This post was written by Randy Newman on March 18, 2009
This will be the last in my series of written reflections about music, prompted by Jeremy Begbie’s excellent book, Resounding Truth. If these short reflections have whet your appetite, I do hope you’ll read his book and enjoy music with a deeper appreciation than you have before. Better still, I hope music will have its sanctifying powerful effect on your walk with the Lord.
For this brief space, I want to address Begbie’s intriguing notion of hearing in a “Trinitarian space.”
This may be difficult to grasp at first. Consider that we can hear more than one note at a time. Sometimes we play two notes on a piano and hear them equally. Often, it’s a chord of three notes we hear. Most of the time when we listen to orchestral or ensemble music, we hear many notes at once.
The point is, this is different from the way we see things. If I place a coffee cup in front of you and ask you to look at it, you can see only one item in the exact space the cup occupies. (I do realize you’ll see things in the background and foreground, etc. but these items are seen in a different space than the cup). Also, you see the cup in only one place at a time. You do not see it both here and there.
You see one and only one cup in one and only one space.
Hearing is different. We can hear more than one note at a time and they are not in competition with each other. In a C-major chord, I hear the note C and it fills up all of my “hearing space.” I also hear the note E and it does the same. Hearing the E and the G of the chord does not diminish or negate the C, etc.
The point is, we “know” things in a variety of ways - not just visually. There is a kind of “auditory knowing.” (These are my attempts to explain Begbie’s points. He does not use all the terms I’m employing).
“Visual knowing” has created problems for people in understanding “invisible” truths - things like aesthetics or philosophy or theology. Our training to only “see” one thing at a time makes it difficult for us to intellectually unravel such tensions as divine sovereignty and human responsibility or the nature of the Trinity.
Western, “visual-knowing” thinking has a huge (perhaps insurmountable) hurdle in grasping how God can be Father, Son and Holy Spirit all at the same time.
“Auditory-knowing” doesn’t have the same level of difficulty. It is trained to handle more things at once.
Please hear me carefully - this is not relativism. I am not promoting irrational belief or contradictory truths. If what I am saying can be understood to be irrational or contradictory, then so can the notion of the Trinity (as some of our critics have insisted).
Instead, I am promoting a way of thinking that allows for different categories than we are used to - but not in ways that contradict the Scriptures.
Here’s how Begbie puts it:
…music can serve to embody the kind of Trinitarian space in which we are invited to share. It is likely that readers will have jumped ahead already to the Trinity. What could be more apt than to speak of the Trinity as a three-note chord, a resonance of life; Father, Son, and Sprit mutually indwelling, without mutual exclusion, and yet without merger, each occupying the same space, “sounding through” one another, yet irreducibly distinct, reciprocally enhancing, and establishing one another as other?
It would certainly be worthwhile to read him in context - with frequent pauses to take in some Mozart or Brahms or Bernstein.
In a day when we’re pressed for foolishly reductionist understandings of complex theological issues, I find Begbie’s insights refreshing, challenging, fitting, and sanctifying. I hope you will too.
This post was written by Randy Newman on March 12, 2009
There are a number of ways that music transforms us. It does not merely entertain. Or, at least, music should do more than that.
In my last post, I wrote about Jeremy Begbie’s book, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music. I mentioned that one way music helps us grow is through the frequent use of a “home-away-home” pattern (thereby deepening our appreciation for things and promoting gratitude). A second way was through variations upon a theme. This helps us think more meditatively and deeply.
Here is one more lesson I learned from that helpful book.
In a similar way to the “home-away-home” pattern, music often employs a “tension-and-release” pattern. Western music does this differently than other cultures’ music but most do seem to create some kind of unresolved tension and then release it.
You may have heard the apocryphal story of Mozart (or perhaps it was Beethoven or Bach or any number of composers) who was up in bed and heard someone play an unresolved dominant chord on a piano…all as a ploy to get the composer up and about. Sure enough, the composer got out of bed, came downstairs, played the tonic chord resolution on the piano and then returned to bed.
Some composers are more masterful than others in delaying the resolution for several measures, minutes, or in the most extreme cases, entire movements, before allowing the tension to resolve. (Some modern composers never resolve the tension, perhaps implying that our world is chaotic and meaningless and therefore the art should reflect the reality. I’ll save that for others to discuss).
The point for our discussion of “sanctification through music” is that the experience of delayed gratification in music can have benefits for our soul - two in particular. First, this training to delay the release can build perseverance into our lives. Second, the increasing of longing for release may help us keep our spiritual focus on heaven, instead of settling in to our temporal home here on earth. I think this is worth pondering.
This post was written by Randy Newman on February 27, 2009
I write a lot about “integration.” I try to say that we need to see the wholeness of life, the places where faith and thoughtfulness intertwine.
Pointing to examples of written works that model this is difficult. There aren’t enough displays of deep reflection about how the Christian frame of reference shines light on other topics.
When I find such examples, I want to point you to them. Jeremy Begbie’s recent book, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, is a beautiful example of thoughtful integrative thinking.
This is not a book about so-called “Christian music,” or about using music in worship services, or about what kinds of music are worth listening to. Such topics, Begbie freely admits, are worthwhile. They are just not the subject of his research and writing.
Instead, he examines music in the most general sense and asks what it does, why it moves us, how it transforms us, and how we can better employ it in our sanctification.
For this blog, I’ll just offer a few examples from his many challenging insights.
First, good music has the effect of taking us away from home and bringing us back again. Many pieces of music (both classical and popular) state a home theme, then take us away from that theme through variations and contrasts, and finally return us back to the home theme. The noteworthy observation is that, when we return home, even though the notes, and in some cases the words, are the same, our appreciation of home is different. It’s as if we’re hearing things that certainly were there the first time but we didn’t notice them or appreciate them. Many hours of listening to music that does this can actually improve our appreciation of our current “home.” In other words, it can foster a sense of gratitude or help us savor God’s gifts.
Second, good music is composed of variations upon a theme. A good composer states a simple theme near the beginning of a piece (think of those first four notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony) and then weaves variations of that theme throughout the song or symphony or concerto. The more you train your ear to listen for these motifs, the more your mind will be able to do the same with thoughts or ideas. In other words, music can actually train us to be more meditative and contemplative.
No wonder we’re commanded to sing so often in Scripture. It’s not just to have a fun experience. God’s gift of music isn’t just for entertainment - it’s for discipleship. Music transforms us.
There’s more…but I’ll save those discussions for future blogs.
Want a suggestion for hearing a masterful display of theme and variations? Find a recording of Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini. Listen to all of them! You’ll never be the same.
This post was written by Patrick Rist on December 6, 2007
The word for today is “kitsch,” meaning something created to appeal to sentimental, popular or undiscriminating tastes. It is often an elitist word, used as a weapon to discredit that which is disliked.
But it is just as often used accurately. Certainly the art world is in confusion, and manifests a substantial amount of moral corruption, but unless we want to jettison all critical judgments, it should still be possible to distinguish between good art, not-so-good art, and kitsch. However, those distinctions and how to make them go far beyond what I want to discuss here.
Ask the average churchgoer to name a Christian artist, and sad to say, you will probably hear the name Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade’s work is (dare I say this?) the epitome of kitsch. While technically quite competent, his pictures present fantasy world of light, pastels, and imaginary settings that have nothing to do with our lived lives. In this sense, Kinkade’s work is akin to pornography. It tells lies for emotional effect.
Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. Pornography is evil for multiple reasons. I would not say that what Kinkade is doing is evil. But it is misguided, and when one sees the level of promotion that sustains Kinkade’s empire, one suspects that he is painting to please a market rather than his Creator. And the two are not the same, even if the market is mainly evangelicals.
The question that interests me, though, is that even if we believe (as I do) that Kinkade’s work lies, what does our enthusiasm for the lies tell us about our desires? Are those desires legitimate? Could it be that Kinkade’s popularity tells us something about our souls, or at least about our vision for the Good Life?
Kinkade presents a life like this:
But in reality, most of us live like this:
The fantasy and the reality are so far apart, Kinkade could just as well include a Pegasus grazing in the front yard of his cottages.
But would not most of us rather live in the Kinkade picture, even if we wouldn’t hang it on our wall? Why is that? What does it say about how we want our lives and homes to be?
My suspicion is that Kinkade’s popularity contains clues to deep-seated longings shared by many, if not most Americans. The challenge is draw out these longings into the open. There they can be discussed, and compared to the decisions that we make as a people that condemn us to kitschy fantasy rather than a better reality.
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