church Fathers to
identify which of them were African.
Alternatively, Charles Mills has pointed out that ludicrous racial
conspiracy theories do exist in black communities, too, and that as terrifying
racial entitlement creeds go Imperial Japan during World War II was as grim as anything
Europeans ever presumed upon by way of racial entitlement.
What I have been saying, which I hope has been clear, is
that we live in an era in which no music will flourish for long if we impose
upon it the purity codes of authenticity and legitimacy that are by and large
If I have to choose between which of the two etiological
stories about the state of contemporary music theory and classical music seems
more plausible I side a bit more with Ewell than Borstlap. Why?
Because Ewell confines his criticisms chiefly to the Anglo-American
music educational scene with nods to situations in Europe. Borstlap’s books are more diffuse and,
frankly, hard to take seriously on what he claims were ideas formulated by the
likes of Theodor Adorno, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher and
others. To not call two famous Protestant
theologians who formatively influenced German liberal Protestantism “philosophers”
invites questions about how “serious” Borstlap’s grasp of religion is. He can say that religious people make
religions and not the other way around but this begs the question of what
Borstlap’s concept of religion even is.
It’s one thing to declare that classical music has a “psychology” that
expresses the eternal and timeless truths of the human spirit and its universal
longing and another thing to make good on the metaphorical implication of
comparing highbrow religion and its truths to religious traditions with an
actual real-world application.
I’ll give you the simplest thing possible, Johann Gottfried
Herder decided to translate Song of Songs from the Masoretic text into what
was, in his day, German vernacular. If
you are able to read a Bible (whether Jewish or Christian) right now it’s because
scholars toiled for lifetimes to gather up a knowledge of languages and usage
to render the scriptures into contemporary vernacular. If Borstlap’s comparison of religion and the
arts (and especially classical music) has any viability at all then he has
already conceded a point that scholars of religion and religion practitioners
know on a daily basis, that the truths of religious traditions have been
translated into contemporary vernacular in Jewish and Christian traditions for
centuries. Yet Borstlap’s call to “revitalize”
classical music hinges on what amounts to a Catholic integralist insisting that
everyone should memorize an entirely Latin liturgy from infancy because this
isn’t that hard and it will be so good for them. This is the point at which I mention I’m a
low-church Calvinist Anglican who subscribes to the necessity of vernacular congregational
participation on the basis of the Apostle Paul’s instruction that where there
are tongues there must also be translation.
Chiara Bertoglio has pointed out that in Germany even
before the Lutheran revolt there was a propensity to stand by German vernacular
liturgical practice. Germanophile art
religion in its highbrow ascetic and lowbrow mystical forms must, at some
point, grapple with a liturgical reality upon which the observations are at
best parasitically dependent and at worst flagrantly misrepresenting, that in
German musical and liturgical traditions scholars have pointed out there have
been synergistic exchanges across lines of class and liturgy for
centuries. The conservative or
traditionalist men who want to invoke a comparison of classical music to
Christianity have not even made a compelling or coherent case that the version
of classical music they seek to defend can even plausibly be likened to Christian
disciplines. After all, vernacular
liturgy has become so widespread that Catholic integralists would never have
complained about it or insisted on a renewal of a Latin liturgy if vernacular
had not mostly become normative.
There’s no reason we should not attempt to relate the “timeless
truths” of classical music into a translated form of music theory and practice
that accepts the coexistence of dual practice.
That was precisely what happened in the Baroque era and it can happen in
the United States. Just because classical
music tends to be presented as white and European doesn’t make it so, and
Philip Ewell has written plenty about this but by the same turn just because
rockist blues and rock fans and historians claim that blues and rock “broke all
the rules” allegedly set up in classical music pedagogy doesn’t mean that’s the
case either. Merely changing the script
of “authenticity” from white highbrow classical to black pop music isn’t rejecting
the shared foundational script and that is what we need to dispense
with.
It is not only possible, it is ironically fairly easily
done if musicologists compare notes with theologians and church music
historians. But I don’t suggest this
merely because I don’t just so happen to be a Christian, I agree with Guy Beck
that scholars of religion and scholars of music can mutually help each other
and the conjoined dualisms of white and black; high and low liturgy; personal
knowledge and group possession; authentic and contrived; and other dualisms
that have been bundled together in critical and pedagogical practices can be
disentangle but Ewell’s point, if I understood him correctly, suggests to me
that there are far more dualisms at play in music education and music theory
than just the white and non-white dualism he sees and that music theory as an
entire field is probably less-than-ready to address these conjoined dualisms
without some outside assistance. Guy
Beck’s plea is that music scholars and religion scholars need to have a meeting
of minds on this kind of thing and I am inclined to agree.
Jason Yust’s comments about tonality are noted but I have
already said that just as perichoresis has evolved as a concept tonality can
also evolve. We may need to be
deliberate in our expansion and recalibration of what we mean by tonal but Ben
Johnston suggested that this could be done and it seems, in the years since
Johnston’s passing, this kind of recalibration has been slowly happening. We don’t need a definition of “tonality” that
becomes, in the hands of writers like John Borstlap or the late Roger Scruton part
of a series of endlessly moveable goalposts around which only the music they
like is considered real music. But we
also need to take some time to question the scripts of authenticity that
permeate musicology whether extolling white or black music. Ewell’s point about colorerasure is noted but
John W Troutman has pointed out that Black Power scholarship held that the
slide guitar tradition had to have evolved from the African monochord zither
tradition despite there not only being 1) no evidence this was the case but 2)
it was asserted in the face of black blues musicians saying repeatedly that in
playing slide guitar they were playing “Hawaiian style”. As Troutman put it, we’ve been given a
history of American pop music that is black and white whose real history is
Technicolor. Recalibrating music theory
and pedagogy to avoid racist dualisms has to go in every direction whether in
pop or other branches of music history.
I appreciate that what Ethan Hein has been attempting to do is precisely
that kind of recalibration.
Select Bibliography not in anything like alphabetical order
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/organized-time-9780197546420
Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form
Jason Yust
ISBN: 9780197546420
https://press.umich.edu/Books/O/On-Music-Theory-and-Making-Music-More-Welcoming-for-Everyone2
On Music
Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone
Philip Ewell
Paperback :
9780472055029, April 2023
Hardcover :
9780472075027, April 2023
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-5314-9
Regaining
Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World
John Borstlap
ISBN:
1-5275-5314-0 ISBN13: 978-1-5275-5314-9
ISBN:
1-0364-1359-4 ISBN 13:
978-1-0364-1359-0
https://store.doverpublications.com/products/9780486823355
The Classical
Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century Revised and Expanded
Edition
John Borstlap
ISBN:
9780486823355
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393006094
Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature
M. H. Abrams
ISBN: 978-0-393-00609-4
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-mirror-and-the-lamp-9780195014716
The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the
Critical Tradition
M. H. Abrams
ISBN: 9780195014716
https://wwnorton.com/books/Main-Currents-of-Marxism/
Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders - The Golden Age
- The Breakdown
Leszek Kolakowski
ISBN: 978-0-393-32943-8
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793619570/God-Race-and-History-Liberating-Providence
God, Race, and History: Liberating Providence
Matt R. Jantzen
ISBN: 978-1-7936-1955-6 Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-7936-1957-0 Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-7936-1956-3 eBook
https://orbisbooks.com/products/black-theology-and-black-power-50th-ann
Black Theology
and Black Power 50th Anniversary Edition
James H. Cone
ISBN:9781626983083
https://archive.org/details/the-providence-of-god-g.-c.-berkouwer
The Providence of God
Gerrit Berkouwer
https://academic.oup.com/book/5106
Black
Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism
Charles W. Mills
Online ISBN:
9780190245450
Print ISBN:
9780190245412
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501764288/the-racial-contract/
The Racial
Contract 25th anniversary edition
Charles W. Mills
ISBN13:
9781501764288
ISBN10: 1501764284
Publication date:
04/15/2022
I have Kyle Gann to thank for discovering
Caplin's work
https://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2010/09/the_end_of_exceptionalism_1.html
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-re-enchantment-of-the-world-9780199265961
The
Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion
Gordon Graham
ISBN:
9780199265961
https://wipfandstock.com/9781620321805/perichoresis-and-personhood/
Perichoresis
and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus
Charles Twombly
ISBN 9781620321805
Paperback
ISBN 9781630879075
eBook
ISBN 9781498227780
Hardcover
https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c030987
"Maximum
Clarity" and Other Writings on Music
Ben Johnston
ISBN
978-0-252-03098-7 Cloth
ISBN
978-0-252-08671-7 Paper
ISBN
978-0-252-09157-5 eBook
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110520811/html
Reforming
Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century
Chiara Bertoglio
ISBN:
9783110520811
ISBN:
9783110518054
ISBN:
9783110636819
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
Practices of
Power: Revisiting the Principalities and Powers in the Pauline Letters
Robert Ewusie
Moses
ISBN
9781451476644 paperback
ISBN
9781451479935 ebook
https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802864055/powers-principalities-and-the-spirit/
Powers,
Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism in Africa and the West
Esther E. Acolatse
ISBN 9780802864055
paperback
ISBN 9781467449373
Ebook
https://wipfandstock.com/9781606084724/the-pauline-concept-of-supernatural-powers/
The Pauline
Concept of Supernatural Powers: A Reading from the African Worldview
Kabiro wa Gatumu
ISBN 9781606084724
Paperback
ISBN 9781498253079
hardcover
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/lining-out-the-word/hardcover
Lining Out the
Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans
William T Dargan
ISBN:
9780520234482
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110520811/html
Reforming
Music: Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century
Chiara Bertoglio
ISBN:
9783110520811
ISBN:
9783110518054
ISBN:
9783110636819
https://www.ipgbook.com/-products-9781782395041.php
Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England
Roger Scruton
ISBN 9781848871991
Supplemental reading:
Johannes Quasten’s Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity
Peter Kwasniewski’s In Good
Music, Sacred Music and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and Life
James Bryson (Anthology Editor) The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton (2016)
Ferenc Hörcher’s Art
and Politics in Roger Scruton's Conservative Philosophy (December
2022)
Frank Burch Brown's books
Religious
Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (1993);
Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in
Religious Life (2003);
Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (2009)
Chiara Bertoglio's Musical
Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien (August 2021)
Ferdia J Stone-Davis' Musical
Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (2011)
Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Art in Action:
Toward a Christian Aesthetic (1987)
Art Rethought: The Social Practices of Art (2017)
John W Kleinig's The
Lord's Song: The Basis, Function and Significance of Choral Music in Chronicles
Philip E. Stoltzfus' Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Modern
Theology (2006)
Jaroslav Pelikan’s Bach Among the Theologians
John Neubauer’s The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from Mimesis
in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics
Rob C Wegman’s The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470--1530
Percy Scholes’ The
Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution to the Cultural
History of Two Nations
Kwame Bediako's Jesus and the Gospel in Africa
Richard Taruskin's Musical Times and Lives Examined (2023)
The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography,
Analysis, Criticism
Spencer Klavan's Music in Ancient Greece: Melody, Rhythm and Life
The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps
2 comments:
I always love these response posts, I know next to nothing about the history of Christianity so this is new information for me. Borstlap calling Ewell a fake is so comical. I saw Ewell give a talk last year in which he rhapsodized about having performed all nine Beethoven symphonies on cello. Maybe Borstlap feels so threatened because the call is coming from inside the house.
Thanks for reading them even when they get so long, Ethan.
If I speculate I could wonder whether Ewell "has" to be a fake to Borstlap because Ewell's criticism of the classical music mainstream in the US in education and performance has sparked a lot of controversy and discussion and is recent. By contrast Borstlap's complaints (and even legal battles, apparently) in Netherlands about what he regards as wrong with the sclerotic Netherlands classical music scene has gone for decades without any notable progress.
https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2024/12/what-is-originality-in-music.html
In the last ten years I have found that, unfortunately, I can never take Borstlap's word for it about authors, whether he's talking about Adorno or Herder or you or Ewell. I have often found that authors he denounces for whatever reasons are basically never as bad as he makes them out to be.
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