The old world

In the opening scene of the American musical Music in the Air (1932), with music by Jerome Kern and words by Oscar Hammerstein, we see and hear a provincial German, Dr Walther Lessing, composing straight out of bed on a sunny morning. A linnet sings outside his window, represented by flute and piccolo in the pit orchestra. After silencing competition from his cuckoo clock, Lessing whistles the linnet’s motif, harmonizes it on his on-stage house organ as the first two bars of a 2/4 polka, extends them to an eight-bar period, and stops to write it down, his scribbling represented by orchestral counterpoint to the motif. Trying it over on the organ, he is disturbed by children singing on their way to school, represented as more counterpoint to his music. They end abruptly as he calls on them to stop, with a two-quaver/crotchet rhythm from which he then tries, unconvincingly, to improvise a B section in the dominant for his polka. As he struggles with this at his desk, the pit orchestra telling us that an emotional, Wagnerian motif of a four-quaver upbeat in 4/4 is also very much on his mind (indeed it opened the scene before the curtain went up, and so was probably in his head as he awoke), yet another interruption occurs: his daughter bangs at the door with his breakfast tray. While she kicks, she also speaks: ‘Father dear, let me in. Both my hands are full.’

The cultural richness of the inter-war period – whether the focus is on Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, or America – simultaneously defies and incites linear history. It defies it because of the extent to which it is marked by diversity and contestation. The cultural high ground was so effectively fought over that narrative accounts are bound to be partial, marked by a bias that is itself a historical residue of the period. Linear history is nevertheless incited precisely by the generally assumed underlying directionality marshalling the complexities of cultural life in a Europe ‘between’ catastrophes. One inevitably turns to Weimar Germany to illustrate the point. Its European and even global importance was attested by the many musicians, artists, writers, and scientists who continued to flock there to study, listen, and observe. With hindsight, everything that happened during the Weimar period pointed with such macabre logic towards 1933 and the arrival of the National Socialists that the imposition of an alternative narrative seems almost a moral obligation. That alternative has familiarly construed modernism and the various avant-garde movements as representing a more sympathetic cultural trajectory – both critical and oppositional – above and around the accumulating evils of the period.

No serious aesthetic analysis can be conducted on the principle that individualism and accessibility are incompatible. The history of the arts offers countless examples of works which are highly personal to their creators yet far from innovative in matters of style and technique. Doing something new with existing styles and techniques is a more common phenomenon in the arts than the kind of individuality that seems to succeed in avoiding all significant connections with other creators, whether from past or present; and this is as true of the years immediately after 1945 as of those just before 1914.

The era of the Cold War, though not without military confrontations, was also a time of reconstruction, of steadily improving communications: and those improving communications – perhaps symbolized most acutely for musicians by Stravinsky’s return visit to Russia in 1962 – only rarely gave prominence to cultural events of a specialized, radical nature. Even though the liberating effect on the musicians of Poland or Hungary of their limited contacts with the Western avant-garde was considerable, and the impact of the cultural ‘thaw’ of the late 1950s on, for example, Lutosławski, was dramatic, it is not always easy to distinguish genuine enthusiasm for the avant-garde from the more basic need for artistic freedom and access to all kinds of cultural production.

Darmstadt after Steinecke

When Wolfgang Steinecke – the originator of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse – died at the end of 1961, much of the increasingly fragile spirit of collegiality within the Cologne/Darmstadt-centred avant-garde died with him. Boulez and Stockhausen in particular were already fiercely competitive, and when in 1960 Steinecke had assigned direction of the Darmstadt composition course to Boulez, Stockhausen had pointedly stayed away. Cage’s work and significance was a constant source of acrimonious debate, and Nono’s bitter opposition to him was one reason for the Italian composer being marginalized by the Cologne inner circle as a structuralist reactionary. Other Cologne figures were starting to assert their creative personalities, and look for their place in the sun: Argentinian-born Mauricio Kagel, whose Anagrama (1959) had upstaged the premiere of Stockhausen’s Kontakte at the 1960 ISCM Festival in Cologne, was starting to rebel against Stockhausen’s assumptions of supremacy; the Hungarian György Ligeti, disenchanted by the incessant conflicts, had left Cologne for Vienna just at the moment where his own distinctive compositional voice was starting to emerge in the orchestral work Apparitions (1960); and Gottfried Michael Koenig (b. 1926), who had been Stockhausen’s right-hand man in the electronic studios since the mid-1950s, and whose Klangfiguren II (1956) had been the only work one could think of setting beside Gesang der Jünglinge, would shortly leave for Holland.

INTRODUCTION

Hans Urs von Balthasar is a theologian whom one never reads indifferently. He himself decried the 'sleek and passionless' theological treatise as the sole form of theological presentation; and, while never suggesting any abandonment of intellectual rigour, he urged upon theology 'movement, sharp debate (quaestio disputata) [and] the virile language of deep and powerful emotion' (ET1, 204). Thus, if readers of Balthasar's oeuvre are oftentimes led to marvel at the sheer range and erudition of his presentation, just as much as they are sometimes left puzzling over the undeniable risk of his 'creative invention', it is when they come to his treatment of the saints - those men and women of prayer who have taken their sanctification by the triune God most seriously - that they become most profoundly aware of the passion and indeed strangeness of his theological itinerary. For what we have to reckon with here is the impact of that powerful and disturbing experience of lives formed and informed by divine love; that is to say, the making and remaking of human beings into the image of Christ. And this, as Augustine well demonstrated in his Confessions, involves no smooth and untroubled elevation to a higher plane of existence, but the struggle and turmoil of discovering at ever deeper levels of one's existence the purification that obedience to the call of Christ involves.

This chapter begins in the late 1970s – not with Abba, or Queen, or Evita, all of which were internationally successful at the time, but with punk rock. Even when dealing with ostensibly popular music, there remains a tension between critical and populist versions of music history, and some history books devote much space to punk while others avoid it. Here pop music towards 2000 is depicted, in a necessarily selective way, as being in the front line of a shift in critical thought from class-based critique to identity politics. Through staying power pop music became established as art form; a case is also made here for a looser discursive model based in movement and creative dialogue, focusing on remix and cover. The perspective of the chapter starts from Britain and jumps around with dates, though the reader may sense a certain centre of gravity around the year 1985.

Punk

Punk rock is sometimes seen as a spearing of the bloated beast which pop and rock had become over the decade from 1965 to 1975. Above all others, The Sex Pistols supplied many of the great iconic moments, over the remarkably short period of time from their first single ‘Anarchy in the UK’, released on 19 October 1976, to their last concert in San Francisco on 14 January 1978. (‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ was singer Johnny Rotten’s memorable last comment.) The Pistols provided great entertainment: spewing foul language over teatime telly, bagging the number one spot with an antimonarchy rant at the time of the Queen’s jubilee, annoying British town councils and American rednecks, and eventually supplying for pop hedonism, in Sid and Nancy, its ultimate Romeo and Juliet script.

Problems and definitions

It should be stated at the outset that light music and easy listening are not diluted forms of heavy music and difficult listening prepared for those with delicate musical digestions. The music discussed in this chapter produces effects and valorizes moods, identities, and ideas that no other music does. When, for example, the crew of HMS Amethyst sailed down the Yangtse under fire from Chinese guns during the Second World War, they chose to demonstrate British composure by singing ‘Cruising Down the River’ (Beadell/Tollerton, 1945). Three types of easy listening need to be distinguished, and in none of these cases does that necessarily entail the meaning ‘facile’, nor imply that it is appropriate to describe the music as easy technically. First, there is the type that is often tightly controlled but perceived as cool, sophisticated, relaxed, and classy, which ranges from the crooners to the more varied song stylists like Frank Sinatra. Second, there is the type that evokes a nostalgic mood and whose present reception therefore differs from its original meaning (it is usually categorized as nostalgia or, in France, as rétro); an example would be a song like ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ (MacDonald/Carroll, 1913) sung by Laurel and Hardy, the corny and sentimental quality of which may now be valued as offering an experience of something vulnerable and human that high art generally guards against. Third, there is the apparently easy listening that proves emotionally difficult listening, as often occurs in the French chanson réaliste.

Anyone who is even casually familiar with the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar must know of his lifelong engagement with those towering figures of early Christian theology known collectively as 'the Church Fathers'. So extensive are his works on these theologians of antiquity that, had he bequeathed to the theological world only his patristic scholarship, his reputation would, by that legacy alone, already be assured. Of course he is known for much more than his writings on early theologians. Indeed, so large and comprehensive is his total output - to say nothing of the wide-angled vision that animates the whole - that his patristic studies must be seen as really just one component, one partial, if essential, contribution to the total picture.

Precisely because a single vision animates the totality of Balthasar’stheology, his studies of the Fathers cannot be judged in isolation from hisother works. In fact, so thoroughly has he exploited his patristic scholarshipto advance his overall concerns that he often puzzles those whose interestsare primarily directed towards understanding early Christian theology inits own context. One expert in the field, Dom Polycarp Sherwood, put it thisway:

INTRODUCTION

Hans Urs von Balthasar and the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) enjoyed a long and mutually but asymmetrically important relationship. On Barth's side, Balthasar was - with the possible exception of the Jesuit Erich Przywara, whom Barth got to know when he taught in Münster - his most significant Roman Catholic interlocutor. From the mid-1920s, Barth took Roman Catholic theology very seriously (the decisive early text is a searching lecture from 1928 on 'Roman Catholicism: a Question to the Protestant Church'), enjoying cordial relations with Catholic thinkers, studying Catholic texts in his seminar, and observing the changing life of Roman Catholicism: his last major trip was to Rome in 1966 to talk to those involved with the Second Vatican Council. But though Balthasar was Barth's most enduring contact with the Catholic world, he did not shape Barth's theology in any decisive way. Partly this was because when the two first came into contact early on in the Second World War, Barth was already the commanding figure of European Protestantism; he was Balthasar's senior by almost twenty years, and the direction of his magnum opus was already well set. Moreover, for all Barth's intense curiosity about all sorts of expressions of Christian faith, he was a good deal less receptive than Balthasar, and in the Church Dogmatics he is more explicitly in discussion with the classical thinkers of the Christian past than he is with his contemporaries. What cannot be doubted is that Barth thought very highly of Balthasar, both as a leading figure in a promising 'christological renaissance' in modern Catholic theology, and as an interpreter of his own work, one in whom he found 'an understanding of the concentration on Jesus Christ attempted in the Church Dogmatics, and the implied Christian concept of reality, which is incomparably more powerful than that of most of the books [on my theology] which have clustered around me'.

Twentieth-century listening and its spaces

Artists, fans, and the music business share an uneasy but symbiotic partnership. Dave Hill’s homosocial friendship, exploring music not through performance but through listening to purchased recordings, is a deeply twentieth-century subjectivity, reflecting the basic premise of much musical entertainment since the invention of sound recording. This involves a set of paradoxical relationships. For one thing, ‘music’ is a phenomenon that can and perhaps should be considered and enjoyed in and for itself – but to facilitate this enjoyment it has become a commodity, bought, sold, and consumed, to the regret of many composers and performers such as Lars Ulrich.

After the last new style

As a label for trends in music history since 1970, the term ‘post-minimalism’ has, at first, a seductively familiar ring – if by ‘music history’ we mean the succession of compositional styles conceptualized as a linear progression, most memorably analogized by Donald Francis Tovey as ‘the mainstream of music’. If ‘post-minimalist’ is a music-historical adjective of time, like ‘post-Romantic’ or ‘pre-classical’, then the familiar narrative strategies of classical music might still apply: an early style (minimalism) progresses – either through evolutionary ramification or dialectical synthesis – to another, later one (post-minimalism). The stream flows on.

So argues Kyle Gann, in the epigraph above and in his 1997 survey American Music in the Twentieth Century. But, as Gann acknowledges, minimalism is most often seen not as the beginning of a new drama of stylistic evolution, but as finis Terrae musicologicae, as the ‘last identifiable new style in music history’.

Even if this statement holds true for enough Christian theologians as to be almost a truism, it none the less bears stating at the outset: Jesus Christ stands at the centre of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology. While such an opening thesis-statement as this may sound unremarkable, yet, for Balthasar, the incarnate Son illumines the work of theology itself in a way that is hard to describe - even by comparison to other modern theologians. Certainly Balthasar shares a form of christocentrism with a figure like Karl Barth, such that all other realities take their bearing from the developing impact of Christ in the world. Even beyond this, however, christology becomes in Balthasar's hands a beckoning to the human soul, drawing theology into a very particular way of being - a stance in which theologians find themselves gazing at the unfolding mystery of Christ with eyes opened by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, beholding a self-giving so unutterable that created life itself is surrendered and re-created. While this prayerful stance for theology may be rather unusual in the modern era, it streams naturally from Balthasar's christology.

In his view the Church’s unfolding understanding of Jesus becomes atransfiguring exposure to the divine momentum at work in the universe. Heonce described the calling to theology as follows: ‘We need individuals whodevote their lives to the glory of theology, that fierce fire burning in the darknight of adoration and obedience, whose abysses it illuminates’ (ET1, 160).Not perhaps since Bonaventure has a theologian explored so profoundlythose abysses made visible in Christ.

The predicament: a musical culture at the margins

From the perspective of the first decade of the current century, the career of high-art concert music during the twentieth century is not a story with a happy end. A significant number of contemporary participants in the world of so-called classical music, particularly journalists, look back at the twentieth century as an era of deepening gloom and decay. The last century, it is argued, bequeathed to the next an unresolved and deepening crisis. The traditions of instrumental and vocal music cultivated in the public sphere since 1750 gradually lost their appeal and a significant hold on the public imagination. Despite striking developments in the transmission of music by electronic means throughout the twentieth century (thereby ensuring music’s wide accessibility), classical music moved to the periphery of culture and politics. In particular, new music for the concert stage commanded less attention during the second half of the century than at any time in the previous two hundred years. The suggestion made by Carl Dahlhaus in 1972 that the Mahler revival of the 1960s might function as a bridge between the traditions of the nineteenth century and the avant-garde of the twentieth seems, in retrospect, not to have been prescient. The embrace of Mahler coincided with a shift away from modernism. The accessible postmodernism of Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, and Arvo Pärt has not succeeded in creating a resurgence of wide audience interest in new music, the brief success of Henryk Górecki’s 1976 Third Symphony (Symphony of Sorrowful Sounds) notwithstanding.

Of all the new musical developments in the years following the First World War, none has been entangled in more controversy than the claim made by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg that their music, and ‘the method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another’ on which much of it was based (otherwise known as serialism), represented the culmination of the mainstream of the Austro-German tradition and thus, by implication, of the mainstream of music in general. All three composers maintained that theirs was the one true path, and drew on historical, national, and even metaphysical arguments to justify their claims. Schoenberg’s ‘National Music’ (1931) traced his lineage from Bach and Mozart, through Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms, concluding, ‘I venture to credit myself with having written truly new music, which being based on tradition, is destined to become tradition’. In a series of lectures from 1932–3, Webern pushed the origins of ‘The Path to Twelve-Tone Composition’ back past the Netherlanders all the way to Gregorian chant; insisting on the historical inevitability and necessity of twelve-tone composition, he charted a progression from the breakdown of the system of the church modes, through to Wagner’s chromatic harmony, the end of tonality, and finally to twelve-tone composition, writing, ‘It’s my belief that ever since music has been written, all the great composers have instinctively had this before them as a goal.’

The decline of the big bands

Early jazz had taken some years to reach a wide international audience, and the furore caused by the visit of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to London in 1919 was an indication that the new music was destined to become notorious on account of its associations with behaviour both rebellious and, in the case of Prohibition in the United States, illegal. For most of its subsequent history, jazz was tainted by extra-musical associations: although it is often tacitly assumed that this music of African-American origin scandalized a predominantly white audience, the perceived link between jazz and moral decay was fostered as much by those middle-class African Americans for whom the blues – ‘the Devil’s music’ – had always been an uncomfortable reminder of the social problems from which they had at least in part managed to escape. The development of diverse jazz styles after the Second World War, and their impact on perceptions of the music as both art and commerce, were significantly affected by the prejudices and partisanship of an earlier generation of commentators and consumers.

Even the definition of jazz was contested. A concerted attempt to legitimize swing as ‘jazz’ was made in the pages of the journals Down Beat and Metronome in the early 1940s, in defiance of those purists who looked askance at any jazzy style that downplayed the role of improvisation and other techniques explicitly associated with the music’s African-American heritage (such as blues structures, blue notes, and ‘dirty’ timbres).

TRINITY AND HOLY SATURDAY

What does it mean to identify, as the definitive embodiment of God in human history, someone who declares himself abandoned by God? This is the question that motivates Hans Urs von Balthasar's entire theological vision; but it is particularly central to what he has to say about the trinitarian life of God. Throughout Balthasar's major writings, especially in his trinitarian thinking, there is a consistent stress on the governing priority of Jesus' crucifixion (with its necessary corollary, for Balthasar, of the descent into hell). If Jesus is the self-communication of God in flesh, then the cry of dereliction from the Cross is a communication of the selfhood of God: God is revealed when there is nothing to be said about God, nothing to be said about God by God incarnate. In Mysterium Paschale, Balthasar sets out with an astonishingly powerful clarity the necessary centrality to the work of Christ of this 'hiatus' represented by the silence of Holy Saturday. 'It is for the sake of this day that the Son became man' (MP, 49).

Why so? Because only in this way can God display the divine freedom to embrace completely what is not divine, and thus display what divinity concretely, triumphantly, and unalterably is. God’s ‘hiding’ of God in the dereliction of the Cross and the silence of Holy Saturday is in fact the definitive revelation.

Prologue: Brave New Worlds

If one major facet of nineteenth-century music was its obsession with the subjective Romantic legacy of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) – of the ‘sublime master’ whose ‘high self-possession [is] inseparable from true genius’, who ‘leads the listener imperiously forward into the spirit world of the infinite’ and seals into his work ‘wonderful enchanting pictures and apparitions… with magic power’ – then its antithesis is found in the increasingly objective scientific scrutiny to which music was subsequently subjected. The best-known example of such scrutiny is The Sensations of Tone by Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), first published in German in 1863 and in English translation in 1875; the dissemination period of Helmholtz’s work thus rather amusingly coincides with that of Wagner’s later operas, including Tristan und Isolde (first performed 1865), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (both 1876). Helmholtz was a scientific polymath: his principal contributions to the study of music lay in such areas as the anatomy of the ear, the physiology of hearing, wave patterns, tuning systems, and especially the analysis of overtones in relation to timbre and such acoustic phenomena as combination tones. When first published, The Sensations of Tone provoked controversy (especially in its English translation, which was not always true to the original) but overall it provided a very solid base for later developments.

Hans Urs von Balthasar believed that all theology is hermeneutics: theologians should devote their energies to interpreting God's self-revelation in nature, history, and the Bible (TD2, 91). His principal theoretical remarks about scriptural interpretation are found in the first volume of The Glory of the Lord, the second volume of the Theo-Drama, the third volume of the Theo-Logic, and in a handful of essays. Although he sometimes emphasized different aspects of biblical hermeneutics in these discussions, several salient points, summarized briefly here, will be elaborated in this chapter. Balthasar argued that the atrophied aesthetic sensibilities of most modern theologians and biblical scholars have undermined the Church's biblical interpretation in various ways. Appropriating the lessons of premodern theological aesthetics would help to revive a set of ancient and medieval hermeneutical conventions that are not incompatible with certain features of contemporary biblical scholarship. These conventions include viewing the Bible as a self-glossing, christologically focused story, the proper interpretation of which is enabled by the Holy Spirit and nourished by regular liturgical worship. The range of ecclesially fruitful interpretation is constrained both by the intentions of its human and divine authors and by the rule of faith.