J.S. Bach famously wrote the letters ‘S.D.G’ after many of his compositions, sacred and secular. They stand for ‘Soli Deo Gloria’, a phrase which the German Reformation made famous - ‘To God Alone Be The Glory’. Bach’s usage of the phrase suggests that every piece of music may, in its own unique way, point to God. As such, it is of great encouragement for the Christian analyst. Such a view is also given a biblical mandate:
Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all who delight in them
We are commanded to go and seek God in all his creation – He is there for all who will look. This is the grand reason for all scientific and intellectual inquiry, including musical analysis.
What is analysis?
Analysis has to do with finding meaning in music. Individually, that quest is often started by the music itself, and our own felt response to it. ‘Why do I find that so beautiful?’ is a question that very often motivates the first moves in an analysis, trying to understand our emotional reaction. And so the analyst proceeds, dealing in the currency of the musical work - harmony, texture, structure, rhythm - seeking to understand its secrets. Analysing a work involves discovering how it uniquely deals in all of these, and more, as a purely musical understanding of a work is grasped.
The recent (and not-so-recent) history of analysis in the academy has wrestled intensely with whether that is all there is to it. Analysis pre-1980 (the date of Joseph Kerman’s seminal ‘How We Got Into Analysis And How To Get Out’) dealt only with the musical aspects of a work.[i] Kerman identified the missing elements – the cultural; the composer’s particular history and circumstances – arguing that musicology needed to move on from the ‘purely musical’. Thus, arose what used to be called the ‘New Musicology’, but is now really mainstream, a worldview that seeks musical meaning in everything surrounding a musical work, especially the cultural milieu out of which it sprang and of which it is an expression - everything, it seems, apart from the musical notes themselves. As a result, the world of analytical musicology has fragmented into those who look primarily inside a musical work for meaning and those who look mainly outside.
Analysis and a Christian Worldview
But what the world has divided, Christ unites. Looking at music from a Christian perspective also reveals how we might practise analysis. Musical meaning can be found in the intersection of the three arenas that are often kept separate – the musical work itself; cultural and external factors; and personal emotional response. Each one brings its own perspective, and each perspective strengthens the others. The starting point here is a doctrine of Creation – we are created as whole people. Music - that which we create - reflects that wholeness such that the intellectual, the ‘extra-musical’, and the emotional should all be considered when unpicking how a composer enshrined his humanity in a work of art.
So, there can be an honesty about the Christian’s approach to analysis. Let the particular piece of music dictate how you approach it. It would be nonsense to try to analyse a movement from Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie as though that work should conform to the harmonic or structural norms of a nineteenth-century symphony (though noting how Messiaen plays with conventional symphonic expectations would be highly relevant). In turn, working on a Mozart symphony or Beethoven concerto movement involves submitting to the conventions of those works, which have been written to accord within particular governing structures (sonata form; binary forms; rondo forms) and should be analysed accordingly. Bach’s music is an animal all its own, foregrounding tonality as a key structural element within its use of traditional Baroque and pre-Baroque forms, whilst also seeming to prefigure later developments. And one cannot analyse Bach’s music in a purely formalist manner, since in Bach, the language of the affections and its linkage to both rhetorical figures and keys are central to the ‘meaning’ of his music.
You see the point: in some works, the purely musical is more important than anything else, whereas in others the full impact of the musical language can only be appreciated by considering external factors; every analysis must start from the particular work and ask what analytical priorities and techniques are most appropriate for it in order to discover truthful musical meaning. For truth is what the analyst must seek, especially the Christian analyst. In a world of many truths, half-truths, and false truths, the Christian can hold onto the reality of ‘True Truth’ and uncover its expression in music.
But how is meaning encoded in music? Through ‘structural similarity’. This is a term from Susan Langer, the American philosopher of music and emotion. Jeremy Begbie has shown how music may act as metaphor through this principal, the various structures of music taking the shape of phenomena in the outside world.[ii] This is the key that unlocks music’s meaning for the Christian analyst.
How can the practice of analysis be informed by the gospel?
With these tools, then, the Christian analyst may be guided by a Christian worldview in the task of analysis itself. But the gospel may also provide the framework for how the Christian understands the fruits of analysis itself. For, seen through the lens of a Christian worldview, music itself proclaims the gospel as the various structures of music map onto the theological underpinnings of God’s story of Creation, Fall, and Redemption.
Created Order
Musical structure is a beautiful thing. Understanding how a composer has ordered their ideas, uncovering the invisible framework that communicates their vision, is one of the most satisfying aspects of analysis. A Schenkerian method can elegantly reveal the hidden harmonic connections in works that explain their emotional power. Such work bears testimony to the beauty of order in the creative process, and allows the believer to glorify the Creator, whose fingerprints we can discern. Even music that may not sound conventionally ‘beautiful’, such as twelve-tonal or atonal works, proves its high degree of order with the right analytical tools.
Images Of Brokenness
Music brilliantly evokes despair. Musical structures that fragment, scream, and go unresolved themselves mirror our deeply-felt awareness of the darkness of life. The analyst is privileged to understand these things, and the Christian can rightly place them in the context of the fallenness of the world. This can be true of entire works (Ravel’s La Valse; Varèse’s Deserts; Chopin’s first Ballade); or movements (the savagery of the second movement of Mahler’s Symphony No.5; the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica). Often brokenness underlies the worldview of a composer’s work (the nihilism of Richard Strauss, or indeed of Barber’s Adagio for Strings). Whole canons of works can be more richly understood through grasping how they interact with an individual composer’s personal darkness (Shostakovich’s historical situation; Elgar’s depressive episodes). Each work speaks of the fall in its own accent; the analyst must tune in to hear.
Signs Of Redemption
Concepts of redemption are built into musical structure – recapitulation; return; reprise. All involve the recovered retelling of the main event, heard as a kind of victory over enemy forces. Of course, it is the multiple ways in which this simplistic template is subverted that forms the stuff of analytical discovery, but is still fascinating that the musical structures we work with so naturally lend themselves to images of redemption. Of non-texted works, symphonic narrative is perhaps the most ubiquitously ‘redemptive’ form, each symphony achieving redemption in its own terms. Some composers seem to express a desire for redemption in the face of its impossibility (Vaughan Williams); in others, its eventual victory comes in the face of near impossible odds (Beethoven, Mahler), whereas in others it seems almost absent, or at least false (Ustvolskaya; Shostakovich). Redemption may be seen in smaller instrumental works too. It is there in the playfulness of Poulenc’s sonata final-movements, or in the dance forms that underly the fugues in Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier.
Conclusion
God’s glory is there to be found in all music. The Christian worldview not only underpins the very practice of analysis but can govern both its methods and its results. The Christian can thus use musical analysis as a means of enjoying God’s world, seeing how it reflects the beautiful story of the gospel through Creation and Fall. But more, musical analysis can be a means of fostering Christian hope as we live amongst the ruins of that world, hope because redemption has come and is coming in Christ.
The Christian analyst’s privilege is to develop eyes to see that hope in the many musical signs around us. Go, analyst, and look.
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[i] Joseph Kerman, ‘How We Got Into Analysis And How To Get Out’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 1980), pp. 311-331.
[ii] See the discussion in Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards A Theology Of The Arts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark International, 1991). Ed: see also this website's Book Review of Voicing Creation's Praise.
