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The malleable meanings of music
No full textThis chapter explores the ways in which music can generate its own religious culture, inspiring a devotion and discipline that can provoke tensions between ‘two religions’: of musicians and of the clergy. The author traces the history of Christianity’s relationship to musical culture, including 17th century clashes over musical style and diversity. As music expressed and emotionally actualized Scripture in new ways, there were arguments about whether, for example, music should be the ‘mistress’ of the biblical text or vice versa. In parsing music’s proper relationship to more propositional aspects of faith, the author invites a reading of music as rhetoric, something not reducible to a ‘stable semantic equivalence’ with a text. From the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 to the Lutheran environment of J.S. Bach, the author explores the performative, sensual, and subjective dimensions of church music, suggesting that its meaning is discerned not only by the relevant text but also by the contexts of listeners: their circumstances, expectations, and emotive reception. Butt suggests that a critical tension between a musical tradition and a religious one could even be productive, resisting closed, simplistic systems, forming a dialectic that benefits both music culture and religious practice
Mellifluous music in early western Christianity
Get PDF This chapter explores the place of ‘sweet music’ in the early Western Church and its subsequent influence on the earliest theologies of music, of creation, and of God. The author begins by reflecting on the account of 4th-century bishop of Minorca, Severus, and his description of music’s role in the Christian conversion of Jews on the island. There it served as a miraculous and ‘mellifluous assault on the senses’, something that could evoke both delight or terror depending on the hearer’s condition, and was believed to be God’s own presence at work in the human soul. Harrison then turns to Augustine and how he developed his own theology – and psychology – of music in De Musica, drawing on the influence of the hymns of Ambrose of Milan. She explores Augustine’s account of the soul’s apprehension of sound, wherein a sensuous and spiritual experience is made possible by a God whose grace and providential order are diffused through His creation, despite humanity’s (and the world’s) fallen state. Throughout this early period, Harrison concludes, we see a Church fascinated by music’s pleasing sweetness as something beneficial to faith and ultimately a sign of God’s presence. </p
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