Digging in Part V - Final Post: All Chops and No Soul

In Part IV, we tread the forbidden topic of religion – specifically how the modern view that religion belongs only to the realm of “opinion” and not to the realm of “fact” has produced a fractured view of life. The deepest and most important questions in life – the existence of God, the meaning of life, eternity – are merely viewed as points of view without any real answer, similar to your choice of toppings on a pizza. This leaves most people confused and empty, without any concrete, robust belief system to see the world and our place in it.

This also leaves us classical musicians with a view of music that likewise has no connection these deeper questions. Our understanding of music becomes merely surface-level without any consideration of how these deeper issues of life dictate our approach to music. We also saw in part IV that the art-religion of the Romantic era had a huge impact on music, changing everything from music’s broader purpose right down to musical nomenclature and concert practices. We saw how this had a debilitating affect on music leading to a misplaced allegiance to dead composers and abstract works of art rather than the human beings who enjoy those works. But as we move into the 20^th century, we underwent another crippling change.

All Chops and No Soul

Although the Romantic Movement idolized art, they at least affirmed the reality of the spiritual realm. This enabled them, at a minimum, to retain the holistic view that people are both physical and spiritual. But as the Romantic Movement came to a close at the turn of the 20^th century, Enlightenment philosophy (Naturalism, Rationalism, and Empiricism) came to dominate modern thinking. As Nancy Pearcey writes in Saving Leonardo, “By the end of the Nineteenth century… Romanticism had degenerated into a faded, moralistic, sugar-and-spice Victorian sentimentalism…It proved an easy target for naturalists...”

Of course the leader of the Naturalists, Charles Darwin and his famous Origin of the Species in 1859, was a significant catalyst to this philosophy. In 1901 Jack London wrote a novel, The Law of Life in which he plays the Naturalist philosophy fictionally. As his main character Koskoosh contemplates his death he remarks, “What did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?” In other words, humans essentially have no purpose beyond biological existence. As la Mettrie said as far back as 1749 (a French, Enlightenment Era physician and philosopher), “man is a machine.”

This Naturalist philosophy continues today. In 2005 the London Zoo featured an exhibit of humans in order to teach “members of the public that the human is just another primate”, said London Zoo spokeswoman Polly Wills. In an interview, Scarlet Johansson said, in reference to her alleged promiscuity, “I do think on some basic level we are animals and by instinct we kind of breed accordingly.” And if man is just another animal, then the soul, something the Bible claims is distinctive to humans, simply doesn’t exist. A writer for Nature wrote that we “are verging on drawing the ultimate materialist picture of human nature… all machine and no ghost.” Philosopher Adrian Woolfson writes in An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics that we have…

…genes that make us believe in concepts like the soul [but] one day such irrational tendencies might be removed by adjusting the relevant brain circuitry. We will have to resign ourselves to the unpalatable fact that we are nothing more than machine.

What was the effect on classical music? If there is no “ghost” and man is merely a biological “machine”, the logical consequence is mechanical, soulless music-making. The Muse was stripped of her Romantic, spiritual garb and became mechanical and dehumanized. The goddess Muse clothed in Enlightenment era philosophies became far deadlier than before. She retained her status as goddess but lost her spirit.

And then, as though on cue, came the Second Viennese School with their invention of 12-tone serialism – a way of composing that uses mathematical formulas to construct non-tonal melodies and harmonies. In this system, neither the performer nor even the composer is creative. The music is purely mathematical, de-spiritualized. Pearcey puts it perfectly:

Boulez said the goal of his mathematical approach was to write music in a way that "eliminates personal invention." The use of mathematical calculation to predetermine the entire musical process left no room for personal creativity. Knowingly or not, he was expressing the logical consequences of a rationalist worldview that begins with blind, material forces. Logically, a cause must be adequate to account for its effect. Any worldview that posits a non-personal starting point does not have the intellectual resources to account for personal agents, like human beings. And therefore it inevitably ends by denigrating the person and squashing personal creativity.

But this mindset isn’t limited to 12-tone serialism. It has infiltrated even the performing approach in the classical music world. A Juilliard student remarked that, in her experience, modern orchestral auditions demand a playing style that is:

…precise, mechanical, robotic.  In orchestra auditions it is more important to do nothing wrong than to do anything particularly well.  They are basically looking for a reason to eliminate you, and “bad intonation” is a lot more convincing than “plays like an automaton.”

Notice how the modern view of man and this student’s sense of performing standards are virtually identical, even in their terminology – mechanical, robotic, automaton. If there is no God and no spiritual realm, man is indeed an “automaton.” Or remember Robert Levin’s remark earlier, that performers are concerned “with the outline of compositions but not their inner content.” If man himself has no soul, then naturally performers will neglect the “inner content” or soul of compositions.

Recall Greg Sandow’s remark when looking at pictures of orchestra, how disengaged and joyless they look. No wonder. They are humans with souls but not performing as such. The constant report I hear from musicians taking orchestra auditions is how note perfection and technique far outweigh emotion and personality in the panel’s assessment of a candidate. Certainly no orchestra would admit that they would accept member that played with no emotion, but what they would have a much harder time admitting is that emotion is given preference over correctness. Typically, a couple missed notes means you will not advance even to the second round.

To recap, we began by discussing the effects of the Werktreue approach in musical terms. We saw how the implications of this approach, which classical musicians naturally assume are normal, is neither shared by our musical cousins of the jazz, rock, and folk world, nor by our musical ancestors before 1800. We then saw how the underlying theme in the Werktreue approach is the idea that the performer is a transparent vessel for the musical “work” and their creative contribution should be minimal. This approach has a direct connection to the often correct but lifeless classical performances today. But this explanation didn’t go far enough. The true problem is what led to Werktreue - the idolizing of art in the Romantic era. Then, when the Enlightenment idea of Naturalism returned to mainstream thinking, along with other de-spiritualized philosophies, this dehumanized view of man led to music and performing that was likewise dehumanized.

To put it another way, both the Werktrue approach (which seeks to serve the music) and the “humanist” approach (which seeks to serve the performer) go wrong because their motivation is misguided. The logical conclusion of a performer-centered approach is showmanship, and the conclusion of Werktrue is oppression. No approach is going to fit neatly into one of those two categories, of course. Many musicians might be a combination of the two. But no combination of serving either the music or the performer will result in music-making as it ought to be. The Gospel offers a view of music making that creates performing with both humility and depth while affirming the humanity and creativity of the performer.

Before we go on, I must clarify two things. First, I am in no way asserting that a performer must be a Christian or even a theist to be an exciting performer. There are plenty of exciting performers who are great opponents of the Gospel and of theism. The principle of “common grace” in Christianity is that all gifts come from God, whether the individuals realize it or not, and there are many general blessings that are common to everyone. Thus, many performers regardless of personal beliefs play with great expressivity, humanness, risk, and excitement. Though they don’t verbally ascent to the Gospel, their lively, creative, human approach to music-making reflects a Biblical worldview to some degree.

Second, I am also not asserting that every classical musician consciously affirms the secular philosophies we examined in the last few posts. Many musicians might have a vague concept of the soul or a spiritual realm. My primary point is that, whether musicians presently accept the Romantic art-religion or the Empiricist, Naturalist philosophy of the Enlightenment era, we have inherited a musical tradition that was heavily influenced by both. There is a tendency to disregard history in the belief that it has little, if any, lingering effect on the present. But these two basic philosophies are embedded in nearly every aspect of classical music, whether one consciously or unconsciously affirms the philosophical traditions that formed that music.

Time to Wake Up

Most musicians are unaware of the baggage we have inherited these secular worldviews and also generally unaware that philosophy can have an impact on classical music at all. We have not critically examined our musical training which we inherited from the secular world and realized its crippling effect. The prevailing idea is that religion has nothing to do with classical music. The concept that even our idea of performance should be, or even can be, fashioned by Biblical principles is rarely considered. Pearcey remarks that:

Truth is a unified whole. Today Christians have largely lost that conviction. When they read verses like “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 111:10) they interpret it to mean only spiritual wisdom… True wisdom consists in seeing every field of knowledge through the lens of God’s truth – government, economics, science, business, and the arts. (pg. 26)

Although Peacey is addressing Christians, there is a sense in which this is true of everyone. Since we have lost the understanding that our beliefs will inevitably affect every aspect of our lives, the “spiritual crisis of the age” that Harnoncourt references is hardly considered in connection to classical music. If we follow music as a religion, like the “art-religion” of the 19^th century, we must not be surprised when it eventually becomes restrictive and oppressive. If we claim that man is nothing but a collection of cells with no soul, then we can expect to loose a spiritual element in classical music. 

I hope this journey through classical music has been helpful and enlightening. My hope is that musicians will consider the claim that Christianity offers answers to some fundamental problems in the classical music world.