Off-Key

What can Christian theology bring to music?” In chatty theological circles, a lot of folks seem to be asking that kind of question, but no one is asking it in greater breadth, with more enthusiasm—and footnotes—than the British theologian and pianist Jeremy Begbie. In the twenty years since his Aberdeen dissertation (Theology, Ontology, and the Philosophy of Art), Begbie has prodded this discussion with Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (1991); Beholding Glory: Incarnation through the Arts (2000); and Theology, Music and Time (2000); as well as numerous articles, chapters in other books, and lectures on both sides of the Atlantic. He is also the founder of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. Housed at Cambridge, the Institute’s purpose is to “discover and demonstrate ways in which the arts can contribute toward the renewal of Christian theology.” In January 2009 he will take up a post at Duke Divinity School as the inaugural Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology.

Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music is in many ways Begbie’s magnum opus. Incorporating expanded versions of passages he first presented elsewhere along with new materials, the book received prepublication endorsements from Rowan Williams, N. T. Wright, and Nicholas Wolterstorff (among others), and their enthusiasm testifies not only to their admiration for Begbie’s writing but also to the importance Begbie’s subject carries for many influential figures today. They are convinced that Christians should think hard about the arts in general and music in particular. There needs to be a theology of it, and Resounding Truth is Begbie’s outline of what that theology might be, or how “God’s truth might ‘sound’ and ‘re-sound’ in the world of music.”

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about all that reverberation. Begbie is an important writer who has thought about this subject for some time. His work merits careful consideration. But while Resounding Truth contains sections of real interest, its factual missteps and blinkered view combine to weaken the book’s central points. Indeed, at least for me, Resounding Truth is a good argument for why the whole business of “theology and the arts” needs to be greeted with more skepticism than it has generally received.

Begbie’s thought largely grows out of two areas: his understanding of the role music plays in contemporary life, and the notion of a divinely ordained “cosmic order”—a notion combining the Pythagorean/Platonic “Great Tradition” and the acoustic phenomenon of the overtone series. But his analyses in both areas are problematic. Take this passage, for example:

Few doubt that music can call forth the deepest things of the human spirit and affect behavior at the most profound levels. Anyone who has parented a teenager will not need to be told this—study after study has shown that music often plays a pivotal part in the formation of young people’s identity, self-image, and patterns of behavior.

Well, no. Not really, or not quite. Music’s proven effect upon behavior isn’t profound; it’s actually pretty trivial. The tempo of particular kinds of music played in particular kinds of grocery stores can affect the speed in which shoppers will generally move through the aisles (but it isn’t particularly good at selling individual products: funny animated critters are better—think of that lizard selling car insurance). And like the Chippendale furniture and brass sconces in the law office that suggest sober stability, music can be used as décor. As décor it can do all the things that décor can do: set mood, play upon cultural memory, suggest appropriate behavior—but music cannot dictate behavior any more than the furniture can get you to sign a contract if you don’t want to. And relationships between parents and peers play the pivotal role in an adolescent’s formation, not music. Music is a means of expressing those relationships.

The idea that music profoundly affects behavior is part of the “Great Tradition.” Begbie’s discussion of Greek ideas about music is much better than many: he recognizes that what modern readers understand as “music” isn’t necessarily what is meant when we read “music” in translations of ancient texts. Many times “music” refers to notions stemming from the mythology of divine number (divine because they are changeless) and has nothing to do with the world of musical pieces that is familiar to us (or to the Greeks themselves). But he slips in his understanding of the mechanics of Pythagorean intonation and fails to deal with its inherent contradictions (for instance, the tuning system is not concerned with pitch but instead with the intervals, and the system yields two differently sized half-steps, not one). While he gives a glance to the complaints musicians have leveled at the Pythagoreans since Aristoxenus, he fails to grasp that these complaints are not arguments between sensualists and intellectuals but between people of rival intellectual positions. (Begbie relies heavily for much of his argument about the legacy of the Pythagoreans on the work of Daniel Chua—perhaps best known for describing the opening chords of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony as “the testicles of the hero”—and his topic would have been better served with a more skeptical use of Chua’s problematic analyses.)

The overtone series is an acoustic phenomenon. Produce any pitch, and that pitch will itself generate a series of pitches above it. It is for musicians what the color spectrum is for artists. Believing that a Christian theology of music should grow out of a “full-blooded doctrine of creation that recognizes our embeddedness in a given, common, physical environment,” Begbie seeks to ground Christian music in the overtone series. But here he again missteps. He seems to believe that the overtone series produces the same tones as are constructed through Pythagorean tuning. It doesn’t. The thirds are markedly different. While being careful not to argue that the harmonic language of Western Europe has a kind of theological superiority to music of other cultures, Begbie does suggest that there is direct relationship between the overtone series and the harmonic syntax of tonal music—that the tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords so important in harmonic tonality are implicit in the overtone series itself. But this is not at all the case. Put very simply, if C is our fundamental, a pitch a perfect fourth above that C, or F, isn’t found within the first sixteen partials of the overtone series at all. Without that F, we have neither the dominant seventh chord (upon which the whole syntax of harmonic tonality is based), nor the subdominant chord. Instead of an F, we find an “out of tune” F sharp at the eleventh partial, flat from an equally tempered F sharp by almost a quartertone. In order for the pitches of the overtone series to be musically useful in tonal music, at least one very important pitch must be altered according to purely culturally derived aesthetic criteria. We have to flatten that eleventh partial. It’s not too far off the mark to say that tonal music exists in spite of the harmonic series, not because of it.

For most of its existence, the music of Christianity hasn’t been tonal, but modal. Except for discussions of several contemporary composers, Begbie limits his musical world to that of harmonic tonality, or the music of Western Europe composed from the 17th to the beginning of the 20th century. There is no mention of the motets of the Ars Nova (perhaps our culture’s most sophisticated musical/theological artifacts), Pope John XXII’s 1324 bull against polyphony, Docta sanctorum partum (which helps contextualize Zwingli’s complaints about music two centuries later), or the Council of Trent’s long debate over music. Begbie is not only largely silent about music in medieval Christianity; he also ignores more recent important Roman Catholic materials about theology and music. No mention is made of either Pope Pius X’s 1903 motu proprio “Tra le Sollecitudini” (which lays out the character of sacred music) or the reforms of Vatican II.

Because his purpose is to show how Christian wisdom can deepen our understanding of the world of music, and vice versa, Begbie’s readers would have been helped if he had discussed two occasions before the 17th century where theologically grounded interventions dramatically affected musical content. Around the middle of the 12th century, the Cistercians began to edit the Gregorian chant they had inherited from the Benedictines, purging a number of chants of their extended melismas and suppressing accidentals in others, thinking that the music exceeded the ranges of the ten-stringed harp mandated in Psalm 143:9. The notes themselves violated Holy Writ, or so they thought. In 1570, at the urging of his Catholic intelligentsia, France’s Charles IX created the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, one of the purposes of which was to conform music in his kingdom to the dictates of Begbie’s Great Tradition. The Cistercian reforms resulted in a repertory of chant that can only be called mutilated. With the exception of the works of the Calvinist Claude Le Jeune, the mandates of the French Académie resulted in works of leaden dullness.

As these instances suggest, we don’t need a Balkanized theology, theologies of “this” and “that.” Theology is for the most part ill equipped to dictate the proportions between a post and lintel, or rotating sorghum with alfalfa, or the size of the interval of a major third. Instead its purpose, as Paul Holmer frequently said, is to make things like belief in God, and repentance, and faith and hope and love plausible.

Like the Cistercians and the members of the Académie before him, Begbie argues against the position that understands music as “essentially a human construction and human expression, earthed in nothing bigger than the ideology of a culture, a social group, or the desires of the individual.” But I think Begbie is wrong. Like grass huts and Coca Cola bottles, music is something we humans construct out of our environment. And what is and what is not considered to be a musical sound, a kind of sound that is found in a piece of music and distinguishes it from noise, is a cultural function.

Contra the “Great Tradition,” music isn’t a privileged form of communication that unlocks mysteries nothing else will reveal. Certainly music is a powerful medium of emotional self-discovery and expression, but so too are poetry and storytelling. And the Chinese have an ancient and sophisticated tradition of porcelain appreciation.

Michael Linton is professor of music at Middle Tennessee State University.