Hegel, Adorno, and the Modern Composer
July 8, 2009
by Matthew Raley
Can evangelicals be united by a common music today? Can sacred music edify, or must we wander in a consumeristic wasteland of narcissism? These are the questions I am considering here, here, and here.
One of the reasons corporate worship has decayed is that Western culture, as I sketched last week, has a troubled view of individuality and community. Modernism abstracted community into a collective consciousness — to some thinkers a mystical, universal mind, to others the industrialized economy, to others a fascist state — into which individuals were absorbed.
Individuals, in reaction, sought to recover freedom, rebelling against collective demands. Arguably, today’s postmodern self-adoration is one result.
Let’s go a step further into these themes. I believe there is a clear reason why Western culture has degenerated into alienation. The wrong god has been reigning, to the destruction of those who serve that god.
Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), many argue, set the idol on its pedestal — if unintentionally. Hegel developed a view of history that influenced thinkers as divergent as Fichte and Marx.
History is sovereign over human events, working to realize its will through a dialectical process of synthesizing contradictions. What history does cannot be undone, ignored, or defied. History must be served.
In particular, history must be served by the artist, of whom Hegel required (in his Philosophy of Fine Art) “a liberal education . . . in which every kind of superstition and belief which remains restricted to certain forms of observation and presentation should receive their proper subordination as merely aspects or phasal moments of a larger process; aspects which the free human spirit has already mastered when it once and for all sees that they can furnish it with no conditions of exposition and creative effort which are, independently for their own sake, sacrosanct.”
Unpack that rationalist sentence.
The artist uses reason to master his culture. He stands back from cultural forms, seeing them merely as history’s tools, not as truths in their own right. Thus the artist is culturally free. But he must use his freedom to express history’s truth, subordinating forms to their role as “moments of a larger process.”
Hegel himself did not intend history to become the god that, for instance, dialectical materialism made of it. But a god it became.
The Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) applied Hegel’s view of the arts to music. Adorno opened his Philosophy of Modern Music (Trans. by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster [New York: Continuum, 2003], p 3) with a quote from Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art: “For in human Art we are not merely dealing with playthings, however pleasant or useful they may be, but . . . with a revelation of truth.”
Adorno also quoted the Hegel passage cited above (p 13), and responded to it. History, he argued, had swept away the freedom Hegel envisioned, moving through the force of collectivism (p 17). “At the present level of development the artist is incomparably much less free than Hegel could ever have believed at the beginning of the liberal era.”
Adorno saw the old world of art forms held in common by all as bankrupt. The domineering force of commercialism was suffocating individual expression, relying on old artistic forms and techniques (dance, tonality, polyphony) to lull the masses with empty certitudes. For music to say something historically true, it had to undermine the familiar with maximum individual expression.
Individual compositions, he said, became laws unto themselves, self-contained and self-defined structures that made no attempt to connect with an audience, instead ignoring the audience and rejecting its claims. Adorno analyzed the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Adorno’s own teacher Alban Berg, showing how the atonal twelve-tone system of composition served history and rose to the level of truth by enabling a composition to obey its own laws. An example (Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, Op. 25):
But, Adorno said, this maximized individuality still didn’t give the artist freedom (pp 17-18):
[T]he artist has become the mere executor of his own intentions, which appear before him as strangers – inexorable demands of the compositions upon which he is working. That type of freedom which Hegel ascribes to the composer . . . is, as always, necessarily related to the traditionally pre-established, within which framework there are manifold possibilities. On the other hand, what is simply of itself and for itself cannot be other than it is and excludes the conciliatory acts by which Hegel promised himself the salvation of instrumental music. The elimination of everything traditionally pre-established – the corresponding reduction of music to the absolute monad – causes it to ossify and affects its innermost content.
So Adorno further shows that, in twelve-tone music, the only option for the composer to express himself is to rebel against the internal laws of his compositions — in other words, to go insane. As an example of this rebellion, he cites the heroine of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, who finds her lover murdered (p 42): “Musical language is polarized according to its extremes: towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks.”
Can music console? Adorno said no. There is no true consolation for modern individuals, only the expression of fragmentation and anxiety. Can music edify? Again, no. Adorno argued that music must not connect people. There is no we anymore.
The agony of this story is that Adorno’s reasoning follows relentlessly from Hegel’s premise. If history is sovereign, then individuals will serve it, artists included. The cultural bankruptcy Adorno saw was real, and the empty boasts of modernism have spawned the various strains of postmodernism.
For evangelicals to worship together in any other mode than demographic conformity, we will have to rebuild a concept of how individuals live in community.
As I’ll sketch next week, that involves dethroning history and bowing to the God who is truly sovereign.
Audio: A God-Driven Life
July 7, 2009
by Matthew Raley
"No. 3," Tina Modotti, 1925, Getty Museum
In response to Israel’s unbelief, Jesus departs from his people. In this sermon, we study John’s explanation for the hardness Jesus faced, a love for man’s glory over God’s.
Poetry: “Stone and Tree”
July 3, 2009
by Christopher Raley
For Graham
What am I leaving him,
this kind-eyed boy with the golden crown?
Stone tree on a stone head?
Lifeless sanctity sheltering lifeless foundation?
From distance in struggle who can tell?
For that is not where we climb.
We rise from shrinking lake on aged paths
and search our footing a feet on scattered stones.
We lose the sky when bent and clutching
and stagger like forefathers on the angle.
The monkey-ed face of the lava-ed crest
glares across the canyon.
Too close to see threats of gaze,
we breach the chin and circle forehead.
His ancient mischief is a bliss
to picking and scratching through
hairless cracks in his stone boulder skull
till the top where we at last must forget
all ridicules for what we now behold.
And what am I to leave him,
my kind-eyed boy with the golden crown,
who pushes my lead and pulls my will:
Not a stone tree, but a tree from stone—
steady and single at the height,
in view of all yet blind to view—
whose bark a warmer gray than rock,
whose branches a cover of arms,
whose leaves a green over death.
It sprang from where soil settled
in the faults of hazard.
The Magic Mountain and the Flatlands
July 2, 2009
by Matthew Raley
The question I’m wrestling with these days is what to do about evangelical music. I have been arguing (here and here) that sacred music should edify people by bringing them together before God, but that evangelical music mostly doesn’t try. Instead, it merely pleases groups as segments of the consuming masses.
I divert today into what may seem an irrelevant story, but I plead your patience.
I think too much attention has been paid to recent demographic changes in America and their impact on evangelicalism. For these changes to have any context, we have to examine developments farther back in Western culture. Today, I’ll sketch some problems in modernism concerning human individuality, problems that shifted the foundations of art music generally, and specifically undermined sacred music’s mission to edify, as I’ll sketch next week.
Consider Thomas Mann’s character Hans Castorp, protagonist of The Magic Mountain.
Hans is from a bourgeois family in Hamburg. In the decade before World War I, he is about to take up his business career as a shipbuilder. On the cusp of this flatland life of science and profit, he journeys to Davos, high in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin being treated for a lung infection in a sanatorium. Hans stays there seven years, during which he has a spiritual and philosophical journey.
What does this fictional bourgeois individual feel about his place in the world?
Reinhold Niebuhr, in his Gifford Lectures (The Nature and Destiny of Man, New York: Charles Scribner’s Books, 1941), might have answered that Hans was enduring his own gradual destruction.
Many modernists saw the defining human ability as reason. Niebuhr called these the idealists, tracing their philosophical roots back to the classical anthropologies of Plato and Aristotle, among others. The individual human mind, through the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, could express its greatness by mastering nature.
Hans comes from this rationalist, dominating culture: the shipbuilder from the flatlands.
But other modernists reacted against this view, as well as against its social consequences. They saw relatedness to nature as the defining human characteristic, a view which Niebuhr called romanticist. The romanticists saw primitive social forms and physical drives as more authentic than the machine-like operations of reason. For the individual to express himself, he needed to reach back to this natural vitality.
Which is why Hans stays on the mountain seven years. There, he is interacting with himself, with the mythic power of the altitude, the snow, the erotic, the night sky. The flatlands were not enough.
Niebuhr said (p 21),
The conflict between rationalists and romanticists has become one of the most fateful issues of our day, with every possible religious and political implication. Modern man, in short, cannot determine whether he shall understand himself primarily from the standpoint of the uniqueness of his reason or from the standpoint of his affinity with nature; and if the latter whether it is the harmless order and peace of nature or her vitality which is the real clue to his essence.
Hans is adrift in this confusion, listening to the perpetual debates of the other residents of Davos, who are a kind of microcosm of European social history and ideologies.
Niebuhr analyzed that history. The bourgeoisie rebelled against the feudal order during the Renaissance, and created the modern world through its relentless application of reason and science. “This bourgeois individual felt himself the master of his own destiny and was impatient with both the religious and the political solidarities which characterized both classical and medieval life.” (p 22)
Hans the shipbuilder ought to be on top of the world.
But by using his reason this way, said Niebuhr, the bourgeois individual destroyed his freedom. Niebuhr asserted that “he lost this individuality immediately after establishing it by his destruction of the medieval solidarities. He found himself the artificer of a technical civilization which creates more enslaving mechanical interdependencies and collectivities than anything known in the agrarian world.” (p 22)
By the 19th century, the bourgeois individual was longing to regain his freedom, and he tried through romanticism (pp 81-92). But early romanticism (e.g. Rousseau) dissolved him into a universal consciousness, and romantic nationalism (e.g. Schleiermacher) swept him into a racial collective consciousness, while romantic nihilism (e.g. Nietzsche) unbound him from every restraint and empowered him with cruelty to express his own will.
It is these debates that Hans spends his time listening to, and the reader waits in vain for some resolution that will transform the shipbuilder into a man of vitality.
Hans finally leaves the mountain and is swept into World War I. The reader’s last look at him is not as an individual, but as a soldier in a mass of others on a flatland industrialized battlefield.
In modern times, Niebuhr said, the idea of individuality is “a tragically abortive concept,” destroyed by both of the modern movements that tried to guard it, idealism and romanticism. We are still living with the impact of this failure, only further down the slope of degradation. The American consumer lacks any rationale for living as an individual in community. He wants to be himself. But his sense of community is so dessicated that he ends up looking and sounding like everyone else.
What this death of individuality did to music is the next part of the story.
Audio: A Cross-Focused Life
June 30, 2009
by Matthew Raley
"Crouching Woman With Crossed Hands," Kathe Kollwitz, 1921, Museum of Modern Art
There is a spiritual passivity in contemporary evangelicalism, an expectation that God will move our limp arms and legs. In this sermon, we see that the Bible is not a magic wand for our spiritual vitality. To read it actively, we need to uncover our need for the cross.
An Example of Romanticism
June 29, 2009
by Matthew Raley
"Two Men Contemplating the Moon," Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1825-30, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Someone defined romanticism as the mixture of beauty and strangeness, a combination that I certainly love in this painting.
Music That Edifies, and Music That Doesn’t
June 24, 2009
by Matthew Raley
The word edify seems to be out of favor. It has the feel of an antique, and the stigma of obscure religiosity. When reaching for an equivalent, evangelicals often use encourage, and the substitution tells a story.
The words are similar.
To encourage is to hearten or animate — to give an emotional uplift when someone is down. Though one can encourage a group, we usually think of encouraging an individual, someone who needs a pat on the back.
Edification, like encouragement, has an emotional impact but is more specific about the purpose. To edify is to build, as both the Latin and Greek roots attest. Edification speaks of joining, cementing, adding, raising. It refers particularly to moral and spiritual improvement.
This is how Paul uses the Greek term (1 Corinthians 8.1): “Knowledge inflates, but love builds.”
Throughout the history of Western culture, sacred music has embraced the mission to edify. Congregations expected their music to cement them together in the praise of God, not just with people of one class but all classes, not just people of one generation but many generations. In the experience of being built together with other Christians, they expected to be improved. Music in worship was viewed as a corporate matter, as participation in a common sound.
This mission of connecting generations and classes was artistic. To achieve its goals, sacred music had tools to draw people in, like using familiar tunes from hymns and folk songs. It had other tools to propel people out of the familiar, not merely repeating tunes week after week, but resetting and combining them so that the folk elements acquired symbolic meanings. Until the late 1700s this music was not sold or performed outside the context of worship, and so had no commercial value.
It was crafted to evoke the spiritual zone where Christ’s people of all times and nations live.
Johann Sebastian Bach had a theology for this art — a view of how God uses music. He believed that the glory of God came upon his people whenever the congregation made music, a belief he based on the dedication of Solomon’s temple in 2 Chronicles 5.11-14. But for this art, Bach also had a cosmology — a view of how music operates in the physical universe. He believed that the planets and stars made literal music that human beings could join with their own sounds, all to God’s praise.
Bach’s music expresses this worldview. In the motet Jesu, Meine Freude (Jesus, My Joy), for instance, he takes a hymn that was familiar to his people, intersperses its stanzas with quotes from Romans 8, a familiar passage, and then propels the worshipers into God’s cosmos.
Notice that at the beginning the hymn is sung in ordinary chorale style (familiar), but that the second stanza (movement 3, 3:55) is more complex. The hymn tune is set in even more complex ways toward the middle of the motet. Notice also that the words from Romans 8.1 are set with five intricate, mutually-imitating lines. This counterpoint evokes the universe’s singing, the “music of the spheres.” (English translation below.)
Jesus, my joy,
pasture of my heart,
Jesus, my adornment
ah how long, how long
is my heart filled with anxiety
and longing for you!
Lamb of God, my bridegroom,
apart from you on the earth
there is nothing dearer to me.
There is therefore now no
condemnation to them
who are in Christ Jesus,
who wander not after the flesh,
but after the Spirit. (Romans 8, V. 1)
Beneath your protection
I am free from the attacks
of all my enemies.
Let Satan track me down,
let my enemy be exasperated –
Jesus stands by me.
Even if there is thunder and lightning,
even if sin and hell spread terror
Jesus will protect me .
This music doesn’t leave a worshiper in a familiar world. It connects worshipers to each other, to past generations of Christians, to the apostle Paul, to the physical universe (as they believed), and to God. It uses the familiar as a doorway into God’s larger world. It edifies. The music is powerful enough to connect with people today.
It is hardly news that contemporary evangelical music does not have a mission to edify. Evangelicals use commercialized pop modes almost exclusively, and the mission of this music is merely to encourage individuals.
Pop music certainly succeeds in its mission. But it has little communal value, since pop audiences have become narrower and narrower, representing the divisions of demographics rather than the unity of Christ’s Church throughout time and space. Some churches do well by singing a broad selection of pop styles, and there are possibilities for unity by using pop tools.
But there are two things evangelicals need to face about music. First, music has been given a spiritual mission by God, a mission that requires it do go further than encouragement. Second, the category of “what I like” will never edify. Giving people only what is familiar will make them smaller.
Sacred music needs to embrace its mission of love.
Poetry: “Men”
June 24, 2009
by Christopher Raley
They gather to build the fire,
men of older dreams, men of dead dreams.
Talk is out of mouths that hear to a world unseen,
and fingers feel with knowing eyes use of axe and wood.
Laughter comes just before the joke is punched.
Around them forest stretches and holds scared and quiet creature’s
frozen eyes, through gnarled manzanita and drooping hands of pine
hidden beholding heavy steps and strange, jagged rhythms of voice.
Beyond them forest stretches over patient deaths
of fallen trunks sprouting rising falls.
And peace is as many moments of silence
until fear of alien perseverance drives out to word.
So at last I left the moment’s sanctuary
to cross the dusty road where evening yet lingered
and their voices were soundings in deep water.
In the trees again I hurry to the call of men around the fire,
men of older dreams, men of dead dreams,
a circle of wrinkled palms yearning toward the flame.
Audio: A Kingdom-Scaled Life
June 23, 2009
by Matthew Raley
"Splendid Mountain Watercolours," 1870, John Singer Sargent, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Too often, Christians have their eyes on the foreground of life, fixated on immediate issues, rather than looking at their place in God’s larger work. In this sermon, we study how Christ calls us to live on a Kingdom scale, and how the Bible can help us do so.
Visual Fresh Air
June 19, 2009
by Matthew Raley
"Garden at Sainte-Adresse," 1867, by Claude Monet, Metropolitan Museum of Art
I ran across this a couple days ago, and found my way back to it.
