This edited collection is a new addition to the series of books published under the auspices of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies, a valuable series which has included both classic works and innovative studies on a wide range of topics. Its aim is stated very clearly at the start – ‘to demonstrate the fruitfulness of theology for music and the fruitfulness of music for theology with a view to encouraging sustained engagements between musicians and theologians’. There is no doubt that this aim is one which it shares with a growing body of literature, and that this in turn reflects an intensifying interest in the interface between music/musicological reflection and religion/theology. For this reason alone, the book is to be welcomed.
Yet it is not easy to see just what kind of ‘sustained’ engagement between music and theology this particular collection of essays would prompt or guide. Why so? On the back cover, the series editor – John D. Witvliet – describes the collection as a ‘burst of cross-disciplinary energy and insight’, and certainly the subtitle ‘conversations between’ suggests that this is its aim. However, even the relatively cursory survey that a short review warrants leaves a stronger sense of multi-, rather than cross-disciplinarity. The difference is an important one. Different disciplines often study the same subjects. Merely combining them in one place does not ensure any cross-fertilisation of ideas.
Real cross-disciplinarity is an unusually challenging task, and a rare accomplishment. The editors have undoubtedly assembled a distinguished set of contributors, mostly from the fields of theology and music. Their essays are gathered together into four sections – Music and Cosmos, Music and Culture, Music and Theology, and Music and Worship. These headings give the impression of a rather greater degree of organisation and coherence than the book actually has, and the brief explanations that the editors provide in their introduction do not do much to substantiate the impression. Most of the essays can be read relatively independently, and many could plausibly be included in a different section. They also oscillate somewhat between abstracted general themes about the relation of music to theology, and more detailed treatments of specific composers and works.
This does not imply, of course, that any of them are intellectually weak or worthless. On the contrary, they invariably exhibit a high level of scholarly expertise and facility with theoretical ideas. It is hard, though, to read them as either mutually re-enforcing or collectively cumulative. The majority arose from two colloquia, but it does not seem (to this reader) that the final versions show much evidence of this.
The problem as I see it lies in the lack of a clear agenda for the ‘engagement’ which this book (and others like it) aims to prompt. Just what is the mark of ‘fruitfulness’ in an exchange of this kind? Most intellectual disciplines are problem driven. That is to say, at any given time they address problems to which they seek solutions and questions to which they seek answers. Bearing this in mind, a structured exchange would be one in which the practitioners of different disciplines were invited/enabled to apply their distinctive disciplinary techniques and approaches to common problems – rather than simply being invited to reflect conversationally on similar themes. Such conversations are often interesting and enjoyable, but the mark of fruitfulness has to lie with the degree to which interesting and innovative solutions to shared problems emerge.
Many of the essays in this volume implicitly address – or at least gesture towards – common underlying problems. What is the proper place of emotion and feeling in music/theology/religion? Is there cognitive content to music/theology/religion? How should authorial intention/sincerity be understood to shape music/theology/religion? What difference does cultural context make to understanding music/theology/religion properly? The person who is concerned with these questions – whether musician, theologian, philosopher or sociologist – will find a lot that is interesting in the pages of this book. But much of it is suggestive rather than instructive. It would take considerable work to uncover the shape of potentially fruitful exchanges that hoped to build upon this collection.
One final observation. There is always a slight danger of reinventing the wheel in the name of novelty. I notice that in the whole of this volume there is only one reference to Erik Routley, and that is not Church Music and Theology (SCM, 1959). In my view, Routley's little book still has a lot to offer on many of the themes of these essays, not least the significance of J. S. Bach.
