Christian {Music, Musician}

One of my mentors, Phil Shackleton, has been quietly launching a protest over the idea of faith integration with music. He is doing this where all good academic progress takes place: in a totally biased, un-edited personal blog. Here’s the background, and some of my thoughts on the matter:

There is a push at APU, and at many Christian universities, to integrate faith into the classroom at every level. The idea is that every course should be distinguished from a parallel course taught at a secular university because it is being taught by someone with a Christian perspective on the course material. This is causing something of a quiet riot at APU, since the presumption that every subject matter can be bifurcated into a “Christian” and “Secular” perspective is not at all well-received. In our little world of music, Phil is the leading voice for rethinking the current faith integration model.

His argument follows something along these lines:

• Music is not “essentially” anything else, therefore, models of faith integration that apply to other academic disciplines cannot be imported to the discipline of music.

The idea here is that music is “Reductio Nihilo” – a fancy latin phrase meaning “reduction destruction”. To try to reduce it to something else is to destroy it. Music is not essentially math, language, art, architecture, semiotics, or any of the other dozens of models that theorists try to use to explain or analyze it. It has features in common with some of those models, but it is not “essentially” any of those things.

Because of this, a model of faith integration that might work for semiotics is not going to work for music. For more on this, see Phil’s running list of posts on what music is not.

• There is no such thing as a “Christian” perspective on music composition or theory.

In other words, there is no real secular/sacred division that naturally exists in Music. What we traditionally think of as “Christian Music” is either one of two things: Christian poetry set to music (CCM, Worship Songs, etc.) or musical motifs that have, in our culture, been traditionally associated with religious experience, and therefore trigger congitive association in the listener (think organ music, a melismatic men’s chorus chanting, etc.)

It’s easy to see that neither of these conditions actually attach to the musical content itself. They are either correlating materials, or social conventions. There is nothing inherently spiritual to a men’s choral chanting, except our common cultural association with religious experience. The sequence of notes and rhythms have either (and here the conversation gets very interesting) no spiritual content, or an inseparable spiritual content that is intrinsic in all of music. In either case, music is either all spiritual, or none of it is spiritual. It’s the division into two categories that’s unnatural.

So far, Phil and I are in agreement on the inappropriateness of trying to teach music from a “Christian” perspective. He and I would both, I think, argue that music is inherently spiritual, sacred, but that this sacredness makes no recommendation to the musician as to how they ought to practice, compose, orchestrate, or analyze, or perform music. Its sacredness permeates, and therefore there is no feature of music that the word “Christan” can modify.

I want to say something further though, and this is where we may reach different conclusions (then again, we may not. Phil is a pretty thoughtful guy, so there’s a good chance he will be swayed by the force of my argument, and completely concede to my superior views on such things. It’s likely. Very likely.) I want to say this:

• There is no feature of music that the word “Christian” modifies.
• There may be features of being a musician that the word “Christian” modifies.

Let me suggest three areas where this might be most true: the ethics of creative participation, the integration of body and spirit, and the ‘Imago Dei’ as a feature of human participation in music.

I will address each of these in future posts.

Academic
Culture
Music
Philosophy
Semiotics
Theology