The Music of Theology: Language - Space - Silence

Introduction in Two Pulsations
I. From Religion to Music: this opening will look at the way a shift in religious thinking in the West is moving us away from theological models reliant upon set philosophical polarities, especially those of transcendence and immanence, or of the absolute and the material. As the second half of the twentieth century offered a sustained critique of the structure of the polarising space from which both sides found their meaning, current thought struggles to sustain an alternative, without reducing it ultimately to one side or the other. While certain philosophical systems look to close off theology altogether, other philosophical approaches remain open to theological possibilities, but only through an expansion of their mode and scope of inquiry. This introduction will show how, among the arts, music is especially poised, not as a “third way” between or above two oppositions, but as a mode oscillating across any polarity, a dialectic mode which, in its oscillation, opens up new theological space by interrupting established space.
II. From Music to Religion: this opening will look at how music has been traditionally theorised on two registers, beginning with Orpheus and Pythagoras, and continuing in modernity with “absolute” music (music with no other intention than to refer itself, unaccompanied by words, gestures, or images) and “programmatic” music (music intending some extra-musical meaning or narrative). But it will contest that now, given developments especially in the last half century, music struggles for a formal starting point. Since all music today, by virtue of technological and commercial mediation, is at some level programmatic, but since people, experientially, claim a certain immediacy in relation to all styles of music, in spite of ever-present technology and commercialisation, how can music remain a potent force as a global language, as a music that shapes our historical and cultural narratives, while at the same time impel a direct power upon individual passions, affections and states of being, as a music that shapes the self? This introduction will explore four factors that currently allow an oscillation between these two sides, breaking down the two registers of theoretical/absolute and practical/programmatic: I. the growth of popular music; II. the development of technology to record, play and market music; III. the opening up of global “musics”; and IV. the Western decline of organised religion. The first three factors will be developed more in contemporary terms of a sociological and phenomenological shift; the fourth factor will be developed more in terms of a history of ideas shaping the modern relationship between music and religion, using Adorno as an important figure for thinking this relationship since the twentieth century. The question of musical language will become crucial in rethinking the secularising tendency of contemporary culture that even Adorno admitted: if music as shared communication integrates human activity as part of its material and cultural formation, then at the same time music exposes the origins of that formation as something exceeding human language and expression. Silence and resonance – even a silent resonance, particularly as explored in the avant garde music of the mid-twentieth century onwards, which gave new freedoms to musical composition and sonorities – help to reinvigorate a spiritual or religious space within music in the dialectic between integrating and exceeding. The chapters to follow will develop this space as a theological language, a new register that invokes a music “programmed” towards the absolute, we might say, in the same manner as religion binds one to a community in order to exceed the bounds of both self and world. In this sense, where religion once defined music’s parameters, music is now in a position to redefine religious space. Music becomes theology.

Chapter 1: The Language Character of Music (Mattias Martinson)
This first main section focuses on the complication of musical immediacy/mediation in relation to music as a radical creation in a spatial mode. It starts in Theodor W. Adorno’s understanding of music analysis as a point of intersection between composition, performance and reception of music. Adorno’s main point about the necessity of analysis for a proper compositional development is discussed in relation to the historical character of music, especially how the autonomy of musical works is dependent on historical tendencies in musical technology. The paradoxical relationship between musical autonomy and heteronomy sets the stage for a discussion about the role of music in a technologically and economically mediated society, and how new creativity might be possible in this context.
This leads to the question of music as a rationalized cultural product, moving along with the dialectics of society at large. At this stage of the argument, Walter Benjamin’s theory of the difference between language as such and the language of modern humanity is brought into the picture in order to clarify Adorno’s understanding of the language character of music (Sprachähnlichkeit). Adorno reflects on music as a creative expression which has its similarities with language, although not with word-language, but with a more expressive side of language that has been radically forgotten or supressed throughout history. For Adorno, however, music is similar to language in general, and it becomes more and more similar to rationalized conceptual language as long as modernization and rationalisation moves on. This is due to the paradoxical historical heteronomy of musical autonomy. In Benjaminian fashion, Adorno theorizes this in theological terms and understands music as an ambiguous form of expression in which the language of creation itself can be heard, although not directly, but by way of critical theory.
The next step in the argument is a move from Adorno to the Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Lögstrup (1905-1981), who distinguishes between two spaces of language, the factual space of reference and the fictional space of sound. The space of sound is always present, but not always recognized in linguistic expression. Music is a kind of expression that makes this side of language understandable, and it is a side necessary to recognize if the creativity of language itself, which ultimately points the creativity of the Word of God, is to be appreciated. The aspect of the fictive space of language is coupled with notions from Adorno and Gilles Deleuze, such as the Versprachlichung and Entsprachlichung of music (Adorno), and the distinction between a smooth and a striated room (Deleuze). Music dwells in historical time as a striated expression in which its creative dimension is concealed through Versprachlichung. The challenge for a theological reflection on music in relation to creation is to smooth things out and open up a form of deterritorialization of music (Deleuze) in order to recreate it as a new space of unpredictable creativity.

Chapter 2: The World of Music and the Obliteration of the Proper (Laurens ten Kate)
This chapter starts from the central hypothesis formulated in the opening of Jacques Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy (1972/82): the logic of the proper as it underlies key experiences in our cultural history like identity, subjectivity, utility and truth is confronted by its limit only in the “sonoric representation”. Insofar as music is a form of this sonoric representation, it “divides” the proper in an “obliterating” way, thereby challenging and even interrupting those areas of human existence, Derrida states, where the proper is presupposed: economy, sexuality, but first and foremost language. The sonoric representation that underlies every form of music hence points toward a different form of language, close to Lögstrup’s second ‘space of language’, that of a fictional space of sound.
Much later, in his Listening (2002/7) Jean-Luc Nancy clarifies this obliterating division by emphasizing that the sonoric representation challenges the proper because its dynamic structure is resonance. Referring to the same passage in Derrida’s Margins, he points out that because rhythm, pulse, dance, tone, and music embracing all these sonoric acts, always resonate, they launch a field of experience in which the player, the dancer, the listener find themselves ¬– their being proper – by losing themselves at the same time. The re- of resonance marks this double gesture, for by resonating, sound only manifests itself, imposes itself to us by disappearing. “…Resonance, a setting in motion and start of an echo: the means by which a ‘subject’ arrives – and leaves itself, absents itself in its own arrival.”
Ten Kate will explore this strange dynamic of music by entering into dialogue with Hartmut Rosa and his recent major work Resonanz (2016). Rosa thinks resonance in a broader perspective, as a fundamental relation between humans and the world (Weltbeziehung), a relation of reciprocal exposure that breaks away from the dominant schema of modernity, that of subject and object, of control and submission, of truth and fiction, of freedom and community. Resonance as a relation to the world implies that the world can only be expressed through imagination. The world to which we relate in resonance is not some outside entity – object – but the relation itself becomes a world, an imagined place where we temporarily dwell. For Rosa, music is one of the examples of this resonating relation that “divides” us between presence and absence, “arrival” and “leaving”.
In this sense, music can be considered in a topological way, as a place – space, world – that exemplifies our being-in-the-world. Again, in pursuing this line of thought, Ten Kate follows on the first chapter that ends with an analysis of music as the space of unexpected creation. The question then is: where are we on this place, and what happens there? Discussing Peter Sloterdijk’s essay “Wo sind wir wenn wir Musik hören?” (in his Weltfremdheit, 1993) and Saam Trivedi’s theory of musical arousal (in his Imagination, Music, and the Emotions, 2017), and engaging case studies of many pieces of music, from early polyphony via Mozart to Coltrane and Bowie, Ten Kate develops the theory that resonance is the key dynamic not only of music, but also of ourselves. We resonate in music, whether playing it, moving to it or listening to it. This means that in music we become ‘worlds’ ourselves in which we relate to ourselves, creating and abandoning ourselves in one movement. Music transforms us into events in which the proper is obliterated, time and again. This brings us back to Derrida’s hypothesis, expressed in that 1972 opening in Margins, that is entitled “Tympan”: a resonating surface. Music transforms us into events by “rendering all events…”, by rendering us, …“possible, necessary and untraceable”. In this way, the musical event touches on theological themes like mystical ecstacy, meditation as the loss of self, and the kenosis of the divine. Put differently: it leads us to thinking theology and religion in an unexpected manner ¬– as music.

Chapter 3: Music as Strained Freedom (Andrew W. Hass)
The first section of this chapter, “Freedom’s Impulse”, will show how modern understandings of music since the 19th century are premised upon a notion of freedom. But rather than look at the philosophical groundwork where freedom, following Schelling, is the bedrock, it will dig even deeper, to look at the impetus that drives freedom in the first instance: freedom’s impulse, an impulse that connects it most profoundly not with spoken or written language but with music as it was being conceived in a more absolute sense (cf. Introduction II). The nature of this impulse, which sets it apart from the natural world, or from mere natural drives, as Schelling first worked it out, is in fact negation – the freedom to negate itself. This section will look at this impelling negation in detail through Schelling, but also through Hegel’s sense of sound as a double negation. It will see impulse (Anstoss) as an oscillation or rhythm between sound and decay, but also between nature and meaning, between excess and limit, and between feeling (Empfindung) as longing and the abandonment of longing, that is, the longing for silence. This silence will be seen to have, like the freedom it unfolds, a theological import: at the ground of our being, which is a non-ground, lies the inexpressible, paradoxically expressed as music.
The second section, “The Dialectic of Intonement”, will develop the above dialectic of longing, negation’s feeling or impulse, as strain. In English, the word “strain” has a wide, often contradictory, semantic range. This range will be worked out through a rereading of the Homeric episode of Odysseus before the Sirens. The most famous rereading, Adorno and Horkheimer’s rendering in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, will not be far from view, and will itself be reread, tying it in with Adorno as he appears in the first chapter above. The longing, desire or seduction of Odysseus will oscillate, as strain, between hearing and listening, myth and rationality, nature and meaning, and ultimately religion and the secular. As Odysseus strains towards the music of the Sirens, while bound to the mast, he manifests the rhythmic tension within self and world, that between freedom and restraint, or in connection with the second chapter above, between one’s own self’s resonance and its obliteration. Thus the strain becomes a binding, a re-binding, and a re-straining, the very stuff of a religious negation (“religion” = re-ligare, a re-binding). The idea of intonement becomes significant here: through strain, the self and the world are intoned anew, repeatedly (i.e. rhythmically) and negatively (i.e. towards its own silence).
In the third section, “The Call of Silence”, the intonement of silence is worked out more specifically in relation to the developments of modern avant-garde music in the West, where concepts of freedom are manifested in radical forms of composition, performance and improvisation. The work of John Cage will figure prominently: already in the late 1930s, Cage was reconceiving what constitutes music, sound, and their distinction, and in the decades to follow silence and nothing would feature centrally in his musical approach. With Cage, as indeed with other forms of aleatory and improvised music in the latter half of the twentieth century, questions of the inexpressible become increasingly significant, lending once again a religious and theological nature to the musical endeavour (in Cage’s case, Christian mysticism and Buddhism). Here freedom’s impulse involves a certain apophaticism, whereby what resounds in music is silence itself. In connection to the second chapter above, this silence resonates in the world and in our innermost being through music. In its resonance music negates, but in its negation it sets us free, even towards a new religious and theological freedom.

Conclusion: A collective narrative of direct engagement with music that is representative of the foregoing discussions, as indexed by prior references and newly introduced works. The volume thus finishes not with pure theory, theology, or philosophy, but with music, which, in all senses, has the last word. The reader will be able to engage directly with this music through links to pieces that illustrate, exemplify or invoke the main issues. The proposal here is to use Q codes that link to a dedicated website accompanying the book, as if by way of an electronic appendix. The website, curated by the authors, will allow for the shifts and flux of online access, and the development of music that comes newly onto the scene, whether by way of new archival availability, new recordings of old work, or new compositions/performances.