Prank and variations with James Lindsay, a belated thought or two on the American Reformer prank

May be the thing about one trick ponies is this, however many times you’ve seen a one trick pony do the same trick over and over for the pony it’s new every time he does it and it means something new in this magical moment.

 

some reservations about Ethan Iverson's suggestion that symphonic musicians should learn how to play blues and a beat

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-468-identity-politics-postmortem

…

On the musical front, let me take this time of liberal bloodletting to mention Florence Price. In the woke era, the classical establishment decided that elevating this long dead black woman composer would expiate their sins.

 

Price’s ragtime-ish piece “Nimble Feet” has had new reach; I just counted 40 performances uploaded to YouTube in the last few years. The piece is attractive although a bit bland. However, that’s not my problem, for a basic argument for diversity is easy to understand. What I find so frustrating is that none of the performers I listened to treated “Nimble Feet” like common practice black music, meaning a situation where the pulse is ruthlessly even and the syncopations work in African opposition to the ground rhythm. Rather, the performances are full of a romantic European attitude.

 

Going one step further: Florence Price took the gatekeepers off the hook. The gatekeepers could fund the performance of an old Price symphony (or a new Concerto in Memoriam George Floyd or whatever), get the social justice kudos at the gala, then go home and watch their stock index go up. Meanwhile, nothing about common practice black music was learned within classical institutions.

 

Our symphonic musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat! It’s not that hard! If you can learn to play Mahler, you can learn to play the basic blues and a basic beat. Once again, this was the point of my New York Times essay about Rhapsody in Blue, “The Worst Masterpiece.”

…

Related post: Philip Ewell’s musicological book from 2023 is peak woke, and I found plenty to criticize.

 

The question begged in Iverson’s comment is why “symphonic musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat”? 

 

What does Iverson really mean by common practice black music?  Which blacks?  In the United States?  In Kenya?  In Indonesia? In Ghana? I pick Kenya and Ghana non-randomly because I’ve benefited greatly from books by Christian pastors and theologians from Ghana and a few of my friends in my college years were fellow Christians from Kenya.  I can intuit what Iverson really means by common practice black music but if I intuit correctly then Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha is emphatically not part of that common practice black music.  There are a variety of questions begged behind two claims and I don’t consider it hair-splitting to ask what assumptions have gone into the claims.

 

What does Iverson think symphonic musicians have to gain from learning to play blues and a beat?  The ability to improvise? Well, no, they won’t learn anything about improvisation from blues and a beat that didn’t exist in the centuries of figured bass usage or in the Italian partimento practices that span centuries.   Blue notes? If by blue notes we mean notes that can only be found “between the keys”, well,  Anton Reicha was extolling the use of quarter-tones in his Treatise on Melody back around 1810.  False relations where G natural and G sharp show up at the same time or in close temporal proximity?  Those show up in English liturgical music from around the time of Tallis and Byrd.  The trouble is that you could pick almost any random element Iverson might potentially propose symphonic musicians could learn by learning to play blues and a beat and not a single one of those elements, taken in isolation, is something that hasn’t been around within concert music traditions.  Sure, the combination of ingredients in blues is different but there’s a more foundational question that is begged behind the question what is to be gained.

 

Whatever common practice black music Iverson means it is clear that just playing more Florence Price somehow fails to convey the secrets and wisdom contained in common practice black music.  But if Lorence Price, a black woman composer, is bereft of those qualities in such a way that playing her music adds “nothing” whose music would?

 

But which common practice Iverson means leads to another question, whether common practice black music and common practice white music are necessarily different.  We know this isn’t the case when it comes to, say, Christian hymnody.  Thomas Andrew Dorsey made very few changes to “Maitland” when he composed his most famous and justifiably beloved hymn.  This is well-known and gets mentioned by Michael Harris in a book about Dorsey’s Gospel blues legacy.  

 

William T. Dargan wrote about the lining out tradition and showed fairly persuasively that the lining out tradition began in the seventeenth century in low Anglican parishes where literacy was low.  The lining out tradition among poor English and Scottish parishes was so commonplace that the tradition of lining out metrical psalmody migrated to the American colonies. There it flourished for a time until nascent black American churches used it and higher brows contended that white churches should switch to shape-note hymnody so as not to have the same kind of lined out metrical psalmody and Dr. Watts idioms in common with their black churchgoing contemporaries.  At different stages in the American experiment white and black churches in the low liturgical scenes had so much in common there were edicts against the shared vernacular.  There have been periods among white and black communities where there were shared musical practices and yet one side or another decided that for the sake of some kind of racial differentiation or pursuit of distinction commonalities needed to be de-emphasized or a tradition needed to be overtly sidelined. 

 

While in predominantly white churches in the 1970s through 1990s there are accounts of worship wars it might be precisely on this topic of Christian battles over what liturgical music is or isn’t suitable that we learn these battles happen in age after age.  In the United States in the early 20^th century a case can be made that was in black churches in what religion scholars would probably call the mainline in which worship wars were fought in the early 20^th century.  You won’t get a very fair take on the situation Richard Allen faced in founding the African Methodist Episcopal Church if you only read something like Michael Harris’ book on Thomas Andrew Dorsey and the birth of Gospel blues.

 

On the other hand if you read Mark Burford’s magisterial Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field you will learn something, the triumph of Gospel blues and the whoop-it-up Gospel shouter singers was so complete that figures among black classical music who openly expressed reservations about this new popular direction in black American church music were functionally sidelined.  William Levi Dawson was doubtful about the new direction because it would pave the way for pastors and church music directors to just run with the least trained and least talented musicians who knew how to work crowds.  But were those reservations informed by Eurocentric highbrow pretenses?  You could choose to read Singing Like Germans that way. 

 

But the salient point I am trying to make here is that people choosing to reject entire bodies of music in the interest of preserving a perceived racial distinction goes in every direction.  One of my personal reservations about Ewell’s book was that he wrote as though the erasure of BIPOC composers within classical music were done by white theorists.  Doubtless this would be the majority pattern, I surmise, but Mark Burford’s work suggests another possibility, that the triumph pf black popular musical styles entailed a parallel rejection of musical styles and forms that were construed as too Euro-aspirant.  In other words, if Burford’s observation that men like William Levi Dawson had reservations about nascent Gospel blues as the purview of musical hacks it’s not a foregone conclusion that blues and ragtime and jazz were all there is or was to a common practice black music.   The violin works of Joseph Boulougne will be sidelined if those whose idea of black music is Armstrong and Davis keep calling the shots just as much as it will be sidelined if people of the cult of Beethoven keep doing their thing.  Classical music by black composers may have been sidelined by black communities choosing to stop backing composers of symphonic and operatic music as by white hostility. 

 

The triumph of blues and jazz as “the” common practice black music may be an overlooked part of the failure of Florence Price’s music to have gotten more traction.  It’s not that her work is badly made it’s that we’ve already got Scott Joplin and I just think it's patently obvious Scott Joplin’s music is more memorable than the music of Florence Price. I recall Iverson had a few words about Harrison for the centennial of the composer’s birth but I don’t recall a similar post that same year observing the centennial of Scott Joplin’s death.  Harrison’s music for guitar using just intonation octatonic scales is fun and I recommend you give it a listen.  That said, is there some kind of tell in Iverson having not written much about Joplin’s death and his influence back in 2017?  What was it about Harrison that got a post but not the King of Ragtime? 

 

Since I’m on the matter of ragtime now might be a time to ask whether or not a common practice is actually an accurate handling of a musical style.  Jazz pianists may say you ought to play rags with swing.  I don’t recall Joplin ever mentioning swing in his School of Ragtime.  For ragtime composed and published before the Jazz Age it’s not a given that you should swing the sixteenth note or any note values.  We know that Scott Joplin’s contemporary Joseph Lamb did not exactly play with swing. There’s nothing in Joplin’s School of Ragtime to suggest swing was a concept to apply to his music. “Play slowly until you catch the swing” is not proof that “swing” as jazz players define it was what was meant. Joplin elsewhere said that Exercise No. 2 would be screwed up by pianists who liked to vamp.  When a jazz pianist says that ragtime should be played with swing it’s okay to be skeptical, especially if you’re familiar with the primary sources (Joplin and Scott and not any jazz musicians from 1917 onward who played Joplin). 

 

Let’s say symphonic musicians would benefit from learning to play blues and a beat.  Should blues players be expected to know how to handle a partimento exercise, a figured bass or writing a fugue with triple counterpoint? Dismissing a blues guitarist for not playing one of Bach’s two-part inventions would be obviously dubious and yet Iverson’s case, as he’s made it, simply flips a script. Iverson’s suggestion is simply saying their music would be better if it took my music more seriously and were informed more by the musical values of my music.  But hasn’t this been precisely the script used by symphonic musicians to cast aspersion on popular music made by black American musicians? How is flipping the script rejecting the script?

 

Ethan Iverson’s prescription is very simple, “Their music would be better if they learned to play my music.” If he means that pop and classical could benefit from synergistic interaction and affection, I agree. If that’s not what he actually meant his prescription risks being, dare I say it, a bit Roger Scrutonish.

POSTSCRIPT:

There are times when Iverson writes about American popular music in a way that can read as if he’s nudging and winking to fellow initiates about the things you could only see if you were part of some mystery cult.  Take these excerpts, which again touch on the recent work of scholars to highlight the work of Florence Price. These comments from Iverson’s writing about Philip Ewell’s book:

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-257-new-book-by-philip-ewell

…

Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book; they know that trying to explain some basics about the mechanism to the committee is casting pearls before swine. A whole lot of college professors need to prove that they are worthy of receiving a few secrets before any of this gets much better.

 

The road for respect is long. Sometimes it feels like we take two steps backward after one step forward. The last decade has seen the elevation of minor romantic symphonist Florence Price to something like sainthood in the classical music academy. The academy thinks it is paying off some dues, but those dues are still waiting to be paid. Celebrating Florence Price offers little currency in the actual fight against racism down in the subconscious where it really matters.

I strongly doubt that any of Price’s recent advocates can sing one Louis Armstrong solo.

In his book, Ewell discusses Price, of course, but the few pages on jazz are an afterthought. Indeed, nowhere in On Music Theory does Ewell mention African-influenced rhythm as a theoretical organizing principle.

…

For the violinists and the conductors, swinging at the drums will help them play Mozart and Mahler. Guaranteed. Indeed, new horizons of expression will be right there for the taking, for there can be a kind of stiffness in classical musicians, a way the beat can be uptight. Jazz drums teaches the triplet, the luminous three within the two that is such a marvelous feature of the formal music descended from Mother Africa. And this also might quell some of the lingering racism in elite musical institutions, where some of the practitioners still think jazz and other black music is “easy.” If it’s easy, let’s hear the first violinist and the conductor play a bit of drums with a decent jazz pianist and bassist.

 

Knowing basic jazz drums is a quick fix for a variety of issues. But apart from renovating the room, an entry-level command of the drum set would unlock new forms of compositional creativity. What fresh combinations of sounds might appear from the best and the brightest if our elite ensembles understood rhythm as well as they understood notation?

 Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book, huh?  So why teach it? Worthy of receiving the secrets?  Yeah, that resembles a gnostic cult!  To whom are the dues to be paid and how does Iverson know for certain the dues are outstanding?  To whom are the dues due to be paid?  Violinists and conductors should play jazz drums?  

This extended excerpt I've quoted is a more overt form of “their music would be more legitimate if they took my music seriously.” It’s in these kinds of paragraphs that Iverson comes off as a flipped script to the paternalism of Roger Scruton.  This time around it's the symphonic musicians who aren't worthy of the raw realness of blues and jazz musicians and not the other way around.  I made this same point in response to Wesley Morris' 1619 Project piece, flipping the script is not the same as rejecting it outright and rejecting the script outright is what we most seem to need. It's as true on the jazz/blues/rock/country/pop side as it is on the classical music/"serious" music side. 

PS 

None of this means I won't be blogging about Iverson's sonatas because I really have been enjoying those lately.  But sometimes Iverson's writing reminds me that practical musicians would do well to take seriously that the theories we think by become all the more harmful if we've never examined them.  As Charles W Mills put it, the theories we least examine that govern our thinking are the ones that most bind us, whether it was in The Racial Contract or Black Rights/White Wrongs escapes me at the moment.  That Ewell's book was not an equivalent to the work of Mills' work in political philosophy with respect to music education doesn't mean I have to take the worst account of Ewell's motives.  I agree with Iverson that the possibilities of a synthesis of classical forms with the vocabularies of American popular music are worth exploring.  I more than agree with that.  It's all the glib potshots he feels obliged or entitled to take along the way that I find off-putting. 

Alan Jacobs has approvingly quoted Roger Scruton on unchosen ties that bind, which reminds me why I have so often found Scruton both frustrating and unpersuasive, his selective double standardized appeals to a vernacular aesthetic for architecture but not music

Alan Jacobs had a short post recently on how John Milton’s Areopagitica was not, its giant reception history withstanding, anything close to a case for what has long since been called the libertarian theory of the press.  Back in my journalism student days textbooks on theories of the press took it for granted that Milton’s work was a case for the liberation theory of the press, and the most definitive one at that.

 

https://blog.ayjay.org/areopagitica/

 

Milton may not have been the most orthodox Puritan but he was Puritan enough to want no Papists getting their tracts published in England.

 

Elsewhere Jacobs has written about how the real Theodor Adorno was not the kind of person who would have sympathized with 1960s era student protesters and didn’t believe academics had obligations to back them.  Whatever contemporary conservatives may tell you about the “real” legacy of Adorno there’s a world of difference between what they tell you “about” Adorno and slogging through what the guy actually wrote.

 

https://blog.ayjay.org/the-real-adorno/

 

Even the late Roger Scruton functionally conceded that no conservative philosopher worth anything can afford to ignore Adorno’s ideas and arguments.

 

Jacobs even cites Scruton from his final book, on the opera Parsifal.  If I may, here’s a somewhat lengthy extract:

One result of the rise of what I call metaphysical capitalism is the redefinition of all legitimate relations as contractual ones and the consequent rejection of the validity of any connections that are not explicitly chosen. And there is another important element to this way of thinking: if all legitimate relations are contractual, then any legitimate relation may be canceled by any party if that party deems that other parties to the contract are not meeting its terms.

 

But what if this redefining of all relations in contractual terms is wrong? And what if it is not just ethically suspect but also in some deep sense inhuman? This is the point that Roger Scruton makes in his final book, which happens to concern Wagner’s Parsifal but often extends its commentary to more general points. Thus:

 

Liberal individualism is an attractive philosophy, and has produced beautiful and influential theories of political legitimacy, including those of Locke, Harrison, Montesquieu, Rousseau and, in our time, John Rawls. But it does not describe real human beings. What matters to us, far more than our deals and bargains, are the ties that we never contracted, that we stumbled into through passion and temptation, as well as the ties that could never be chosen, like those that bind us to our parents, our country, and our religious and cultural inheritance. These ties put us, regardless of our aims and desires, in existential predicaments that we cannot always rectify.

 

(Note, by the way, that Scruton is including erotic love alongside family membership as something unchosen. Many years ago I wrote on that theme here. I’ll come back to marriage — and possibly friendship, which in its strongest forms is also unchosen, in later posts, but for now I’m only talking about mothers, fathers, children.)

Scruton makes two important points here. The first is that “the ties that we never contracted” often cannot be “rectified,” that is, put right. They remain wounded, damaged in some way — as I say above, diminished. But such diminishment is no reason to abandon them, because — and this is Scruton’s second point — such ties matter to us “far more than our deals and bargains.” (Note, perhaps to be developed later: To say that they matter more to us does not mean that we consciously prefer them.)

 

If we do live in the age of metaphysical capitalism I think a possible oversight in Alan Jacobs’ ruminations is that this age can be full of gurus who extoll the potential necessity of cutting ties with toxic family who are not just, say, progressive neoliberals.  

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. 

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.