Just finished Jeremy Begbie’s Resounding Truth today. There have been many things going through my head, but this is one that has the most practical impact for me right now. On pages 198 and following, Begbie writes on the order of creation and the openness of creation. He hits on these two main subjects a few times in this book and a few of his other books: freedom exists within constraints and change does not always necessitate disorder.

On the topic of freedom and constraints, he quotes Stravinsky on page 249:

I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. If everything is permissible to me…every undertaking becomes futile…I shall overcome my terror and shall be reassured by the thought that I have the seven notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal…strong and weak accents are within my reach, and…in all these I possess solid and concrete elements which offer me a field of experience just as vast as the upsetting and dizzying infinitude that had just frightened me…What delivers me from the anguish into which an unrestricted freedom plunges me is the fact that I am always able to turn immediately to the concrete things that are here in question…Whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible…Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength.

This idea of freedom working within constraint is the subject of another post regarding jazz.

The second idea of change not necessitating chaos can easily be heard in Bach’s violin partitas. There is a sense of improvisation here (Bach was an incredible improviser), but there is the unmistakable feeling of order. Order within improvisation. For the believer, this is a great comfort. God, who made order out of disorder in Genesis, is in control of all things, even change. And change need not be automatically characterized as disorder. This gives meaning for our lives- lives of suffering and pain- these things have meaning and purpose in the grand scheme of things, they are not God’s mistakes or evidences of his lack of control. Through Bach’s works, we can see that change or variation or rearrangement can be ordered and have teleological meaning as well as existential and situational meaning.

Both of these truths give great comfort to the believer, and allow us to hear these truths in our time.

I’m currently reading Jeremy Begbie’s Resounding Truth and am digging it so far. Unlike other books by Begbie that I’ve read, this one attempts to look at what theology can bring to music. Most of the other books were the other way around (what can music bring to theology). In the first chapter, Begbie digs around something integral to music and the arts in general: the idea of metaphor.

Starting on page 50, he starts with the metaphor being a “surplus of meaning”:

The different terms of the metaphor each draw on a whole range of connotations and associations of the the words…thus a metaphor generates a whole new set of new meanings for us, and just because they are generated this way, these new meanings can be apprehended only through this metaphor, by being drawn into its life. Thus a metaphor is irreducible.

Begbie goes on to say that unlike many visual arts, music does not live or die based on referring outside of itself. It is a “stream of metaphors” that reference itself constantly. The rhythms that we hear or the repetitions of melodies, for example, all reside within the music themselves.

And the metaphor creates something unique, or at least something other than a wooden description. If I say, “My friend is a rock,” I could have said,”My friend is strong.” But this doesn’t have the amount of connotations and associations that Begbie’s quote spoke of. And this also brings up the question why use the metaphor at all if strength is the only thing I mean? When David says that God has broken his bones, does he mean God actually broke his bones? There is something more going on here- something that says much more than what appears initially on the page. That’s why Hebrew poetry can be so terse, and yet so deep and almost timeless, but I digress…

This metaphor of music that can happen from completely within itself may not be able to refer to specific words or thoughts like “my cat is fat” but that does not mean it does not refer at all. It seems to me the biggest push that comes from music’s use of metaphor is a realization that there is something going on out there, outside of ourselves and outside of mere materialism. As Begbie writes, “Art reminds us that in fact the world always exceeds our grasp and perception.”

Obviously something like this gets me excited, being the music-theology-nerd. And we all know that I like Begbie. These few quick thoughts show us that we need art, we need music, for more than mere entertainment. It is part of theology.