Abstract

Music, it will be claimed, intones the meaning of being human. In the Christian tradition, music is central to liturgy and worship. From its roots in the New Testament, through its approval or prohibition by the Church Fathers, to the Puritan purges, the Classical liturgical commissions, and the revivalist celebrations, sacred music continues to be a means of negotiating the relationship between human selves and the sacred. The theological importance of music has been examined most recently with respect to time, but the theological promise of the spatial dimension of music either has been ignored or rejected. Accompanied by the Augustine of the Confessions, this article asks whether “the space of music” offers a way of seeking to know who one is and who God is.

Highlights

  • Music is a foundational grammar of being human.[1]

  • The density of harmonic resonance is evident in this space of music;[6] and it is in the spatial inflections of sound that the emotional colouring of a work is found

  • For the Christian pilgrim, who seeks to know the self, the tones that answer the self’s questing search for Quis ego et qualis ego? (Confessions IX. i), which, if they share resonances with others who hear them, are the notes of one’s own compositional becoming through one’s own cadential falling towards God – ad te – who is one’s rest

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Music is a foundational grammar of being human.[1] More so than language and more so than art, music sounds being In contrast to these two forms of articulating or representing even the barest lineaments of the dusty essence of one’s human fragility, the incisive tonal abrasions of music see to “speak” and “depict” one’s human condition with more expressive definitude. It is being claimed, articulates the veracity of the self in an unmediated mode, probing in its inquiry and promising in its melodic truth If such a candid declaration of intent, at least, may be entertained, why, one must ask, does listening to pitched and rhythmic sound sequences concealingly reveal the inwardness of being human? At its most acute, does this tonal articulation of the human self reside? And how does music perform this sounded definition, in the sense that it may penetrate the self so knowingly in the time and in the space of one’s life? And, significantly, what, has pitched sound – temporally unfolding and spatially expansive – to do with theology?

THE SPACE OF MUSIC’S CADENCE
WHAT IS MUSIC?
Music and time
Music and space
THE SEARCH FOR “WHO AND WHAT ONE IS”
SENSORY KNOWING IN SOUND
PROBING MUSIC’S SPACE
CONCLUSION

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