Using the availability bias to demonstrate the survivorship bias. Ted Gioia conveniently extolls making art as the fastest bid for immortality in our age by invoking Shakespeare

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-to-achieve-immortality

...

Sometimes this immortality of art happens in surprising ways. I recently watched the TV miniseries Capote Vs. The Swans—and it documents author Truman Capote’s shameful betrayal of his closest friends.

He took their secret scandals—told to him in private—and used them as plot points in his unfinished ‘gossip novel’ Answered Prayers.

I condemn what Capote did. But this miniseries makes something clear to me I’d missed before.

Babe Paley and the other friends he betrayed, come across as more positive and endearing figures than Capote himself in this miniseries—they now seem heroic compared to him. And they have been effectively immortalized by the way their lives intertwined with his, despite all his bad intentions.

They will still be remembered a hundred years from now—and recalled sympathetically—because of Capote’s artistry, which will prove more durable than his friendship or betrayals.

This is more common than most people realize. One of my musician friends spent a lot of time with Jack Kerouac back in the 1950s. My buddy ended up as a character in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur, and even got portrayed in a movie adaptation. I have other friends and acquaintances who also became characters in Hollywood biopics.

This is what art does. Even at secondhand.

If you’ve crossed paths with a great artist, some of that immortality might even rub off on you.

That’s a different way of surviving—and one that no tech bro can match by getting injections of teenager blood or gulping down 100 nutritional supplements per day.

It’s useful to remind ourselves of this genuine immortality of art and of the great deeds praised by the ancients—especially in an age that worships tech and marginalizes all other pursuits.

 

...

The availability bias is that you go with the easiest, most immediately available exemplar of X that springs to mind at your first thought.  It is the heuristic I have relied upon when I wanted to think of who would be most likely to use the survivorship bias in making a case for something.  Thus I have gone with Ted Gioia's claim that through art people can achieve immortality, if not by making art that is "immortal" by being depicted in art that is immortal and which thus grants them a kind of second-hand immortality.

But do ancient religious texts promise that kind of vicarious immortality or is the immortality of some other kind?  Doesn't texts that refer to physical resurrection of actually dead people in Judaism and Christianity suggest that those texts had a more literally, well, literal take on immortality?  

Besides, Gioia can roll out any easy examples of artists who have been canonized and are required reading in school programs to make his case.  His case depends on the most overt survivorship bias possible.  What about all the poems that no one can read because they haven't survived?  Did the person who wrote "Here I sit all broken-hearted" in a bathroom stall really achieve immorality?  Who was that person?  I indulge in the reductio ad absurdum here for what I take to be obvious reasons.  Sure at some point there once was a man from Nantucket but who made that limerick?  

I read George Steiner's In Bluebird's Castle a few years ago after reading his book get denounced by John Borstlap and Richard Taruskin.  I think that both men took a rather melodramatic stance against Steiner's book, which openly asks whether the demise of "literacy" and literacy as the basis of "high culture" suggests that the bid at immortality through the arts that has been valorized since ancient Greece hasn't turned out to be something of a shell game.  That's a crisis for someone who was committed to the idea that the humanities actually ought to humanize, perhaps.  It's also a melodramatic reflection to anyone who regards life as more than the accumulation of books you've read or have been told you should have read before you die.  What both Taruskin and Borstlap seemed to miss was Steiner concluded that the age of literacy had ended but this meant that kids-these-days were not quoting ancient Latin and Greek poets so much as they were sharing musical references saturated with pop and classical music.  What seemed to the great literary minds and critics of the mid-20th century to be a possible crisis of letters might have turned out to have been a paradigm shift in which there was a new literacy replacing the old one.  For those committed to the old paradigm of "literacy" the loss was insuperable but would generations capable of triangulating half a millennia of musical references across multiple continents regard the ability to juxtapose memories of Bob Dylan songs with Baroque keyboard music feel they were illiterate?

Different people read different books in profoundly different ways.

But what Steiner touched on at various points in his book was the observation that immorality gained through the arts was, if we're honest, a somewhat dubious way of defining immortality.  It may have been a Greek notion of immortality and a Roman notion of immortality but did Judaism or Christianity really define that as "immortality"?  Steiner's conclusion was a rather simple one, no. 

Warren Cole Smith and Alastair Roberts on Simon Kennedy's Against Worldview, considering the evolution of "worldview" from early 20th century neo-Calvinist theology through to Cold War and post Cold War Anglo-American shibboleth

https://lexhampress.com/product/305968/against-worldview-reimagining-christian-formation-as-growth-in-wisdom

 

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/against-worldview-review/

January 24, 2025  |  Alastair Roberts

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning—then it can be put back into circulation.” For evangelicals, one example is the word “worldview.”

 

D. G. Hart and other Reformed writers have had a worldview aversion for years.  An expression that gets withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning in music theory might be “tonality” (per my post on Ethan Hein discussing Jason Yust discussing the freighted nature of “tonality” in music theory). Terms do change over time and with changing usage.  Worldview is a term that has taken on a lot of connotations in Christian evangelical and fundamentalist circles.  It is one of the most reliable shibboleths of the entire evangelical media field.  So a book writing against the use of the term getting published in December 2024 is … not a surprise. 

 

But one of the joys of reading criticism is saving yourself the need to read a book you realize, from reading reviews, you don’t even need to read.  That worldview has turned into the kind of shibboleth that pre-empts rather than encourages Christians to think through complex issues is not something I personally need to read about.  I’ve seen it over the course of thirty years.  That said, a book that attempts to describe how and why the term “worldview” became a shibboleth should be out there.  I can benefit from reading reviews of the book even if I don’t read it because reviews and criticism can reveal the state of the discourse.

For instance … I just read Warren Cole Smith’s review and this stood out.

 

https://mereorthodoxy.com/after-worldview

February 5th, 2025 By Warren Cole Smith

…

For example, Kennedy is wrong when he blames this debasing of the word on such figures as Frances Schaeffer and Chuck Colson. Kennedy, an Australian, is not fluent in the dramatis personae of the American Evangelical Industrial Complex, especially those cogs in the machine that interface with conservative politics. Blaming the weaponization of the phrase “worldview” on Schaeffer and Colson while ignoring Jerry Falwell, James Robison, Gary Bauer, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, and a host of others who were and are explicit culture warriors is a confusion of category that leaves this American reader scratching his head. The worst you can say about Schaeffer and Colson in this regard is that they didn’t fully appreciate or arrest the debasement. 

…

 

I think we really can blame Schaeffer and Colson for debasing the use of the concept of worldview but I think Smith is on to something by suggesting there’s something wrong with “just” doing this blame game. But what that thing is Smith doesn’t address is historical context.  Pitting Kuyper against Bavinck helps nobody, sure.  But I think the historical setting is the big thing that needs to be mentioned. 

 

The real problem with how worldview was deployed by men like Schaeffer and Colson is the potentially under-examined context within which they wielded the term.  One of the joys (or frustrations, if you don’t like his work) in reading Richard Taruskin’s music history is he situates the 20^th century firmly in the context of the Cold War.  By explicitly shifting the history of classical music away from Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union Taruskin aggravated Brits and Europeans who regarded him as having summarily dismissed Europeans as having nothing to contribute to the history of the music that “they” invented.  Taruskin’s counterpoint was that the geopolitical reality of the Cold War meant that Europe had become a functional extension of American power rather than America being an extension of the European powers.  The imperialists and colonizers of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries had become the vassal and buffer states of American empire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and there was no gainsaying that.

 

So, that’s where we get back to the Dutch Reformed neo-Calvinist pioneers who died in 1920 and 1921.  What Dutch Reformed theologians meant by worldview as men who both died at the onset of the 1920s is not the same thing as what figures like Schaeffer or Colson meant by worldview at the height of the Cold War and the summit of pax Americana.  By the time the Cold War began and even more so after it ended worldview had been transformed, in part by men like Schaeffer and Colson, into a kind of buzzword similar to the way Marxists wielded the term ideology.  When a Christian evangelical author waxed eloquent on the impact of worldview it could be like reading a Marxist going on about how the base and the superstructure related to each other.  When I belatedly got around to reading Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury’s turgid Stockhausen Serves Imperialism I couldn’t help but notice an overlap in their denunciations of John Cage the man and his music much like Francis Schaeffer denounced John Cage in his trilogy of books. Thus …

The Music of John Cage and a Self-Extinguishing Avant Garde: revisiting Francis Schaeffer's criticism of John Cage in comparison to Maoist criticisms of Cage

 

I do think a case can be made, and sustained, that by the time Schaeffer and Colson were writing books “worldview” had devolved into a political theological shibboleth.  Maybe those two men were not more to blame than others for the way the term became a shibboleth and I read Schaeffer in my teens.  I think it’s possible what Smith has referred to is the distinction between people who read Schaeffer and people who used Schaeffer as a kind of shortcut for intellectual engagement.  Now in my older years I regard Schaeffer as having made a lot of embarrassing blunders in his appraisals of artists, musicians, writers and philosophers.  He didn’t address Wagnerian art mysticism at all, which I consider a disastrous misstep on Francis Schaeffer’s part.  He also seemed a bit too eager to lambast Kierkegaard. 

 

But even when Schaeffer was bungling the primary sources he was reading those sources and that is where worldview discourse in the last forty years has steered people wrong.  To pick on a very specific example, if Douglas Wilson says that X said Y I never take it as given.  If even Roger Scruton claimed “Adorno said this” I’m going to go back and read Adorno.  Adorno could probably still be wrong but if I hadn’t slogged through swaths of Current of Music I would have never known that Adorno took the trouble to say that “Deep Purple” was an okay pop song and “Two in Love” was a tedious knock-off of “Deep Purple”.  What!?  Adorno was doing musical analyses on American pop songs?  Yeah, but Current of Music was never published in his lifetime.  I’m ambivalent about Schaeffer’s legacy because I felt I benefited greatly from him in my teens and twenties but as I got older I began to feel his influence was largely negative, that he became the go-to figure for people who wanted him to give a Christian worldview pre-digested set of answers to questions.

 

Which is more than I strictly needed to say.  I think Christian scholarly examination of worldview as a shibboleth is worth doing even if I don’t get around to reading those books that come in the wake of such an examination.  

Thoughts on Art Religion by way of Article 26 of the 39 Articles from the Anglican Communion--debates in the wake of Philip Ewell's book can be seen as debates about what elements can be regarded as acceptable for music that becomes Music as designated by a priesthood of music scholars and composers

Thoughts on Art Religion by way of a reflection on Article 26 of the 39 Articles, regarding priestly moral character and the administration of a sacrament

 

https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/109014/Thirty-Nine-Articles-of-Religion.pdf

...

26. Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacraments. Although in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ's, and do minister by his commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the Sacraments. Neither is the effect of Christ's ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God's gifts diminished from such as by faith, and rightly, do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ's institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men. Nevertheless, it appertaineth to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil Ministers, and that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and finally, being found guilty, by just judgment be deposed.

 

 

https://northamanglican.com/ministerial-character-intention-and-the-sacraments-commentary-on-browne-article-xxvi/

Ministerial Character, Intention, and the Sacraments [Commentary on Browne: Article XXVI]

James Clark

November 18, 2024

 

It is generally agreed among commentators that Anabaptists are the primary target of Article XXVI: “Whatever may have been the popular feeling on this subject among the advocates of reformation in general, there is no doubt that the Anabaptists (in conformity with their general principle, that the whole Church should be pure and sincere) held the impropriety of receiving Sacraments from ungodly ministers,”^[1] which notion the Article rejects. The issue did not originate with them, however, but goes back to the controversy in the early church over whether baptisms performed by heretics are valid. Whereas “Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage…and the African bishops who were with him, denied the validity of baptism by heretics and schismatics…. Stephen, Bishop of Rome, took the directly opposite view, admitting all baptism, whether by schismatics or heretics, so it was with water in the name of the Trinity; and such has been the rule of the Latin Church ever since.” This principle remains a source of comfort even now, for churches today are no less plagued by heretical ministers than they were in the first centuries of Christianity. Yet because the power of the sacraments does not depend on the personal character or doctrinal soundness of those who administer them, the laity do not have to fear on the minister’s account that the washing away of their sins in baptism was but an external sprinkling of water, or that the Body and Blood of Christ are but mere bread and wine.

…

 

One of the things I have said in the past is that defenders of Art Religion can come across as people who are not very conversant in topics that show up in the the observance of religion.  It’s a bit glib to put it this way but partisans of Eurocentric Art Religion, whether in its highbrow or lowbrow formulations, tend to not think much about sacraments, and why would they?  They don’t believe in religion … but … the liberal arts make you better people than people who don’t imbibe from the Great Well of Well-Being that is Art for the sake of Art. 

 

Gordon Graham has written about how art religions can come in the form of highbrow asceticism and in lowerbrow forms.  Graham has contended that Art is never going to replace Religion because all the partisans of art religion are artists who know they are artists and are making things for artists and art consumers.  In other words, Art is not a viable civic religious cult.  Since the art for art’s sake people dismiss any art that has a social utility of any kind as “propaganda” Art Religion will crash and burn on the island of autonomy.  This was what Theodor Adorno said was the problem with the liberation of art from theology all the way back in the 1960s in Aesthetic Theory:

 

Aesthetic Theory

Theodore Adorno

Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Continuum

ISBN 0-8264-6757-1

 

page 1

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. ...

 

page 2

...

As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that—shorn of any hope of a world beyond—strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself. ...

 

If an artwork should attain (or be granted) the lofty status of “autonomy” for the partisans of art for the sake of art then the artwork has been (and has to be) divested of any social utility.

 

And what is that if not the consecration of chosen elements for a sacrament?  Adorno wrote plenty of tortured and opaque prose but this is an element of Art Religion lurking in his observation that:

 

Page 271

… The aesthetic principle of form is in itself, through the synthesis of what is formed, the positing of meaning even when meaning is substantively rejected. To this extent, whatever it wills or states, art remains theology; its claim to truth and its affinity to untruth are one and the same. This emerged specifically in Jugendstil. The situation culminates in the question of whether, after the fall of theology and in its total absence, art is still possible. But if, as in Hegel—who was the first to express historicophilosophical doubts as to this possibility—this necessity subsists, art retains an oracular quality; it is ambiguous whether the possibility of art is a genuine witness to what endures of theology or if it is the reflection of an enduring spell.

 

The aesthetic principle in Art Religion is the rite of designating something as adhering to the aesthetic principle (whatever that is) in such a way that the bread and wine are no longer just bread and wine.  If something has not been designated as “art” it is not imputed with the capacity to sanctify the recipient of the Art Religion sacrament to those who are willing and able to receive it with the proper Intention.

 

Speaking of which, let’s get back to James Clark’s series on Browne on the Thirty-Nine Articles:

 

Another topic commonly raised in connection with this Article is the Church of Rome’s so-called doctrine of Intention, which Browne characterizes as the belief that “no Sacrament is valid, unless the priest intends that it should be so.” More fully, “If…in outwardly ministering a Sacrament, [the minister] does not intend to confer the benefits of the Sacrament, they will not be conferred.” Browne does not think it “probable”^[2] that the framers of the Article had this doctrine in view, but he believes the Article “virtually and in effect meets it.” The consequences of the doctrine, as Browne expounds them, are dire: “If no Sacrament is valid, unless the priest intends that it should be so; then we know not whether our children be baptized, our wives married, our communions received, or our bishops consecrated.”^[3] Implicit in this critique is an understanding of the intention in question as being mental or internal. However, it is disputed within the Church of Rome whether the intention said to be required of the minister is indeed internal, or merely external:

 

Generally speaking, the principle of the Roman Church is that this Intention is necessary. Thus, Aquinas says that if a man does not intend to minister the Sacrament and only does it in mockery the validity is at an end. The Council of Trent anathematises those who say that the intention of the minister to do what the Church does is not required. Subsequently a subtle distinction arose between internal and external Intention. The external Intention is the intention of the priest to administer the Sacrament in the customary form; the internal Intention is the intention to administer it in the sense of the Church. The only vital difference is as to the internal intention, and on this there is a difference in the Roman Church itself. The Ultramontane party has maintained the necessity of the internal intention, while the Gallican school have denied this.^[4]

…

If the internal intention to minister the sacrament is faulty or absent but the external intention to minister the sacrament is effected then we’ve got a sacrament.  There are those who are set on a version of Art Religion in which the internal intent is so paramount nothing else matters.  If the Artist intends to make Art that is all that matters and whether that manifests as an external expression of some kind that “connects” with an audience who is not emotionally touched by the resultant music, well, so much the worse for those people in the audience who have some notion about music that its purpose is to “make me feel something”.  Theodor Adorno poured scorn on those kinds of listeners who seek out music to function as some kind of mood-altering opiate in his Introduction to the Sociology of Music. The kinds of people who listened to music to feel something were not listening for the unfolding of musical structures, they were also usually the kinds of women or Slavs who sought out Tchaikovsky and other composers who dispensed intense emotions like melancholy and “joy” like candy from a dispenser. No, real and serious art was not going to do the listening for the listener.

 

On the other hand, by the 1950s Adorno was damning both Stockhausen and Cage at a stroke in “The Aging of the New Music” because he regarded the likes of Pierre Boulez and John Cage as having embraced systems of composition that relieved composers of ever being decision-making subjects.  Whether through Boulez and his integral serialism or Cage and his aleatoric music both men embraced approaches to music where there was no personal agency exercised, in Adorno’s damning appraisal.  There were composers Adorno didn’t rip into like Edgar Varese and Gyorgy Ligeti (whom he said were still using their actual ears to guide them in their composing and making actual artistic decisions) but his vitriol for the post-Webern approach to integral serialism was unstinting.  So the lofty intent to make Art wasn’t sufficient even for Adorno, there had to be a finished result he could still regard as music and he lamented bitterly that the post-Webern serialists seemed to believe that by merely arranging the paints on the palette they had already made actual paintings, but it was not so!

 

But what about the external intention to make Art?  Maybe that is to express something. The trouble, in a post-Adorno trans-Atlantic academic world, is that Adorno claimed tonality was “used up” and that no one could “legitimately” use tonal materials without being some kind of fraud or sentimental twerp.  Maybe Bartok could still use tonal materials because he wasn’t a sell-out but nobody in Western Europe could wield the tonal materials of even a Debussy or Wagner with any legitimacy. There was still what Richard Taruskin described as the “rush to the patent office” ethos and praxis of originality. Mere expression was no good.  When George Rochberg turned away from serialism back to Mahler and late Beethoven he was scorned as a sell-out.  Who could “legitimately” attempt to have external expression as a goal in music?  This is where the second half of intentionality and the ministration of the Art Religion sacrament of Music stays a hot topic.  Is originality important?  John Borstlap has posed this question very directly with respect to his own music over at The Subterranean Review this December 22, 2024.

 

 I was tidying-up some old papers, and came across a couple of assessments that had been submitted during the court case I had initiated in 2012 against the Netherlands national funding foundation which had consistently refused to fund commissions I got from music life, on the grounds that my music lacked all forms of originality and was mere pastiche and thus, irrelevant and thus, should not be paid for, even if orchestras or ensembles had chosen to commission me. Assessments of the music at the foundation were done by comitees of experts, drawn from the circles of the new music network: composers and performers active in the ensemble circuit of the country, who themselves were clients of the foundation (grants, commission fees) and thus knew exactly into which direction state subsidies for new music had to go.

…

Western serious concert music up till 20C modernism, has two layers of meaning: the musical language (as described by Scruton), and the layer of expression: that which is being conveyed in terms of musical meaning. This concept has been pushed to the margins or even completely out of sight when modernism in the last century became some kind of 'standard view' of new music: the language as such is the only thing that counts because there is nothing else. And in a culturally-provincial country like the Netherlands, deviations from what is considered by circles of ignorant people as 'the norm', are not tolerated. So, of course since 2012 I have focussed on the world outside the country where I have no place. Therefore I am very grateful to Jaap van Zweden who commissioned and premiered my music with his orchestras in Dallas and Hong Kong and thereby proved, by its audience success and enthusiastic press, how miserable the 'new music establishment' in the Netherlands was, and still is, thinking of the fragments I occasionally hear of what is currently being produced.

 

This would be the point where it’s possible to be sympathetic to a composer who was denied payment by bureaucrats and yet also consider that many a “timeless” work of choral music written by practicing Christians in the 18^th century was written as liturgical music and not as Art. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions and cantatas were liturgical music performed in churches.  Joseph (or Michael) Haydn’s masses were liturgical music.  When Schutz set every last verse of Psalm 119 to music for double choir it was as liturgical music and not as Art.  Sweelinck made settings of texts from every Psalm in the Psalter drawing on melodies from the Genevan Psalter and that was liturgical music with a clear social function and it is only retroactively that Romantic era writers might designate it as Art. 

 

The thing that contemporary scholars debate or even openly resent is that dead white guys were posthumously credited as having made Art who, in their actual lifetimes might have not just denied the credit but objected to it.  The elephant in the room might be that for Christians their objection would have been an actually religious objection.  The arts may beautifully adorn the sacraments but the arts are not themselves sacraments. The hat trick of Art Religion has been to transubstantiate debates and discussions of sacraments from what people used to call Christendom into terms that have been putatively secularized.  Philip Ewell isn’t a crank or a fake or a fraud for picking up on the highly parasitic nature of this Eurocentric Art Religion discourse and explicitly rejecting the terms of presentation.  As a Christian I differ with Ewell the atheist on a few metaphysical points but because I come at religious life as a low-church Calvinist Anglican with Presbyterian history and a real sympathy for Puritans as well as Swiss and Dutch Reformed theologians I am probably about as skeptical of Germanophile Art Religion mysticism as Philip Ewell is for ostensibly “opposite” reasons.

 

I have made my thoughts on the problems of Art Religion plain enough over the years and I have even written a piece called “John Borstlap and the theodicies of art religion”. What makes art religion such a bad faith enterprise is its partisans take up every theodicy for Art that they often implicitly or even explicitly reject for Religion but what’s bad for the goose of Christendom in the “West” is no better for the gander of an Art Religion that is, I say, parasitically dependent upon the Christendom it was alleged to replace and surpass.  Yet here we are in 2024 and Norman Lebrecht could, in all earnestness, write about the death of Dmitri Shostakovich as the day the symphony died.  Forgive us guitarists who love the music of Shostakovich but have never seen the “death of the symphony” as any kind of death of classical music.  Palestrina masses and Byrd’s Gradualia are still around to be heard and admired, after all.  Anyone who has read about William Byrd knows he was obstinately set on not becoming the kind of Anglican who turned away from Catholic doctrine. He was so good at what he did he was granted forms of clemency others were not, a recusant Catholic who was not arrested or jailed for saying and doing the kinds of things other men were jailed for.  If Byrd were alive today he would not, likely, be the kind of man who would think of his music as a sacrament when he could go attend mass.

 

That the questions about the proper and legitimate ministrations of sacraments in trans-Atlantic academic contexts may be debates that have “migrated’ from what were originally religious debates is part of the things music scholarship can address.  I think Ewell’s points are tendentious in some ways and understandable in others.  If he were more conversant in the kinds of literally religious debates that have happened about liturgy and sacrament he might be more able to articulate why he believes a sacramental view of Beethoven’s Ninth is not good for people nor good for Beethoven’s Ninth.  I am partial to the Dutch Reformed Gerardus van der Leeuw’s complaint that the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is a “crude deistic frenzy”.  I actually hate a lot of Beethoven’s choral music whereas I think Haydn and Mozart are fine (I even love Haydn’s music, for that matter).

 

And here may be the thing about Religion that makes it particularly relevant to Art.  In Religion innovation for its own sake has no intrinsic value and you’re not supposed to come up with the newest way to “express” liturgy.  There are reasons a bunch of Catholics despise what they regard as the dubious innovations of Vatican II.  There are reasons people want the oldest and most venerable forms of ministering sacraments.  There are Anglicans who want the older or oldest version of the Book of Common Prayer because it is ancient and because they consider it to be not “original” in the sense of some rush to the patent office.  It is also the case that there are people who want liturgy and sacrament that expresses the truths of the true faith and are not looking for someone to work “personal expression” into things. Palestrina may have expressed himself as a “person” in his liturgical music but that was a fringe benefit to writing music as a Catholic. Art Religion, seen in these kinds of terms, has put the cart before the horse and by the 21^st century has its partisans wondering why we can’t get back to the Old Time Art Religion of “expression” when that kind of “expression” was an innovation of Romantics whose art mysticism tried to pick up what was allegedly spent or opaque in Christendom.

But who was one of the most far-out avant gardists of the mid-20^th century?  Olivier Messiaen, that’s who.  O sacrum convivium is weird but in a gorgeous way. It was the kind of sincere and sugary religious piety that Dmitri Shostakovich found insufferable and infuriating but he was, after all, a Soviet composer.

 

I have been a fan of Richard Taruskin for years now and even when I sharply disagree with things he’s written I have found him a helpful interlocutor. His arguments against Art Religion are trenchant and I consider one of his lasting achievements as a historian and a scholar is to have expressed a love of classical music while simultaneously arguing passionately against viewing music in sacramental terms. It may be one of the paradoxes of this world we live in that a Christian who has respect for Puritans and Zwingli and Calvin could agree with a secular Jew who was a big fan of Adlai Stevenson.  Well, hey, I have come around to consider myself a Mark Hatfield Republican and Richard Taruskin was certainly old enough to have known who the Oregon Senator was. There was a time in the early 1980s where two of the most famous evangelical Christians holding political office in the United States were President Jimmy Carter and Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield.  The Religious Right was taking shape but it had not yet risen to prominence in the era of Nixon and Carter.  That would come later.  During those years the trendy thing in academic musicology was being certain that tonality was still “used up” and that the intentions of composers to make serious music that didn’t pander to the desire of audiences to be made to “feel” was a thing.  Ex opere operato indeed!

 

Richard Taruskin’s writing against what he called the poietic fallacy can’t even be the least bit mysterious if we approach his point from the perspective of someone who has any inkling of what a sacrament is.  Schoenberg intended his music to be Art and therefore for partisans of Art Religion in its highest of highbrow forms that Intention would be sufficient to make the artwork a proper sacrament provided the artwork was produced in the appropriate way. 

 

One of the simplest problems with any claim that if an artist intends to create Art that this is sufficient to make the thing so is the matter of craft.  Roger Scruton claimed for years that John Cage was a charlatan.  Now I am not really a fan of Cage overall but I don’t regard him as a charlatan. What I do think can be said about Cage was he took an approach to making music that highlighted the problem of the poietic fallacy, as Taruskin discussed it, and which highlights the core problem with Romantic conceptions of the Artists making Art, that if intention is all that matters everyone is the greatest Artist on earth. 

Christopher Hitchens is said to have quipped that just about everyone has a book in him which is usually where that book should stay and the same could be said about other arts.   Everyone can have an idea for a story but the skill is in the execution.  Good or bad execution has been the historically observable difference between whether or not something has been called Art.  But …

 

In an era in which scholars have questioned the criteria by which Beethoven symphonies were declared sacred and not albums by James Brown it can be easy to overlook that in the debates about whether the elements have been properly set aside and rendered suitably sacramental that the process of officiating the sacrament itself can be more or less the same in the Art Religion of Michael Jackson sons as Beethoven symphonies. In this respect poptimists and rockists are debating not about their Art Religion sacrament being a sacrament or not but about what elements are acceptable for presentation via rite as fit to be sacramental elements.  Is this wine and that bread acceptable?  Is this song or that piece acceptable?  Does that album not count? 

 

My own stance is that however much the arts may adorn sacraments the arts are not sacraments. When I want to partake of Eucharist I make sure I attend church in person rather than just livestream attend (we live in such an age, after all, though priests and pastors can bring the sacramental elements to you if you’re a shut-in). Because I am not a partisan of any form of Art Religion as it has been developed in European writings and American spin-offs I don’t think listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the spirit in which Beethoven meant it actually makes you a better person relative even to yourself, let alone to other people.  I am “that” kind of low church Calvinist type and for people who don’t know about how Christians who have read any Zwingli or Calvin or Bullinger on the arts, we don’t regard the liberal arts as sacraments.  Nothing against the beautiful art (formerly science) of music but Zwingli pointed out that David’s harp did not in and of itself cast out King Saul’s evil spirit tormenter and that the Holy Spirit’s use of music in this or that providential setting is not to be construed as (or conflated with) some mystical power of music.  Many partisans of Eurocentric Art Religion obviously disagree!

 

That’s the nature of the conundrum or controversy that has come up with Philip Ewell’s book, indirectly though the matter comes up.  Ewell has mentioned that partisans of European canonized music treat it like a religion and he is right about that.  I have been noticing over the years that when partisans of art religion go on about their preferred Artists and Art they tend to be bad at talking about sacraments.  They are, to be blunt, incompetent in the liturgical and sacramental aspects that should be clearest and simplest about the ordinances and sacraments of their art asceticism or mysticism. The trouble is, as I have noted elsewhere, the role of music in epiclesis doesn’t automatically change because some people say “that isn’t music” or “I don’t recognize the spirit that is moving these people”.  

I grew up Pentecostal and am now Anglican so I get that for Pentecostals music is a way that God inhabits the praises of His People and this is a belief you can find in Pentecostal churches of any color.  It’s no coincidence to me that many battles about aesthetic value come from partisans of the highest of highbrow Art Religion who have not set foot in Pentecostal churches and it’s interesting to me as I get older to consider, as I have mentioned in the past, that early rock musicians hailed from Pentecostal churches.  Many a debate about the musical merits and demerits of musical genres and styles have implicitly and explicitly religious roots.  I don’t expect people to be Pentecostal or Anglican but I do think that the debates about modes and forms of liturgy and sacrament can be brought in to illuminate and maybe even elucidate aspects of debates about Art and Music that Philip Ewell’s writing has sparked in the last few years. It’s actually because I try to take my Christian faith seriously that I take Ewell’s complaint about music theory and Eurocentric art religion in musicology seriously whether or not I agree with everything he’s said or written.  Partisans of Art can have a nasty habit of being dishonest about how recent their dogmatic innovation actually is.

Through the ages guilds of actual liturgists, theologians and musicians do (past, present and future) have defined what counts as good and bad art and what counts as legitimate and illegitimate sacrament and liturgy.  Eurocentric Art Religion has tended to be formulated and defended by men who, I’m afraid, couldn’t even start to explain what is involved in a sacrament and don’t even care to (I’m thinking particularly of the late Roger Scruton who claimed that there was more and better theology of Eucharist in Wagner’s Parsifal than in books written by theologians).  And Scruton was an Anglican.  So surely he should have been familiar with the Thirty-Nine Articles about things like what I have been touching on here, that in the administration of sacraments debates about inner and outer intention come up.  If Scruton thought John Cage was a charlatan and not a musician the least Scruton could have done was to articulate his claim in terms of sacramentology.  Cage was the kind of man who imputed so much potency to the act of attentive listening that “it” became the sacrament rather than the music that a highbrow highflyer like Scruton regarded as the necessary precondition for the art religion sacrament.  Beethoven’s Ninth and not 4’33”.  The Intention of Cage to make Art and the Intention of his fans to hear his music as Art may not make 4’33” Art but would that be the case for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Mozart’s Requiem or Mahler’s Fifth Symphony? For a Dutch Reformed anthropologist of religion like Gerardus van der Leeuw African American spirituals were as sacred as a Palestrina mass or a Mozart opera.  Guy Beck has pointed out that van der Leeuw and Rudolf Otto had conceptions of the holy expressed in music that reached out well beyond Eurocentric concerns but it is precisely the most Eurocentric conception of the numinous Roger Scruton kept coming back to in spite of explicitly invoking the influence of Rudolf Otto. The trouble was that Scruton was the kind of Anglican who saw Anglicanism as English Christianity and not necessarily as a global expression of Christian faith.  Whether he’d have found much common cause with Kenyan Anglicans I am not so sure.  But it is in Anglican discussion of liturgy and sacrament that I find all sorts of ways in which partisans of Art Religion in the Wagnerian mold show themselves to be parasitically dependent on literally religious discourse that, in the last century and a half, has had more room for non-European musics to contribute to liturgy and sacrament than defenders of the Great Tradition of European Art.

two pieces from Current Affairs discussing Philip Ewell's book, some semi-organized thoughts on epistemic trespass that happens when musicians and music theorists opine about religion

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/can-music-theory-education-overcome-its-whiteness-problem 

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/a-music-theorist-on-how-white-supremacist-assumptions-have-shaped-the-evaluation-of-music

...

But when people in the United States say “European” music, it’s really just a few places—German-speaking territories, prime among them—and we present it as the way we should think about music. And of course, the idea that pitch, the piano, and 12 tones in a system that emanated—to be blunt—from the Catholic Church is the system that represents all music, that’s kind of what we’ve been teaching. And, of course, colonization: you have to immediately think about the idea of presenting what were essentially white supremacists and patriarchal ideas across the globe in a colonial context. Of course, Christianity played a massive role.

I’m teaching Theory 1 currently, and to just look at all the music theory textbooks, literally last night I thought, Oh, my God, all of these hymns, all of these chorus, all these “Jesus, my pain and suffering”—there’s a lot of Christianity in the music theory textbooks, which I didn’t really dig into in my book. Maybe that’s the next project because that’s what we’re talking about: Catholic traditions morphing into German Protestant traditions of making music.

...

As Taruskin pointed out in The Ox, consolidating and ratifying liturgical music within Carolingian Catholicism is more or less why we began to have the musical notation traditions we have.  Now, obviously, just because those were the historical seeds of what Taruskin called the literate musical traditions of Europe and the United States doesn't mean for a second things stayed that way. Although Taruskin name-checks him, he doesn't mention that Charles Garside Jr. made a case that Zwingli and Bullinger, by banning music from church services, functionally created the realm of fully secular music that was not automatically in service of throne or altar.  

...

Alan Jacobs briefly considers the possibility that we will have a future of the humanities that is not tethered to the university--considering a history of scholars developing the arts myths we don't always know we've lived by

https://blog.ayjay.org/45702-2/
…

As I have often written, these are good times for the humanities; they’re just not good times for humanities programs in universities. This is why I keep thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s Traveling Symphony. Even as we try to keep the humanities-in-the-university afloat, I think we need to spend a lot of time imagining the humanities without the university. 

Jacobs is floating the idea that the humanities and the liberal arts will continue even if they are no longer defined by their relationship to university systems.  There is not necessarily going to be a death of the artist, even if there may be what William Deresiewicz has called The Death of the Artist by way of vocational, paid full-time artists.  But let's consider how many centuries the arts pre-dated Anglo-American educational systems and bear that in mind as we face a potential (not actual) future in which the post-industrial university liberal arts programs stop being "the" or even "a" primary way through which people learn the tools of the trade and the crafts of the arts.

Ted Gioia continues to say musicology originated in the study of spells but his just-so tale would make more sense as a battle between highbrow and lowbrow art religions

I was reminded of the progress of a book by Bryan Townsend's blogging lately.

At this point on April 1, 2023 it’s not surprising Ted Gioia’s latest book Music to Raise the Dead: The Secret Origins of Musicology has been getting self-published by Gioia at his Substack. By now GIoia has reached chapter 5 of 11. Lately he has held forth along the following lines:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/where-did-musicology-come-from

…
That shouldn’t be possible. Magic and science are total opposites. They shouldn’t rub shoulders. But music is the place where that strange meeting actually happens—in fact, an aware musician is always operating at a kind of crossroads where the known world meets a mystical realm. And that happens constantly, not just in ancient times but even today.
This is no empty claim. You feel it when you listen to music—perhaps not everyday, but at least on a few transformative occasions, maybe at a memorable concert you still think about years later, or at a dance or party or ritual. That’s why musicology, esteemed as the science of music, must also learn to embrace the ecstasy of music.
 
Musicology really ought to be a science of ecstasy. But instead, this magical stuff is feared and censored. That’s why conventional musicology is at a loss when dealing with the mystical writings of Sun Ra (which we discussed in chapter one). That’s why scholars try to sanitize the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, whose mythos has such deep supernatural elements. That’s why they gape in disbelief when I point out that the oldest active jazz venue in San Francisco is the Church of John Coltrane.
 
It’s no coincidence that we find ourselves discussing churches at this stage. That’s because magic and religion also intersect—and their dialectical merging is a crucial part of understanding the true scope of musicology.
 
At a certain point in human history, magical spells turned into prayers and religious music. You might think that those two things are very different, but they’re almost the same. Sometimes it’s very difficult to distinguish between a magic spell and a religious prayer. If you examine the history of witchcraft, you will learn that judges often made decisions of life or death on the basis of tiny word differences.
 
Sometimes inserting the name of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in the middle of a spell was enough to make it acceptable to authorities. But not always. As we shall see later in this book, many people were condemned as witches even though they thought they were aligned with formal Christian theology and practice.
 
This is a good juncture for us to look at how the hero’s journey—which is the central myth of musical magic—got turned into a religious concept. The oldest sources for musicology focus on this journey, which predates all organized religions but also permeates them. Sonatas and fugues and symphonies (and other formal structures) came later, but they retain these mythical and religious evocations.
 
That’s why the earliest theoretical commentaries on music—which are essentially guides to this journey—are permeated with metaphysics. The science of harmony didn’t exist at this early juncture. Or, to put it a better way, harmony was a much larger concept in this musicology than just the ways the notes fit together.
 
I could demonstrate this in many ways. For example, I could point to remarkable passages in Augustine’s Confessions where he describes ecstatic experiences, merging intense joy and painful hardship, that are almost like a Christianized shamanism—and they are initiated by singing or chanting the psalms. Or I could cite countless Pythagorean or Neo-Pythagorean texts on music that aspire to scientific accuracy, but keep on collapsing into the strangest mysticism. Or I could explore similar elements in Sufism and its whirling dances, or Tibetan Buddhism and its chanting and damaru drumming, or the ritualistic theurgy of the Neoplatonists.
…

Richard Taruskin's Musical Lives and Times Examined: Keynotes and Clippings, 2006–2019 is published

I've been on some slow reading marathons of late, the two slow ones being John Neville Figgis and Emil Brunner and the less slow one being Roger Scruton and the handful of scholarly books that have come out about him and his political and aesthetic philosophy.  Taruskin noted, merely in passing, the extent to which academics dogpiled on Scruton.  Longtime readers of the blog know that I have soaked up a fair amount of both Richard Taruskin and Roger Scruton over the years so there's no way I wasn't going to note this posthumous compilation of essays by Taruskin.

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520392014/musical-lives-and-times-examined

I really liked Cursed Questions. When it came out I think I read it in just barely over one week. This one will no doubt take longer to read when I manage to get to it. 

the death or change theme in classical music

 Richard Taruskin began his Oxford History of Western Music seriously proposing the era of literate music in the West was coming to an end, a kind of death-of-classical-music that was more typical of a Norman Lebrecht.  By the end of the fifth volume he concluded that classical music wasn't dying, it was changing.  

I have more than a handful of times floated the idea that the symphony and the orchestral traditions of the long 19th century constituted an equivalent to the ars perfecta of the late Renaissance mass. When the mass of the earlier era gave way to new styles and forms partisans of the older style complained that the new recitative genre was garbage, that any unmusical hack could do that and simulating the rhythms of human speech in such a dubiously literal way was not really musical or expressive.  

Here we are in 2023 and I would venture the proposal that rap has become a kind of recitative in our era, declamatory speech that is organically fused with melodic activity and it's the kind of thing that is denounced as the death of melody by partisans of the older ars perfecta equivalents of our era.  The historical irony would be that recitative in Italian opera was viewed by partisans of Palestrina and company as being as much anti-musical junk in the time of Monteverdi as rap is viewed by fans of Italian opera now.  

Art was supposed to find liberation from court and church, from throne and altar and for a time in the long 19th century instrumental music took flight and became the top dog in the musical arts.  Earlier theories of aesthetics and treatises on the arts regarded music as suspect and instrumental music as nearly contemptible for its lack of verbal and propositional content.  Mark Evan Bonds has written a few books outlining how that status quote from the 18th century mutated into the Beethoven syndrome we have had since E. T. A. Hoffmann and company. 

It's commonplace to see thinkpieces asking how and why classical music has declined or whether classical music can withstand the shift from the private to public realm.

Two links will suffice.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/why-has-classical-music-declined.html

https://www.overgrownpath.com/2023/02/can-classical-music-survive-private-to.html

The Romantic era had a lot of salon and club music, though, which was not necessarily "public".  There was indeed a lot of public music-making but in histories of classical music hausmusik doesn't figure as prominently in music histories and I, being a guitarist, think there should be a counter-vailing interest in precisely the house music traditions to offset the symphonic stuff.  There was plenty of music-making going on in Biedermeier era Vienna but it was not the stuff of Beethovenian legend, exactly.  Paul Hindemith contended that the state of musical life should not be assessed on the basis of professional activity but on the basis of amateurs.  Sure, he could be a snob about lowbrow pop music like many other emigre composers to the United States but the point remains a point worth considering.  It may be more salient now that we've got books like The Death of the Artist lamenting that it is easier than ever to publish in all the arts and harder than ever to monetize that activity.  

It may be there's more going on in "classical music" now than can possibly be covered by mainstream music journalism or even indie music journalism.  I know that for classical guitar there are half a dozen cycles of preludes and fugues that have been composed mainly in this very century that have not even been discussed in most music journalism, or even in classical guitar journalism.  That would be because stuff is on Youtube. German Dzhaparidze's cycle has been recorded but the cycle in score form is unpublished.  Gerard Drozd's cycle of preludes and fugues for solo guitar seems to be unavailable in the West.  Rekhin's cycle was composed in the last century but has never been recorded in full for a commercial release.  

But my soap box issue here (among others) has been that we live in an era in which a synergistic relationship between "pop" and "classical" is both feasible and desirable in North America.  I know there are people in Europe who dissent from such a view but I submit those kinds of writers and composers are not being coherent with their own stated views about authenticity and flexibility in the understanding and application of tradition.  I'm going to resist the temptation to drag in Jaroslav Pelikan's The Vindication of Tradition beyond a short mention but I see many a claim that "the muse" must be rescued or saved.  Writing as a Christian and not a partisan of Greek gods and goddesses I can't help but think that if the muse needs you to rescue her she's not a worthy muse, is she?  

The thing about muses is that muses have favorites and muses can move on. Maybe the muses, if muses there be, have left the symphony behind. Maybe expecting the muses to stick around with one art form forever is to misunderstand their nature. Partisans of ars perfecta may well have thought their favorite music was literally heavenly, timeless, eternal and beyond improvement.  I do love listening to Renaissance choral music now and then but is that style the norm?  Has it even been the norm since roughly 1650?