God, Theology and Music

Abstract

There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schönberg, establishing private societies for the performance of contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composers have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.

TheoArtistry: collaborations with Sir James MacMillan and Michael Symmons Roberts

“…14 Indeed, this collaborative spirit was quite apparent in a Q&A with MacMillan and Symmons Roberts at the TheoArtistry festival, as the two reflected on their many projects, and MacMillan has publicly expressed his indebtedness to Symmons Roberts as a theological and artistic inspiration. 15 Similarly, the scholarly collaboration between David Brown and Gavin Hopps as co-authors may also act as a pattern for theologians exploring and publishing on difficult philosophical or theological questions in the future. Although these two examples are artist-artist and theologiantheologian partnerships rather than theologian-artist, they nevertheless exemplify the relational ethos necessary for such pursuits.…”

“…In the connection is found the revelation, a realisation of something not grasped before.' 19 Indeed, as the TheoArtistry collaborations support, music and poetry (and film) can properly do theology, not merely depict it.…”