Ethan Hein on Jason Yust's April 2024 essay on tonality and racism, some belated thoughts on books by Philip Ewell and John Borstlap as etiological narratives

A word of warning, this blog post is 12,318 words long and includes a rather hefty bibliography.  I am glad Ethan Hein got around to writing about Yust's essay on tonality because it spurred me to finally collect my thoughts about books by Philip Ewell and John Borstlap I read earlier this year and Yust's book Organized Time is a wonderful, challenging read!  I'm glad to read that it seems Ethan and I both found Yust's work challenging and rewarding.  So, here we go.  Warning you ahead of time this is long even by the standards of Wenatchee The Hatchet. 

Drawing on Jason Yust and Drew Nobile to explore rock and ragtime sonata possibilities

Ethan Hein has a new post up about hypermeter and though I’m not foremost among Beatles’ fans I liked his explication of hypermeter in their songs.  In the post he mentions Jason Yust’s Organized Time.  Something Yust mentions early in his book is that though he drew up Schenkerian categories one of his chief criticisms of the Schenkerian tradition is its failure to deal with rhythm and if a theory fails to develop an adequate account of rhythm then, to put it very sharply indeed, how is it really ultimately very useful for an art that is about organizing time and space?  It is here that I interject that there’s good reason Augustine of Hippo decided to start De Musica with the books on rhythm before he ever got around to discussing melody or harmony.  In fact he never moved beyond the treatment of rhythm and never finished De Musica.

recently finished reading from Jeremy Begbie and Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

I haven't put together my thoughts on John Borstlap's newest book to the point where I could write about it here, for instance, but I can say that if you want to read a book that takes traditions of spirituality seriously and makes a case against materialist reductionism in the arts more effectively than Borstlap has in his new book (and is much cheaper!) you could read Jeremy Begbie's newest book, which I finished reading this week.

http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/abundantly-more/410871

Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World by Jeremy Begbie

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.