a further thought on John Borstlap's simplistic invocation of Schleiermacher as positive and Herder as negative influences in history, dipping a toe into a contemporary discussion of latent Eurocentric and white supremacist elements in Schleiermacher's work

I have written in the past about how I find John Borstlap's references to Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johan Gottfried Herder troublesomely simplistic by way of writing about other things.  Borstlap valorized Schleiermacher as someone who used the idea of art religion and was a forebear of Wagner, who really got the idea going of art doing for religion what religion could no longer do.  Borstlap has claimed that religions don't make people people make religions.  Conversely, he has contended that Herder was responsible for developing a chauvinistic, jingoistic form of ethnic nationalism that led, eventually, to National Socialism.  

I found multiple levels of problems with Borstlap's approach.  First and foremost he treated two famous Christian theologians who were pioneers in the liberal Protestant tradition as if they were philosophers.  They were that, too, of course, but Borstlap's simple valorization of one and demonization of the other does not reflect an engagement with their respective works.  Now who am I to begrudge someone for not wanting to read Schleiermacher's Christian Faith since it is, in its recent 2016 English translation, at least a thousand pages long! Philip Bohlman's assembly of the writings of Herder on Music is much shorter and cheaper.  I have said in the past that I simply can't take Borstlap at his word when he claims Herder was a forerunner of chauvinist German nationalism.  Why?  Because I've read Herder and Herder specialists are swift to say there was a nationalist streak in his work but he was also, just as much, an aesthetic pluralist and translator.  Herder complained of his generation of Germans they were too busy doing garbage knock-offs of Greek and Latin poetry to benefit from knowing the Hebrew Scriptures better and he produced a modern translation of Song of Songs that was considered a landmark act of translation. 

My point today, however, is that if Herder was not necessarily as proto-Nazi as Borstlap implied in The Classical Revolution, Schleiermacher's influence has not been considered uniformly positive.  Even if contemporary liberal Protestants regard the neo-orthodox fusilades of Emil Brunner or Karl Barth against Schleiermacher to be unfair there are contemporary theologians who regard Schleiermacher's work as being full of latently Eurocentric and white supremacist defaults.  They were not as pernicious as those of, say, Richard Wagner, but they have come up for discussion just in the last few years.  

Theodore Vial's Modern Religion, Modern Race is a book that digs into the theological and philosophical writings of both Herder and Schleiermacher to argue that both men had Eurocentric and racist defaults.  Herder and Schleiermacher were (and are) considered significant contributors to the liberal Protestant Christian project and yet they both had Eurocentric and racist aspects to their work.  I haven't gotten to Vial's book and as my sympathies are more Swiss Reformed, Anglican and even a few Puritans I am not in a rush to read Vial's book.  I have, however, read that the book is out there and it's germane to my disagreement with Borstlap about what I regard as his simplistic take on Herder and Schleiermacher.  That Schleiermacher was influential can be attested by the fact that, for instance, even the orthodox Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck felt obliged to attempt to salvage from Schleiermacher the ideas he thought were actually good ideas.  

Guy Beck has contended that Schleiermacher's legacy via Rudolf Otto and Gerardus van der Leeuw has waned in the last century and that both Otto and van der Leeuw sustained Schleiermacher's aesthetic pluralism.  Ironically, Roger Scruton, who openly cited Otto as an influence, did not seem eager to embrace the aesthetic pluralism of Otto's approach.  It's one thing for a Swiss Reformed theologian like Emil Brunner to dissent from Otto's art mysticism because it abandoned any commitment to Christian scripture.  Among Christians writing about matters of Christian concern Brunner had every right to register that complaint. The Hebrew Bible is notoriously uninterested in discussing the nature of music, so most discourse on what the Bible does or doesn't say about music revolves around the presumed dualism of Orphic and Pythagorean traditions.  The world is far bigger than what the Greeks kept debating about.  When the African Christian bishop Tertullian rhetorically asked what Athens had to do with Jerusalem a contemporary Copenhagen school minimalist might say that the Hebrew Bible was a knock-off of Plato's laws and only came into being during the Hasmonean era.  But in his day Tertullian was arguing that Christians had the Bible and they didn't need to be beholden to categories of thought imposed by Greek philosophy.

Now, regarding Schleiermacher, I think at this point I can add a few links for your consideration.

https://readingreligion.org/9780190212551/modern-religion-modern-race/

https://www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/race-difference-and-religion-is-there-a-universal-humanity

https://brill.com/view/journals/pneu/44/2/article-p285_15.xml

It's obvious from the way scholars have interacted with Vial's book that they can take his point that Schleiermacher did have Eurocentric and white supremacist defaults and yet still regard Vial as having misread Schleiermacher on important issues (there are liberal theologians who have felt ardently Barth and Brunner misread Schleiermacher for about a century now).  

Even the concept of religion itself is, in contemporary scholarly discussion, something regarded as a scholarly invention of the long 19th century.  Jason Storm, for instance, has a book on the invention of religion in Japan. Piety can overlap with religion or religious customs but is not necessarily the same thing.  He also wrote a whole book called The Myth of Disenchantment showing that belief in spiritual and supernatural elements is more common now than in the past and that founding figures in the social sciences had substantial occult interests (Carl Jung perhaps foremost among them).

Now Vial's project may be stymied from the outset by a desire to demonstrate racist elements in Schleiermacher and then contend that the categories of religion he introduced have thus been problematized.  I'm slogging through an annoying book called The Music of Theology where three European theologians annoyingly mix metaphors and seem to take as given that Christianity is "Western" or "European".  No on both counts.  Christianity started in southwest Asia and made its way to Africa as well as Europe.  That trans-Atlantic academic norms take as given an Orphic and Pythagorean dualism is pretty obvious to me at this point even if Ted Gioia weren't jumping up and down on that soapbox at his Substack.  That Schleiermacher is important is basically beyond dispute, but at a lay level I think we can suggest that if Schleiermacher was a racist he wasn't the same kind of racist as H P Lovecraft, who was really virulently white supremacist.  As a half Native American and half white man I'm the kind of guy that Lovecraft would have regarded as an abomination.  

Even if Vial's work is tendentious that's literally a debating point for scholars of Schleiermacher and scholars of race.  I mention this all, of course, to highlight my simple point that when I read Borstlap's books over the years I knew enough to know that he was making claims about Herder and Schleiermacher that, alas, can't hold up under even the briefest possible scrutiny.  If anything Borstlap is more eager to valorize or demonize authors for what he imputes to them as their one big good or bad idea than Ewell does with Schenker.  

I've read Ewell and Borstlap so I'm not just saying this for purely rhetorical effect.  I've got my disagreements with both authors but Ewell is a self-identified atheist and a son of an atheist who stays in the wheelhouse of music theory.  So I don't take any offense that someone who has advertised he wouldn't know the first thing about liberal Protestant theology doesn't go there.  Borstlap, by contrast, implicitly takes the stance of a polymath without necessarily showing that he's ever done his homework.  What makes Schleiermacher good and Herder bad?  Can Borstlap cite works?  He hasn't, not in a decade, and has relied on sweeping generalizations.  It comes off almost as if he took survey courses in philosophy and religion half a century ago and took in those accepted norms.  People can do that but an academic consensus can change in a generation or two. If Herder was a Eurocentric chauvinist there has to be proof provided from the writings.  Borstlap never provided it.  The same can be said about Schleiermacher.  

Even the very category of "religion" that Borstlap has invoked is, here in the 21st century, regarded by anthropologists and historians of religion as an actually freighted and problematic concept itself.  Obviously religious convictions and beliefs have existed for some time but the way German writers in the long 19th century used the term "religion" has not escaped scrutiny.  

I wrote previously that one of the biggest problems with partisans of Art Religion is they never stipulate what kind of religion Art is supposed to be a surrogate for.  I grew up Pentecostal and am currently Anglican so I know the differences between high and low liturgical practices and I can tell you that within just global Anglicanism itself a wide variety of practices exist.  Borstlap's Art Religion seems tacitly tethered to the highest of highbrow forms of liturgy but that's not a sustainable assumption.  Chiara Bertoglio's monumental work on sixteenth century Christian debates on music and liturgical norms in Europe, all by itself, should disabuse anyone of the idea that Christian music and liturgy was uniform.  Not that Borstlap ever said that, rather, the European Christian musical norms of the sixteenth century (and before) were full of genres cross-pollinating across what we'd colloquially identify as folk, pop, art, and so on.  Particularly in nascent Lutheranism a lot of cross-form and cross-genre and stylistic exchange was going on.  

Borstlap and folks at the formerly called Future Symphony Institute have committed to a future for the symphony. But that's precisely the problem, the symphony is a mere fraction of what is retroactively called The Great Tradition of Western European classical music.  Before that there was Byrd or Palestrina or Josquin or Perotin or Schutz or, ah, right, we're seeing a ton of overly liturgical music in that history.  But there was also dance music.  Charles Garside Jr. contended in Zwingli and the Arts that, by banning music from church services altogether Swiss Reformed notables like Zwingli and Bullinger paradoxically created a realm of secular music that was not tethered to either the throne or the altar.  What liberated music in Europe, depending on which scholars we read, was the process of being desacralized.  It's hardly a surprise that a scholar of Swiss Reformed theologians would regard that as an innovation of the likes of Zwingli, much like fans of the Enlightenment want to believe that it was their pet movement that liberated music. 

Maybe the zeitgeist has it that liberal theologians are doing handwringing about the unexamined racism of their heroes.  This would, if anything, mightily underline Ewell's point in On Music Theory that confronting racist legacies is happening in seemingly every other field of academic except music theory.  

For my part I am just coming back to my earlier point that I can't take Borstlap's claims about Herder and Schleiermacher as given.  My reading on contemporary debates about theologians in the liberal Protestant tradition has just underlined my hesitation to take Borstlap as having any authority (or even basic competency) on matters of Christian theology. 

links for the weekend: Ethan Hein on songs covered by Norah Jones and The Allman Brothers; Norman Lebrecht on the day the symphony died; Anglican high and low liturgy and why that matters with art snobs; Brad East on providence as a doctrine of consolation and Matt Jantzen on the same as doctrine of racial entitlement and theologians against that paradigm; Alastair Roberts on providence and ambition; riffs on Leviathan; and Jim West will be happy to know there are new books on Emil Brunner this year

We haven’t had a links for the weekend in a while and there’s some catching up to do.

Interpolation is the new contrafacta: on Rick Beato’s discussion of interpolation in pop music in light of contrafacta in 16th century Lutheran musical practice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_9Larw-hJM

Rich Beato recently discussed how recent popular songs display such obvious debts to songs from the last century that the question he asks is “Isn’t this just stealing?” I'm not going to address that question. Instead I'm going to ask a new question, "Has this kind of overt musical borrowing of existing musical materials and super-imposing a new text on old music happened before?"  The answer to that is yes and that this has happened for centuries in Christian church music traditions.  But first ... 

Rick Beato discusses a concept called interpolation, which in this case means to take a melody from an existing popular song, giving it new lyrics, and recording it from scratch without actually sampling the song from which the melody has been borrowed.
 
Beato describes interpolation as a bit of a puzzle, how it’s possible for you to take an existing melody that maybe someone else wrote, adding new lyrics and then “it’s yours?” This practice was so commonplace in sixteenth century German-speaking lands music historians refer to the practice as contrafacta, where German Lutherans might take a melody such as the chant Veni Sancte Spiritus and rework it into a German vernacular tune that preserves the core of the chant but makes it accessible to non-Latin speakers.  Now there is the old saw that Luther and Lutherans just transformed old bar melodies into hymns but that view has largely been dismantled. 
 
Chiara Bertoglio published a door-stopper of a book around 2017, summarizing research into how Lutherans in the sixteenth century did not necessarily just add Christian texts on secular tunes but what they did frequently do was adapt existing Catholic music into German vernacular.  Contrafacta was the practice of imposing a new text on an established musical work, which could even be a polyphonic work. A simple potential case study for an English-language contrafacta would be if someone took a slow Latin chorale setting of Verbum Caro Factum Est and rendered it into English with a vernacular text “And the Word Became Flesh”; the music itself would not be changed at all, only the text, but this could and would be treated as a “new” work and there were composers in the sixteenth century who specialized in this kind of re-composition or, if you will, “sampling”.  Not only was it not frowned up in nascent Lutheranism this kind of practice could be regarded as an act of musical heroism and public service, seeing to it that Lutherans would not deprive themselves of the best music the Catholic tradition had to offer in the process of differentiating themselves from Catholicism on doctrinal issues such as the nature of justification by faith and rethinking aspects of how liturgy “worked”.
 
If you have an extravagant amount of time (or are a lightning fast reader) I suggest Bertoglio’s book.  I’m only a few chapters into it but it’s a formidable survey of the practices of Christians in Europe in the sixteenth century and all the debates and practices and theories they had about music.
 
https://www.chiarabertoglio.com/reforming-music
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110520811/html?lang=en
Reforming Music : Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century
 
eBook
Published: March 6, 2017
ISBN: 9783110520811
 
Hardcover
Published: February 20, 2017
ISBN: 9783110518054
 
Paperback
Published: November 19, 2018
ISBN: 9783110636819
 
So when Rick Beato asks “Isn’t this just stealing?” an answer to that can be:

1.       In the sense of overt recycling, maybe but

2.       Modal mutation and reharmonization of known musical phrases isn’t that literal (I did listen to the songs Beato references)

3.       Per the Dua Lupa reference, contrafacta obviously still exists in the 21^st century, it just involves lawyers

Back in the sixteenth century lawyers were not arguing over musical borrowings.  Lawyers (if they were named John Calvin!) were arguing about literally more religious doctrinal issues in the sixteenth century.  What people call “interpolation” in 21^st century popular music has a precedent in early modern European Christian liturgical music. The differences, among many, between “then” and “now” is that in the long 19^th century (let’s say between 1780 and 1920) a doctrine emerged in northern trans-Atlantic philosophy and aesthetics that touted the power and value of originality among Artists who were supposed to be genius enough to come up with their own ideas and not just recontextualize, revise, or even literally recycle existing pieces of music with new texts and call it new music.  That was not how Lutherans rolled between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.  Johann Sebastian Bach was not really the kind of person to feel bad about super-imposing a new cantata text on a previously written piece of music and calling the result a new musical work. 

If you want a short and fairly readable primer on Bach’s late career self-borrowing Daniel Melamed’s
Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio is a good start.  And for a review …
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/20/bach-master-recycler/
 
Historically the response of “they just don’t care” was the more normative response.  It was in the wake of Romanticism that “isn’t this stealing?” was more likely to become the musician’s default response.  This is not to defend all behaviors of musical borrowing without citation or credit.  Far from it.  But since Beato has obviously been baffled by what “interpolation” is supposed to be taken for and is asking, I think, in good faith, “Isn’t this stealing?” this would be exactly where people steeped in the history of what many call “classical music” in general and liturgical music in Christian European practice in particular, can jump in and discuss.  Happily adding new texts to old music was considered a good thing in nascent Lutheranism. Chiara Bertoglio tours the sixteenth century and has noted that within early Lutheranism the boundaries between what we might now call highbrow and lowbrow musical styles and forms were all considered permeable, endlessly negotiable boundaries and it was not considered a bad thing to make a new German chorale on an old Catholic plainchant, and it wasn’t even considered a bad thing to create a German vernacular liturgical text adapting a Psalm and super-imposing it on, say, an old Latin language choral work.  The whole concept of intellectual property as taken for granted in 20^th century Anglo-American popular music had not yet arrived. 

So if we ask "Isn't this stealing?" Well, if it is `now' it most certainly wasn't `then'.  A whole web of philosophical and economic and social customs emerged in the last few centuries to change how people might have construed the question "Isn't this stealing", more to the point, of even starting to conceive of music in such a way as to even allow Rick Beato's question to be conceived of before even being asked. In the sixteenth century the answer might have been "No, and if it `is' stealing it's the kind of shameless musical `stealing' that needs to happen if vernacular church music is going to move forward".  I won't attempt to flood your attention span with a list of Lutheran music historians and scholars on that topic because I'm more in the Anglican/Swiss/Dutch/Scottish Calvinist traditions and I'm not going to pretend Lutheran musicology is even remotely my wheelhouse.  But I've dipped my toes into it here and there.  

It looks like today's pop music `interpolation' maps with yesterday's German Lutheran `contrafacta', at least a little bit. 

POSTSCRIPT 7:24pm 

In U.S. contemporary Christian music it may be more common to create new music for old texts than to create new texts for old music because when so many beloved texts are already vernacular and in the public domain the cultural rewards of adding a contemporary musical sound to an established text are substantial.  

But I can't help mentioning that as contrafacta practice goes in church music in the United States there may be few examples more famous than Thomas Andrew Dorsey setting the next text of "Take My Hand Precious Lord" to the well-known tune Maitland.  Dorsey made a few substantial bluesy changes but here in 2024 I don't think anyone could mistake what he did "with" Maitland for earlier forms of the tune.  I have an older post discussing a book about Dorsey's development you can read, if you like.

So contrafacta, interpolation, the tradition of taking a known, even a legendary tune, and superimposing a new text on it is one of the more venerable practices in Christian music of the last, oh, four centuries.  It's in contemporary secular trans-Atlantic popular music that it comes across as possibly (or, sure, actually) stealing. 

I'm halfway through Jason Yust's book Organized Time--Yust's ideas of musical time and space for rhythm, harmony and form could've easily been filiation, spiration and procession in a thinker like Thomas Aquinas in a very different field of study

Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality & Form is a dense but fascinating read.  His proposal that different elements in music such as rhythm, melody, harmony and form have overlapping and interpenetrating yet simultaneously identifiably distinct forms of time in a single musical work is heady, to say the least.  

At the same time ... I found myself thinking that if Thomas Aquinas could write at length on the

 distinctions between filiation, spiration and procession in intra-Trinitarian relationships between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in Questions 29 through 43 of Part One of Summa Theologica, then Jason Yust's observations about musical time(s) in his conclusion (I did skip to the end) seem weirdly mundane.  Different kinds of times evoke a kind of timeless stand against temporality?  Okay, but this is something I could just as easily read from Chiara Bertoglio.  I'm going through two of her books lately: Musical Scores and the Eternal Present: Theology, Time and Tolkien, and her gigantic Reforming Music:Music and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century on the other.  Not that I'm not loving Jason Yust's book, but his wrap-up on time and music seemed a bit of a let-down. The analytical insights are spectacular and the musings on time and temporality less so.

But then I was considering graduate school in both music and biblical studies at one point in my life.  Compared to even third-rate theologians music theorists speculating about temporality and human perception can seem pedestrian by comparison.  What could we infer from the simultaneity of different forms of musical time?  If Yust's thesis is plausible, and I think it is, then any attempt to describe any musical experience is predicated on what amount to a perichoretic set of timespaces.  perichoretic relationships between different elements of musical time Yust proposes and look back on the work of theologians like T. F. Torrance on Trinitaran ontology and time and space as created things in Space, Time and Incarnation.  There Torrance advised us to reject a ham-fisted embrace of Newtonian "receptacle" concepts of time."  

Charles Twombly wrote a wonderful little book called Perichoresis and Personhood: God, Christ, and Salvation in John of Damascus.  The title pretty much tells you just what you get from the book! For the uninitiated, perichoresis (or circumincession if you're more Catholic than Eastern Orthodox, I guess) is what theologians describe as the intra-Trinitarian relationships of union and distinction between the Father, Son and Spirit.  John of Damascus picked up work done by his predecessors such as Maximus the Confessor, refining generations of transforming the Stoic concept of perichoresis into something that can describe the nature of the personhood of the persons in the Trinity as well as the mystery of Christ's divine and human natures. 

So when L Poundie Burstein advised in Journeys Through Galant Expositions that we either abandon the receptacle concept of musical time and space or modify it so as to not imagine these musical containers of timespace can only hold one thing at a time I agree!  But it's also patently obvious to me that admonitions against constrained concepts of timespaces as receptacles that hold either this or that but not these are those is something anyone with a decent amount of theological reading on the immanent and social Trinity would keep in mind as a matter of course.  

Now how and why might any of this stuff even matter?  I have a proposal for why it matters, when cultural conservatives write and speak as though X or Y musical vocabularies are incompatible with large scale forms or "argument" they are witlessly repeating canards by that arch-Marxist Theodor Adorno on the one hand, and claiming that there are types of music that cannot be "redeemed" by Christians for any use. I am still incubating an expansion of Ragtime and Sonata Forms after all these years.  It doesn't matter if Catholic polemicists claim that ragtime was music made in red-light districts and can't be used in church services. One of the greatest composers of ragtime, Joseph F Lamb, was by general account a loving father and husband and regularly attended Mass (which wouldn't be a shock to hear about an Irish Catholic in the early 20th century).  Maybe you wouldn't want to hear a ragtime variation on "Just As I Am" but I personally wouldn't mind, and if it was for hausmusik and not liturgy I don't see what the trouble could be.  The more music theorists play with ideas of what music time and space might be the more their speculations converge on what turns out, in my own life of reading, to be tip-toeing up to some of the most ordinary and long-standing reflections on the mystery of the Trinity in Christian dogmatics spanning Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Reformed thought. 

Jason Yust's proposals about what amounts to a perichoretic approach to musical timespaces "is" fascinating and it's fascinating to me precisely because it reinvents a wheel that was refined centuries ago in a different context. Aquinas' ruminations on the distinctions between filiation, spiration and procession could as easily have been making distinctions between rhythm and melody and form and harmony and timbre in musical timespaces had he set his mind to another set of topics.  He didn't, of course.  

One of the canards I keep seeing from cultural conservatives who don't abide "pop" is they claim the musical materials are organically incapable of being congruent with "serious" music, let alone liturgy.  The case is asserted rather than proven.  Johann Sebastian Bach had a historically specific fusion of "ancient" church music and then-modern dance forms.  Synergistic dynamics between "high" and "low" have run through music history for some time.  It was the advent of Romantic art religion that seems to have been the start of a newly dogmatic phase of segregating "high" from "low", at least in reception history and teaching about canonized masterworks.  

Roundaboutly what that means is that I distrust the confident judgments of the jazzbros as much as I disagree with the pat conclusions of Roger Scruton and contemporary Catholics who pine for the return of a Tridentine rite which, based on the Cardinal Ratzinger I've read so far, may be more the dream of revanchists than a historical reality.  These men (and so often they are men) instruct us in philosophies and stances of aesthetic judgment rather than creation.  It's easier to get them to go on and on about the "timeless" nature of the "eternal" masterworks than to discuss musical time.  Meanwhile, in music theory and philosophy of aesthetics reflections on the embodied nature of time are legion.  That's great.  I like to read Ferdia Stone-Davis pick apart the problems in Roger Scruton's notion of acoustic vs. acousmatic audiation and cognition.  One of the canards I have been thinking about a lot is the idea that the obstacles to having blues sonata forms is that allegedly blues material cannot be wedded to sonata form.  The Harlem Symphony disproved this canard in the last century, ditto the symphonies of William Grant Still, yet a conclusive argument against the "organicism" fallacy has not been made, and I have begun to suspect one of the key reasons for this is that people get sidetracked on questions and dogmas regarding musical vocabulary without considering the nature of musical time.

Roger Scruton contended that music is more like architecture than language. 

... But it seems to me that, in the haste to squeeze music into the framework suggested by linguistics, writers have not always been careful to distinguish the two kinds of hierarchy. Music, in my view, is more like architecture than it is like language, and this means that repetition, amplification, diminution and augmentation have more importance in creating the musical surface than rule-guided transformations of some structural ‘source’.

Fair enough, let's consider that idea.  Actually, precisely because I consider that idea I find it absurd Roger Scruton kept coming back to his one-dimensional notion of musical time. When is the last time anyone saw a one-dimensional building?   Never.  If the foremost philosopher of the aesthetics of music, at least in conservative circles, committed to such a dubious idea we might be better off sticking to the speculations of non-philosophers.  I could consider writers whose work Scruton mentioned and passed over briefly because they weren't philosophers: Victor Zuckerkandl had a very three-dimensional concept of musical time and space in Sound and Symbol Volume 1: Music and the External World!  George Rochberg built upon Zuckerkandl's precedent to distinguish between "timespace" and "spacetime" in The Aesthetics of Survival!  There are times when philosophers make blunders non-philosophers can't even think of.

Worse yet, Scruton was a lay Anglican.  In other words, he should have been conversant in all the conventional Trinitarian doctrines from Aquinas to know what filiation, spiration and procession are and why those matter to Catholics.  He did say he thought of himself as an Anglo-Catholic, after all, Sir Roger.  

So let's turn back to this idea of music as being like architecture.  We drop the mono-dimensional idea because Christ became flesh and blood.  Through the Incarnation time and space are part of what He took upon himself.  Gregory Nazianzus contended that that which was not taken up (by Christ) is not healed. Christ is fully human and fully divine.  In Pauline literature we read that through Christ God is reconciling all things to Himself.  Yet conservative philosophers and philosophers who state that they are Christians can keep coming back around to this idea that musical styles X or Y cannot be redeemed?  Why not?  We're just told so.  The path from perichoresis being a Stoic philosophical concept to being the term John of Damascus used to describe the hypostatic union of Christ's divine and human natures took centuries.  Partisans against a synthesis of blues, ragtime, rock, country and other "low" styles with the "high" of complex musical forms keep coming back to the canard that these materials are incommensurate with a de facto "divinity" of classical music.  These people, if they are professing Christians, need to go back and review their dogmatics some more.  Was flesh and blood so lowly and irredeemable Christ could not take it upon Himself?  Why, then, do some Christians claim that the music of African American popular song and dance styles have no place in the church?  Have these people talked to any black church historians, musicians or theologians or liturgists?  

Having finished Philip Ewell's On Music Theory one of the things I have been struck by is that musical punditry for and against his book defaults to race and "civilization".  I have seen a canard among some defenders of "the great tradition" that pluralism is relativism is rejection of hierarchy.  But as I'm reading Joseph Ratzinger or Nicholas Wolterstorff or Maeve Louise Heaney or Frank Burch Brown or David Brown (note the spread of Catholic, Anglican and Dutch Reformed in that list of names) I see that there have been cases for aesthetic pluralism as an outworking of the spiritual discipline of Christian hospitality in theological aesthetics going back for a century.  

When I read music historians say anything about Richard Allen it tends to be a bit negative since he and other black clergy did not like the nascent popular sounds that are venerated by rockists, jazzbros and others.  But I think theologians, at precisely this point, have a more sympathetic reading of Richard Allen's life and times, he was the seminal figure in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who had to deal with the reality of aesthetic pluralism in congregational life.  The fact that many fans of Gospel blues have decided that some of the clergy who were cautious to denigrating about their favorite styles of music does not mean we have to read their concerns uncharitably. What I appreciated about Mark Burford's magisterial Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field is how seriously he took the reservations William Levi Dawson had about the emerging Gospel blues singers. He worried that the emergence of Gospel blues might led black churches to hire cheaper and less trained musicians.  Burford also pointed out that while in rock historiographies Sly and the Family Stone are rightly celebrated for being a racially integrated rock group he points out that hardly anyone remembers that Doris Akers had a racially integrated Gospel choir in the 1950s. 

It can be far too easy on "our" side of musical history to remember that there were quite a few voices in black churches who were not happy with what came to be known as Gospel blues and it's to Burford's credit that he went back and found the writings of these black musicians and clergy to give their perspective, which has long since vanished into music history as the objections of the losing side.  The winning side was the side that had Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharp and, later, the early soul and rock singers.  As Anthony Heilbut put it in his landmark work on the contributions of black Pentecostals to early rock, the history of how the sounds of the underground went mainstream was through black churches. 

In other words, if contemporary polemics back and forth about race and class and music forget church music then a globe-spanning field of shared faith gets ignored.  I thnk about this stuff, obviously, and part of why that is is because I had a Native American Calvinist dad and a white Pentecostal mom.  I made friends with Christians from Kenya and Japan in my college years.  I came to a relatively early and formative understanding that Christianity is not "Western" or "Christendom" or a Western concept of "civilization".  I might have more in common, in doctrinal terms, with African Anglicans than Boston Episcopalians.  There have been many a black musician who has suggested that if you don't even try to understand black American church music there are many things about black American you won't understand.  Conversely, if conservatives only invoke a "Christendom" that has no black churches in it I can't take them seriously for even one solitary second.  

In the praise and blame for Ewell's book (which I actually like quite a bit) I notice that virtually no one who has complained about his brief against the white supremacism in U.S. music education thinks outside the box of Wagnerian art religion, whether they call it that or not.  Conversely, it's one thing for Don Baton to rip on Philip Ewell for having a brief and negative swipe at Christian complicity in approving of black slavery and another thing for Don Baton to display any working knowledge of Christian dogmatics.  I have been contending, at some length, that because Christianity began in Asia and Africa before it become European, fidelity to the earliest Christian writings does not obligate us to defend a "Western" sense of "civilization" or "culture" or "Christendom".  To defend those things is to defend a set of idols that are not worth defending.  It is at precisely the nexus of church music that people for and against Ewell's thesis seem to want to talk entirely about race.  We should talk about race, of course, but the irony I'm seeing around me is that writers like Ewell and Baton do us no favors by only talking about Christianity as "for" or "against" blackness or "Western civilization".  Augustine of Hippo was born in Africa. Ditto Tertullian.  As Esther Acolatse has put it, even many Western scholars have come around the re-affirmation of Christianity as a religion with Afro-Asiatic beginnings.  

Black pastors, theologians and musicians and churchgoers were all, in their own ways, contending with the conundrum of aesthetic pluralism in liturgical life.  People who want their highbrow or lowbrow race music (whether white or black) seem too often too eager to pick their favorite side and overlook the larger discourse, the centuries of negotiation, definition and recalibration involved in aesthetic changes in liturgical musics.  It's at this nexus of issues that theologians, church historians, music theorists, music historians and practical musicians and clergy could potentially have a lot to share with each other.  The "crisis" of pluralism can be read in political or racial terms but for thousands of years Christian thinkers could think of it as the challenge of catholicity, and not necessarily the explicitly Roman Catholic kind of catholicity.  The Protestant Reformations erupted in part because of the conviction that Roman Catholicism was far too Roman and not catholic enough. That is, in a very palpable way, what Philip Ewell has highlighted as a problem in music theory education.  What is proclaimed to be "universal" has been anything but.  

I don't think Christians should jump on some bandwagon of denouncing the "woke joke folk".  That is stupid because a lot of these allegedly "woke joke folk" are brothers and sisters in Christ.  If you can't love them who you have seen then you can't love Him who you have not seen.  I don't write that as a political or religious progressive, I write that as a Christian, a low-church Calvinist Anglican to be specific, but as a Christian.  I think Ewell's book is well worth reading and there's a lot about it I like.  I also think, drawing a bit on Adolph Reed Jr., that there are pitfalls in making conversations on music theory about race.  The injustices we should discuss, but at several points we can't talk about the damaging impact of post-Wagnerian art-religion without discussing the bad faith and bad arguments and theological incompetence of the men who claim that highbrow art does what "religion" can no longer do.  If anything we live in an era in which theologians and musicians are more interested in aesthetic pluralism than in earlier epochs of "Western" civilization or "Christendom".  We have a broader and bolder grasp of how truly global the Christian faith is.  Even Ratzinger granted aesthetic pluralism as a reality to be incorporated into Catholic liturgical life (I'm slowly going through The Theology of Liturgy alongside my neo-Calvinist binge).

So I am having fun reading Jason Yust's book and it has gotten me thinking a lot about the ways people have tried to describe music in time and space.  Yust's book has also gotten me thinking about polemics against "pop" made by Christians, whether Catholics, Anglicans, evangelicals or other.  The old Christian doctrines about perichoresis can be instructive to Christians at this point. If we take perichoresis seriously in Trinitarian dogmatics and Christology, it should tell us it's the dumbest thing in the world to claim that you can't make a ragtime sonata or a blues fugue because, oh, that material doesn't "fit" the form-follows-function axiom.  Music is a kind of architecture?  Well, you can build a house from wood or clay or paper or what-have-you.  For anyone claiming to be some kind of theonomistic Christian the proposal is even more patently idiotic.  Why would Christ reconcile people to Himself but not their music?  

If Scruton took his own idea that music is like architecture more seriously he should have abandoned his one-dimensional concept of musical time and space.  Part and parcel with that mono-dimensional idea would be the claim that the materials are "unfit" for some musical "argument" or "structure".  Architectural principles might tell us that this or that won't support the weight that's going to be put on it but then the comparison breaks down.  Is the "house" of a symphony made of "German" materials so different from the "house" of a symphony made from American materials?  If "art cannot be learned" and conservatory education is stifling then if conservatory-trained musicians claim that you can't create ragtime or blues-based sonatas and fugues then, hey, these conservatory trained Romantics testify against themselves.  

If I have a proverbial hat to throw into the ring I want to write on behalf of ideas for sparking creativity.  The scholastically created and journalistically sustained boundaries between a "high" that defaults to "white" and a "pop" music that is "low" which tends to be defined by innovations from musicians who were (or are) not white does seem to be a chasm that some want to cross and others want to be left as is. I'm firmly in the camp of wanting to make that Jimi Hendrix dream more feasible for anyone, that Bach, Handel, Muddy Waters flamenco sound he aspired to. 

Seemingly inseparable from art-religious fanaticism is a commitment to a highbrow or lowbrow art mysticism.  I've made this point before but there are the Ted Gioia advocates of "sorcery" and the Roger Scruton advocates of "sacrament".  Since I hail more from the Reformed (Swiss, Dutch, Scottish, and American) traditions I don't have a sacramental view of music.  As an ex-Pentecostal I came from a tradition that recognized music was and is powerful but the Spirit decides when music does or doesn't have the anointing.  You feel it or you don't and it's not a matter of some magic formula or some fool-proof schematic.  One of the things I don't miss about my Pentecostal days was the sometimes verbalized sentiment of "the music I like is anointed and the music I don't isn't" but that's the low church variation of the kinds of screeds for and against various styles of musics I've read over the course of my life.  

I thank God the Scriptures don't include anything remotely useful or clear about what "biblical" music actually sounded like. If I did want to go hear music from the apostolic period I'd take a cue from Xenakis and listen to Greek Orthodox chant, or maybe Syrian psalm-singing or the Psalms sung in Aramaic, literally none of which would sound like Tallis or Palestrina or Beethoven's Ninth.  The rockist, the jazzbro, the classical music elitist, the partisans of "authenticity" are not the people I take seriously.  There have been scholars who have raised questions whether the mystical perfect-church-music-of-the-past eras really existed.  The only people who may have heard those amazing votive masses were the performers.  The golden age of Lutheran congregational music may have existed in the minds of the scholars who were looking for it rather than in Johann Sebastian Bach's actual lifetime, because he came in for some trenchant criticism in his flesh and blood life.  The providential benefit of having virtually no clear idea what the sacred music of "then" sounded like in the apostolic and post-apostolic era is that we have some freedom to figure out what works now. 

A few semi-organized thoughts the night before Thanksgiving.  If it applies to you, happy Thanksgiving.