Abstract
Music, Brown and Hopps argue, has the capacity to engender religious experience, awaken listeners to a sense of wonder and transcendence, and provide ‘epiphanic’ experiences. This collaborative volume seeks to argue for a broader view of music’s revelatory possibilities: music as a phenomenon that breaks open a sense of ineffable and irreducible vision that is suggestive of the divine, even if in the loosest of terms. From this suggestion emerges the idea that music’s generous excess may itself be a sign of divine generosity – a sonorous breaking forth that mimics and perhaps communicates something of God’s own lavish self-giving openness towards creation and within its very fabric.
In Part I, Brown explores modes of aesthetic encounter, examining how such apprehension may relate to religious sensibility and interpretation. The aesthetic dimension of music must be allowed to speak in its own register, and from this can emerge ‘actual religious insight or experience’ (p. 64). Brown examines a range of principally classical composers – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Schoenberg and others – in a bid to show music’s ability to open up ground for religious insight and inspiration, if one can but restrain one’s predetermined theological framework for judgement. Brown’s approach here suffers from two inadequacies. First, Brown moves through such a range of examples that there is insufficient depth of critical attention paid to any; they read like the quick commentaries of an enthusiastic listener, often littered with irrelevant additional information, and the argument suffers for it. Second, and in part a result of this, his account is simply musicologically and theologically underdeveloped, and the reader may rightly tire of vague language that fails to receive the robust critical analysis required to make a clear case. In frequent phrases, such as ‘the listener being in some sense caught up into the divine life’ (p. 112), a raft of contended issues about musical and emotional perception, theological apprehension and divine communication are skirted and never firmly analysed.
In Part II, Hopps delves into the world of popular music, claiming its potential for religious evocation and realization. Hopps’ analysis, both as he tackles the thinking of Roger Scruton and Jeremy Begbie about pop and in his analysis of music, is more robust and clear. His emphasis on the hermeneutical importance of (subjectivized) listening contexts and the ecological ‘affordances’ that spring up through music are valuable dimensions to a postmodern musical aesthetic, and would merit greater roles in the book’s thesis. That said, Hopps’ analysis of pop songs fails, surprisingly, to pay adequate attention to social practices and presences of listening. The how of listening may matter more here than the what. Hopps’ musings over song lyrics seem too focused on the capacity of individual songs to be meaningful and lack attention to the phenomena of listening and to the ways in which various forms of musical encounter may achieve effects of realization and augmented religious attunement within the listeners’ perceptive field.