This book explores the ways in which music can engender religious experience, by virtue of its ability to evoke the ineffable and affect how the world is open to us. Arguing against approaches that limit the religious significance of music to an illustrative function, The Extravagance of Music sets out a more expansive and optimistic vision, which suggests that there is an ‘excess’ or ‘extravagance’ in both music and the divine that can open up revelatory and transformative possibilities. In Part I, David Brown argues that even in the absence of words, classical instrumental music can disclose something of the divine nature that allows us to speak of an experience analogous to contemplative prayer. In Part II, Gavin Hopps contends that, far from being a wasteland of mind-closing triviality, popular music frequently aspires to elicit the imaginative engagement of the listener and is capable of evoking intimations of transcendence. Filled with fresh and accessible discussions of diverse examples and forms of music, this ground-breaking book affirms the disclosive and affective capacities of music, and shows how it can help to awaken, vivify, and sustain a sense of the divine in everyday life.
Table of Content
1. INTRODUCTION: AN ART OPEN TO THE DIVINE
The Extravagance of Music
Ancestral Conceptions of Music
The Pythagorean Tradition
The Orphic Tradition
The Extravagance of the Divine
Prospectus
Part One: God and Classical Sounds
2. A GENEROUS EXCESS
The Divine at Work beyond Scripture
The Possibility of Music as Encounter
Types of Aesthetic Experience and Their Relation to Religion
Competing Types of Aesthetic Evaluation and Experience
Religious Perspectives Interacting with Aesthetic Criteria
Music in the Context of Words: Setting Divine Encounters to Music
Interim Conclusion
3. TYPES OF EXTRAVAGANCE
Order and the Music of the Spheres: Haydn, Mozart, and Bach
A Sense of Transcendence: Beethoven and Led Zeppelin
Divine Immanence: Beethoven, Sibelius and Debussy, and the Creed’s Incarnatus
Divine Immanence in Nature
Immanence and the Incarnatus est of the Creed
The Mystery of the Divine Life: Minimalism, Bruckner, Liszt and Franck
Transcending Time
Serenity, Majesty, Ecstatic Joy
Specifics: Coltrane on Generosity, Schubert on Suffering, Massenet on Suicide
4. DISCOVERING GOD IN MUSIC’S EXCESS
Giving Sense to the Encounter
From the Human Side: Knowledge and Emotion
From the Divine Side: Developing a Philosophy of Presence
Restraints on Such Experience
Part Two: Popular Music and the Opening up of Religious Experience
5. CULTURED DESPISERS
The Cloistral Refuge of Music
Pop Pollution
God’s Love of Adverbs
The Wonder of Minor Experiences
Dancing ‘with’ and Dancing ‘at’
What Has Graceland to Do with Jerusalem?
Theological Imperialism
Aesthetic Hospitality
The Wandering of the Semantic
One Size Fits All
Too Much Heaven?
Rehabilitating Lightness
The World ‘in front of’ the Text
The Spiritual Assets of Tackiness
Cultural Pessimism
6. SPILT RELIGION
The Listener’s Share
Unheard Melodies
Only Connect
Jordan: The Comeback
The Word in the Desert
Post-Secular Popular Music
The In-Between
The Impure Sacred
Oxymoronic Postures
Metaphysical Shuddering
Ontological Exuberance
Ludic Avowal
Subjunctive Explorations
Being in Darkness
The Interlocuted Listener
Secular Forms and Sacred Effects
Musical Hyperbole
The Moment out of Time
The Swarming Forms of the Banal
Homeward Bound
Coda: Being Opened
7. CONCLUSION
About the author
David Brown is Emeritus Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture, and Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews, UK.
Gavin Hopps is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Theology at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA), UK.
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