Abstract
This article presents an annotated English translation of the composer-theologian Dieter Schnebel’s seminal essay exploring music’s spiritual capacities. Speaking explicitly from his time and place, Schnebel considers compositional questions arising from the most advanced new music of European modernism. The approach is driven by insights derived from Marxist critical theory and the “new theology” associated with Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, and others. Acknowledging the secularized, religionless society Bonhoeffer had predicted in 1944, Schnebel argues that an authentic geistliche Musik has always been one driven by a secularizing dynamic, pressing beyond the walls of the church to engage a broken world of injustice and suffering. For him, the experimental avant-garde is fertile ground, since a music of the Spirit is a new, non-conformist music engaged in renewal. A translator’s introduction analyzes briefly the major components of Schnebel’s thought.
Highlights
This is striking, since it is in relation to Adorno, not to Bultmann or his pupils, that Schnebel chooses to cite the notion of demythologization in Spiritual Music Today
On 31 March 1967, over a half century ago, a German conference on contemporary church music meeting in Kassel programmed an address entitled Geistliche Musik in der neuen Zeit (Spiritual Music in Modern Times)
The speaker was Dieter Schnebel (b. 1930), trained in theology and musicology at Tübingen, parish minister, teacher of religion, and composer associated with the experimental Darmstadt circle
Summary
This is striking, since it is in relation to Adorno, not to Bultmann or his pupils, that Schnebel chooses to cite the notion of demythologization in Spiritual Music Today. Spiritual music has been affected, since, in the fairly widespread, secularized conditions at present, whoever speaks about God in a thoughtful way already begins to smell of the Salvation Army.
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