In defence of sad songs (late finish)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
Over at Diary of an Arts Pastor, David Taylor has an interesting post on The Art of Lament. This reminded that I started on this subject, but — lamentably — never really got to the end of my thoughts. So here are a couple of brief ideas that should have been included…
The first is a quote from U2 sermons blog (quoting, in turn, Douglas Blount):
…for U2, “all roads to the Gospel lead first through the blues… gospel without blues leads to self-deception.”
… which, I guess, is the up-swing of what we’ve said previously.
The second is William Edgar’s suggestion (during the talk Heaven in a Nightclub) that jazz is able to express true joy because it has faced up to the darkness and despair in life. In contrast, a lot of current praise music only gets as far as happiness.
Maybe we can link these two fragments together: In a recent interview, Simon Mayo suggested that one of U2′s attractions is their joy. And certainly, for me, little praise music reaches the joy of, for example, Magnificent. Perhaps this is the result of a willingness to take the road that passes ‘first through the blues’.
Or, to be seasonal, we find the full joy of Easter Sunday only when we’ve truly engaged with the darkness & despair of Good Friday. (For more on this, see Robin Parry’s post on Tenebrae.)
in defence of sad songs (3)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’d better get the next post in this ‘series’ written before Jonny beats me to it…
Tags: art, culture, imagination, lament, music
in defence of sad songs (2 1/2)
Posted by Paul | Filed under web sights
OK, if you’ve been around long enough to have read the start of this series of posts, then you probably thought it had finished. But, no… In fact, over the last few days I’ve been meaning to write to get round to writing some more.
We do not know how to think theologically about sorrow, we do not know how to make space for it in communal worship, we lack the doxological vocabulary to bring the whole of our human experiences before God and so instead we simply bury them.
…
Do we lack the faith and courage of Old Testament saints to lament? To refuse to keep any dimension of our human experience from God but to come before him as we are – in our joy and our pain?
Tags: art, lament, music, web sights
in defence of sad songs (1)
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
A number of things I have read or listened to recently have (tangetially) touched on art that considers the brokenness of life. It often seems that many Christians are worried about such negativity, implying that we should only focus on happier things. So, here are a few posts with reasons why we need both.
(Before I start, I’m not saying it is healthy to stay on the negative side, only that there is a place for art that looks in that direction — OK?)
First point is from an mp3 interview with Dick Keyes, his concern is commercialism (and cynicism). He points out that commercialism focusses on an unreal rosy picture of life — drink this can and your life will be OK. Consequently, we are suprised when bad things happen to us; we can’t cope and become cynical. Obviously this isn’t necessarily limited to commercialism — it can apply to Christians if we try to do the same thing. (Which raises the question, why we, as Christians, have the tendency to look away from the brokenness — are we following the wider culture? Just a thought…)
What is the answer? Perhaps, we can get a clue from Pete Lowman’s article If There Really Is a God, Why Don’t People Notice? – A Media Studies Approach (Which is great, by the way, and deserves a post of its own, if I get the time.) Let’s try this quote:
the media reshape our perception of what is normal or acceptable… Actually, this is how Bible reading should work: we read, say, an old testament narrative, we then encounter something similar in real life, and we apply the categories from the clarified narrative we have absorbed in our Bible study across to understand the real-life situation: `Ah, this is a little bit like the story of Abraham… and in the biblical story this was right, that was important… and therefore this is what I should do.’ The Bible supplies our norms. But in our society, immersion in the intensely-presented alternative (unreal) universes of media shapes our understanding of what is normal and appropriate, gives us categories to apply (consciously or subconsciously) to understanding our own experience. `What’s going on here in my life reminds me of what happened in the movie; and then what happened was….’
We need art, songs, imagination-formation that encompasses all of life, both the good and bad bits, from a Christian perspective. Otherwise, when bad things happen we have no reference points to guide us. So, either we collapse or we fall back on reference points from other sources.
Perhaps, this helps us see the value of the Bible bits that we tend to avoid. You know, the depressing Psalms, Ecclessiaties, Lamentations. They might not give cheery answers, but they engage with brokenness while retaining a God-sourced perspective. They provide a model of people in tough places who are still keeping the big Mission-of-God picture in mind. So, they can form our imgainations in ways that allow us to see God in those situations.
If we produce art that only fits the neat middle-class Christian optimal vision of life, then we miss out on this. Since art forms our imagination, we need to see the importance of art that recognises the significance of the fall as well as the hope. Of course, the point we need to get to is where we can hold both together at the same time…
Tags: art, culture, imagination, lament, music, worldview
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…
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...