Benedict XVI on divine beauty

In August 2002, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) sent a message to the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation in August 2002. His topic was divine beauty, and his message is one of the most powerful treatments on this subject that I have ever read. Here's a portion of what he said (the entire message can be read here).

Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction. Of course we must not underrate the importance of theological reflection, of exact and precise theological thought; it remains absolutely necessary. But to move from here to disdain or to reject the impact produced by the response of the heart in the encounter with beauty as a true form of knowledge would impoverish us and dry up our faith and our theology. We must rediscover this form of knowledge; it is a pressing need of our time. …

The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: "Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true."

The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration.

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Great Music from the Piano Guys

I Love Gilbert & Sullivan

I always wanted to watch a Gilbert and Sullivan production but never had the chance until recently when a friend signed us up for the video rental service Netflix. I found that I absolutely LOVE Gilbert and Sullivan. The combination of jocularity and mock seriousness, together with very tuneful melodies, couldn't make for more enjoyment. Here is one that I particularly love that I found off Youtube.

Discussion questions about music

I've had frequent occasion in the past to post about aesthetics and the objectivity of beauty. Yet I feel I have only begun to scratch the surface of the questions that Christians must carefully think through with regard to the arts in general and music in particular. Here are some discussion questions I recently wrote for Christians as they struggle to think Biblically about muisic.

Bach's Music is Very Emotinoal

Sometimes lay people caricature the music of J.S. Bach as being dry and academic. However, his compositions actually explore the full range of human emotions from deep sadness (Passacaglia and Fugue for Organ in C Minor) to playful joy (Brandenburg concertos).

Bach's compositions are incredibly varied and defy categorization. His works include dizzying heights of mathematical complexity—The Art of Fugue—to lush melodies like his Air on the G String, to works such as the Chromatic Fantasy which approach a jazzy dissonance.

 

But by far Bach’s greatest legacy remains his Sunday morning worship music. During Bach's first five years at Leipzig he went through a frantic period in which he composed hundreds of sacred Cantatas, even though this was not required by his job description, and despite the fact that the Leipzig authorities were not always supportive of the projects. The cantatas were multi-movement works, sung by a choir and solo voices, to be used in worship on Sunday morning or feast days. They incorporated both the gospel reading for the day as well as the Lutheran hymn, which formed a thematic background to the entire work.

 

By the time Bach finished, he had given the church three complete annual cantata cycles, to be used in the liturgical cycle. In addition to being great musical achievements, many of the Cantatas articulate the beauty and exquisite sweetness of a relationship with Jesus. In the Cantata “Awake, A Voice is Calling”, there are two passionately intense duets between Jesus and the Soul:

The Soul: When are you coming, my Savior?

Jesus: I am coming, your portion.

The Soul: I am waiting with burning oil. Open the hall for the heavenly banquet.

Jesus: I am opening the hall for the heavenly banquet.

The Soul: Come, Jesus!

Jesus: I am coming; come, sweet soul!

Then, a little later in the work, Jesus and the soul are united and celebrate this with an even more intimate exchange:

The Soul: My friend is mine,

Jesus: And I am his.

Jesus and the Soul: Nothing shall separate this love.

The Soul: I will feed on heaven’s roses with you,

Jesus: You shall feed with me on heaven’s roses

Jesus and the Soul: Where abundant joy and bliss will be found.


To learn more about Bach's music and his relationship with Jesus, read my article, "The Devotion of J.S. Bach".



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Modern Music Scene

Does the modern music scene reflect a love of disorder and death? Yes and no. The problem is not universal. It would be simplistic to equate rock music and disorder. But it is not that difficult to point to numerous "musicians" who are unquestionably bent on glorifying ugliness and disorder. It occurred with a great deal of "punk" music twenty years ago, and is echoed again in a high percentage of the so-called "alternative" music of today. (I am always tempted to see the term as identifying an "alternative" to music: non-music.) It is typified by the lingering death-image of some popular musical celebrities: black cosmetics, ashen faces - a deliberate attempt to appear dead. "All those who hate me love death." Christian groups who imitate this are severely ignorant of their own message, and the message of the musicians they are imitating. These are two worldviews in collision: truth and beauty versus disorder and ugliness; creation versus curse.
My point here is not to claim that any kind of ugliness or dissonance in music, for any purpose, is evil. There is artistic value and appropriateness for some instances of ugliness and dissonance. But there is something evil about its glorification. 

The above passage is taken from Tim Gallant's excellent article "A Creational Perspective on Modern Music: Introductory Thoughts"


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Glorifying God in Music

How does my music glorify God? Some CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) folk seem to think that their music glorifies God, if only they sing about God. And I suppose that the proper response is: well, perhaps the word-content of your music glorifies God. (But even here, it is all too common to find shallowness and banality.)
 
It is, however, anti-creational to insist that the glory of God resides only in the text, not the music. We are created as embodied beings, who do embodied things. The precedent of creation means that we should not be indifferent to that which we create.
 
Consequently, as musicians we need to make higher demands of ourselves than merely asking the question: "Are these lyrics biblical, or biblically-grounded?" We need to ask ourselves: "Am I imitating God in my creativity?" Because God didn't create junk. He created beauty. If we wish our music to glorify God, we need to be more creational. And that means that we need to care more about the package. Not in the way CCM so often operates, where the "package" refers to image, and it means presenting yourself in a way similar to the worldly presentation. NO! I'll even go further: we have to stop thinking about music merely as a package. We're devaluing it. Music is more than a vehicle for lyrics. Music is an endeavour to reflect the creative activity of God. 

The above passage is taken from Tim Gallant's excellent article "A Creational Perspective on Modern Music: Introductory Thoughts". To read some of my other posts about music, click here.


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Christian Heavy Metal and Rap

Is it true that any style of music can glorify God, and what makes it good or bad is just the words? That is another question we were discussing after church last Sunday. Can styles like heavy metal and rap music glorify God as long as the words are Christian?

 

In order to answer this question, we must first back up and consider the relationship between form and content. The form of an artwork is simply the vehicle by which the content or meaning is communicated. Put another way, form is the building blocks out of which an artwork – whether visual art, literary art, musical art, etc. – is constructed. This is best understood by way of example. In the art of poetry, the form might be iambic pentameter or couplets or limerick or something else, while the content is the actual words or meaning that fill up that form. In the musical arts we have the form of the sonata, the form of the symphony, the form of the minuet, etc.. It is through these musical forms that the content of a piece - which includes melody and words, if the piece has lyrics - is mediated. In the visual arts, form is to do with light, colour, shape, etc. and this is the means through which the content of a painting or sculpture can be mediated.

 

Music and the Objectivity of Beauty

I’m sitting at the train station waiting for 9:30 to arrive when the tickets for London become cheaper, so it seems a good time to jot down some comments on music and the objectivity of beauty. We got into a great discussion after church last Sunday about music. Can you say that certain music is “evil”? And if so, is it only the words that make such a verdict possible? Can any style of music be written for the glory of God? These were some of the questions we were discussing.

Wow!

Is certain music sinful?

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Click HERE to read my discussion on the question of whether certain music is sinful.
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Worship Choruses

In his book Losing Our Virtue, David Wells makes some interesting comments about contemporary worship choruses. He argues that these choruses, being the hymnody of postmodern spirituality, are essentially parasitic. “It lives off the truth of classical spirituality but frequently leaves that truth unstated as something to be assumed, whereas in the hymnody of classical spirituality the truth itself is celebrated. The one rejoices in what the other hides. That seems to be the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the large majority of praise songs I analyzed, 58.9 percent, offer no doctrinal grounding or explanation for the praise; in the classical hymnody examined it was hard to find hymns that were not predicated upon and did not develop some aspect of doctrine. But that is not all. Not only is the praise in this postmodern spirituality often shorn of theological scaffolding, but what it facilitates is deeply privatized worship. One indication of this is that the Church, the collective people of God, features in only 1.2 percent of the songs; what dominates overwhelmingly is the private, individualized, and interior sense of God. By contrast, 21.6 percent of the classical hymns were explicitly about the Church. The texture of the songs in the postmodern spirituality, furthermore, is more therapeutic than moral…. The themes of sin, penitence, the longing for holiness appear in only 3.6 percent. And, as one might expect, while the holiness of God appears in 4.3 percent, his love, coupled with romantic imagery about loving him, ran through 10.4 percent of the songs, in comparison to about 1 percent in the classical hymnody. The though of loving God, and occasionally of being in love with God, that characterizes postmodern hymnody has replaced the emphasis on consecration and commitment that was so characteristic of classic hymnody.

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At this point the essentially mystical nature of postmodern piety becomes obvious, even though it is a mysticism that is filtered through modern, psychological assumptions. This is evident, first, in the way that this kind of spirituality believes in direct access to reality. The experiencing self is admitted, as it were, into the innermost places of God directly, without any wait. The result of this assumption is that personal intuition about the purposes of God, how his will is being realized in one’s personal life, tends to blur into divine revelation and become indistinguishable from it. Second, the God so approached is often beyond rational categories. Third, grace in this form of Christian life is often understood as a power that brings psychological wholeness rather than as God’s favor by which we are constituted as his in Christ. And worship is less about ascribing praise to God for who he is than it is celebrating what we know of him from within our own experience.”

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Piano Joys

Now that school has broken up until the 7th of April, I have time to do some hobbies. Only a bit of time, mind you, because I am spending most of my days writing lecture notes for the rest of the school year.

One of things I have done is to brush the dust off our piano and work on some masterpieces by a few great composers. Since moving to America I lost or misplaced some of my favourite music, so I simply went to the Sheet Music Archive, which Steve Hayhow told me about, and printed off the music I needed.

One of the pieces I printed off is Schubert's Impromptu No. 1 in C minor. This piece, though challenging, is a real joy to play because of the constant fluxuation of emotions, ranging everywhere from very tender to angry and aggressive. It's the kind of piece that you can really throw yourself into. Because of the genre you're 'allowed' to personalise it, even to play it slightly differently each time, as long as you keep within the basic structure specified by the composer.

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My friend Dennis Smith first introduced me to Schubert's impromptus after listening to Mitsuko Uchida's excellent CD of the Impromptus. I still have a long way to go before I can play as skilfully as she can.

Another one of Schubert's Impromtus which I am working on during Spring Break is the # 2 in A flat major. It is described in Wikipedia as follows: "This Impromptu is written in the standard minuet form. Its main section features a melody with chordal accompaniment. The opening bars of the melody are highly reminiscent of a similar theme[citation needed], from the opening of Beethoven's piano sonata in A-flat, Opus 26. The middle section of the Impromptu, marked Trio as standard in minuets, is contrasted in character with the main section. It is written in D-flat major, and features continuous triplet motion. The second part of the Trio moves enharmonically to C-sharp minor (the tonic minor), then climaxes on A major, fortissimo, and finally calms down and repeats the major-mode first phrase."

I haven’t just been spending time on Schubert. I have also been practicing a piece by Schubert’s idol Beethoven. (Interestingly, Schubert ‘worshiped’ Beethoven from afar, and although every day he ate at the same restaurant as the master, he never had the courage to introduce himself. If Beethoven looked anything like the picture on the left, we can perhaps forgive Schubert for his reticence). I have been working on the Adagio movement of Beethoven's 'Pathétique' Sonata (I don't yet feel accomplished enough to do justice to the first movement). This beautiful piece, deceptively simple, presents a real challenge to make the melody sing and to get the appropriate dynamic balance that will allow all the beautiful harmonies and counter melodies to sing out.

Finally, I am also working on Liebestraum by Franz Liszt. This is a piece that I started learning years ago but never mastered. I don't know if I will ever master it because it has some pretty difficult passages. It is a sentimental, showy piece without much depth, but if I can get it sounding nice it will be a good piece to show off with when people ask me to play something.

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If I ever have time to become serious about piano playing, I really need to start working on easier pieces to help my note-reading, but at the moment the above pieces are keeping me pretty busy and giving me a lot of joy.

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History of Music in a Week

For my son and a few other homeschool students, I have designed a Monday through Saturday crash course in the history of music with parallel studies in worldview developments. It can be downloaded HERE and might be of use to other homeschoolers.

I would welcome input from those who know a bit more about music than I do.