Augustine's De musica is all that remains of his ambitious plan to write a cycle of works describing each of the liberal arts in terms of Christian faith and is actually unfinished; whereas the six books extant today primarily examine rhythm, Augustine intended to write about melody also. The sixth book of De musica was better known in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages than the first five, and it takes up philosophical questions of aesthetics related to the proportionate ordering discernable throughout creation. After a brief introduction summarizing De musica's content and its importance in subsequent Christian writings, my presentation outlines and explains how I have used this document in my own music classes. For example, my students learn that a vital notion in Augustine's writings, and in Neoplatonism more broadly, is the spiritual benefit of academic study. That is, through study of music, one gains insight into the created order, but, more importantly, one's soul is strengthened and trained to perceive higher realities of the cosmos such as the ordering of the planetary spheres and the progression of celestial hierarchies, which span the spiritual distance from God to humanity.
This article shares objectives, teaching methods, and sources of inspiration as I lead 21st-century students in engaging a Reformed/Calvinistic vision for the arts generally, and music specifically. Special explanation is made of Calvinistic concepts such as sphere sovereignty and sensus divinitatis. To conclude, I discuss aspects of a recent composition titled The God of Material Things by Jonathan Posthuma, a graduate of our college music program, whose work exemplifies many of the elements that my colleagues and I hope distinguish the accomplishments of music students beyond their education at Dordt College.
This article presents the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) as an historical educator in the context of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Poetry at Harvard University (1939–1940), published as The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. As music professors at North American institutions of Christian Higher Education, the authors each read Stravinsky’s Poetics with students in music classes. We describe here our different pedagogical methods and how we employ Stravinsky’s Poetics to form students with Christian approaches to culture-making.
The inspiration and starting place for this Special Issue was the book Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide (Routledge 2018), edited by Monique Ingalls, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe Sherinian [...]
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.