Concrete Music
Jeremy Begbie's Music in God's World, in this month's Books and Culture (Sept/Oct 07) has some good and solid things to say about music. Music, Begbie points out, is concrete and physical, that is, it is not an abstraction. When music becomes treated as an abstraction we are flung into the chaotic world of modernism, serialism and the concert-hall-emptying rest.

Music is physical: strings are plucked, wind is blown through a hollow pipe, the hammer strikes the string, the cymbals collide. All in real time and space, hard things coincide. Sound waves pass through the air and strike our eardrum. Sound is phyical.

All of this stands in opposition to a false spiritualization, the view that music is, at bottom, a non-phyisical, pure spiritual thing. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) expressed this spirituality in an essay, On the Spiritual in Art. Begbie summarises: "Physical forms must be isolated form their everyday contexts and treated with a high level of abstraction so that their inner non-physical meaning may shine forth, so that their physicality and particularity may be transcended". Hence, Kandinsky moved towards abstract art.

The extension of this move, in music, was Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). With Schoenberg we must move away from melody and the pleasure of sound to abstraction. "Schoenberg believed that music's sensory pleasure - how beautiful if sounds to the ear - is irrelevent to the quetsion of artistic significance (and to this day the music will sound jarring to many). Music shoud be concerned chiefly with the creation and development of artistic ideas; the pleasure it affords should be primarily intellectual". Enough said: there it is, the intellectualisation of music towards abstraction.

Modernism tends towards abstraction, a rejection of the "lower" physical realm, a false "spirituality" and flight form the physical world into the world of the mind.

In response our Christian repsonse is robustly physical. We rejoice in our materiality and our physicality. Christ came in the flesh for our salvation and the earth is the Lord's. Worship is not to be an abstraction, an inner experience, or a mere propounding of ideology, but the physical gathering of a physical people around a wooden table, with real bread and real wine. With musical instruments and physical voices with lift up praises to heaven. There is no abstraction here.