This chapter is an account of various transformations that took place during the Spring and Autumn period (770–481 B.C.). It covers the transition from a Zhou feudal system to a multistate system; from the expansion of the Zhou into the Yellow River drainage to the ancient China that spanned the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers and the highlands in the north and the west; from an economy based on manorial management to a market economy; and from a family-based society to one based upon great social mobility. The most significant development in this period was a major break through in the intellectual sphere, in which the moral values of Confucius provided an innovative reinterpretation of feudal ethics. This break through brought Chinese culture into a Jaspersian “Axial Age” of civilization. Thereafter, intellectuals served not only as officials in government but, of more profound impact, also as cultural carriers who interpreted the meaning of life and ideals of society. This new condition in the intellectual sphere continued beyond the Spring and Autumn period, remaining characteristic through out Chinese history. In other words, this break through initiated in the Spring and Autumn period would eventually lead China to develop a persistent, collective identity – Chinese civilization.

The Asian context

Liberation theology differs from other theologies in that it starts with an analysis of the context, as it wants to respond to the cries of the people arising from it. As contextual theology we can distinguish it by regions - Latin American, African, Asian, European - and by social groups such as the poor, women, blacks, Dalits, indigenous peoples. However, none of these social or geographical identities can be understood in isolation. Contexts and identities are multiple and overlapping. The realities of class, caste, patriarchy and ethnicity, and of local, regional and global economy are intertwined. A Dalit girl working in a factory in an export-processing zone in India is exploited as an underpaid worker - like other workers around the globe - and suffers from a lack of protection by trade-union rights, while as a woman she suffers from male domination and violence - as other women do - whereas she shares her plight as an 'untouchable' suffering from caste oppression with other outcastes, male and female, in India.

What is specific about Asia, especially in contrast with Latin America, is the religio-cultural context. The overwhelming majority of the poor and oppressed in Asia are non-Christians, many of whom adhere to a wide variety of popular religious traditions which are more or less connected with the traditions of the great religions which have shaped dominant Asian cultures. Yet within Asia there are again tremendous differences. Latin America is, compared to Asia, a relatively homogeneous continent in terms of history, language, economic and political developments. Asia has to be subdivided into various regions with different cultural, religious, political and economic histories.

The urgency and the richness of the commitment that many Christians in Latin America and the Caribbean began to feel in the 1960s as part of the struggle for justice and solidarity with the poor raised new questions, as well as pointing to fertile new pathways in the discourse about faith. These circumstances helped convert such reflection into a theology of liberation; that is, a way to understand the grace and salvation of Jesus in the context of the present and from the situation of the poor.

From the start, therefore, this theological perspective is bound up with the life of grassroots Christian communities and their commitment, as well as with the evangelising mission of the Church. This is the reason for its great impact, also from the outset, in the magisterium of the Church. Medellín and other Latin American Bishops’ conferences, as well as many other texts, bear witness to this fact

The theology of liberation, like any theology is about God. God and God’s love are, ultimately, its only theme. But since for Christian revelation (the starting point for any theology) the love of God is a mystery, the immediate question is how to talk of a mystery? The humble and respectful advice of Thomas Aquinas remains valid: ‘we cannot know what God is, only what he is not’ (ST I.9.3 introd.). It is in this context that, nearly thirty years ago, we asked ourselves what path the theological task ought to take in the context of Latin America.

Introduction

There are several ways of approaching Black theology. One approach seeks to characterise it in terms of its history, that is, of its origins in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s. It maintains that the demands for racial justice embodied in these two movements provided the basis for the emergence of Black theology. I shall not follow this approach here since it is not the aim of this chapter to offer a detailed description of the relationship between movements of protest and Black theology in the 1960s. This has been done elsewhere.

The second but related approach starts from an interpretation of the different ways in which African-American slaves appropriated and reworked Christian faith in the context of their experience of slavery. According to this understanding Black theology represents not just a faddish attempt to redefine Christian teaching in the light of the demands of the social and political forces of the 1960s but a critical search for a historically black Christian form of reflection on issues of racial justice and liberation. The materials for such reflection come from the twin realities of slavery in the past and the experience of racism in the present. One important difference between these two approaches is that, although they both share the same understanding of Black theology, the first is very much shaped by the politics of the recent past whereas the second locates its point of departure in the history of slavery itself, with the latter being seen as a historical expression of racism.

The two and a half centuries commonly known as the age of the Warring States (481–221 B.C.) witnessed the creation of the major political institutions that defined early imperial China. The old league of cities ruled by the Zhou nobility was replaced by a system of territorial states built around unchallenged monarchs who commanded a large number of dependent officials. These in turn were employed to register and mobilize the individual peasant households, primarily for the sake of imposing universal military service. The mass peasant armies of the period entailed the emergence of military specialists who were masters of the theories and techniques of warfare. At the same time, the needs of diplomatic maneuver produced theorists of stratagem and persuasion who formulated new models of interstate relations. The Zhou world was also reinvented as a geographic entity, both through expansion to the south and the southwest and through new patterns of physical mobility that marked differences of status.

However, the writings of this period present no tidy portrait of politics or institutions. Since written materials were still rare, difficult to produce, and not widely diffused, “books” tended to emerge, evolve, and survive as the legacy of groups who defined themselves through loyalty to a common master. Members of these groups sought patrons who took an interest in the wisdom or expertise that they claimed to offer. As a consequence, the writings that preserve information about the political history of the period are pragmatic and factional. They are devoted to the policies, philosophies, and actions of those who actively participated in creating the new states, and they defend these actions or philosophies as uniquely efficacious.

Introduction

It seems that for every commentator who has put pen to paper or given voice upon the lecture circuit, there is set forth a different, and supposedly conclusive, definition of the base ecclesial community (comunidade eclesial de base). Ever since the emergence of this innovative and challenging ecclesial phenomenon within the Latin American continent, ecclesiologists and sociologists alike have fallen over themselves in an attempt to explicate the concrete, lived experiences of those within the base communities by way of their own preferred analytical vocabulary. The precision with which etymological origins, epistemological status and theological significance is sought, whilst laudable in terms of theoretical rigour, often belies the haphazard, disjointed and sporadic nature of much of the actual pastoral practice and tangible experience of those engaged in the day-to-day struggle to survive at the base of Latin American society.

As the above intimates, it is not our intention here to understand the base ecclesial community by means of dissecting the words comunidade, eclesial, de base. Rather, we shall explore the character of the comunidade eclesial de base (hereafter, CEB) by way of highlighting a number of landmark events and experiences which, over the course of at least a decade, played a constitutive part in the emergence of the CEB phenomenon. To this end, we seek to understand the CEB, not as a neatly definable entity, but rather as an ecclesial tool and lived experience which has emerged out of a prolonged series of pastoral crises, perceived threats, ecclesiological shifts, theological refinements, and historical exigencies born of a whole gamut of economic, political, social, and theoretical upheavals.

The question of the relationship between socially engaged biblical scholars and ordinary poor and marginalised readers of the Bible lies at the heart of this chapter. While it may seem strange to begin an essay on 'The Bible and the poor' with such a statement, liberation theologies in their various forms all emerge from the interface between socially committed theologians and ordinary Christians from poor and marginalised communities. The task of this chapter is to understand the contours of the interface more clearly.

As most of the readers of this volume are probably from the First World, we must begin by making it quite clear that liberation theologies are different from First World theology.1 It is not just that liberation theologies have a different content, they are more profoundly different in that they have a different methodology. ‘The established methodology of First World theology – often regarded as a universally valid norm – has recently been challenged. The challenge comes from different quarters in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but it also comes from certain groups within the First World, e.g., from Christians within the feminist and labour movements.’

The following summary may serve as an introduction to the modes, the basis of all organ music through to the seventeenth century. The voice-ranges of the twelve modes are given, the white note being the key-note. All are in their untransposed state with the exception of modes II and XI, which have been transposed respectively up a fourth and down a fifth, reflecting common usage. All pairs of modes function regularly:in the odd-numbered modes Tenor (and Soprano) use the authentic scale, Alto and Bass the plagal scale. In the even-numbered modes the roles are reversed except in the case of mode IV,which is often almost indistinguishable from mode III, having sometimes a smaller range, sometimes a larger one, especially at the upper end of the Soprano. In all cases it is quite normal to extend the voice-range occasionally by one or possibly two notes. For further reading see Meier 1992 and the present writer’s introduction to his edition of Giovanni de Macque’s Ricercari sui Dodici Toni.Unless otherwise stated, the descriptions represent a précis of the widely-known account of the modes given by Gioseffo Zarlino in his Le istitutioni harmoniche of 1558.

In 1648 the devastating Thirty Years War was ended by the Peace of Westphalia. Though this left some Catholic areas in essentially Lutheran north and central Germany (and southern Protestant areas too, like Nuremberg and Württemberg, including Stuttgart) it was in the south that the Catholic heartlands lay. From Baden in the south-west, they ran through parts of Swabia (including the publishing centre of Augsburg) and Bavaria (Munich pre-eminent) with the large bishoprics of Passau and Salzburg leading to the expanses of the Austrian Empire in which Vienna and Prague were the major centres. These areas had always looked south of the Alps for trade and culture. After the War, with the revival of Catholic Counter-Reformation confidence, Italian baroque art-forms were eagerly adopted, while the desire of many German princelings for monarchical splendour, in the style of Louis XIV, made their courts increasingly receptive to French taste also. The raising of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and ensuing victories reinforced both the prestige of the imperial Viennese court and the mood of religious triumph in Austria and her supporting German principalities. This was reflected in the many powerful monasteries, such as Melk, Weingarten and Ottobeuren, rebuilt in the first half of the eighteenth century in a dazzling conjunction of princely and celestial glory – artistically, the climax of a process of original re-interpretation of forms invented in Italy and France (the organ at Melk is shown in Figure 14.1).

Although modern etymologists would question Burney's appropriation of a Greek word with a general meaning (organon seems to have meant a tool with which to do a job of work) for so specific a purpose, it would be hard to deny that the pipe organ in its most developed form is structurally the largest, and (for sheer variety of effect) musically the most comprehensive of all instruments. And if by ‘harmonious’ is meant the capacity to order diverse elements and bring them into concord with one another for a common purpose, then Burney's claim for the organ, with its multiplicity of sound-producing and mechanical parts, can surely be substantiated.

At its most basic, the organ is a simple wind instrument. It consists of a grooved chest supporting a set of pipes, bellows to supply wind to the pipes, and some sort of mechanism to cause the pipes to sound. Though such simplicity is now rare it perfectly well describes the sort of organ depicted in medieval illuminated manuscripts (Figure 1.1). The path from such modest instruments to giant modern organs boasting four or five keyboards, 32 pipes, dozens of registers, sophisticated stop controls and electrical blowing apparatus encompasses a complex and fascinating process of development in which music, technology, architecture, liturgy, industrial organisation and changing taste all play a part.

Introduction

The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium (c335–263 BC) tells us that the reason we have two ears and only one mouth is so that we may hear more and speak less. We could dismiss this utterance from the founder of the Stoics in Athens as mere wishful thinking on the part of one who argued that the elements of physics and logic must serve the element of ethics; we might even declare it to be rubbish! Paradoxically, there are some grains of truth in his statement. Two ears do hear more than one; we experience binaural summation. At least for moderate intensities, a sound heard in two ears at once does seem to be about twice as loud as the same sound heard in one ear only. Our hearing system must obviously be ‘wired’ differently from our seeing system – closing one eye does not change the brightness of the scene in front of us. Nevertheless, binaural summation really has little to do with the main purpose of the two-eared system we have inherited.

We have two ears so that we may hear more, but in the late twentieth century AD the word ‘more’ has to be interpreted in a subtle way. Our ears allow us to use, quite unconsciously, very small time differences (and, at high frequencies, intensity differences) associated with the binaural reception of sound, for location and discrimination within a complex acoustic environment. A solo violin or clarinet represents a localised source of sound for the listener, who is able to recognise the particular type of instrument through its tone quality or timbre.

Introduction

Frescobaldi is obviously central to any discussion of Italian organ music. What is sometimes forgotten is that, like J. S. Bach, he comes at the end of a great tradition – at least as far as Italy is concerned. His most important pupil and follower was Froberger. Through him, and indirectly through others such as Kerll, Frescobaldi was to exercise considerable influence on German keyboard music, not least on Bach himself.

The great age of Italian organ building was already in decline when Frescobaldi was born in 1583. The last large instrument to be built was that by Luca Blasi for St John Lateran in Rome in 1598. The new enormous basilica of St Peter's where Frescobaldi was to serve most of his lifetime never had an organ commensurate with its size, its importance or the stature of its organist. Most seventeenth-century Italian organs do not extend below 8 C and have a range of four octaves (C/E–a2 or c3). Virtually all Frescobaldi's music can be played on such an instrument quite satisfactorily. This has given rise to the idea that the Italian organ was always a small instrument, especially since many such organs still exist and because the basic format remained unchanged for another two centuries. The bulk of this chapter will therefore attempt to explain the Italian scene up to Frescobaldi, relating its music not only to the large instruments that survive (e.g. San Petronio, Bologna, 1471; Arezzo Cathedral, 1534; San Giuseppe, Brescia, 1581; St John Lateran, Rome, 1598 – all of these based on 16′ or 24′ principali) but also smaller 6′ and 4′ organs.

A survey of French organ music before 1800 is bound to recognise the unique flowering of the years 1660 to 1740. The repertory of this period is often referred to as ‘classical’, the term ‘baroque’ ill suiting, according to some commentators, the essential nature of its musical language. The corpus of extant music is large and includes music by well-known and versatile composers such as Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers (1632–1714), François Couperin (1668–1733) and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1676–1749). Others, such as Jacques Boyvin (1653–1706), André Raison (d. 1719) and Pierre Dumage (1674–1751), are known only for their organ music. The work of these composers merits pride of place in an account of French organ music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The publications of the last forty years of the seventeenth century stand out as the central monument in the classical school (see Table 12.1). They emanate from the period in French history when Louis XIV outstripped all his European rivals in cultural endeavour. The beginning of his reign, from 1660, marks the coming of age of French baroque music. The Italian artists and musicians, imported by Cardinal Mazarin (1602–61) to boost the claims of Italian culture over French, left in the early 1660s, bereft of their patron. The more or less final manifestation of their struggle was the performance in Paris in 1662 of Cavalli's Ercole amante, an event noted for the success of the additional dance music by the young Jean-Baptiste Lully rather than Cavalli's score. The moment was ripe for a resurgence of national identity and pride in French art.