The great works of European art music exist in an aesthetic field defined by the dipole of classicism and expressivism, the two generative sensibilities that drive (or drove) developments in musical style between about 1700 and 1950. By “dipole” I am not picturing a Venn diagram but something more like a magnet:
As in the magnetic field, classicism and expressivism are dialectical and interpenetrating, not antithetical and opposing. There is no “pure” specimen of either. No one work, or composer, ever exemplifies one sensibility to the total exclusion of the other. In one period a work may be predominantly classicist despite its composer utilizing musical language and form that were originally developed from expressivist impulses. (Note: I use these two terms here in largely ahistorical ways — small-c and small-e, not the capitalized historical movements Classicism and Expressivism — for lack of better terms occurring to me at the moment.)
The mark of classicism is the aspiration to balance and perfection in musical presentation. The classical sensibility yields the sort of work about which one thinks: “There was not a single note out of place” — even if, as the Emperor is supposed to have told Mozart, there may have been “too many notes.” Stereotypically, Western music loves four-bar phrases, clean chord progressions with well-prepared resolutions, standard accompaniment figures and phrases (the Alberti bass being the most famous), and the like: these are hallmarks of the classical. There is a self-conscious inhabiting of traditional forms, even as they may be innovated or subverted in various ways. To be sure, there may be musical surprises, but they do not feel experimental. To the listener there is little or no sense of struggle in the act of composition, no matter how dramatic the music itself may be. To the performer the chief difficulty is making the music seem effortless, regardless of the technical challenge it may pose. The overriding impression in the greatest of these works is of exquisite craftsmanship, occasionally of an almost unearthly or inhuman perfection.
The mark of expressivism is the aspiration to communicate the hitherto incommunicable, to somehow reach across the gulf between composer, performer(s), and audience. (Note the asymmetry between the two core aspirations.) The expressive sensibility yields the sort of work about which one thinks: “That was so powerful!” — even if, in places, it seemed overwrought or difficult to follow. (Bertrand Russell’s remark about Wagner’s opera is apposite: “marvelous moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour.”) Traditional forms and stereotyped devices are used, but not loved; they are the composer’s vehicle, not his or her habitation. Every aspect of the music is, if not actually experimental, a potential site for experimentation; there are not so much musical “surprises” as a more or less steady experience of “surprise.” The listener is expected to not just hear but feel the sense of personal exertion that has gone into the composition; even the less dramatic moments reveal the struggle for expression by temporarily concealing it. To the performer the chief difficulty is summoning the emotional vigor to make the music seem sufficiently effortful. The overriding impression in the greatest of these works is of overwhelming genius, that the composer has somehow expressed the previously inexpressible.
The greatest of classicists is, of course, Mozart. There is nobody to match him — except perhaps Schubert, who stands after him but in the same rank. The second rank of classicists includes Mendelssohn, Chopin, Fauré, Tchaikovsky (yes, a classicist by temperament, except perhaps revealing his expressivist side in the Sixth Symphony!), Rachmaninoff, and the late Stravinsky (there’s something about those Francophile Russians). I am unsure whether to say Haydn is a classicist or an expressivist at heart; probably a classicist, albeit one who was toying with expressivism before it had come to full flower. Richard Strauss had the fullness of classicism within him — especially present, perhaps, in his Eine Alpensinfonie, in his Violin Sonata, and in some passages of the early tone poems. Mahler, too, wrote some marvelous classical passages, though mostly integrated into overall expressivist works — especially the waltz movements in his earlier symphonies; in his later period, the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies are remarkably classicist works despite the force of their expression.
The greatest of expressivists, who ushered this sensibility into maturity after Haydn had disclosed a new measure of its potential, is Beethoven. In his earliest works, one can hear him toying brilliantly (if sometimes unimpressively) with the classicism of his teachers, at times sounding impatient to get on to writing in his own way. His Third Symphony is still the touchstone expressivist (and Romantic) work, often imitated but never bettered, with its astonishing self-confidence, its total mastery of and almost equally total disregard for musical convention. More subtle in this regard, but no less masterful, are his late string quartets, especially Opp. 130 and 131. (But in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies especially Beethoven showed that his embrace of expressivism did not indicate a total repudiation of classicism.) Wagner undoubtedly aspired to be, and maybe imagined himself to be, the greatest of expressivists, but he did not understand its hidden and tragic secret: that it depends irreducibly on the dialectical tension with the classicist pole for its power. Among Beethoven’s successors, the greatest expressivist accomplishments are those of Schumann (in the solo piano works), Mahler (in the Second and Ninth Symphonies), and Strauss (Ein Heldenleben), though they also at times exhibit the tragic tendency of expressivism to cut loose from classicism and thus lose itself. Also deserving mention are the French luminaries of expressivism, Debussy and Ravel. The early Schoenberg (cf. Verklärte Nacht and the first string quartet) had the promise of greatness, but his turn to anti-tonality was his undoing. Dmitri Shostakovich, long after much of European music had followed Schoenberg down his disastrous path, continued cultivating the genius of expressivism, as did his Soviet colleague Sergei Prokofiev.
In the middle zone of the dipole, offering remarkable and singular syntheses of these two sensibilities, stand J. S. Bach and Brahms. Perhaps less brilliant than those two, but great nevertheless, is Anton Bruckner, who offers his great expressiveness with remarkable musical economy and in a (yet more remarkable) spirit of humility. And the Vier letzte Lieder of Strauss dwell in the same extraordinary territory.
Next I need to read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy — whose title, I just learned, originally continued … Out of the Spirit of Music — to see how closely my intuition here maps to his famous juxtaposition of Apollo and Dionysos.
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
— Deuteronomy 21:18–21
“To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.’ For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”
— Luke 7:31–35
And… the very next passage in Deuteronomy is the law of the hanged man, quoted by St. Paul in Galatians 3.
A fantastic essay from Zac Koons, including this stellar line: “The rapid creep of AI into every nook and cranny of life represents a golden opportunity for our churches to grow and flourish. All we have to do is not use it.”
The safety of home, the allure of afar: … modern everyday culture ceaselessly evokes and reproduces these two promises. Home improvement stores, flower shops, and furniture stores assure us that we can design our own homes in such a way that they begin to sing, while travel agencies and real estate brokers inform us that the world sings somewhere else. And at a secondary level, local history guides, travel memoirs, sentimental dramas of the countryside (Heimatfilme), and documentaries about German emigrants starting new lives abroad all likewise suggest that responsive segments of world indeed exist.
The hope of finding such a segment of world — or, rather, of establishing a relation of resonance to a segment of world — is by no means limited to physical space alone, but extends just as well to the social world. Find your home! as an imperative of modernity may well [363] mean first and foremost: Find people with whom you can enter into a resonant relationship. The social embeddedness of modern subjects is no longer a priori predetermined along estates-based or class lines or by traditional or conventional commitments such as arranged marriages. The psychosocial and psycho-emotional basis of social association in the private realm is rather formed by the notion that every subject has both the right and the responsibility to seek out and find friends and romantic partners who want and are able to enter into affirming, productive, lasting responsive relationships with them. Love and friendship have changed shape in modernity, in that they are now directly understood as resonant relationships and have become the social responsibility of the individual.
These two paragraphs set up this extraordinary, and (dare I call it?) convicting, insight and metaphor:
Modern society is thus characterized by the fact that it demands that those who live in it move through social space as seismographs of resonance, establishing social bonds when and where they are mutually called or addressed, i.e. where there is a “spark” between the participants in an interaction. The idea, at least, is that intense private social relationships are thus freed of estates-based, ritual, courtly, or religious stipulations and instead conceived as pure relationships of resonance. The fact that late modern subjects are clearly increasingly inclined to enter into partnerships and friendships with people who are like them as opposed to those who are “other” (sociostructurally or in terms of cultural or social background) does not necessarily contradict the criterion of resonance. They expect successful relationships from and are more likely to feel addressed by people who are similar to them. From a diagnostic perspective, this behavior could, however, also be read as an indication that subjects under late modern conditions tend to steer clear of what is genuinely other. They seek out harmony and consonance and avoid dissonance — though at the price of confusing harmony for resonance and thus forfeiting the possibility of adaptive transformation. Not unlike those potentially depressive types who keep their homes immaculately clean and smelling of flowers, they are at risk of moving in environments that are beautiful, but do not speak.
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 362–63. As the meme goes: “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.”
Sketch for a longer reflection: St. Paul’s supposedly negative statements about the Law are in fact positive summaries, drawn from considering the narrative of Scripture in the retrospective light of Christ’s death and resurrection, of what the Law must have been meant for in the first place.
A genius little summary from St. Irenaeus, near the close of his great book, of the seven essentials (as he sees it) we receive from the tradition:
[The] path of those belonging to the Church circumscribes the whole world, as possessing the sure tradition from the apostles, and gives unto us to see that the faith of all is one and the same, since all receive one and the same God the Father, and believe in the same dispensation regarding the incarnation of the Son of God, and are cognizant of the same gift of the Spirit, and are conversant with the same commandments, and preserve the same form of ecclesiastical constitution, and expect the same advent of the Lord, and await the same salvation of the complete man, that is, of the soul and body. … For the Church preaches the truth everywhere, and she is the seven-branched candlestick which bears the light of Christ.
— Against Heresies, V.20.1. The seven marks of catholic orthodoxy: eternal Father, incarnate Son, outpoured Spirit, dominical instruction, ecclesial structure, second coming, physical† salvation.
In the dogmatic and theological history of every age, not excluding that of Protestantism, secular factors have played a part which tends to cover over all else. For all the gloating with which it was done, it was a good thing that the work of Pietism and the Enlightenment in Church History established so incontrovertibly the fact that even in such periods of supreme decision as that in which the dogma of the Trinity arose the history of the Church was anything but a history of heroes and saints. Yet in this case we should be just and perceptive and allow that not only the Church of Byzantium but also that of Wittenberg and Geneva, and finally the purest Church of any of the quiet in the land, have always and everywhere been, when examined at close range, centres of frailties and scandals of every kind, and that on the basis of the Reformation doctrine of justification at all events it is neither fitting nor worth while to play off the worldliness of the Church against the seriousness of the insights it has perhaps gained in spite of and in this worldliness. The same may be said about the indisputable connexion of the dogma with the philosophy of the age. By proving philosophical involvement we can reject the confessions and theology of any age and school, and we can do this the more effectively the less we see the beam in our own eye. For linguistically theologians have always depended on some philosophy and linguistically they always will. But instead of getting Pharisaically indignant about this and consigning whole periods to the limbo of a philosophy that is supposed to deny the Gospel—simply because our own philosophy is different—it is better to stick strictly to the one question what the theologians of the earlier period were really trying to say in the vocabulary of their philosophy. Caution is especially demanded when we insist on differences in the so-called piety of different periods and therefore claim that the piety out of which the dogma of the Trinity arose was completely different from our own piety with its sober focus, as they said some years ago, on “worldview and morality.” What right have we to regard our own piety, even if its agreement with the Reformation and the New Testament seem ever so impeccable, as the only piety that is possible in the Church, and therefore to exalt it as a standard by which to measure the insights of past ages? Let us be sure of our own cause so far as we can. But antithetical rigidity especially in evaluating the subjective religion of others is something against which we can only issue a warning.
There is much hype afoot about LLMs now being suitable “research assistants” or “writing companions” for serious humanistic work, so I decided to take a temperature check by asking Claude (what I took to be) a fairly basic historical theology research question:
What is the best English edition of St. Augustine’s Enchiridion?
The Enchiridion, a short, late catechetical work, is perhaps one of that Father’s less well-known works today — it lacks the name recognition of, say, the Confessions or the City of God — but is nevertheless one of his most continuously influential works throughout church history. I had a hunch there might be a handful, but not a plethora, of translations. So I asked Claude to help me out.
You can read the ensuing hilarity here. Spoiler alert: It did not go well.
Disclaimers: I have not ponied up $20/month to Anthropic, so I ran this little experiment on Claude Sonnet 4 (rather than the supposedly Pro-level Opus 4, a “powerful, large model for complex challenges”; apparently I overestimated what a “complex challenge” this actually was). Now for the scorecard. Claude:
got everything right about the NPNF translation by J. F. Shaw (which, being public domain, I imagine was actually part of its training data);
misidentified the editor (Boniface Ramsey, O. P.) as the translator of the New City Press edition, and was unable to find the translator’s name (which I found in moments by following one of the links which Claude provided me);
initially overlooked the Library of Christian Classics version translated by Albert Outler and published in 1955, and then required additional prompting to discover that the 1955 edition was, in fact, the same as the Outler edition;
and completely invented not one but two(!) translations: one by Thomas Williams, who at least is a known translator of St. Augustine, and one by Mark Dever, who is not.
For now, I think, I will be sticking to my old and LLM-less research habits.
UPDATE: Ian Harber — who has ponied up for Claude Pro — tasked Sonnet 4 with the same prompt, but in Research mode, and it generated what appears to be a largely accurate and, I admit, pretty useful report; I learned from it about a couple of older translations which actually exist (though are largely unavailable). It does, however, offer some peculiar comments, e.g., “The market [for translations of the Enchiridion] shows stability around current major editions rather than competitive innovation” — a comment I would not expect to find in a research guide written by, you know, an actual human historian. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that my humorous little experiment with the free, non-Research version did not give me an accurate sense of Claude’s current capabilities, and I stand appropriately corrected.
The principal question remains, of course, not whether one can but whether one should use even the more powerful and capable tools for humanistic research. About this we have much to say, and we may try to explain it later…
The superscription of Psalm 51 links that most famous and gut-wrenching of repentance Psalms directly to David’s sin concerning Bathsheba and Uriah. Verses 1–17 are relentlessly first-person singular, with one English translation containing thirty-two instances of I, me, my, and so forth. Verse 4, “Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” — a stumbling block for contemporary readers, who are here inclined to wonder, “Hasn’t David sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah, too?” — represents a radical narrowing of focus such that David’s sin is, at least for the moment of this Psalm, entirely viewed from within a single I-Thou relation. David reflects that God “will not be delighted in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.” Rather, “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (He has learned well the lesson which his predecessor failed to grasp.)
Then the Psalm concludes on a completely different note, seemingly in a completely different voice: “Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; build up the walls of Jerusalem; then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on your altar.” What is the deal?
I am not usually one for speculative text-critical historical reconstructions, but in this case these last two verses (18–19 in ETs) sure seem like a later supplementation to an originally shorter text. And if that is the case, it must be said that the editors have not tried very hard to disguise the addition. There is no attempt to inhabit David’s point of view, or even make many explicit verbal links. Indeed, the underlying plot of the appendix seems quite different than the underlying plot of the main Psalm. So one wonders if the discontinuity is, in fact, the point. The “seam” in the text draws the attentive reader’s eye, and sets him or her thinking on how one tragic situation — David’s adultery with (and abuse of power over) Bathsheba, compounded by his murder of Uriah — may illustrate, elucidate, or analogize the situation of Israel’s idolatry and subsequent destruction. One might hear, in the plea to “build up the walls of Jerusalem,” an echo of the post-exilic situation of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which right sacrifices have long ceased because the Temple and the walls have been destroyed. I imagine there are many fruitful connections to draw.
This leads me to one further point of canonical interest. Many of the Prophets (Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in particular) develop the metaphor of Israel as God’s unfaithful wife, with the exile coming as long-overdue punishment for her adultery. If I am right that in the appendix to Psalm 51 we are to hear a correlation with the exile, with David standing for sinful and punished Israel, this is one of the only examples I can think of in which the Biblical commentary on the exile flips that gendered dynamic. Instead of a (variously) promiscuous or easily-seduced woman, Israel is here cast as — in the person of David — an abusive, murderous man.
