well...

It's too hard to update on two blogs. I sometimes write things like the below posts here.

My top 10 Essential Symphonic Works

Here are 5 out my top 10 essential symphonic pieces. All of these great works of music have had profound influence on my life, and they are all a witness to the possibility and the realness of the beauty that God has invited the world to participate in.

Tchaikovsky, 4th Symphony- The first "classical" piece of music that ever grabbed my full attention. After hearing the piece for the first time in an open-to-the-public Houston Symphony rehearsal, I acquired every Tchaikovksy piece I could get my hands on. The 4th Symphony is still my favorite of the great Russian composer. The massive trumpet theme throughout, the overflowing graciousness and endearment of the second movement, the novelty and lightness of the pizzicato ostinato in the third movement, the volatile and explosive finale interlaced with the flowing and expressive motifs; all of this helped clear away any repellent to symphonic music that I had developed over the years, and I have not looked back since.

Shostakovich, 10th Symphony- It was the music of 19th and 20th century Russians that I was drawn to initially. Along with Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninoff- Shostakovich's music is dark, deep, and full of struggle. The slow and painful procession of the lower strings that begin the 10th Symphony, and the tragic and profoundly painful passages of lament, dance, anger, and irony throughout create a wonderfully tragic and circumspect musical journey. This is Russian music. Epic, tragic, and dark. Listening to this piece is like sitting by a warm fire in the middle of a cold house in a Russian winter.

Beethoven, 5th Symphony- Though this is possibly the most cliche example I could have come up with, the 5th Symphony is truly a masterpiece, a tour de force of epic theme and variation, existential confession, and sublime gracefulness. Listening to the whole piece is essential. The angry and fateful statement of the first movement is embraced and made beautiful by the second movement's rich and regal dance procession. The third movement bids the listener to continue moving towards the knock of fate that rings from the first notes of the piece, and the finale gloriously consummates that fate with a love supreme that rings out in majestic triumph. Truly remarkable. God forgive us for exploiting such brilliance.

Debussy, La Mer- Debussy forged a whole new sound with his orchestration. Bruckner's orchestration has been compared to the sound of an organ; Debussy's is typically compared with a harp. 'La mer', or 'the sea', is envisioned in a subtle and rich sound that consists of absolutely beautiful and brilliant musical evocations of the ocean in all of its subtlety, complexity, and power. One can hear in gorgeous detail the seamless gliding and sweeping of the sea gull hovering the flowing waves, the roaring power of the tempest, and the sheer peacefulness of the calm ocean at dawn. It is a magnificent sound that is almost totally particular to Debussy. I can think of very few pieces of music that so greatly depict the beauty of nature. Subtly and in great nuance, La Mer is a witness to the beauty and depth of God's creation.

Saint-Saens, 3rd Symphony (The Organ Symphony)- The organ is one of my favorite instruments. I am always awe struck and amazed when I hear a really great organ. The sheer force and power of that much air moving around to create such a sound can be almost fear-inducing. Saint-Saens uses the full spectrum of the organ in this great symphony. From thick walls of sound to delicate and frail clouds of chords, the listener is taken on a wonderful journey of action, dreaminess, and triumph. The piece evokes a similar mood to Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet with intense moments that seem like sword fighting sequences to absolutely gorgeous moments of romantic love overflowing into sheer bliss. The combination of organ, orchestra, and piano in the last movement is a moment of utter triumph. The power of the organ opens up in full force while the piano rains down descending and cascading lines that shatter like glass as the orchestra moves into it final statement of triumph. Brilliant and powerful.

The General with a sword in his mouth

"Then it came to her, with an unpleasant little jolt, that the General with the sword in his mouth, marching to do violence, was Jesus."

This is the ending to Flannery O'Connor's "Why Do the Heathen Rage?". I have been trying to read an O'Connor short-story everyday this week, and I have been delightfully disturbed with each story. O'Connor's brutal and unconsoling depictions of ordinary people and everyday life cuts deep into the reality of that shadowy line that runs between the light and the dark in every person. Grace emerges in the unlikeliest ways and in the most peculiar places for O'Connor's characters, and it is in her often-times inverted and concealed perception of redemption that the reader is invited into a sobering and ironic experience of grace. The world is a horrible place, yet it is only in seeing God and his goodness over-against such banality, brutality, and horror that there is that possibility of hope. This is not a life-denying sentiment, but rather a glorious and severe apprehension of the God that has acted through the darkness of the cross. Seeing God and goodness is so often hidden from our "natural" and ordinary viewpoint, and it is in stories such as O'Connor's that grace is shown to be uncovered in unexpected and surprising ways.

School.

I hope to be done with my dissertation this week. Barring a critique from my supervisor that would force me to frantically rework the paper, I should be able to send it over to the UK by the end of the week. My time at St Andrews has been rewarding, challenging, and frustrating. Originally enrolling in the course to "get my feet wet" in the world of academic theology and to test out if this was something that I wanted to pursue further than just reading books on the side, I have been thoroughly bitten by the bug, as it were. Doing a distance learning course has certainly had its benefits and disadvantages, allowing me to teach myself how to do research and to write better papers, but excluding the face to face time with both peers and professors that is so essential to the learning environment of the academy. I have to say that the program would have been far less enjoyable and profitable without the residential week at the beginning of each semester. Going to Scotland four times over the last two years wasn't much of a burden, either.

I took three modules: "Fictionalizing the New Testament", "Theology, Art, and Politics", and "Public Theology"; and wrote a Dissertation on James MacMillan's St John Passion . Through these modules and the research I have been doing for the last seven months, I feel like I have acquired a decent understanding of how to approach theology, politics, and the arts; I say approach because I feel like this degree was more of an introduction to these things than a thorough exploration. I am fairly satisfied with my dissertation, but I feel, having gone through this experience, that I have simply learned how to start thinking about music and theology. I feel that if I started now, with all that I have learned through writing this paper, I might be able to say something more substantial. Nonetheless, I am thankful beyond measure for this experience and I feel that I am entering Duke Divinity with a solid foundation.

I am very much looking forward to being a full time student. Duke is a beautiful place, and I am privileged beyond my wildest dreams to be studying at such an institution. There is an anxiousness burning in my belly to begin the fall semester. I am a bit nervous. Not because I don't think I will be able to handle the work, but rather because I am not yet fully convinced that I belong here. I didn't even take Algebra 2 in high school and my undergrad experience was defined mostly by my attempt at rock-stardom, not by any scholarly efforts or achievements. But, whatever. God works strangely- or at least makes the world strange; here I am.

The World Part 2

To withdraw from the conflict and sheer severity of the Gospel story, particularly the Passion narrative, is to ignore the fact that God has worked through this world to achieve his purposes in Jesus Christ. Any account of the transcendence of the Gospel must come to terms with the fact that God became man, lived a fully human life, and died a violent and horrendous death. Fully transcending the conflict and tension inherent in the human experience –an experience that the Gospel tells us that God fully entered into- comes dangerously close to a Gnostic or docetic account of the incarnation. To remove the concrete human experience of Jesus is to turn the Gospel into a purely spiritualized account that short-circuits a positive doctrine of creation and disregards the very mode in which God has acted salvifically. It is over-against such a view of transcendence that Macmillan’s Passion offers such a robust account of what Jesus’ Passion tells us about the God who became a human being. It is to a particular theology of art and an aesthetic of transcendence that I now turn to in order to show why Macmillan’s Passion is an example of a piece of art that embraces fully the ambiguity and conflict of the incarnation and the world as it exists under God’s action.

In Rowan William’s Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love , the notion that the Christian faith is at odds with a philosophy of art that fully embraces the concrete world in all of its ambiguity and conflict is challenged as to be profoundly misguided. Offering an account of transcendence that embraces the world and its substance, as opposed to escaping or avoiding the concreteness of the given world, Williams engages with a number of Catholic figures such as the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, poet and painter David Jones, and the novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor. Using Maritain’s philosophy of aesthetics and by looking at the particular processes that artists such as Jones and O’Connor go through as they produce their art, Williams offers an aesthetic of transcendence that is “intensely serious, unconsoling, and unafraid of the complexity of a world that the secularist too might recognize…” A primary thread running through the book is the idea that “things are more than they are”, as Maritain has it, and the artist, through an honest reshaping of the world as they perceive it, uncovers and reveals that “more”. Williams takes this “more” as to be intrinsically and “[necessarily] related in some way to the ‘sacred’, to energies and activities that are wholly outside the scope of representation and instrumental reason.” Thus, good art provides a sort of gateway into a dimension that is unable to be perceived or conceptualized with “ordinary” human experience; it transcends the “on the surface” aspect of the world and “‘dispossesses’ us of habitual perception and restores to reality a dimension that necessarily escapes our conceptuality and our control. It makes the world strange.” This, however, does not mean that the world as we experience it is something to be left behind, or spiritualized into a sort of other-worldly stratus of the sacred. Far from it. The world in which human experience takes place is the world given by the Triune God, who out of a radical, self dispossessing character of love creates the world as other, and therefore loves it “ as a work, as a product that is at once dependent and underdetermined, in process of achieving its own integrity.” That being, the artist is free to depict the world as it exists, which is “radically grounded in God, in God’s ‘wisdom’…and just as radically different from God (and hence vulnerable to change and chance).” As creatures that are bound to the otherness and time of the created world, there is the necessity and a freedom of embracing our own identities as creatures and the world in all of its own integrity and reality. As Williams says,

"The most profoundly free action human beings can take in relation to their identity, the action that most fully realizes the image of God, in theological terms, is to elect to discover and mould what they are in the process of ‘remaking’ the world in a love that is both immeasurably different from God’s (because it is to do with the self’s self-definition in history and material relationship). Human making seeks to echo, necessarily imperfectly, the character of God’s love as shown in making and becoming incarnate."

So, the artist working with integrity allows the world to be itself -something which may or may not be what we think it is. This, as Williams has it, is an act of love; a love that attends to what the world actually is, being completely honest and leaving nothing out of sight. Thus, for the artist, an honest vision and a full participation in the concreteness of the given world is what makes possible the uncovering of different dimensions that remain hidden to our “ordinary” perception. This is a vision of transcendence that allows the world to sustain its own integrity, and allows human beings to embrace their very createdness.
Now, this does not mean that the music of a composer like Pärt is to be looked upon as insufficient or even misguided. There is no sense in drawing a line in the sand as to which type of music is preferable or even theologically superior. Art should speak for itself, and theology should always be careful to avoid ideology as it makes judgments on something as abstract as music. In many ways, Pärt’s music, though it has avoided the conflict and complexity that is so much a part of human experience, offers the sort of “uncovering” that Williams is talking about. As Pärt has said,

"Music … exists all around us without the composer, just as the sculpture exists in the rock and the sculptor only releases from the stone. It’s the same with music. You see I take the skin off the potato, and the musician cooks it and puts it on the table. But it was God who made it grow. It’s the same with music: it exists."

Passio, it seems, is an attempt to take the words of the biblical text and let them create their own music through dropping away all that would hinder a “purity” of expression, to “uncover” the spiritual character that is already there underneath the text, and tap into a deeper truth. There are no direct or explicit outside sources or coloring other than a vision of complete transcendence that lets the words of the text speak for themselves. Yet, on the other side of the coin, there seems to be something essential missing, a wholeness that includes a fully human perception of the text, a musical reading of the words that is unafraid to include the concreteness –particularly the humanity of Jesus- of the Gospel’s worldly setting. This is where Macmillan offers a more robust example of an artist who has chosen to embrace and confront the world as humanly perceived and experienced.
As has been shown by the descriptions of the characters and events above, Macmillan’s setting of the text comes out of an understanding of the world that embraces the ambiguity of Jesus’ divinity and humanity, the irony of Peter’s denial and redemption, the severe clashing of powers as Jesus and Pilate come face to face, and the beauty and mystery of the mother-son relationship between Mary and Jesus. He doesn’t attempt to somehow “purify” the text into something other-worldly or metaphysical- or even Johannine for that matter. There is an honesty about the world as paradoxically fallen in sin and violence and redeemed under the death and resurrection of Jesus. It cannot be reduced to categories where everything is clearly separated and visible. It is much more ambiguous than that. (With the frequent juxtapositions and intermingling of conflict and resolution in Macmillan’s music, Augustine’s theology of the saeculum comes to mind.) For Macmillan, a truthful vision of the world must include an engagement with the ambiguity and conflict inherent in the way in which God has revealed himself through the incarnation. Particularly for the Christian artist, to avoid conflict and to avoid the reality of the world is to retreat from the very nature of how God has acted through the incarnation. As Macmillan has said, “The fact is that if history had to be changed, if we had to be changed, then God had to interact with us in a severe way. You can’t have the resurrection without the crucifixion.” The historical person of Jesus Christ is how God reveals himself to human kind, and it is by entering into the narrative of cross and resurrection we are able to see and experience God’s very nature. This is what makes possible a real transcendence that is rooted in God’s truth, revealed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The cross challenges everything that the world, fallen in sin and violence, assumes is the way it has to be. It is in holding everything up to the cross that a true knowledge of the world is possible. Passion is an example of a musical work that has been held up to the cross, in all of its severity and tragedy, broken apart (quite literally) by the very narrative that it is setting. It is in holding his music up to and accountable to such a narrative that Macmillan’s music becomes a fitting witness to the Gospel of God’s severe love.
It should be noted, however, that conflict and struggle should not be held up as something necessary or desirable. The act of crucifixion is not what is vindicated by the resurrection. It is not crucifixion that should be the focus, but rather the crucified Christ. In the cross, God does not affirm conflict and suffering as something necessary to his purposes, but rather overwhelms and triumphs over evil through excessive love rooted in radical sacrifice. By engaging the conflict and struggle of the Passion narrative, we see that it is through cruciform patterning and a life tuned into God’s character and action that true love and transformation is possible. By fully entering into the cross and severity of the Passion narrative, Macmillan has pointed to the way in which God has salvifically acted. He has not simply rehashed a text through music or tried to capture a systematic portrayal of John’s Gospel, but has engaged as a human susceptible to the concrete world that God has created, and loved enough to die for. As Williams says of O’Connor’s perception of the world,

"Doing justice to the visible world is reflecting the love of God for it, the fact that this world is worth dying for in God’s eyes. The tightrope that the Catholic writer must walk is to forget or ignore nothing of the visually, morally, human sordid world, making nothing easy for the reader, while doing so in the name of a radical conviction that sees that world being interrupted and transfigured by revelation. The event that disrupts and questions and changes the world is precisely what obliges the artist not to try and recreate it from scratch. Irony is going to be unavoidable in this exercise."

Passion certainly does not make things easy for the listener. Yet in doing so Macmillan shows the world as it is loved by God and how it has been infiltrated and interrupted by God. It is the very severity of Passion- with its tensions, juxtapositions, and resolutions- that witnesses to God’s radical transformative power and subversive action through the disrupting event of the cross.

The World

After examining Macmillan's St John Passion in light of a Johannine theology, I decided that it was almost pointless asking whether the piece could be called "Johannine". A large part of the paper addresses the "Johanniness", but it is in looking at the work from an artistic point of view that I feel like I found the real theological value of the piece. Rowan William's Grace and Necessity led me to see the work through a philosophy of artistic integrity, rather than a systematic approach that reduces the work to a theological text, which it is certainly not. Williams's vision in Grace and Necessity utilizes the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Maritain and gives examples of such philosophy manifested in the work of the painter/poet David Jones and writer Flannery O'Connor. Utilizing Jones and O'Connor as prime examples of Christian artists that employ an uncompromising artistic integrity that is completely honest about the world that they inhabit, Williams offers an aesthetic of transcendence that is "intensely serious, unconsoling, and unafraid of the complexity of a world that the secularist too might recognize." The Christian artist working with integrity allows the world to be itself, something that may or may not be what we think it is. By looking honestly at the world in all of its joy, tragedy, violence, and banality, the Christian artist reflects the world as it is loved by God. Also, it is by engaging with the concreteness of the incarnation, including the complexity, brutality, and tragedy of the cross, that the artist witnesses to the severe, shattering, and subversive love of God made fully visible as he goes to the cross. Over against Arvo Part's "Passio", which is work rooted in pure transcendence and simplicity, I have argued that Macmillan's St John Passion is a work that confronts and embraces the given world, provides an honest and engaging look perspective of the cross, and witnesses to the full scope of God's action through the incarnation. By allowing the conflict and resolution inherent in the Passion narrative to work itself out, Macmillan has written a piece of music that runs 'with the grain of the universe', with the love of God that has infiltrated and interrupted our world, witnessing to God's radical transformative power and subversive action.

SJP

I will be writing on Macmillan's St John Passion, analyzing his interpretation of John's Passion in light of a Johannine theology of the cross. I will also be engaging Rowan William's "Grace and Necessity", looking at the ways that Macmillan is working out an artistic and theological tradition that is "serious, unconsoling, and unafraid of the complexity of the world." I will also be looking at Macmillan's SJP over-against Arvo Parts work of the same title.