Absolute Music / Absolute Worship

Abstract

This chapter explores the nature and history of ‘absolute’ (or ‘unconditional’) music, and its relevance for Christian worship today. The author sums up absolute music’s history with two numbers, one and zero. The first represents Pythagorean notions of music’s organized, enchanted, and immaterial cosmology, of metaphysics before physics, a world where musical unity reveals universal harmony. Zero, meanwhile, stands in for the modern era and its relinquishing of musical cosmology for a more materialist, human, and logocentric conception of reality (and music) that disenchanted the universe but enchanted the now enlightened, emancipated humanity instead. It is exemplified by the 16th century birth of the opera and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A third direction, a synthesis of both ideas, is found in Immanuel Kant’s conception of human autonomy and the ineffable sublime and is played out in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. Chua critiques each perspective and parses their influence on church music and theology, suggesting that an epistemology of music directly impacts a theology of worship. He asks ultimately what distinctively Christian, trinitarian worship should look like today.