The song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc7b62El_fk) isn’t great, but a mixed bag. A gorgeous chorus, tasty instrumental parts, but the song’s feel is too characterized by the embarrassingly breathy “ahh” sound that punctuates the verses. If (as Will Farrell fans know) there . . . . Continue Reading »
This blog has been carried by Peter Lawler for the last year or so, and the time has long since passed for yours truly to lend a hand. As a way of prodding myself into the unremunerated glories of blogospheric content production, I’ve given myself permission to muse upon old rock songs. Most . . . . Continue Reading »
In a Mars Hill Audio with Ken Myers, Christopher Page discusses teh ritualizing effects of music. Speech is much more tonally and rhythmically complicated than music. To reduce all the tones and variations in speech to a seven-note scale is a radical simplification of sound, and, Page thinks, moves . . . . Continue Reading »
Brian Brock begins his Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture by noting how foreign Augustine found the Bible. Brock doesn’t want to familiarize the Bible: “It is as strange and eternally different from our common sense as is Christ himself.” There . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s not because of its sonority, its emotion, its excellence, or its beauty. No, forget all that; none of those messy, unscientific explanations get to the bottom of why we like music. The real truth has at last been revealed in its fulness: Whether it’s the Beatles or Beethoven, people . . . . Continue Reading »
A lovely carol that I came across in the old Oxford Book of Carols. If I could sing, and if I could sing over my blog, I’d sing this. The melody is haunting. Awake were they only, those shepherds so lonely, On guard in that darkness profound. When colour had faded, when nighttime had shaded . . . . Continue Reading »
Late in the nineteenth century, men and women in apparent possession of their senses heard Richard Wagner’s new operas and announced that their lives had changed forever. Charles Baudelaire saw Tannhäuser in 1861 and gushed, “Listening to this impassioned, despotic music, painted upon the . . . . Continue Reading »
“Do all in moderation” can sound ascetic, life-denying. Me genoito ! Moderation is an aesthetic term, and as an ethical standard combines aesthetic and moral criteria. It’s a musical ideal. Moderatus is linked to modus , measure, limit, rhythm, song. Epieikes . . . . Continue Reading »
Maya Angelou says he “thinks like a sage, acts like a warrior and writes like a poetical prophet.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. says he is “the pre-eminent African-American intellectual of our generation.” And Marian Wright Edelman says he is “one of the most authentic, . . . . Continue Reading »
Music has undergone serious theological neglect according to Jeremy Begbie, a professionally trained musician and theologian at Duke Divinity School. In his introduction to Theology, Music and Time, he writes:In the twentieth century, the corridors of theology were not generally alive with the sound . . . . Continue Reading »
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