The Word Refreshed

This chapter takes its cue from the vision of music adumbrated by the previous three essayists: in which music is seen as depending on a ‘faith in an order of things that exceeds the logic of statement and counterstatement’, arising from an embodied dwelling in the world which is pre-conceptual, pre-theoretical. As such, music has the capacity to free us from the kind of alienating relation to our physical environment that an over-dependence on instrumental language brings, and free us for a more fruitful indwelling of it that has been largely lost to modernity. This resonates with broadly biblical-theological view of humanity’s intended relation to the cosmos, as exemplified in the concept of New Creation in Christ. This essay returns to language, considered in this light: how can music, and thinking about music, enrich language? Specifically, how might music facilitate a deeper understanding of the way ‘God-talk’ operates? It is argued that music can offer a powerful witness to the impossibility (and danger) of imagining we can grasp or circumscribe the divine (the antithesis of human freedom). More positively, it can greatly enrich our use (and understanding) of existing theological language, and generate fresh language that enables a more faithful perception of, and participation in the realities it engages.

Individual and Communal Freedom and the Performance History of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach and Mendelssohn

When Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the concert hall of the Berlin Singakademie in 1829, he not only transferred a piece of liturgical music into a secular space, but he also made numerous cuts that changed the theological profile of Bach’s composition. The essay explores the theology of the St. Matthew Passion in the context of early eighteenth-century theology and gives an overview of the original performance conditions and the audiences at the performances in Bach’s time. The second half of the essay analyses how these parameters changed when Mendelssohn conducted the Passion in 1829. It becomes clear that the sociological profile of the audience (educated middle and upper class who had to pay money to attend the performance) remained essentially the same, while the theology shifted from a focus on the freedom of the individual in Bach’s time to an emphasis on the community (congregation, Volk, nation) in the adapted version the Singakademie presented to its listeners in 1829.

Freedom in Paul and Modernity

In this chapter, Tilling argues that an account of Paul’s understanding of freedom can be brought into fruitful dialogue with other contributions in this volume, and with ‘freedom’ in the Eroica and in modernity more generally. An outline of Pauline scholarship sets the stage for Tilling’s constructive proposal, which claims that Paul’s core theological axioms situate the Apostle’s ‘freedom’ language in such a way that takes us beyond contemporary New Testament debates. It does this by deploying musical analogies, presenting a more coherent account than before of both Paul’s language as well as the interpreter’s task of describing Paul’s theology. The upshot, which presents freedom in Paul as a corollary of divine love, facilitates critical interaction with modernity’s freedom.

Herder’s Alternative Path to Musical Transcendence

Transcendence has become a lively topic in the hermeneutics of Viennese Classicism, but Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime has squeezed out competing models. Numerous critics have pointed to moments in the music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in which the overwhelming or bewildering experience of the sublime tests the limits of the phenomenal self and thereby, as Kant argued, awakens the listener to the supersensory noumenal realm. This chapter offers an alternative model of musical transcendence based on Johann Gottfried Herder’s late aesthetic treatise Kalligone (1800), a polemic aimed directly at Kant. Herder challenged the familiar Kantian account by emphasizing the sensory experience of music, its affinities with language, its temporal nature, and its grounding in the phenomenal realm of bodily experience. Kalligone not only offers an alternative vision of musical transcendence but also suggests intriguing links with current trends in musical scholarship obscured by Herder’s more famous teacher.

Music in the Margin of Indifference

This chapter considers the role of a specific Lutheran idea of freedom in the emancipation of sacred music from liturgy during the early modern period. It proposes that the Lutheran appropriation of the classical notion of ‘adiaphora’, as a stance of indifference towards practices and objects not essential for salvation, opened up a quasi-autonomous space for musical elaboration, within which music could gradually acquire its modern status as a self-sufficient artistic practice. The eighteenth-century tradition of Passion performances in Protestant Germany offers a rich test case for this process of ecclesiastical divestment, in particular J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion of 1727, which made claims for music that clearly outstripped its functional remit, and Carl Heinrich Graun’s immensely popular setting of Karl Wilhelm Ramler’s Der Tod Jesu of 1755, which consolidated the genre’s move from the liturgy to the concert hall. Yet this migration outside the church walls by no means provides straightforward confirmation of a standard secularization narrative of Western modernity. Rather, in absorbing and retaining crucial aspects of sacrality, these musical repertories and practices reveal the rootedness of the modern aesthetic sphere in that Lutheran margin of indifference.

Music Language Dwelling

This chapter takes seriously the idea that music does not just address some of the broad currents of modernity but also offers ways beyond some of its aporias. Its argument is that music reconfigures the relation between our sensible being in the world and ways of being structured by certain kinds of language use. This musical reconfiguring, it is proposed, can be experienced as a kind of re-enchantment that brings with it a renewed sense of dwelling, or of being-at-home in the world. The chapter is in three sections: section I reviews the powerful claims made for the value of music around 1800 in relation to language and examines the potential of such claims in respect to the idea of freedom; section II explores the particularity of two musical works, comparing the relation of music and language in Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1798) and Schumann’s song ‘Mondnacht’, from his Eichendorff Lieder, Op. 39 (1840); section III explores the idea that ‘music as dwelling’ helps us to understand both the significance of the historical moment around 1800 and its renewed importance for a contemporary understanding of the idea of freedom.

The Witness of Praise—The Hope of Dwelling

Praise has long been identified as a linguistic and musical form that is a response to the goodness and beauty of creaturely life. More generally, it reflects forms of life that seek to participate in God’s creative, nurturing, and reconciling ways with the world. In Western modernity, however, praise is rendered difficult and more tenuous because people find it hard to perceive and engage with the world as God’s creative realm. It is, instead, reduced to a brute material realm devoid of purpose or sanctity. The muting of praise is reflected in modern musical forms, but also in changes in the built environment. After describing the logic of praise, this essay argues that the action of praising God is much more than a personal, pious gesture. It is also a primary and practical way of being that communicates a desire to dwell in the world in ways that honour creatures and their creator. Understood this way, praise mobilizes worship and world-making at the same time.

The Theology of Richard Allen’s Musical Worship

This chapter examines the role music may have played in Bishop Richard Allen’s struggle for African-American liberation from slavery, and empowerment as full participants in church and state affairs. It begins with a broad survey of music in American and British abolitionist efforts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including two hymns of Allen’s own composition, to provide context for Allen’s engagement with music. In comparison to such protest songs, the hymns Allen selected for his hymnbooks were not overtly political. Nevertheless, the theology of music they represented resonated with socio-political significance, coalescing around three key themes: musical worship as (a) a means for conversion and a telos for the Christian life; (b) a bridge between heaven and earth; and (c) a reflection of, and aide to, the formation of community and ecclesial unity.

Kant, Aesthetic Judgement, and Beethoven

This chapter explores Kant’s conception of the relation of the beautiful and the sublime to freedom and to moral theology. It then turns to Beethoven’s conception of the sublime, and illustrates this by an analysis of the slow movement of his early piano sonata Op. 2, No. 2, and an analysis of the first movement of the Eroica. The thesis of the chapter is that a Kantian ‘optimistic’ account of the sublime fits these pieces better than some other accounts of the sublime that the chapter describes, namely ‘the uncanny sublime’, ‘the authoritarian sublime’ and ‘the solipsistic sublime’. The chapter ends with a brief remark about the relation between Kantian freedom and the Christian faith.

Introduction

What can the world of music bring to a theological reading of modernity? It was with that question in view that a group of theologians, musicologists, and music theorists met in 2015 under the auspices of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts at Duke University, and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale. We had little idea in advance of what the meeting would yield, but we soon realized that the benefits were going to be considerable. We were being pressed beyond our own comfort zones to think about familiar issues in fresh and highly fruitful ways, and we discovered multiple synergies we could never have predicted. A project began to take shape, and in due course was given the name ‘Theology, Music, and Modernity’ (TMM). We gathered for three major meetings over four years, and shared each other’s work for comment, encouragement, and criticism. We corresponded regularly and met in smaller groups when needed. The essays which follow are the result of those rich and fecund conversations....