Good and Fearless Musicians-part 4

Good and Fearless Musicians-part 4

          Oswald Chambers was born in 1874 and lived until 1917, so he experienced the major changes that were happening: the music impressionism  of Claude Debussy (1862-1918); the art of Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and Pierre-Auguste Renoir; and the existentialism philosophy of Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855).  Although we do not know exactly which philosophies Chambers was referring too, l love the people mentioned above exerted an influence on the major changes that affected fine arts aesthetics.  What we do know is that this great thinker was concerned before the turn of the twentieth century about the philosophy of fine arts aesthetics.

            Chambers did not live long enough to experience the emancipation of dissonance by Schoenberg, Webern and Berg and the anti-music ascetic of composers like John Cage that came later in the century.  However, he could perceive that “The kingdom of aesthetics lies in groveling quagmire, half fine, half impure”.  Little did he know how much the aesthetic developments of the twentieth century would affect religious music in the latter part of the twentieth and now in the twenty first century and how fearful Christian musicians would become of resisting these destructive changes.