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VOICING THE INEFFABLE:
Musical Representations of Religious Experience
edited by
Siglind Bruhn
CONTENTS
Introduction (Siglind Bruhn)
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iii
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Part I: Signs of Transcendence and couleur locale
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Of Spain and Sin: A Glance at Wolf's Spanisches
Liederbuch (Susan Youens)
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3
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From Paganism to Orthodoxy to Theosophy: Reflections
of Other Worlds in the Piano Music of Rachmaninov and Scriabin (Anatole
Leikin)
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25
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Part II: Lifting the Secular Veil
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A Sermon for Fishes in a Secular Age: On the Scherzo
Movement of Mahler's Second Symphony (Magnar Breivik)
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47
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Music, Religious Experience, and Transcendence in Ben
Jonson's Masque of Beautie: A Case Study in Collaborative Form (Anthony
Johnson)
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71
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The Truth Ineffably Divine: The Loss and Recovery of
the Sacred in Richard Wagner's Parsifal (Robert A. Davis)
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97
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Part III: Temptation, Death, and Resurrection
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Eschatological Aspects in Music: The Dream of
Gerontius by Edward Elgar (Eva Maria Jensen)
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133
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Wordless Songs of Love, Glory, and Resurrection:
Musical Emblems of the Holy in Hindemith's Saints (Siglind Bruhn)
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157
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The Passion According to Penderecki (Danuta Mirka)
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189
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Part IV: The Divine Breath of Worldly Music
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Spiritual Descents and Ascents: Religious Implications
in Pronounced Motion to the Subdominant and Beyond (Chandler Carter)
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233
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Time and Divine Providence in Mozart's Music (Nils
Holger Petersen)
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265
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Music and the Ineffable (Eyolf Østrem)
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287
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The Contributors
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313
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Introduction
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Siglind Bruhn
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The relationship between music and religion
has long been a clearly delineated one, seemingly requiring little
verbalization, much less justification. Up to the late Middle Ages,
music employed for ritual expressions of faith in sacred contexts and
for evocations of the numinous (as, e.g., in the theater) was
contrasted with music presented for entertainment, be it that of an
aristocracy with too much time to fill, or that of the common people
with a need for diversion from their hard lives. Both the highly
intricate works played in the august halls of princely palaces and the
easily accessible genres presented in the open air on market squares
and the like were eventually referred to as "secular" in nature. The
distinction was understood to denote the spiritual as well as the
aesthetic impact: music heard as a pastime or background to other
activities (like formal dining or dancing) fulfilled different purposes
and consequently conveyed different messages from music heard in the
context of rituals addressing human erring and divine Redemption, or
right versus wrong human conduct. The latter was believed to aid in the
communication of eternal truth, while the former was suspected of
arousing sensuality and thus potentially leading away from the
spiritual perspective of life.
In subsequent centuries, music offered for entertainment at various
levels of sophistication spilled from the courtly salons to the concert
hall and the home. Such music, created for virtuoso performance or for
the enjoyment in private chambers, occasionally made room for an
expression of religious experiences outside the dedicated spaces of
worship and moral edification. This aspect is particularly intriguing
in instrumental music, where allusions to extra-musical messages are at
best hinted at in titles or explanatory notes, and in those cases of
vocal music where it can be shown that the musical language adds a
subtext or at least significant nuances to the verbal text.
Based on case studies that transcend a music-analytical approach in the
direction of the hermeneutic perspective, the essays collected in this
volume set out to explore how the musical language in itself,
independently of an explicitly sacred context, conveys the ineffable.
The focus is on the musical means and devices employed to this effect
and on the question what the presence of religious messages in certain
works of secular music tells us about the spirituality of an era.
Great care has been taken to gather contributions that address various
notions of the term "spiritual" and explore musical works from across
the span of the common-practice period of Western music (from the 16th
to the 20th centuries) and from a variety of genres-solo piano music,
string quartets, and symphonies; early music drama and its Wagnerian
and later offspring; piano-accompanied lieder as well as Romantic and
modern oratorios, and even ballet music.
The first two essays explore how traits of local musical traditions are
employed-either by cultural outsiders who interpret their "otherness"
to effects suiting their own ends, or by composers emerging from within
the tradition and exploiting its signaling functions. In her essay, "Of
Spain and Sin: A Glance at Wolf's Spanisches Liederbuch," Susan Youens
investigates the ambivalent attraction of Spain to the German
imagination in two poems from Emanuel Geibel's and Paul Heyse's
Spanisches Liederbuch. She argues convincingly that the composer's
idiosyncratic, post-Wagnerian concept of the numinous as well as his
anguish about his own sexuality, which brought him into conflict with
rigid Catholic sexual morality, have influenced his music and may have
contributed to a sense of identification with mythical Spanish
religiosity.
This picture from the South-Eastern part of Europe is complemented by
one from the North-West. In "From Paganism to Orthodoxy to Theosophy:
Reflections of Other Worlds in the Piano Music of Rachmaninov and
Scriabin," Anatole Leikin discusses ancient pagan traditions, Orthodox
Christianity, and later mystical beliefs in Russia in connection with
instrumental music. The essay traces how certain characteristics of
musical language associated with or influenced by various religious
experiences found their way into the 19th- and early 20th-century piano
repertoire, particularly that of Rachmaninov and Scriabin.
Part II of the collection deals with music that served secular goals at
least at the surface: the masques performed, with the active
participation of the English aristocracy, at the court of King James,
Richard Wagner's operas, most of which played to late-19th-century
Germany's taste for Nordic myths, and Mahler's symphonies, which
satisfied early-20th-century Viennese audiences' hunger for
recognizable folkloric ingredients. As the three studies show, even
such purportedly worldly compositions may be designed along concealed
spiritual agendas.
Magnar Breivik's essay, "A Sermon for Fishes in a Secular Age: On the
Scherzo Movement of Mahler's Second Symphony," reads Gustav Mahler's
second symphony as a giant depiction of the dualism of human death and
eternal life. Between the first movement, "Totenfeier" (Funeral), and
the extensive "Auferstehung" (Resurrection) finale, the works includes
three intermediate movements. According to Mahler's program notes, in
the third movement, often referred to as the scherzo, "the spirit of
disbelief and renunciation" has seized the fictive protagonist. The
movement is based on the composer's prior setting of "Des Antonius von
Padua Fischpredigt" from the collection of German folk poetry, Des
Knaben Wunderhorn. Breivik explores the music in this piece in relation
to the legend and its parable, as a senseless and purposeless dance of
human renunciation denoting denial and the spirit of alienation from
traditional faith in a secular fin-de-siècle.
In "Music, Religious Experience, and Transcendence in Ben Jonson's
Masque of Beautie: A Case Study in Collaborative Form," Anthony Johnson
draws on the fact that, as recent research has suggested, a number of
Stuart Masques (particularly those produced in a collaboration of the
poet, Ben Jonson, and the architect, Inigo Jones) may be structured
around "transcendent moments": complementary nodes in which their
scenic, choreographic, and textual architectonics key in with one
another through the Platonic/Pythagorean number harmonies which were
common to the arts of the time. Where the music played to these
masques, which was written primarily by Alphonso Ferrabosco II and
Nicholas Lanier, survives, there is evidence to suggest that this
aspect, too, may have been formally arranged to complement the same
transcendent moments. Johnson examines the musical, scenographic, and
literary collaboration on the Stuart court masques and discusses the
implications of the "transcendent moments" they create as surrogates
for religious experience.
Robert Davies, in his essay, "The Truth Ineffably Divine: The Loss and
Recovery of the Sacred in Richard Wagner's Parsifal," analyzes the
representation of the sacred in Romantic art. Parsifal's tangled and
problematic roots in medieval romance, in Christian allegory, and in
the aesthetics of the Wagnerian music drama give rise to forms of
subjectivity that redefine traditional conceptions of the sacred. The
author argues that the internalization of quest-romance that is such a
dominant pattern in Parsifal, while appearing to affirm a traditional
apprehension of the ineffable, in fact involves a radical reworking of
the forms of religious experience for an essentially godless modernity.
The three essays of Part III deal with subject matters that are more
specifically sacred; in each case, at least one aspect of the work is
found to be presented from an unexpected angle.
In "Eschatological Aspects in Edward Elgar's Dream of Gerontius," Eva
Maria Jensen reads this concert-oratorio, which is based on a text by
Cardinal Newman, as a secularized interpretation of death and salvation
whereby religious qualities have been reduced to aesthetic attributes.
She analyzes how Elgar copes with the eschatological aspects of
Newman's text and, particularly, how he expresses in music-in a work
that, while unusual in many respects, stands firmly in the
centuries-long tradition of European oratorio writing-those issues that
are difficult if not altogether impossible to express in words.
In "Wordless Songs of Love, Glory, and Resurrection: Musical Emblems of
the Holy in Hindemith's Saints," Siglind Bruhn discusses Hindemith's
three musical portrayals of canonized persons in compositions not
intended for sacred functions: Saint Francis of Assisi, protagonist of
the ballet Nobilissima Visione, Saint Antony of Egypt, the visionary
impersonation of the painter Grünewald in the opera Mathis der
Maler, and the Virgin Mary, whom the composer places at the center of a
highly provocative tension between spirituality and sensuality in his
two versions of the Rilke song cycle Das Marienleben. Bruhn observes
that in all three cases, the composer introduces the protagonists with
historic quotations: a trouvère song, a Lutheran choral, and a
14th-century Easter hymn respectively. She argues that both the initial
choice of the pre-existing musical material and its further development
within a 20th-century composition serve to characterize the
protagonists in their struggle between spiritual quest and human
temptations in the midst of their idiosyncratic concerns.
Danuta Mirka, in "Passion According to Penderecki," addresses the
general question of how the internal structure of a compositional
system determines the expression of a work, and offers a persuasive
answer with regard to the sonoristic system of binarily opposed
sound-masses in Penderecki's interpretation of the Passion drama. She
juxtaposes the composer's sonoristic instrumental writing, employed in
sections of the Gospel text that depict dramatic aspects of the story
(and particularly the extreme emotional states ascribed here to the
suffering Christ) with his vocal writing based on twelve-tone
principles, which he uses in the settings of hymns, psalms, and a
sequence constituting the contemplative, liturgical comments to the
events of the Good Friday.
Finally, Part IV of the volume addresses several of the overarching
concerns shared by composers from diverse periods and places in their
attempt at a musical representation of religious experience. Chandler
Carter's essay, "Spiritual Descents and Ascents: Religious Implications
in Pronounced Motion to the Subdominant and Beyond," builds on the fact
that the nearly obligatory large-scale tonal motion in works of the
common practice is to the region of the dominant harmony. Nonetheless,
he argues, composers sometimes strongly emphasize the region of the
subdominant or its harmonic extensions, even at or near structural
cadences. In analyzing examples of such pronounced motions to the
subdominant and beyond in works by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, but also
by Josquin, Schubert, and Verdi as well as Stravinsky, Vaughn Williams,
and Ives--works in which either a text or an explicit program points to
a religious or spiritual meaning--Carter speculates on the possibility
that such tonal motion can imply a similar meaning also outside such
explicitly stated contexts.
Mozart's person and music have been valued very differently in
religious contexts. In his essay, "Time and Divine Providence in
Mozart's Music," Nils Holger Petersen addresses not so much Mozart's
personal relationship to Christianity, but argues that his works,
including even non-texted compositions, can be read in a theological
light. He proposes to take up the hermeneutical problems mainly through
a discussion of the idea of musical form in relation to the traditional
Christian understanding of the concept of time, a concept formulated by
St Augustine in the late 4th century but prevalent in Christian
theology ever since. Through a musical double example, two string
quartet movements from the quartets in d minor (K. 173 and 421),
Petersen shows how the musical structure in Mozart's work can be
understood to deepen traits of a Christian understanding of time and
history.
In the final essay, "Music and the Ineffable," Eyolf Østrem
looks into the aesthetic history of the assumption that music may be
particularly apt at expressing the ineffable. He presents two
approaches to the notion of "the ineffable," one an historical
understanding based on concepts about God's ineffability as developed
by Jerome and Augustine, the other a philosophical evaluation of the
term in light of modern language philosophy. While according to Jerome,
God exceeds any comprehension, Augustine allowed for an understanding
beyond language, based on sensual experiences that suggest the
ineffable God by way of analogy. Less prominent during the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance, these thoughts resurfaced with the German
Romantics and their aesthetics. Their notion of the character of
absolute music resembled Augustine's notion of the ineffable God.
Finally, Østrem shows how the "loss of the referent" stated in
the writings of Saussure, Wittgenstein, and Derrida has not only
reshaped our view of language, but has also made it possible to
re-construe music's relationship to the spoken word.
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