Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom

Abstract

This book addresses the question: how can the study of music contribute to the theological reading of modernity? It seeks to demonstrate that the making and hearing of music, and the discourses surrounding music, can bear their own particular kind of witness to the theological dynamics that have characterized and shaped modernity, and especially with respect to modernity’s ambivalent relation to the God of the Christian faith. Music can provide a distinctive ‘theological performance’ of some of modernity’s most characteristic impulses and orientations. The guiding theme of the book is freedom: one of the most critical issues of the modern era. And the overall theological perspective is provided by the theme of New Creation, a central and pervasive current in Christian Scripture. Concentrating on the period 1740–1850, the book is arranged into four parts (each section taking a particular musical work or corpus of music as its major reference point): (1) ‘Revolutionary Freedom’, (2) ‘From Church to Concert Hall’, (3) ‘Singing Justice’, (4) ‘Music and Language’.