From Heavenly Harmony
Passionate Praise
by Ken Myers
Douglas Adams, best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, once offered a brief catalog of the possible range of musical expression. "Mozart tells us what it's like to be human," explained Adams. "Beethoven tells us what it's like to be Beethoven and Bach tells us what it's like to be the universe." Like all caricatures, Adams's summary contains a valuable insight into something that happened in music history, and in Western culture more generally, between the early eighteenth century and the early nineteenth.
Bach (who died in 1750) still represented the view that human experience could best be comprehended in the context of a divinely sustained cosmic order. In Beethoven (1770–1827), we hear a personality more in synch with the ideals of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on freedom and subjectivity. Hence Adams's contrast (with Mozart somewhere in the middle) between musical expression that portrays all of reality (in a joyous dance) and the later, more modern uttering of the inner uniqueness of the individual. These characterizations are matters of emphasis, not stark black-and-white contrasts, but they are helpful in describing and understanding the genealogy of our own time, in which the self has eclipsed the world almost entirely.
Scholastic versus Humanist Assumptions
Of all the arts, music has a unique ability to integrate objective order with the subjective response to that order. In music at its best, form and freedom are reconciled. The rationality and intelligibility of the universe can be affirmed musically by means that employ the will and emotions. The actions of body, intellect, and spirit in the giving and receiving of music refute in joyful practice the fragmentation of the human person that modernity promotes. And the eternal purpose of God to unite all things in Christ (Eph. 1:9f.) is actualized in the shared experience of harmony.
But music has also been used in attempts to assert freedom without form and self-expression without submission to the gift of symphonic order in creation.
Music can be abused to simulate primordial darkness and chaos rather than eschatological light and glory. (The fact that many people would balk at the idea of the "abuse" of music shows how modernity's emphasis on the autonomous self has penetrated our cultural lives.)
Maintaining the balance between affirming the order that precedes us and the experience of subjects who participate in that order—who find their freedom in submission to the order—has always been tricky, in the arts and everywhere else. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, music theory and practice were wrestling with how music might be more affective, might address the feelings more dramatically. In often heated debates that paralleled the Renaissance battle between scholastic and humanistic approaches to intellectual life—approaches that pitted reason against rhetoric, proof against persuasion, theory against empirical observation—musicians and philosophers argued about the propriety of musical structures that violated rules of order in the interest of moving the listeners.
These debates were complicated by the sympathy among many of the humanists for (as musicologist Gary Tomlinson characterizes it) "a new human ontology, in which the will assumed a centrality at odds with its scholastic position as mediator between reason and the base passions." Where the scholastics (in the words of William Bousma) "assumed not only the existence of a universal order but also a substantial capacity in the human mind to grasp this order," the humanists, Tomlinson argues, held a "fragmented view of reality, and the pessimistic estimation of man's ability to comprehend it." These contrasting sets of assumptions presented practitioners of music with a significant challenge, echoed in Douglas Adams's contrast between a composer who reveals the universe and one who reveals only himself.
Musical Codifier of the Passions
It was into this contested philosophical, theological, and musical world that composer Claudio Monteverdi was born in Cremona, Lombardy, 450 years ago this year. Having published a collection of madrigals at the age of 19, Monteverdi's early career was spent at the ducal court of the Gonzagas in Mantua. There he continued to compose mostly non-liturgical vocal music, especially madrigals, which (conductor John Eliot Gardiner judges) "expanded Monteverdi's finesse in writing for the voice, and pushed his [musical] language to new expressive extremes." In Gardiner's view, Monteverdi "is the first codifier of the passions in music, whether it's love or anger, whether it's suffering, pathos, languor, religious fervor or erotic desire."
The latter part of Monteverdi's career was spent as maestro di cappella at St. Mark's Basilica in Venice. What Monteverdi learned while composing secular madrigals—whether frivolous, flirtatious, or melancholy—and in his writing of some early operas (his 1607 L'Orfeo is widely regarded as the first great opera) he applied to his setting of sacred texts that display deep human emotions, especially settings of the psalms.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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