Article
Art
Faith
Music
5 min read

Music and religion belong together

The connections between music and faith and the mystery within.

After 15 years as a lawyer in London, Oliver is currently doing a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

A pianist plays in the foreground and a seated singer gestures with eyes closed behind
Rachel Chaplin accompanies Evi Dobner.

J.S. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, Elgar. The list could go on and on. That is – a list of composers and musicians who wrote music for and played music within the Church. The roots of Western classical music are in the church, as Jeremy Begbie shows in his book Resounding Truth. In fact, it was only relatively recently that ‘popular music’ meant music outside of the Church. The Church has been a great sponsor of the arts throughout modern history, not least in the great Michaelangelo. It is time for that sponsorship of human creativity, in all its forms, to return (see the Renaissance project of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, for a new initiative on precisely this).

Why is it, though, that music and religion can sit so closely alongside one another? And why, in this day and age, might it be time for the two to reconnect?

For all its form and structural devices, there will always remain a horizon of mystery about music. Roland Barthes called music a field of signifying and not a system of signs. In other words, even in its most programmatic examples, music-as-sound has a kaleidoscopic range, which refuses to be pinned down to one meaning or another. This is why Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century found music so useful in the elaboration of his religious idea of Gefühl – an inward yearning and feeling, or, as he also called it, the intuition of the universal. And it is for this same reason that Karl Barth in the twentieth century, a passionate listener to Mozart, was so cautious of using music constructively within his theological system.

Even in its most programmatic examples, music-as-sound has a kaleidoscopic range, which refuses to be pinned down to one meaning or another.

In that sense, music is well placed to carry the new wave of Christian apologists like Elizabeth Oldfield, James K.A. Smith, or even this website, seeking a new direction away from rationalism and clever abstract truth-claims. God is both more real, and more mysterious than that. Music, in fact, can lead the way for language itself. To release language from the captivity of pointing to apparently clear and obvious truth is a distinctly Christian move. After all, we remember that truth is not what a rationalist, or an empiricist, or a logical positivist would want, but is a person, Jesus Christ. And language, like music, can embrace such a mystery. The word ‘God’, as the theologian Gerhard Ebeling once wrote, brings to utterance the mystery of reality. To refer to God is the most pure possibility of language. It affirms the presence of what is completely hidden. “To speak about God”, Ebeling continued, “means to speak about reality as a whole and therefore to speak about humanity, who is exposed to reality as a whole. Conversely, to speak about God is to deny that one can speak about the world as a whole as such, by speaking only about the world, or that one can speak about humanity as such at all by speaking about nothing other than humanity.”

Whilst music without words, then, has often been assumed to be the most numinous, there is no reason why music with words should be any less numinous. Language paired with music knows a not-just-of-this-world reality. Even the most didactic settings in church hymn books engage right-brain activity, shape the memory, and therefore contribute to life formation. Ignoring that function in the shrunken assumption that the goal is simple mathematical truth is a form of sub-human, less-than-creation, folk-lore.

The word ‘God’, as the theologian Gerhard Ebeling once wrote, brings to utterance the mystery of reality. To refer to God is the most pure possibility of language. It affirms the presence of what is completely hidden.

We must celebrate, then, a whole new generation of composers who have written glorious music for Church choirs setting texts from the Bible, amongst them, Sir James MacMillan, Judith Weir, Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Arvo Pärt, Alexander and Joanna Forbes L’Estrange, and Deborah Pritchard.

And to their number, we can also now add a professional oboist, Rachel Chaplin, whose beautiful new album ‘Music from an Inner Space’, seeks to guide the listener into religious contemplation. This is an account where words and music both contribute to create a space for contemplation and prayer.

The words are most often taken from the Psalms, given stunning new accounts in these compositions for strings, trumpet, piano and soprano voice, but also in the composer’s own settings such as the remarkably poignant See Him. Psalm 51 is rendered with a bubbling brook of cleansing water rather than the deathly painfulness of Henry Purcell’s setting. A short verse from Psalm 23, ‘he leads me beside quiet waters’, manages both to be consoling and to feel unsettling, urging the listener into a new and uncomfortable space. Like a tree gives Psalm 1 one of its best-ever accounts, with a confidence, a liveliness, and a sense of purpose normally missed.

The simplicity of the vocal settings, combined with the immense skill of the accompanying players, promises for this music to be heard more widely, and reconstructed in different contexts, private and public, within and without the church. What’s more, the care of the musical curation is matched by the composer’s sourcing of paper for the liner notes, artwork for the album cover, and accompanying beeswax candle, specially designed for the album. Listening should not just be on the go. Listening should go with what Charles Taylor would call attention: stopping, lighting a candle, and breathing, still, for more than the length of time it takes to boil a kettle.

Many of us enjoy listening to music of all kinds. Most of us recognise feelings and emotions which appear to go beyond the data and push notifications which the world loudly proclaims to us. Choosing contemplation and prayer over production and wealth-creation can usher us into a form of life which is more human. Music and religious feeling were made for each other.

You can catch Rachel and the group performing the album at the Greenbelt Festival on 24 August 2024.
More details at www.rachelchaplinmusic.com

Article
Art
Belief
Culture
5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.
Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating. 

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art. 

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it? 

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.  

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics. 

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books? 

 JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration. 

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others. 

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?       

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.  

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns. 

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period? 

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well. 

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such. 

 

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)