CULTURAL PARADIGMS

The cradle for jazz was in the French-American, predominantly Catholic culture of New Orleans.  In that - for the 19th century - relatively liberal climate, talented musicians of African descent were able to find positions in symphony orchestras.  Consequently, the music of jazz has been informed by French composers from the earliest (who in turn, later, became informed by jazz), and, in acquiring its modern milieux, has been naturally receptive to the harmonies of subsequent 20th century innovators, especially the French, early on the first culture - primarily in the person of Debussy - to come out from under the dominance of the German school - mainly in the person of Wagner. 

Pop America, on the other hand, comes of the more dominant British, predominantly Protestant, influence that, up until recent times, was musically subordinate to German standards, less harmonically adventurous.  Similar to the traditional British-Protestant musical practice, pop is lyric bound, more dependant on words than music for its interest. 

Perhaps the story of the mid-seventeenth century English composer Byrd goes a way towards highlighting matters, at least symbolically.  In the Protestant Elizabethan Age, while the queen was busy beheading Catholics in her realm, Byrd, one of her favorite composers, was required to put the lyric up front and to limit the music to simpler homophony, while in secret and in danger to his life he would write greatly more-musical pieces (polyphony ¹³² ala Tallis or Carlyle) for his Catholic patrons.  When Elizabeth’s father, Henry the Eighth, decided to go Protestant, it was musicians in the churches who were among the first to be put out of work. 

Interestingly, such contradistinctions can be seen in other polarized paradigms: the French being Catholic; the British being Protestant.  Handel’s Messiah, a German composer and work commissioned by British Protestants, continues to be incorporated into the liturgy of American Protestant churches, while the first, and probably only, church to incorporate America’s own music into its liturgy has been Catholic, in the jazz mass.  The American southern accent, the sine qua non of so much that is pop, comes down to us from the vernacular spoken in 17th and 18th century England.  Jazz is more resonant to the sonorities of the French.  France was for a long time the only nation in the world to welcome African-American jazz musicians into the mainstream of its culture.  The acceptance-ratio of the two musical paradigms in America is relative to the French-British ratio of influence within the United States itself.  Developments in classical music were to occur primarily on the Continent (in France, for one), long before their effects were to be felt in England, consequently hardly at all in the “colonies.” 

Around Evangelical circles you will hear that culture does not matter.  Okay.  But, try to remove from it whatever a particular church is used to, and let’s just see how unimportant culture is.  Whenever I hear pious noise against culture, it is invariably against someone else’s. 

The majority of American Protestants, while often denying that culture or the specifics of a culture are important to the Christian effort, nevertheless stay carefully inside that which comes directly down to us from the British and Germans (do I hear Anglo-Saxon?), holding it to be good enough for everyone, and regularly act as if nothing else matters - ironically, not unlike the French. 

“TOOLS” AND “EXILE”

Chapter VIII, “The Nineteenth Century,” of Routley’s book, is a cogent description of the degenerating effects to occur resulting from the machine-age.  One of three characterizations of that time, used to describe it, he calls ” the “Age of Tools,” 

It was a flowering of the notion, even more prevalent today, that a thing is valued according to what it can earn.  Victorian popular music was one such “thing.”  It was the first time in history on such a scale that music was not valued so much for itself, but on its use as a “tool” for profit. 

“. . . . the discovery of tools is the discovery of the results man can obtain by using a thing for an end which may not be intrinsically its own.  Aristotle held, it will be recalled, that everything has its own ‘end’ or ‘function’, the proper performance of which is the measure of its goodness.  Nineteenth century commercial man found the strange secret of judging things not by the fulfilment of their own ends but by the fulfilment of some end which is ordained by man.

The process by which the legitimate use of money developed into an idolatry is the archetype of the degeneration which overtook every civilised activity during the nineteenth century.  The machines which give their name to the age, being themselves a whole class of objects which exist not for themselves but only ‘to be used’, are as certainly derived from the new mythology of money as they are the cause of the Forsytean refusal to assess any object otherwise than by the measure of ‘what it will fetch’. 

 Now this attitude of assuming that everything exists ‘to be used’ is the direct denial of Greek and also of Biblical philosophy’.” ¹³³

 "It was also the age where Men were enslaved on an unparalleled scale, and experienced that most terrible of newly-invented diseases, technically [in Britain] called ‘redundancy’ which is ‘being unwanted’, or more strictly, ‘being of no use’ [unemployed].” ¹³⁴

Sound close to home?  Is it any wonder how Marxism, the socio-political form of humanism, appealed to Western man, or that Socialism has taken hold in Europe?  The saying is not without truth that capitalism invented communism.  But more to the point, Christian churches were faithless to Christ’s commandment, silent to the abuses resulting from capitalism, satisfied to reap in the tithing from profits of industrial progress, ignoring the victims. 

“[the age] was seriously affected by what St. Augustine . . . called both amor agendi (the love of doing) and superbia (pride).” ¹³⁵

“Doing,” i.e., to be the performer.  Routley also calls the century

“. . . the “age of exile,” because “for by far the greater part of the population of England , the nineteenth century was a time of homelessness.” ¹³⁶

Uprooting man from the land, as the Industrial Age did, was a business decision, making man an employee subject to market-economics.  Man is naturally a “doer.”  In fact, man finds it virtually impossible to physically do nothing.  Man’s basic impulse to do something needs no beatings from the brows of “work ethic” moralizers.  It just needs place to be applied.  Man without land to fall back on in times of economic stagnation makes welfare necessary.  Welfare is an ethical responsibility of the business class. 

It was also the time of classical music’s Romantic period and the virtuoso.  Despite that, or actually in a perverse way because of it - the plethora of second-rate imitations and publishing companies, music being now a “tool” for making money - the “Age of Tools” became the [first] century for “Bad Music.” ¹³⁷

“. . . ecclesiastical modes [in music] disappeared and were replaced by the classical scales and key-relationships. . . . A music orthodoxy developed with the presupposition. . . that ‘major' is normal and ‘minor’ abnormal.” ¹³⁸

Thereafter followed generations awash in a new orthodoxy of tonality that in the hands of second-rate imitators made sentimentality a box office success. 

“In sum, then, we can describe Victorian church music as ‘tool-music’ . . . composed in a self-conscious way which was unknown to the composer of the Puritan psalm-tunes or the music of the Wesleyan revival. . . . 

 “John Wesley had showed what could be done with song, and the Wesleyans of the nineteenth century incorporated into their worship a system of degenerate church music which manifested in an exaggerated and even caricatured form the more evident qualities of eighteenth century English music.”. .  “‘What we are used to’ - still in most churches the normal criterion of good music - is identical with the symbol of security, and for the possessing classes no less than for the dispossessed, some symbol of security was urgently needed.  It is the lack of tension, challenge, adventurousness, and judgment in Victorian music which makes it so flaccid, and it is precisely these qualities that made the worshipper cling to it so helplessly.

 “If we consider one more form of Victorian bad music we shall see this point much more clearly.  I refer to the music of nineteenth century Revival.” ¹³⁹ 

It comes down to us that a measure for cheapness is a “song.”  From America came two revivalists to England, Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey. 

“Ira D. Sankey, the musician of the team, composed many tunes and adapted many others, all in the style which should most easily appeal to their listeners.  The characteristic revivalist hymn-tune is therefore jaunty in rhythm and rudimentary in harmony, and this because that kind of music was ‘simple’ for the people to whom the revivalist ministered.  Simplicity for them was ‘what we are used to’, . . . And we must say that the musical content of much of the Sankey-type hymnody is so low as to be infantile. . . . [However] Sankey’s own . . . There were Ninety and Nine. . . is simple and although its harmony is impoverished, its rhythm is carol-like and its melody has a conspicuous climax.  This we can regard as symbolic of a music designed for homeless people.  It was what they were used to; it proclaimed for them the gospel of peace ‘in the arms of Jesus’.  The fear-ridden populations of the industrial cities of England could not respond to challenge and austerity; there was already too much of that in their lives. . . . Its intellectual content might be tenuous to the point of illiteracy; it might, and indeed did, correspond to the architecture of most modern cinemas and roadhouses in its combination of the trivial and the pretentious.  Its homeliness is an exaggerated and caricatured homeliness.” ¹⁴⁰

But it served its purpose then.  It is, therefore, that in the “Age of Tools” music first became a utility. 

“This astonishing outbreak of illiterate and poverty-stricken music has therefore to be seen as the product, at several removes, of the same force which produced the bad music of the cathedral and the parish church.  It is, once again, amor agendi - the love of ‘results’.” ¹⁴¹

In this continuing age of tool-music, the urgency for results, now that the facility for doing so is possible electronically, gives rise to engineers making the “music.” 

I will expand only a little on what has been said by Mr. Routley.  Music, in this continuing utilitarian age, has come to be regarded, also, as a form of “communication,” with which Routley agrees.  Except where it is crafted specifically with that in mind, I disagree.  Music is not “communication,” in the sense of bearing a message.  

“The use of the term ‘communication’ implies that art is merely another means for saying something which may be equally well said in other ways.” ¹⁴²

Otherwise it is to say that art is a form of propaganda, which it is when used in commerce.  Art is non-specific.  It is the one thing in the world that can be, is meant to be, and thrives on being.  I would agree that art can be a process of communion between the metaphysical and the physical.  Perhaps that is splitting hairs.  But “communication” is too much identified these days with message sending, broadcasting and the like, the transmittal of something specific.  Mr. Routley is professionally involved with ecclesiastical matters, where music is but one part of a program, programs that bear messages.  So music must subordinate itself there.  It must be fixed, without surprises.  But, real art changes in a moment, without notice.  This is especially true of the music improvisator’s artcraft.  It is involved in communion.  That is why, as Robert Penn Warren writes, art is dangerous.  And so it can be, where the environment for communion is not Godly. 

In sharp contradistinction to the demands of commerce, true music is made in response to the metaphysical.  I agree with Mr. Routley with respect to the following:

“There is a logical priority in the metaphysical kingdom. . . from the One to the Many, which demands a responsive movement from mankind towards the metaphysical, but without which that response is impossible. . . . [T]he religious music of primitive peoples . . . . is the music of people conscious that they are being in a sense acted upon from without. . . . Music to the Pythagoreans was virtually a quality of the universe waiting to be discovered.  In neither case is music in any sense a ‘human invention’.” ¹⁴³

CRIMINAL AS ARTIST

The innovative artist and the criminal have even been confused by a society unable or unwilling to distinguish between them - each beyond the pale, one to give, the other to take.  Innovations can step on cherished cows and, to the uninformed and those holding that art must be either old or news or entertainment, crime seems a likely comparison.  As society slips further into the totalitarian ethos of marketplace economics, the power of currency being the only measurement of value, and popular success rather than achievement the ideal, then more and more people deserving to be at the bottom of society will be running things.  What is to stop them? 

If it is so, as Calvin Coolidge spoke, that “The business of America is business,” then it follows that every idea is to be directed towards marketplace economics; that every skill is either product or means toward production.  Is it any wonder that music has become a major division of an industry putting out products that are now beginning to sing the song of a burgeoning market of disparate buyers capable of pulling away the moral underpinnings of social order itself?  I find it interesting and significant that it was not musicians but businessmen Jesus tossed out of the temple. 

Currently we are seeing examples of the two - artist and criminal - merging into one - where art forced into the underground meets the underworld, and criminals begin to emerge as artists - or criminals arise as the means and authority behind production of art (they know an unattended thing when they see it).  Not that the artists have nothing to say - they appear to speak for a growing, doubtlessly record-buying, segment of society; or that there is not some art to what they do - but compared to what?  In a nation so woefully ignorant of the historic process of culture it seems a fitting irony. 

“When reading the histories of music in America we almost gain the impression that the emigrants of the seventeenth century detested not so much the religious political or economic atmosphere of Europe as the musical.” ¹⁴⁴

Written in 1907, such an almost-impression is amazingly perceptive; and prophetic, considering the state of music in America today.  Approximately ninety percent of public and private funding goes to support the European, mainly pre-20th century, symphonic tradition ¹⁴⁵ (meaning there is insufficient public interest in, or support for, the music).  On the other hand, indifferent to America’s first universal culture, these same funding agencies require that jazz earn its own way, despite the hostile commercial climate it is forced into.  The ”work ethic,” you know. 

The American church is being successfully challenged in its moral position through the outrages coming by way of the musics of marketplace economics.  Is it any wonder, then, or beyond reason to speculate, that the rules of marketplace economics  - not imposed, by the way, on European fine art music - will ultimately put one of the main influential means for social direction into the hands of society’s lowest element? 

Responsible stewardship in this matter of music culture is virtually non-existent in Christian community, even more so than in the public sector.