Aesthetics and the Christian Musician-Part 4

Aesthetics and the Christian Musician-Part 4

What does all this mean to church musicians in the 21^st century?  Why should we care what “serious academic music” composers do?  The reason we care is that in order for us to know how contemporary Christian music derived its philosophical basis, we must understand the history of music.  With these basic understandings of 20^th century philosophical despair in music philosophy, we are able to know how 21^st century church musicians derive their synthesis music philosophy.

Contemporary Christian musicians have accepted many elements of the anti-music despair of the 20^th century.  They believe, like Stravinsky, that the music part of music is not efficacious i.e. it is incapable of expressing anything at all.  Furthermore, these Christian musicians believe, like John Cage, that nothing is “sacred” or “profound” about the music part of contemporary Christian music.  Finally, like the religious music of Pierre Henry, these contemporary Christian’s religious music is grotesque and dissonant but the words are clear and clean!  To them this sanctifies the deed!  If the words are clean, nothing else matters.

Under this lack-luster philosophy religious music no longer has to be aesthetically beautiful.  Although almost all Christian musicians who perform rock-based music would deny it, they don’t believe in a music aesthetic based on any definable traditional standards of beauty.  If they do believe in an Christian music aesthetic, it is most certainly a redefined beauty based on a synthesis somewhere in between beauty and ugliness.  How did music degenerate in its aesthetic beauty from the music of J.S. Bach to the anti-music of composers like John Cage?  I believe that Achille-Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was one of the early composers who started in the direction of despair music.  He became interested in the literary works of the symbolist writers of the 19^th century.  These writers addressed their writings to a system of symbols and symbolic meaning as a negative reaction to naturalism and realism in literature.  This school was non literal and figurative thus developing a network of vague images.

The music of Claude Debussy was chromatic, fluid and vague.  Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande in this symbolist style

The opera is an expression of Debussy’s philosophy that music should be a free art, truly representative of the fact that it cannot be contained, but exists in time and is born on air.  That freedom meant a relaxation of restrictions such as those that normally governed form, harmonic progressions, and rhythm.2 

This vagueness was considered impressionistic and thus the connection was made with the vagueness of the visual art of Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Claude Monet (1840-1926), and Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919).  The works of these painters are studies in the impression light makes on the subjects of these paintings.  Often, light and subject seem to almost merge. The overall impression takes precedence over clarity, thus vagueness reigns

---

2 The Development of Western Music, K. Marie Stolba, p.775