Gavin Hopps

Introduction: An Art Open to the Divine

This chapter explains what is meant by ‘extravagance,’ first in relation to music and then in relation to the divine. The section on the former includes a consideration of music’s ineffability—which is defended against the objections of certain ‘new musicologists’—and a contextualizing historical discussion of music’s disclosive and affective capacities, which are associated with the ‘Pythagorean’ and ‘Orphic’ traditions. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on what is innovative about the volume, which focusses in particular on its optimistic theological vision of music, which seeks to widen and multiply the spaces in which the divine may be encountered and encourages an openness to religious possibilities.

Types of Extravagance

This chapter draws its numerous examples mainly from instrumental music, in order to undermine any suggestion that it is really words that encourage a sense of divine encounter. Five types of disclosure are explored: (1) the way in which order in Haydn or Mozart can carry listeners to a comparable sense of a divine ordering of the world; (2) how works like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ might conjure divine otherness or transcendence; (3) similarly, immanence with the music of Sibelius and Debussy; or (4) the mystery of majestic serenity with Bruckner or of timelessness with Messiaen or Part. The chapter ends by exploring (5) the possibility of more specific attitudes being communicated—for example, a universal divine generosity in John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

A Generous Excess

The chapter is in four sections. The first provides various reasons for rejecting theological accounts which insist significant divine communication should be seen as confined to the Bible alone, a point that is elaborated in the second section as the argument is developed in the opposite direction against non-believers who deny any cognitive possibility for religion. A longer section then considers the various types of aesthetic theory currently applied to music and how religious experience through music may be analysed as a further distinct element which may or may not supervene on a purely aesthetic experience: a generous excess, as it were. The final section examines the relation between words and music in five examples of musical settings of famous biblical encounters between an individual and God.

Discovering God in Music’s Excess

The chapter has two main parts. The first is concerned to clarify how best to make sense of such epistemic encounters through music. From the human side it is important to note that emotion can sometimes convey truth, while from the divine an important parallel is drawn with prayer: Just as in contemplative prayer it is a matter of the individual opening up to a God is already present everywhere, so with music it is a case of its ‘excess’ enabling barriers to dissolve between our material world and God’s immaterial reality. A shorter second part then explores contextual restraints on such possibilities among both believers and non-believers, as well as sometimes in the music itself.

Romantic Invocation: A Form of Impossibility

Rilke’s Duineser Elegien begin with a stepping away from invocation: ‘Wer wenn ich schriee, horte mich’. The invocation, which convention- ally announces the beginning of epic poetry, is suspended in the amber of a conditional clause embedded in a question about the efficacy of invocation. This stepping away is, however, complicated by the fact that the question is itself a sort of invocation — calling out in asking about the point of calling out — so that it in a sense argues against its own argument against invocation and suggests an attachment to as well as doubts or anxieties about the act of calling out to a transcendent other. In this chapter, I wish to suggest that this ‘oxymoronic’ combina- tion of aversion and attachment — which pulls the poet simultaneously in opposite directions — is not peculiar to Rilke but is, rather, more generally representative of the Romantics’ attitude towards this conven- tional poetic form of calling out, which leaves the post-Miltonic speaker ‘stammer[ing] where old Chaucer used to sing’ (Keats, Endymion, I, 134).2