John Ahern’s superb essay calls for a harmonization of tradition and vernacularism in church music. Hold to the old, even while singing a new song. Or, following Bach’s lead, sing new and old simultaneously.

To rephrase John’s admonition: Church music should be catholic.[1] That doesn’t simply mean our hymnals, service music, and hymn selections should draw on the whole history of the church and all branches of the divided church. It also means liturgical music should draw us in, singers living now, into harmony with the church of all ages and places. We do that whenever we sing old music, but John is right to be dissatisfied with such a thin catholicity. If we are to join in the perpetual song of the church, we need to bring our own musical idioms with us. For we too, along with our predecessors, are members of the body, equipped by the Spirit to edify the whole.

Catholic music: Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. How do we achieve it? Let me develop two lines of response, both suggested by John’s arresting claim (borrowed from Daniel Chua) that our secular age disenchants by disconnecting music from the motions of the cosmos. If that’s the case, any effort to re-enchant will involve a renewal of a musical understanding of everything. My first line of consideration below sketches the contours of that re-enchantment. My other response is critical, or at least questioning. John blames modernity for our inability to merge tradition and contemporaneity. I suggest John’s solution, illustrated primarily by Wachet auf, is itself modern. But then I want to end by asking whether or not we should consider that a problem.

Re-Enchanting the World

Daniel Chua summarizes the pre-modern understanding of the musical cosmos this way:

In Plato’s account of creation, music tunes the cosmos according to the Pythagorean ratios of 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 and 9:8, and scales the human soul to the same proportions. This enabled the inaudible sounds of the heavens to vibrate within the earthly soul, and, conversely, for the audible tones of human music to reflect the celestial spheres, so that heaven and earth could be harmonised within the unity of a well-tuned scale. This scale came to be pictured as a monochord that connected the stars to the earth like a long piece of string that vibrated the structure of the universe (plate 1). Its geometric and astral mathematics represented the binding order of an immutable and crystalline world. So music, as the invisible and inaudible harmony of the spheres, imposed a unity over creation, linking everything along the entire chain of being. It functioned, says Giambattista della Porta, “as a rope stretched from the first cause” to the ultimate end by a reciprocal and continuous connection that “if we touched one extremity of that cord it will make tremble and move all the rest.” When music moves, the earth moves with it. Thus music was not simply an object in a magical world, but the rational agent of enchantment itself. As the monochord, it animated the cosmos and tuned its very being. To disenchant music is therefore to untune the entire world. This is why tuning has apocalyptic overtones. The slightest change in global temperament can cause a collapse of the cosmic order.[2]

Though the origins of this cosmology are Pythagorean and Platonic, Christian thinkers from Augustine to Boethius to the theorists of the medieval and Renaissance periods adopted and adapted it.[3] They had sound theological reasons to do so.[4] Though Scripture doesn’t mention the proportions of Pythagoras or hint at a chordal “rope” linking heaven and earth, it does present a theological ontology in musical mode. In this short space, I can do no more than point to a few biblical indications that will make my claim plausible.

Israel’s God is a Singer. When the nations are judged and daughter Zion rescued, she will shout and sing for joy (Zephaniah 2:10; 3:14), and Yahweh, the victorious warrior, “will exult over you with joy” and “will rejoice over you with shouts of joy” (v. 17). He sings the song of the vineyard to Israel (Isaiah 5:1-7), and the songiest song of all, the most-musical music (Song of Songs). Given the density of temple references in the Song, we are justified in concluding that Solomon views temple worship as a concert hall for the love-duet of Yahweh and His Beloved.[5] He’s also an instrumentalist, blowing a trumpet fanfare from His chariot cloud (Exodus 19:13-19; cf. Zechariah 9:14). He likes music, approving the sweet-sounding melody of the Levites with fiery applause (2 Chronicles 5:11-14).

In the New Testament, Yahweh’s divine music is distributed among the Persons of the Trinity. Jesus sings with His disciples at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:30; Mark 14:26), and is chief Singer in the assembly of believers (Hebrews 2:11-12), the greater Asaph.[6]

When Christ dwells in us, we are filled with Wisdom to teach and admonish in song (Colossians 3:16), as if the voice of the Chief Singer were sounding through each singer, making the choir’s voice an enrichment of the Choirmaster’s, the voice of the totus Christus. Not surprisingly, those filled with the Spirit of Jesus are inspired to sing Psalms, hymns, and Spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:19). The Father utters His eternal Word by the breath of His Spirit. And then it’s but a short step to this: The Father sings His eternal Song in the music of the Spirit. God dwells in an eternal communion. God is one eternal choir in three parts.

Such a God will create a musical world. Tolkein and Lewis were right to imagine the Creator singing the world into being. There are perhaps hints in Genesis 1 itself, read in the light of the whole canon. Throughout Scripture, the advent of the Spirit who hovers over the waters (Genesis 1:2) is accompanied by sound, whether the “voice of Yahweh” in the “Spirit of the day” (Genesis 3:8) or as the violent rush of a Pentecostal wind (Acts 2:2). The Spirit “hovers” like a bird, fluttering, beating, humming over the waters, chanting the formless void into a harmonized cosmos. Elohim speaks His Word with and by this Spirit, and He speaks in poetic rhythm; He speaks musically. And the creation comes to form as resonance with His song.

Made in the image of the singing God, man is made to sing, made to make music. In Scripture, mature humanity is musical humanity. Priests play instruments and sing. King David invents musical instruments, composes Psalms, and organizes the Levites into a liturgical orchestra and choir. Music catches up Saul (1 Samuel 10:1-13) and Elisha (2 Kings 3:15) into prophetic ecstasy.[7] Glorified martyrs join the white-clad choir of heaven (Revelation 6:9-11; 15:2-4), and restored Zion is a city of song (Isaiah 51:3).

Creation sings. The morning stars, whether angels or actual stars or both, sang for joy at the dawn of creation (Job 38:7). Mountains and hills shout as trees clap when the Lord comes to judge (Isaiah 14:8; 51:12). Rivers clap along to the singing of mountains at Yahweh’s advent (Psalm 98:4-6). Someday, “every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them” will sing with the saints and angels “to Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” (Revelation 5:13). This is the way the world ends, in a cosmic chorus.

Modern Problem, Modern Solution?

Now for the critical response, somewhat briefer. John claims we’re unable to harmonize tradition and the contemporary because we’re locked in the dilemmas of modernity. In our descralized world, bereft of traditional sources of authority, our only recourse is “to artificially import language of authority from an era that had it.” But we then risk sliding into archaism and traditionalism. To keep things fresh, we adopt the vernacular, but it lacks the “muscle” of the tradition’s “metaphysical and ontic commitments.” We jig to a modernist two-step.

It’s a compelling thesis, but I don’t think John has provided an escape from the problem, at least not with the examples he offers. Rather, the exemplars he puts forward share the modernist framework he condemns.

We can start with a simple chronological observation: Tinctoris and Coclico provide surprising witness to the anti-traditionalism of the Christian tradition, but they come rather late in the story. Tinctoris was a fifteenth-century figure, Coclico is three-quarters of a century after him, and Bach flourished in the first half of the eighteenth century. Tinctoris favors novelty in a modernish way that would, I suspect, not have resonated with church musicians of the sixth or tenth centuries. And this comfort with novelty only intensifies with the Reformation.

Traditionalism is easier to find when we look earlier. Jacques de Lieges’s Speculum musicae assaulted the notational system of the Ars nova and gave a partially biblical defense of the Ars antiqua. After quoting Deuteronomy 19:14’s prohibition of moving landmarks, Jacques writes:

Now in our day new and more recent authors have appeared, who write on mensurable music with little reverence for their ancestors, the ancient doctors; to the contrary, they change their sound doctrine in many respects, corrupting, criticizing, annulling and protesting against it in word and deed, whereas the civil and ethical thing to do would be to imitate the ancients in what they have said well, and in doubtful matters, to explain and defend them.[8]

We can broaden the point. The first significant challenge to monody arose during the high middle ages, a millennium into the church’s history. Though there were varieties of chant in the Western church prior to the triumph of Gregorian chant, how much was there that we would recognize as musical innovation? Would church musicians of the first millennium be more likely to side with Tinctoris or with Jacques’s suspicion of novelty? The anti-traditionalism John identifies is arguably a late medieval (proto-modern?) development.[9]

But the problem with John’s thesis is more fundamental. Bruno Latour has argued that the central ideological binary of modernity is the opposition of “Us” versus “Them,” Us moderns v. Them ancients, Us civilized v. Them primitives, Us enlightened v. Them of darkened ages past. In each case, of course, Us is better than Them.[10] Modernity, as others have suggested, enhances our experience of historical distance. In Wachet auf, Bach harmonizes Them with Us, but the need to harmonize in the first place only arises within an assumed modern binary. A medieval composer, one imagines, would have viewed his compositions as slight extensions of what we’ve always done. In short, John’s proposed exemplars – Tinctoris as a theorist, Bach as a practitioner – share a modern sensibility.

If that’s right, that leads into a final question: Does it matter? Should we be skittish about the modernity of our musical understanding? Above, I offered a biblical defense of something close to the pre-modern musical cosmology, but here I want to qualify my endorsement of that model. A looser musical ontology, one roomy enough for modernity’s genuine discoveries, is preferable.

The contested issue of tuning illustrates my point. Max Weber illustrates the disenchantment of music, its subjection to instrumental reason, with a discussion of equal temperament. In Chua’s summary, the “modern semitonal system is . . . instrumental reason as instrumental music, for it is the mechanisation of sound that rationalises the scale with the kind of efficiency and pragmatic economy that Weber associates with modern societies. This is why he claims that modern tuning, as a rationalisation of harmonic production, has desensitised modern ears with a ‘dulling effect’ and has shackled music in ‘dragging.’”[11] Worse, on Pythagorean-Platonic premises, the revolution in tuning untunes the sky. Every tug on the monochord that links heavens and earth, the slightest adjustment between intervals, leads to cosmic catastrophe.

Do we want to restrain the range of “instrumental reason” quite that far? Don’t we want to admit that equal temperament has some mighty pleasant results? I do. Beyond that, though I imagine I’m showing my modern colors, I would add: If piano tuners can unleash the apocalypse, then the cosmic lyre is too tightly strung.

Where does this leave us? It leaves us living after the Something-Big-Happened we call the beginning of modernity, seeking to re-enchant the world and cultivate catholicity in church music under the conditions of modernity.[12] It leaves us where we already were, but perhaps more comfortably, grateful for the chance to formulate an inescapably modern solution to a modern problem.


Peter Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute.


[1] I borrow the term “catholic” from Calvin Stapert’s analysis of the Credo of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. There, as in Wachet auf, Bach contemporizes the traditional, in this case by working “age-old Gregorian chant melodies” into a “seven-part fugue” that produces a “contrapuntal marvel.” The creed is sung by a chorus, not solo, which hints at the “catholicity of the Creed”: “The collective voices of the choir better represent the voice of the holy catholic church than do solo voices” (Stapert, My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000] 93).

[2] Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: CUP, 1999) 15-16.

[3] See, for instance, Boethius: “There are three types of music. The first type is the music of the universe (musica mundana), the second, that of the human being (musica humana), and the third type is that which is created by certain instruments (musica instrumentis constituía) such as the kithara, or tibia or other instruments which produce melodies. Now the first type, that is the music of the universe, is best observed in those things which one perceives in heaven itself, or in the structure of the elements, or in the diversity of the seasons. How could it possibly be that such a swift heavenly machine should move silently in its course? . . . it is impossible that such a fast motion should produce absolutely no sound, especially since the orbits of the stars are joined by such a harmony that nothing so perfectly structured can be imagined. . . . Thus there must be some fixed order of musical modulation in this celestial motion” (quoted in Andrew Wilson-Dickson, The Story of Christian Music: From Gregorian Chant to Black Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003) 40-1.

[4] I don’t think the Pythagorean-Platonic model is entirely compatible with Scripture. I see no reason, for instance, to privilege unheard musica mundana over the audible music of creation and culture. When Scripture speaks of music, it nearly always has the latter in view.

[5] On the Song as allegory, see here; on the temple context of the song, see here.

[6] See Edmund Clowney’s 1979 essay, “The Singing Savior,” available here.

[7] For a fuller treatment of this theme, see here.

[8] Quoted in Michael Wood, “Ancient Worship Wars: An Investigation of Conflict in Church Music History,” Musical Offerings 5.2 (2014) 128, available here.

[9] I also wonder what happens to John’s thesis when we extend the scope of the inquiry and take in the Eastern churches, which claims with some justice, an unbroken tradition of chant and hymnody across the centuries. Do Orthodox musicians struggle to harmonize tradition and vernacularism? Or is Orthodox liturgy so untouched by modernity that they don’t even feel the weight of the problem?

[10] Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

[11] Chua, Absolute Music, 13-14. Weber develops his argument in The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958).

[12] This isn’t a pipe dream. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is replete with evidence that modernity throws up its own forms of enchantment.

Next Conversation
Hold to the Old
Calvin Stapert

John Ahern’s superb essay calls for a harmonization of tradition and vernacularism in church music. Hold to the old, even while singing a new song. Or, following Bach’s lead, sing new and old simultaneously.

To rephrase John’s admonition: Church music should be catholic.[1] That doesn’t simply mean our hymnals, service music, and hymn selections should draw on the whole history of the church and all branches of the divided church. It also means liturgical music should draw us in, singers living now, into harmony with the church of all ages and places. We do that whenever we sing old music, but John is right to be dissatisfied with such a thin catholicity. If we are to join in the perpetual song of the church, we need to bring our own musical idioms with us. For we too, along with our predecessors, are members of the body, equipped by the Spirit to edify the whole.

Catholic music: Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. How do we achieve it? Let me develop two lines of response, both suggested by John’s arresting claim (borrowed from Daniel Chua) that our secular age disenchants by disconnecting music from the motions of the cosmos. If that’s the case, any effort to re-enchant will involve a renewal of a musical understanding of everything. My first line of consideration below sketches the contours of that re-enchantment. My other response is critical, or at least questioning. John blames modernity for our inability to merge tradition and contemporaneity. I suggest John’s solution, illustrated primarily by Wachet auf, is itself modern. But then I want to end by asking whether or not we should consider that a problem.

Re-Enchanting the World

Daniel Chua summarizes the pre-modern understanding of the musical cosmos this way:

In Plato’s account of creation, music tunes the cosmos according to the Pythagorean ratios of 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 and 9:8, and scales the human soul to the same proportions. This enabled the inaudible sounds of the heavens to vibrate within the earthly soul, and, conversely, for the audible tones of human music to reflect the celestial spheres, so that heaven and earth could be harmonised within the unity of a well-tuned scale. This scale came to be pictured as a monochord that connected the stars to the earth like a long piece of string that vibrated the structure of the universe (plate 1). Its geometric and astral mathematics represented the binding order of an immutable and crystalline world. So music, as the invisible and inaudible harmony of the spheres, imposed a unity over creation, linking everything along the entire chain of being. It functioned, says Giambattista della Porta, “as a rope stretched from the first cause” to the ultimate end by a reciprocal and continuous connection that “if we touched one extremity of that cord it will make tremble and move all the rest.” When music moves, the earth moves with it. Thus music was not simply an object in a magical world, but the rational agent of enchantment itself. As the monochord, it animated the cosmos and tuned its very being. To disenchant music is therefore to untune the entire world. This is why tuning has apocalyptic overtones. The slightest change in global temperament can cause a collapse of the cosmic order.[2]

Though the origins of this cosmology are Pythagorean and Platonic, Christian thinkers from Augustine to Boethius to the theorists of the medieval and Renaissance periods adopted and adapted it.[3] They had sound theological reasons to do so.[4] Though Scripture doesn’t mention the proportions of Pythagoras or hint at a chordal “rope” linking heaven and earth, it does present a theological ontology in musical mode. In this short space, I can do no more than point to a few biblical indications that will make my claim plausible.

Israel’s God is a Singer. When the nations are judged and daughter Zion rescued, she will shout and sing for joy (Zephaniah 2:10; 3:14), and Yahweh, the victorious warrior, “will exult over you with joy” and “will rejoice over you with shouts of joy” (v. 17). He sings the song of the vineyard to Israel (Isaiah 5:1-7), and the songiest song of all, the most-musical music (Song of Songs). Given the density of temple references in the Song, we are justified in concluding that Solomon views temple worship as a concert hall for the love-duet of Yahweh and His Beloved.[5] He’s also an instrumentalist, blowing a trumpet fanfare from His chariot cloud (Exodus 19:13-19; cf. Zechariah 9:14). He likes music, approving the sweet-sounding melody of the Levites with fiery applause (2 Chronicles 5:11-14).

In the New Testament, Yahweh’s divine music is distributed among the Persons of the Trinity. Jesus sings with His disciples at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:30; Mark 14:26), and is chief Singer in the assembly of believers (Hebrews 2:11-12), the greater Asaph.[6]

When Christ dwells in us, we are filled with Wisdom to teach and admonish in song (Colossians 3:16), as if the voice of the Chief Singer were sounding through each singer, making the choir’s voice an enrichment of the Choirmaster’s, the voice of the totus Christus. Not surprisingly, those filled with the Spirit of Jesus are inspired to sing Psalms, hymns, and Spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:19). The Father utters His eternal Word by the breath of His Spirit. And then it’s but a short step to this: The Father sings His eternal Song in the music of the Spirit. God dwells in an eternal communion. God is one eternal choir in three parts.

Such a God will create a musical world. Tolkein and Lewis were right to imagine the Creator singing the world into being. There are perhaps hints in Genesis 1 itself, read in the light of the whole canon. Throughout Scripture, the advent of the Spirit who hovers over the waters (Genesis 1:2) is accompanied by sound, whether the “voice of Yahweh” in the “Spirit of the day” (Genesis 3:8) or as the violent rush of a Pentecostal wind (Acts 2:2). The Spirit “hovers” like a bird, fluttering, beating, humming over the waters, chanting the formless void into a harmonized cosmos. Elohim speaks His Word with and by this Spirit, and He speaks in poetic rhythm; He speaks musically. And the creation comes to form as resonance with His song.

Made in the image of the singing God, man is made to sing, made to make music. In Scripture, mature humanity is musical humanity. Priests play instruments and sing. King David invents musical instruments, composes Psalms, and organizes the Levites into a liturgical orchestra and choir. Music catches up Saul (1 Samuel 10:1-13) and Elisha (2 Kings 3:15) into prophetic ecstasy.[7] Glorified martyrs join the white-clad choir of heaven (Revelation 6:9-11; 15:2-4), and restored Zion is a city of song (Isaiah 51:3).

Creation sings. The morning stars, whether angels or actual stars or both, sang for joy at the dawn of creation (Job 38:7). Mountains and hills shout as trees clap when the Lord comes to judge (Isaiah 14:8; 51:12). Rivers clap along to the singing of mountains at Yahweh’s advent (Psalm 98:4-6). Someday, “every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them” will sing with the saints and angels “to Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” (Revelation 5:13). This is the way the world ends, in a cosmic chorus.

Modern Problem, Modern Solution?

Now for the critical response, somewhat briefer. John claims we’re unable to harmonize tradition and the contemporary because we’re locked in the dilemmas of modernity. In our descralized world, bereft of traditional sources of authority, our only recourse is “to artificially import language of authority from an era that had it.” But we then risk sliding into archaism and traditionalism. To keep things fresh, we adopt the vernacular, but it lacks the “muscle” of the tradition’s “metaphysical and ontic commitments.” We jig to a modernist two-step.

It’s a compelling thesis, but I don’t think John has provided an escape from the problem, at least not with the examples he offers. Rather, the exemplars he puts forward share the modernist framework he condemns.

We can start with a simple chronological observation: Tinctoris and Coclico provide surprising witness to the anti-traditionalism of the Christian tradition, but they come rather late in the story. Tinctoris was a fifteenth-century figure, Coclico is three-quarters of a century after him, and Bach flourished in the first half of the eighteenth century. Tinctoris favors novelty in a modernish way that would, I suspect, not have resonated with church musicians of the sixth or tenth centuries. And this comfort with novelty only intensifies with the Reformation.

Traditionalism is easier to find when we look earlier. Jacques de Lieges’s Speculum musicae assaulted the notational system of the Ars nova and gave a partially biblical defense of the Ars antiqua. After quoting Deuteronomy 19:14’s prohibition of moving landmarks, Jacques writes:

Now in our day new and more recent authors have appeared, who write on mensurable music with little reverence for their ancestors, the ancient doctors; to the contrary, they change their sound doctrine in many respects, corrupting, criticizing, annulling and protesting against it in word and deed, whereas the civil and ethical thing to do would be to imitate the ancients in what they have said well, and in doubtful matters, to explain and defend them.[8]

We can broaden the point. The first significant challenge to monody arose during the high middle ages, a millennium into the church’s history. Though there were varieties of chant in the Western church prior to the triumph of Gregorian chant, how much was there that we would recognize as musical innovation? Would church musicians of the first millennium be more likely to side with Tinctoris or with Jacques’s suspicion of novelty? The anti-traditionalism John identifies is arguably a late medieval (proto-modern?) development.[9]

But the problem with John’s thesis is more fundamental. Bruno Latour has argued that the central ideological binary of modernity is the opposition of “Us” versus “Them,” Us moderns v. Them ancients, Us civilized v. Them primitives, Us enlightened v. Them of darkened ages past. In each case, of course, Us is better than Them.[10] Modernity, as others have suggested, enhances our experience of historical distance. In Wachet auf, Bach harmonizes Them with Us, but the need to harmonize in the first place only arises within an assumed modern binary. A medieval composer, one imagines, would have viewed his compositions as slight extensions of what we’ve always done. In short, John’s proposed exemplars – Tinctoris as a theorist, Bach as a practitioner – share a modern sensibility.

If that’s right, that leads into a final question: Does it matter? Should we be skittish about the modernity of our musical understanding? Above, I offered a biblical defense of something close to the pre-modern musical cosmology, but here I want to qualify my endorsement of that model. A looser musical ontology, one roomy enough for modernity’s genuine discoveries, is preferable.

The contested issue of tuning illustrates my point. Max Weber illustrates the disenchantment of music, its subjection to instrumental reason, with a discussion of equal temperament. In Chua’s summary, the “modern semitonal system is . . . instrumental reason as instrumental music, for it is the mechanisation of sound that rationalises the scale with the kind of efficiency and pragmatic economy that Weber associates with modern societies. This is why he claims that modern tuning, as a rationalisation of harmonic production, has desensitised modern ears with a ‘dulling effect’ and has shackled music in ‘dragging.’”[11] Worse, on Pythagorean-Platonic premises, the revolution in tuning untunes the sky. Every tug on the monochord that links heavens and earth, the slightest adjustment between intervals, leads to cosmic catastrophe.

Do we want to restrain the range of “instrumental reason” quite that far? Don’t we want to admit that equal temperament has some mighty pleasant results? I do. Beyond that, though I imagine I’m showing my modern colors, I would add: If piano tuners can unleash the apocalypse, then the cosmic lyre is too tightly strung.

Where does this leave us? It leaves us living after the Something-Big-Happened we call the beginning of modernity, seeking to re-enchant the world and cultivate catholicity in church music under the conditions of modernity.[12] It leaves us where we already were, but perhaps more comfortably, grateful for the chance to formulate an inescapably modern solution to a modern problem.


Peter Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute.


[1] I borrow the term “catholic” from Calvin Stapert’s analysis of the Credo of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. There, as in Wachet auf, Bach contemporizes the traditional, in this case by working “age-old Gregorian chant melodies” into a “seven-part fugue” that produces a “contrapuntal marvel.” The creed is sung by a chorus, not solo, which hints at the “catholicity of the Creed”: “The collective voices of the choir better represent the voice of the holy catholic church than do solo voices” (Stapert, My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000] 93).

[2] Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: CUP, 1999) 15-16.

[3] See, for instance, Boethius: “There are three types of music. The first type is the music of the universe (musica mundana), the second, that of the human being (musica humana), and the third type is that which is created by certain instruments (musica instrumentis constituía) such as the kithara, or tibia or other instruments which produce melodies. Now the first type, that is the music of the universe, is best observed in those things which one perceives in heaven itself, or in the structure of the elements, or in the diversity of the seasons. How could it possibly be that such a swift heavenly machine should move silently in its course? . . . it is impossible that such a fast motion should produce absolutely no sound, especially since the orbits of the stars are joined by such a harmony that nothing so perfectly structured can be imagined. . . . Thus there must be some fixed order of musical modulation in this celestial motion” (quoted in Andrew Wilson-Dickson, The Story of Christian Music: From Gregorian Chant to Black Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003) 40-1.

[4] I don’t think the Pythagorean-Platonic model is entirely compatible with Scripture. I see no reason, for instance, to privilege unheard musica mundana over the audible music of creation and culture. When Scripture speaks of music, it nearly always has the latter in view.

[5] On the Song as allegory, see here; on the temple context of the song, see here.

[6] See Edmund Clowney’s 1979 essay, “The Singing Savior,” available here.

[7] For a fuller treatment of this theme, see here.

[8] Quoted in Michael Wood, “Ancient Worship Wars: An Investigation of Conflict in Church Music History,” Musical Offerings 5.2 (2014) 128, available here.

[9] I also wonder what happens to John’s thesis when we extend the scope of the inquiry and take in the Eastern churches, which claims with some justice, an unbroken tradition of chant and hymnody across the centuries. Do Orthodox musicians struggle to harmonize tradition and vernacularism? Or is Orthodox liturgy so untouched by modernity that they don’t even feel the weight of the problem?

[10] Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

[11] Chua, Absolute Music, 13-14. Weber develops his argument in The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958).

[12] This isn’t a pipe dream. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is replete with evidence that modernity throws up its own forms of enchantment.

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