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.
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