music, culture, theology, the kitchen sink…
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I was going to resist recommending another mp3 so soon after the last one, but as there is an intersection with my last post I have point out A Sense of an Ending by Jeremy Begbie. This is a great talk that wanders from looking at culture through music to the lessons from music for culture and theology.
Where it interacts with the previous post is the reference to improvisation. In this case, Begbie puts forward the idea of improvisation as a description of identity and self. Where modernism had the lone hero as the ideal and post-modernism has transient identities that change from one day to the next, Begbie suggests something that he terms ‘the musical self’. As a ‘musical self’, we become more who we are supposed to be through improvising the ‘music’ alongside others and playing off others. All the time we know that God has the ending sorted, so there is safety in the improvisation. (Seems like an interesting model for church.)
He says all these things far better than I can explain… And you really need the musical examples to appreciate it all.
He also has an interesting lesson from musical meter. You really have to listen to the talk to get this one, but the gist is that one down-beat/resolution in a piece of music is often an up-beat in a large plan. The lesson/analogy being that, through the small rhythms of our lives, God may well be working with a higher level meter that we can’t quite see as we go along. Or, the example of prophesy in the Bible, where fulfillment often sets up a larger expectation of things to come.
I had some random thoughts based on the last point, but they are a bit specific so you may want to leave before I get started. Here goes: One of Tom Wright’s big themes for NT studies is that Second Temple Jews did not believe the true return from exile had happened, even though they were strictly back in their own land. Somehow not all that was promised had worked out. (Wright’s idea being that Jesus was bringing about the true return from exile.) There is constant disagreement over whether this is true — whether Jews believed the exile had ended or not. I think Begbie’s multiple-layers-of-meter helps here: Yes there was a return from exile on one level and presumably many were happy with that. But that resolution also set up a bigger longing for a more complete release and some felt that more intensely than others. Just a thought…
Anyway, the main message is the 1.5 hrs needed to listen to the mp3 are well worth it…
Tags: art, culture, mp3s, music, theology
One Response to “music, culture, theology, the kitchen sink…”
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jonnyjpg Says:
October 4th, 2007 at 9:28 am
ahhh. i still haven’t lisyened to the last one! – their stacking up now. i’ll get started on this one today!
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...