Pius XII, The Function of Art (April 8, 1952)

[3] An address by His Holiness Pope Pius XII to a group of Italian artists received in audience on April 8, 1952.

1. With deep satisfaction, beloved sons and daughters, promoters of the figurative arts, We welcome your devout homage and that of your families, by reason of your coming to Us on the occasion of the sixth Roman quadrennial meeting, and We express to you Our pleasure for the remembrance-gift which you are leaving with Us.

2. How delightful your presence is to Us is shown by the tradition itself of the Roman pontificate. As the heir of universal culture it has never ceased to appreciate art, to surround itself with works of art, to make art, within due limits, the collaborator of its divine mission, preserving and elevating its destiny, which is to guide the soul to God.

3. Upon crossing the threshold of this house of the common Father, you felt as though you were in your own world, perceiving yourselves and your ideals in the masterpieces gathered here throughout the centuries. Nothing is lacking therefore to make this meeting mutually delightful between the Successor, though unworthy, of those Pontiffs who shone as generous patrons of the arts, and you who continue the Italian artistic tradition.

4. It is needless to explain to you—who feel it within yourselves, often as a noble torment—one of the essential characteristics of art, which consists in a certain intrinsic 'affinity' of art with religion, which in certain ways renders artists interpreters of the infinite perfections of God, and particularly of the beauty and harmony of God's creation.

5. The function of all art lies in fact in breaking through the narrow and tortuous enclosure of the finite, in which man is immersed while living here below, and in providing a window to the infinite for his hungry soul.

[4] 6. Thus it follows that any effort—and it would be a vain one, indeed—aimed at denying or suppressing any relation between art and religion must impair art itself. Whatever artistic beauty one may wish to grasp in the world, in nature and in man, in order to express it in sound, in color, or in plays for the masses, such beauty cannot prescind from God. Whatever exists is bound to Him by an essential relationship. Hence, there is not, neither in life nor in art—be it intended as an expression of the subject or as an interpretation of the object—the exclusively "human," the exclusively "natural" or "immanent."

7. The greater the clarity with which art mirrors the infinite, the divine, the greater will be its possibility for success in striving toward its ideal and true, artistic accomplishment. Thus, the more an artist lives religion, the better prepared he will be to speak the language of art, to understand its harmonies, to communicate its emotions.

8. Naturally, We are far from thinking that in order to be interpreters of God in the sense just mentioned, artists must treat explicitly religious subjects. On the other hand, one cannot question the fact that never, perhaps, has art reached its highest peaks as it has in these subjects.

9. In this manner, the great masters of Christian arts became interpreters, not only of the beauty but also of the goodness of God, the revealer and Redeemer. Marvelous exchange of services between Christianity and art! From their Faith they drew sublime inspirations. They drew hearts to the Faith when for continuous centuries they communicated and spread the truths contained in the Holy Scriptures, truths inaccessible, at least directly, to the humble people.

10. In truth, artistic masterpieces were known as the "Bible of the people," to mention such noted examples as the windows of Chartres, the door of Ghiberti (by happy expression known as the Door of Paradise), the Roman and Ravenna mosaics and the facade of the Cathedral of Orvieto. These and other masterpieces not only translate into easy reading and universal language the Christian [5] truths, they also communicate the intimate sense and emotion of these truths with an effectiveness, lyricism and ardor that, perhaps, is not contained in even the most fervent preaching.

11. Souls ennobled, elevated and prepared by art, are thus better disposed to receive the religious truths and the grace of Jesus Christ. This is one of the reasons why the Sovereign Pontiffs, and the Church in general, honored and continue to honor art and to offer its works as a tribute of human beings to God's Majesty in His churches, which have always been abodes of art and religion at the same time.

12. Beloved children, crown your artistic ideals with those of religion, which revitalize and integrate them. The artist is of himself a privileged person among men, but the Christian artist is, in a certain sense, a chosen one, because it is proper to those chosen to contemplate, to enjoy and to express God's perfections. 

13. Seek God here below in nature and in man, but above all within yourselves. Do not vainly try to give the human without the divine, nor nature without its Creator. Harmonize instead the finite with the infinite, the temporal with the eternal, man with God, and thus you will give the truth of art and the true art.

14. Even without making it a specific aim, endeavor to educate men's hearts—so easily inclined toward materialism—toward kindness and a spiritual feeling; you to whom it is given to speak a language which all peoples can understand. Strive to bring men closer to one another. May the artist's vocation, for which you are indebted to God, lead you to this mission: a mission so noble and worthy that it is sufficient in itself to give to your daily life—often harsh and arduous—its fullness and a courageous faith.

15. In order that these Our wishes may be fulfilled and God glorified in your art, We invoke upon you and your families an abundance of heavenly favors and may the Apostolic Blessing which We impart upon you from the fulness of Our heart be a promise of them.

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Source: Pius XII, "The Function of Art," address, The Function of Art: Address of Pope Pius XII; On Sacred Art—Instruction of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office (Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1952), 3-5.

Pius XII, The Art of Fra Angelico: Window into Heaven (April 20, 1955)

 [125] Address of Pope Pius XII at Opening of Exhibition of Paintings of Fra Angelico at the Vatican

In welcoming into Our dwelling so many masterpieces of Fra Giovanni of Fiesole it is Our intention not only to pay a special tribute of admiration to his genius, which reached the highest pinnacle of art by drawing inspiration from the mysteries of faith. It is also Our desire to revive the deeply religious and human message his paintings have preached to his own and succeeding generations, which have never tired of contemplating his symbolic images where beauty and harmony seem to transcend the summit of the purely human and to open as it were a window into Heaven.

Above all, We wish to express Our great pleasure at the extensive study inspired by the 5th centenary of his death. It has stimulated outstanding critics and authors to deepen and spread knowledge of the personality and work of Fra Angelico in noteworthy publications. Some of these have presented in a new and truer light the period and currents of thought and art which marked the first half of the 15th century. They are publications which redound to the honor not only of the arts but of culture in general and of religion itself.

Perennial witness

We wish also to express Our heartfelt gratitude toward each and all of those distinguished persons who responded with filial solicitude to Our desires and arranged that the works of Fra Angelico, cherished as incomparable treasures in the museums and galleries of various nations, be entrusted to U s for a while on this happy occasion. This has secured Us the pleasure of viewing them and at the same time the joy of being able to show them to Our beloved sons from all over the world who will be visiting Rome at this time. 

The present Exhibition is the first important collection of Angelico's works in one place, and fittingly enough in this Apostolic Palace, whose threshold the eminent man of genius crossed many times. The humble and pious Fra [126] Giovanni of Fiesole, as is well known, came here at the peak of his artistic maturity at the request of Our predecessors, first of Eugene IV, and later of the great patron of the arts Nicholas V, to whom the Renaissance owes much of its early beginnings. And here ono these walls Angelico immortalized some of the most vigorous creations of his artistic imagination, an honor and adornment of this Apostolic residence, and a perennial witness of the perfect accord between Religion and art. 

The homage rendered today, after five centuries, to this holy monk and consummate artist, gives added meaning to the well deserved tribute We gladly pay him, because, among other things, his memory and his work seem somehow associated with Our own laborious Pontificate. It is a pleasures to recall Our visit fifteen years ago to the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva where his mortal remains are cherished with pious devotion. But in a special way, Fra Angelico, who may be called the ecstatic painter of Mary Queen of Heaven, recalls the extraordinary favor Divine providence granted Our lowliness, that of honoring the Mother of God in singular ways. Among these was crowning with Our own hand the image of the Virgin, as he did so often in the ecstasy of art in masterpieces which throughout the centuries have remained models of celestial beauty.

Acclaimed in every age

And now Our high esteem for Fra Angelico, so many of whose works are here before us, would lead Us to make some analytical comment on his art. However, Our present condition permits Us only to touch briefly upon a few of its most characteristic aspects. We shall leave to the eminent critics the function and pleasure of going deeply into some of the questions which have always interested lovers of art since the age in which he flourished and especially since the science of the history and the criticism of art developed with its own methodology. It is inf act one of the great honors of Fra Angelico that in every age he has claimed the admiring attention of scholars. [127] Nor in fact could he have been overlooked by anyone attempting to trace the main avenues along which Western culture advanced; he is unquestionably one of the pillars of this culture, as a successful promoter of its progress and development as well as an interpreter of his own era.

While in the past and the present critical judgments have been divided in his regard, these judgments have been concerned only with secondary aspects of his personality or of the genesis of his art, or else have differed only in its interpretation. But no honest critic has ever questioned his essential attributes, which are universally recognized, namely, that he was a very great painter, of deep spirituality, a felicitous innovator, an effective, sincere and perfect artist. Although with the passage of time tastes and fashions change in the field of art, too, and although the search for new forms of expression often leads to a certain forgetfulness or disdain of the old, Fra Angelico, like all great and true geniuses, has never in any age suffered a lessening of the admiration he evoked both in the scholar and in the popular mind. His art is bound, it is true, to one time; it belongs to a specific era, succeeded by many, many others. But later developments are not to be considered as improving on or surpassing his art, as if it had lacked perfection or failed to attain its goal. The most modern scholars concur in this basic judgment, and have also resolved in his favor the long debated question as to whether he was a disciple of the Gothic tradition or a precursor of the humanistic renaissance. Fra Angelico was ready and prompt to assimilate the new revivifying currents of art, but he always strove to preserve for it the traditional religious character of its didactic and ethical aims. There is no doubt that he was one of the most representative links in the labor of transition from one period to the next.

Sermon and prayer

Similarly, his personality has been set in its true light, extricated from the popular and pious legend which depicted the fervent friar painting his Saints while absorbed in unconscious ecstasy, his brush guided by superterrestrial beings. This does not mean, however, that his profound religious sense, his serene and austere asceticism, nourished by solid virtue, contemplation and prayer, did not exercise a determining influence on his artistic expression, giving it the potency and immediacy with which it spoke to the minds of others and, as has frequently been noted, transmuting it into prayer, just as he was int h e habit of repeating "he who makes the things of Christ ought always to be with Christ" (G. Vasari, Vite dei piu eccell. Pittori, Scult. ed. Arch., Florence, 1878, t. II, p. 520).

As for whether or not he derives in certain respects from Giotto; what influence Masaccia had on him; with what criteria he resolved the new and difficult problems then debated around the theories of space and light; how he understood the return to classicism; whether he sided with Cennini, who considered that the function of painting was to discover the invisible, [128] and not with Alberti, who restricted the realm of art to the visible alone; whether he intended an explicit polemical stand against the neoplatonic current, which he unquestionably rejected — these questions are still objects of studies and research which do honor to those who conduct them. 

Thomistic in content and technique

The candid piety of Fra Angelico is rightly considered an essential basis for his efficacy as a painter. But still another basis is to be sought in his cultural formation, that is in the doctrine of the universe he learned in the school of the philosophia perennis and to which he adhered with clear and tranquil certitude. Not a few critics have rightly pointed out how Thomistic doctrine is reflected not only in the content of his paintings but also in his style and technique. Fra Angelico takes nature as his point of departure, one might say, like the great Doctor in his exposition of the "five ways." And he loves nature passionately as the work and the reflection of God. However, he insists on highlighting the aesthetic aspects of nature; he seems in fact to be striving boldly to fix upon it his own ideal of beauty, sought in devout contemplation of his supernatural world. The vision of creation in his aesthetic form is neither stunted nor incomplete, for he identifies the beautiful with the true, the good, the holy, the perfect, the chaste, almost in the same way that the Divine perfections, of which creatures are the reflection, are not really distinct in God but only more or less explicitly so because of the innate weakness of the created intellect.

The Alpha and the Omega

Likewise he has learned from the teachings of St. Thomas the great synthesis of the universe, which, varied as it is in the elements which compose it, takes its origin from God and returns to Him after having run its course in the form of an orbit radiant with harmony, beauty, truth and holiness. This synthesis seems reflected in those famous compositions in which delightful figures of angels, saints, friars and virgins form a crown for the throne of the Redeemer and his Mother.

Celestial light

Certainly Fra Angelico's painting is always religious, both in subject matter and in style and method of treatment. Accustomed to the tranquility of monastic discipline, and striving always for perfection in intention, in word, and in action, it is natural he should seek to attain it also in the techniques of his art, which, as a result, is always cleanly bright and serene. In his life, as in his paintings, there are no moments of exterior drama, but inner struggles, fought in complete resignation to the Divine Will and with calm confidence in the victory of good. The very light which he pours over his figures and through his backgrounds is measurable not so much in quantity as by its quality of purity; it is in so far as possible, a celestial light.

Spiritual lyricism

His themes are simple and [129] linear, patterned as it were on the style of the Evangelists. His figures always reveal an intense interior life. Their countenances, their gestures, their movements are all transfigured by it. As he narrates or expounds the divine mysteries to his audience, Fra Angelico is ever the skillful [sic] "preacher," seeking to elicit an immediate response with descriptive and decorative elements in order to speak more quietly to the inmost soul. When, on the other hand, his aim is to offer a subject for contemplation to his brother monks, practised [sic] in the meditation of supernatural truths, he is careful to eliminate any element of distraction, such as strong tones of light and color or the busy converse of too many figures and gestures, and his emphasis then is on the purely internal. The figures are sublimated in an ethereal, other-worldly lightness, the background is empty, the canvas is smaller, and the decorative elements so dear to him, like the gentle landscapes of his native Tuscany and the architectural forms created by Brunelleschi, disappear. The result is a spiritual lyricism, bursting from pure interior harmony, which still hovers in the cells and corridors of the convent of San Marco in Florence, whose walls alone would be sufficient to celebrate an artist's immortal glory.

On occasion, as in this "study" of Nicholas V and in other large altar pieces, he uses a monumental style but always within the measure allowed by his artistic purpose, become by now his unalterable canon of expression, namely, to speak of things divine in accents which are true and understandable but at the same time worthy of God and of his Saints.

Religion, a transhumanizing force

But what is substantially the aim of the picture language which Fra Angelico addresses to the children of his own and succeeding centuries? On the one hand, his purpose is to teach the truths of faith, convincing men's minds by the very force of their beauty. On the other, he aims to draw the faithful to the practice of the Christian virtues by setting before them beautiful and attractive examples. Because of this second purpose, his work becomes a perennial message of living Christianity, and, in a certain sense a sublimely human message based on the principle of the transhumanizing force of religion, by virtue of which everyone who comes in direct contact with God and his mysteries becomes like Him in holiness, in beauty and in bliss; becomes, that is, a creature according to the original design of his Creator. 

Model man—balanced, serene, perfect

Fra Angelico's brush, therefore, gives life to a kind of model man, not unlike the angels, in whom all is balanced, serene, perfect: a model man and Christian, rarely found perhaps in the circumstances of earthly life but still to be offered for imitation by the people. Look carefully at the Saints who surround Christ and the Virgin, or even the anonymous figures in his picture stories. They betray no intellectual uncertainties or torments; each of them enjoys the [130] calm possession of the truth, which he has attained by natural knowledge or by supernatural faith. Their will is oriented toward the good; the passions, reactions, emotions to which they are subject because they are human creatures, are always tempered by the inner control of the soul. The tears for the dead Redeemer represent indeed a bitter grief but not desperate anguish. The joy of the blessed is not yet abandonment to uncontainable exultation. The austerity of the penitents has no shadow of torment. The contemplative concentration of St. Dominic is quite different from the ecstatic abstraction which would erase his human personality. The vehemence of John the Baptist is controlled by the strong temper of his soul. This moderation in the passions and emotions is what Fra Angelico wished to preach to Christian souls. 

Positive goodness

A positive goodness, besides, clothes every one of his figures, be they angels, or saintly religious, or humble folk. His Madonnas breathe a material goodness even when seated in majestic grandeur on a throne. The angel who has received from God the tremendous duty of driving the first parents from Eden manages to lay a sword-free hand on Adam's shoulder, as if to give him courage and hope. Even the wicked judges and executioners of the martyrs have a certain air of goodness about them, as if they were conscious of being the instruments of God's glory.

It might be said, in fact, that the artist himself declares his inability to portray what is turbid or evil. Constrained at times to include in his world the darker elements of human reality, he avoids as much as possible their direct portrayal, as can be noted in the "Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian" and in the "Last Judgment." The group of the damned in the latter painting is attributed by some to disciples of his school.

Man, in Fra Angelico's world, which is the world of truth, is naturally neither good nor holy. But he can and must become so, for holiness is easy and beautiful, since Christ, whose ultimate sacrifice he painted so often, died for this very purpose, His most holy Mother is the supreme example of it, the Saints rejoice because they have attained it and the Angels take delight in conversing with the Saints.

Reward of virtue

To win souls to the virtues he sets before them, he highlights not so much the effort of achieving them as the bliss that comes from possessing them and the nobility of those adorned by them. Thus the profound humility of the Virgin listening to Gabriel is expressed in her face with the same queenliness that illumines it as she is crowned by her Son. Thus both portraits of the Virgin bespeak the same queenliness, except for the slight hint of perturbation in the one, transformed into a delicate smile of joyousness in the other. In the condemnation of St. Stephen, virtue and passion confront each other in the persons of the accused and the judge respectively. But the accused humiliates the man of power, though seated on his throne, by the [131] sheer fearless strength of his faith. Fra Angelico is unsurpassed in weaving praises of other Christian virtues. This praise becomes perhaps a poem in the wonderful fresco here which might be called the apotheosis of poverty and misfortune endured with a Christian spirit. The blind man, the paralytic, the man covered with sores, the widow and the other poor who cluster about the holy deacon Lawrence draw from the Christian faith that fills them a shining dignity which their pitiful miseries cannot obscure. Perhaps one of the many delightful angels who grace his other pictures would not be out of place in this group of human creatures, who may be poor but whose soul is rich with serenity and hope.

World of peace and holiness

The world of Fra Angelico's paintings is indeed the ideal world, radiant with the aura of peace, holiness, harmony and joy; its reality lies int he future when ultimate justice will triumph over a new earth and new heavens (cf. 2 Pet. 3, 13). Yet, this gentle and blessed world can even now come to life in the recesses of men's souls, and it is to them he offers it, inviting them to enter in. It is this invitation which seems to Us to be the message Fra Angelico entrusts to his art, confident that it will thus be effectively spread. 

Art and religion

It is true that an explicit religious or ethical function is not demanded of art as art. If, as the aesthetic expression of the human spirit, it reflects that spirit in its complete verity or at least does not positively distort it, art is in itself sacred and religious, that is, in so far as it is the interpreter of a work of God. But if its content and aim are such as Fra Angelico gave his painting, then art rises to the dignity almost of a minister of God, reflecting a greater number of perfections.

Sublime possibility

We should like to point out to artists, who are ever dear to Us, this sublime possibility of art. For if instead the words and cadences of artistic expression were fitted to minds which are false, empty and confused, that is, unlike the Creator's plan, if, instead of lifting the mind and heart to noble sentiments, art excited the baser passions, it would indeed encounter some response and welcome, if only because of its novelty, which is not always a virtue, and because of the slim fraction of reality reflected in all human expression. But such art would be a degradation of itself; it would be a negation of its primary and essential character. Nor would it be universal and eternal, like the human spirit to which it speaks.

A message religious and human

In paying homage to the greatness of the artist and in inviting Our beloved sons to accept, almost as if disposed by Providence, the religious and human message of Fra Giovanni of Fiesole, Our mind cannot escape the anxious consideration of the present world in which we live, so different form that portrayed in these wonderful [132] paintings, win which the loftiest and truest human aspirations are sealed with exquisite artistry.

Ardently therefore do We hope that the breath of Christian goodness, serenity and Divine harmony that escapes from the works of Fra Angelico may pervade the hearts of all, while in pledge of more abundant grace from heaven, We impart with all Our heart Our paternal Apostolic Blessing.

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Source: Pius XII, "The Art of Fra Angelico: Window into Heaven," address, The Pope Speaks 2, no. 2 (summer 1955): 125-132.

Pius XII, Address to the First International Congress of Catholic Artists (September 3, 1950)

 [3] You have undertaken a thing both timely and useful, dearly beloved sons, in promoting and organizing among yourselves the First International Congress of Catholic Artists, the distinguished representatives of which we are happy to greet on this occasion.

So much has already been said about art — that inexhaustible subject! Your present undertaken moves us to outline — very briefly — art's part in the task of Peace [sic]. Pax Romana!

The tremors of a world shaken to its foundation, misunderstandings between the minds of men, opposing interests, and shadows cast by hypersensitive individualism — all these, despite the new abundance of contacts and assimilation in material matters, have sharpened the sense of separateness, broadened and deepened the moral distances. The very excess of this evil has bit by bit made clearer the need for uniting in common action all the scattered strength of the nations and peoples anxious for peace. 

Neither to-day nor yet yesterday have first seen tenacious and skilful [sic] efforts everywhere aimed at bringing about joint action or cooperation with other lands. Contemporary events have stressed, not the futility and uselessness, but rather the inadequacy and shallow-rootedness of such efforts. Hence, with laudable eagerness, and faced with difficulties of every kind, men have set about establishing international associations on the political, juridical, economic, and social levels. it was promptly realized that there was still need for something more intimate, more human, and associations — at least partial associations — have begun to take shape in the technical, scientific, and cultural realms.

On this intellectual level, the Congress of Catholic Artists, now holding its first general meeting, ranks among the most estimable activities. This is self-evident, given first of all that art is, in certain respects, the most living, the most all-inclusive expression of human thought and feeling, and, moreover, the most broadly understandable, because art, speaking directly to the senses, knows not the diversity of tongues, but only the highly stimulating diversity of temperaments and mentalities. What is more, thanks to its subtlety and refinement, art — whether heard or seen — reaches depths in the mind and heart of him who beholds or listens, which words, either spoken or written, with their insufficiently shaded analytical precision, cannot attain.

For these two reasons, art helps men — regardless of all differences in character, education, or civilization — to know themselves, to understand themselves, at least mutually to comprehend each other and, consequently, to make common store of their respective resources with a view to rounding themselves out, one complementing the other. 

A first condition is required for art to be able to produce so desirable a result: namely, its expressive value, lacking [4] which it ceases to be a true art. To say as much is not superfluous in our day when all too often, among certain groups, the work of art is not sufficient in itself to render the thought, to externalize the feelings, to lay bare the soul of its author. Yet the moment it needs to be explained in verbal terms, it loses its value as a sign and serves only to afford the senses a physical joy rising no higher than their own level, or else it affords the mind merely the pleasure of subtle and useless play. Another condition exists if art is to accomplish fruitfully and worthily its glorious mission of understanding, of concord, and of peace; this is that through art the senses, far from burdening the soul and anchoring it to earth, should indeed supply the soul with wings, with which it may lift itself above passing trifles and meannesses toward the eternal, toward the true, toward the beautiful, toward the only true good, toward the only centre [sic] where union takes place, where unity is achieved, toward God. Is it not here that we may literally apply the resplendent utterance of the Apostle? "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen — His everlasting power also and Divinity — being understood through the things that are made." (Rom. i. 20.)

Hence all the schools of thought which cause art to forfeit its sublime role profane it and make it sterile. "Art for art's sake": as though it could serve itself as it sown end, sentenced to bestir itself, to drag itself about close to sensible and material things; as though through art man's senses do not obey a vocation higher than that of the simple apprehension of material nature, the vocation to awaken in the mind and soul of man, thanks to the transparency of that nature, the desire for "things that the eye has not seen or ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man." (I Cor. ii. 9.)

We shall say nothing here about an immoral art, which professedly lowers and enslaves the soul's spiritual powers to the passions of the flesh. After all, the words "art" and "immoral" are in flagrant contradiction, and your programme [sic] nowhere suggests their union. Congratulations, then, Gentlemen, for having understood the task incumbent upon you and for having desired, in the face of a "culture without hope" to regard art as "the source of a new hope." Make then to smile upon the earth, upon mankind, the reflection of the divine beauty and the divine light, and you shall, as you help man to love all things which are true, pure, just, holy, and worthy of love, have greatly contributed to the task of peace, and the "God of peace will be with you." (Cf. Phil. iv. 8-9.) May the immaculate Virgin, mirror of God's justice and splendor, Queen of peace, and whom we may well call the Queen of the arts, inspire and help you, may she cause to descend upon you, whose .lovingly contemplated ideal she is, her Son's graces, in pledge of which we give you — you and the whole body of Catholic artists and all those who are dear to you — our apostolic benediction.

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Source: Pius XII, "The Sovereign Pontiff's Address to the First International Congress of Catholic Artists" (September 3, 1950), address, Liturgical Arts 19, no. 1 (1950): 3-4.

N.M. Wagner on Secular Orchestral Masses (1909)

 [92] Why are the Masses composed by Jos. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Cherubini, Bruch and Gounod not true church music?

We admit that the musical composition as such is of artistic value; however, the Masses of these masters are not true church music because the spirit of the decrees issued by the Church on church music is wanting in them, either because of

(a) their form (concert-like, soli, duetts [sic], superfluous repetition of words, incorrect text or misplacement of words or omission of words) or because of

(b) their style of musical composition (which is worldly, theatrical, distracting instead of edifying; while the composition is not suited to the words, but the words are forced to suit the music). For instance, do we not notice in Mozart's "C" Mass motives similar to those in the opera Cosi Fan Tutti? Does the Gloria in Gounod's Paschal Mass not spontaneously remind us of passages in his Faust? In the style of musical composition employed, these men did not, therefore, distinguish between music for the stage and music for the church. Again, I find a Sanctus in one of Bruch's Masses the rendition of which would take about as long as a Credo of one of the Cecilian Masses, not to mention the ridiculously long Masses of Beethoven and Haydn; e.g., Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.

The impossibility of rendering the classical compositions of these masters [Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart] with correctness and fidelity, because of their difficulty, prompted imitators like Wiegand, Lambillotte, Millard, Giorza, Diabelli, Dachauer, La Hache, Mercadante, Novello, Farmer, Stearn, etc., etc., to produce diluted substitutes. These imitators would obviate the difficulties while retaining the attractive form of the others, and their results are found in the compositions which, in abundance of repititon of words and mutilation of text, go beyond the classical authors, and in their attempt to give musical value merely become vulgar.

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Source: Excerpt of an address by Rev. N. M. Wagner (trans. from German) in St. Peter's Church, Newark, NJ in "Notes," Church Music: A Magazine for the Clergy, Choirmasters and Organists 4, no. 2 (Jan. 1909): 92.

Igor Stravinsky on Universality and Order in Music

[75] It just so happens that our contemporary epoch offers us the example of a musical culture that is day by day losing the sense of continuity and the taste for a common language.

Individual caprice and intellectual anarchy, which tend to control the world in which we live, isolate the artist from his fellow artists and condemn him to appear as a monster in the eyes of the public; a monster of originality, inventor of his own language, of his own vocabulary, and of the apparatus of his art. The use of already employed materials and of established forms is usually forbidden him. So he comes to the point of speaking an idiom without relation to the world that listens to him. His art becomes truly unique, in the sense [76] that it is incommunicable and shut off on every side. The erratic block is no longer a curiosity that is an exception; it is the sole model offered neophytes for emulation.

The appearance of a series of anarchic, incompatible, and contradictory tendencies in the field of history corresponds to this complete break in tradition. Times have changed since the day when Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi quite evidently spoke the same language which their disciples repeated after them, each one unwittingly transforming this language according to his own personality. The day when Haydn, Mozart, and Cimarosa echoed each other in works that served their successors as models, successors such as Rossini, who was fond of repeating in so touching a way that Mozart had been the delight of his youth, the desperation of his maturity, and the consolation of his old age.

Those times have given way to a new age that seeks to reduce everything to uniformity in the realm of matter while it tends to shatter all universality in the realm of the spirit in deference to an anarchic individualism. That his how once universal centers of culture have become isolated. They withdraw into a national, even regional, framework, which in its turn splits up to the point of eventual disappearance.

[77] Whether he wills it or not, the contemporary artist is caught in this infernal machination. There are simple souls who rejoice in this state of affairs. There are criminals who approve of it. Only a few are horrified at a solitude that obliges them to turn in upon themselves when everything invites them to participate in social life.

The universality whose benefits we are gradually losing is an entirely different thing from the cosmopolitanism that is beginning to take hold of us. Universality presupposes the fecundity of a culture that is spread and communicated everywhere, whereas cosmopolitanism provides for neither action nor doctrine and induces the indifferent passivity of a sterile eclecticism.

Universality necessarily stipulates submission to an established order. And its reasons for this stipulation are convincing. We submit to this order out of sympathy or prudence. In either case the benefits of submission are not long in appearing.

In a society like that of the Middle Ages, which recognized and safeguarded the primacy of the spiritual realm and the dignity of the human person (which must not be confused with the individual)—in such a society recognition by everyone of a hierarchy of values and a body of moral principles established an order of things that put everyone in accord concerning certain fundamental [78] concepts of good and evil, truth and error. I do not say of beauty and ugliness, because it is absolutely futile to dogmatize in so subjective a domain.

It should not surprise us then that social order has never directly governed these matters. As a matter of fact, it is not by promulgating an aesthetic, but by improving the status of man and by exalting the competent workman in the artist that a civilization communicates something of its order to works of art and speculation. The good artisan himself in those happy ages dreams of achieving the beautiful only through the categories of the useful. His prime concern is applied to the rightness of an operation that is performed well, in keeping with a true order. The aesthetic impression that will arise from this rightness will not be legitimately achieved except insofar as it was not calculated. Poussin said quite correctly that "the goal of art is delectation." He did not say that this delectation should be the goal of the artist who must always submit solely to the demands of the work to be done.

It is a fact of experience, and one that is only seemingly paradoxical, that we find freedom in a strict submission to the object: "It is not wisdom, but foolishness, that is stubborn," says Sophocles, in the magnificent translation of Antigone given us by André Bonnard. "Look at the trees. By embracing [78] the movements of the tempest they preserve their tender branches; but if they rear against the wind they are carried off, roots and all."

Let us take the best example: the fugue, a pure form in which the music means nothing outside itself. Doesn't the fugue imply the composer's submission to the rules? And is it not within those strictures that he finds the full flowering of his freedom as a creator? Strength, says Leonardo da Vinci, is born of constraint and dies in freedom.

Insubordination boasts of just the opposite and does away with constraint in the ever-disappointed hope of finding in freedom the principle of strength. Instead, it finds in freedom only the arbitrariness of whim and the disorders of fancy. Thus it loses every vestige of control, loses its bearings and ends by demanding of music things outside its scope and competence. Do we not, in truth, ask the impossible of music when we expect it to express feelings, to translate dramatic situations, even to imitate nature? And, as if it were not enough to condemn music to the job of being an illustrator, the century to which we owe what it called "progress through enlightenment" invented for good measure the monumental absurdity which consists of bestowing on every accessory, as well as on every feeling and every character of the lyrical drama, a sort of check-room number called a Leitmotiv—a [80] system that led Debussy to say that the Ring struck him as a sort of vast musical city directory.

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Source: Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 75–80.

Igor Stravinsky on Revolution and The Rite of Spring

[11] I am well aware that there is a point of view that regards the period in which The Rite of Spring appeared as one that witnessed a revolution. A revolution whose conquests are said to be in the process of assimilation today. I deny the validity of that opinion. I hold that it was wrong to have considered me a revolutionary. When The Rite appeared, many opinions were advanced concerning it. In the tumult of contradictory opinions my friend Maurice Ravel intervened practically alone to set matters right. He was able to see, and he said, that the novelty of The Rite consisted, not in the "writing," not in the orchestration, not in the technical apparatus of the work, but in the musical entity.

I was made a revolutionary in spite of myself. Now, revolutionary outbreaks are never completely spontaneous. There are clever people who bring about revolutions with malice aforethought . . . It is always necessary to guard against being misrepresented by those who impute to you an intention not your own. For myself, I never hear anyone talk about revolution without thinking of the conversation that G. K. Chesterton tells us he had, on landing in France, with a Calais innkeeper. [12] The innkeeper complained bitterly of the harshness of life and the increasing lack of freedom: "'It's hardly worth while,' concluded the innkeeper, 'to have had three revolutions only to end up every time just where you started.'" Whereupon Chesterton pointed out to him that a revolution, in the true sense of the word, was the movement of an object in motion that described a closed curve, and thus always returned to the point from where it had started . . .

The tone of a work like The Rite may have appeared arrogant, the language that it spoke may have seemed harsh in its newness, but that in no way implies that it is revolutionary in the most subversive sense of the word.

If one only need break a habit to merit being labeled revolutionary, then every musician who has something to say and who in order to say it goes beyond the bounds of established conventions would be known as revolutionary. Why burden the dictionary of the fine arts with this stertorous term, which designates in its most usual acceptation a state of turmoil and violence, when there are so many other words better adapted to designate originality?

In truth, I should be hard pressed to cite for you a single fact in the history of art that might be qualified as revolutionary. Art is by essence constructive. [13] Revolution implies a disruption of equilibrium. To speak of revolution is to speak of a temporary chaos. Now art is the contrary of chaos. It never gives itself up to chaos without immediately finding its living works, its very existence, threatened.

The quality of being revolutionary is generally attributed to artists in our day with a laudatory intent, undoubtedly because we are living in a period when revolution enjoys a kind of prestige among yesterday's elite. Let us understand each other: I am the first to recognize that daring is the motive force of the finest and greatest acts; which is all the more reason for not putting it unthinkingly at the service of disorder and base cravings in a desire to cause sensation at any price. I approve of daring; I set no limits to it. But likewise there are no limits to the mischief wrought by arbitrary acts.

To enjoy to the full the conquests of daring, we must demand that it operate in a pitiless light. We are working in its favor when we denounce the false wares that would usurp its place. Gratuitous excess spoils every substance, every form that it touches. In its blundering it impairs the effectiveness of the most valuable discoveries and at the same time corrupts the taste of its devotees—which explains why their taste often plunges without [14] transition from the wildest complications to the flattest banalities.

A musical complex, however harsh it may be, is legitimate to the extent to which it is genuine. But to recognize genuine values in the midst of the excesses of sham one must be gifted with a sure instinct that our snobs hate all the more intensely for being themselves completely deprived of it.

Our vanguard elite, sworn perpetually to outdo itself, expects and requires that music should satisfy the taste for absurd cacophony.

I say cacophony without fear of being classed with the ranks of conventional pompiers, the laudatores temporis acti. And in using the word I am certain I am not in the least reversing myself. My position in this regard is exactly the same as it was at the time when I composed The Rite and when people saw fit to call me a revolutionary. Today, just as in the past, I am on my guard against counterfeit money and take care not to accept it for the true coin of the realm. Cacophony means bad sound, contraband merchandise, uncoordinated music that will not stand up under serious criticism. Whatever opinion one may hold about the music of Arnold Schoenberg (to take as an example of a composer evolving along lines essentially different from mine, both aesthetically and technically), whose works have frequently given rise to violent [15] reactions or ironic smiles—it is impossible for a self-respecting mind equipped with genuine musical culture not to feel that the composer of Pierrot Lunaire is fully aware of what he is doing and that he is not trying to deceive anyone. He adopted the musical system that suited his needs and, within this system, he is perfectly consistent with himself, perfectly coherent. One cannot dismiss music that he dislikes by labeling it cacophony.

Equally degrading is the vanity of snobs who boast of an embarrassing familiarity with the world of the incomprehensible and who delightedly confess that they find themselves in good company. It is not music they seek, but rather the effect of shock, the sensation that befuddles understanding.

So I confess that I am completely insensitive to the prestige of revolution. All the noise it may make will not call forth the slightest echo in me. For revolution is one thing, innovation another. And even innovation, when not presented in an excessive form, is not always recognized by its contemporaries. Let me take as an example the work of a composer whom I choose purposely because his music, the qualities of which have long been clearly recognized, has become so universally popular that barrel-organs everywhere have made it their own.

I am speaking of Charles Gounod. Don't be surprised at my lingering over Gounod for a moment. [16] It is not so much the composer of Faust who holds my attention as it is the example that Gounod offers us of a work whose most obvious merits were misunderstood when they were still new by the very people whose mission it is to be exactly informed about the realities they have to judge.

Take Faust. The first critics of this famous opera refused to acknowledge in Gounod the melodic inventiveness that today seems to us the dominant trait of his talent. They even went so far as to question whether he had any melodic gift at all. They saw in Gounod "a symphonist astray in the theater," a "severe musician," to use their own terms, and, of course, more "learned" than "inspired." Naturally, they reproached him with having "achieved his effects not through the voices, but through the orchestra."

In 1862, three years after the first performances of Faust, the Gazette musicale of Paris declared quite flatly that Faust, as a whole, "was not the work of a melodist." As for the famous Scudo [Pierre Scudo (1806–1864) was a famous conservative French music critic], whose word was law for the Revue des Deux Mondes, this Scudo in the same year turned out the following historical masterpiece, which I should never forgive myself for not quoting to you in full:

Monsieur Gounod, to his misfortune, admires certain outmoded portions of Beethoven's [17] last quartets. They constitute the muddied wellspring from which issue the bad musicians of modern Germany: the Liszts, the Wagners, the Schumanns, and even Mendelssohn in certain questionable aspects of his style. If Monsieur Gounod has really made his own the doctrine of continuous melody, of the melody of the virgin forest and of the setting sun, that constitutes the charm of Tannhäuser and of Lohengrin, a melody that may be compared to Harlequin's letter: "as for periods and commas, I don't give them a thought, I leave it to you to put them wherever you wish"—Monsieur Gounod in that case, which I should like to believe impossible, will be irrevocably lost.

But even the Germans corroborated the good Scudo after their fashion. As a matter of fact, one could read in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten that Gounod wasn't French, but Belgian, and that his compositions did not bear the stamp of the contemporary French and Italian schools, but precisely that of the German school in which he had been educated and formed.

Because the literature that springs up on every side of music has not changed in the last [18] seventy years and because, while music is constantly changing, the commentators who refuse to take note of these transformations do not themselves change—we must naturally take up cudgels.

Therefore, I am going to be polemical. I am not afraid to admit this. I shall be polemical not in my own defense, but in order to defend in words all music and its principles, just as I defend them in a different way with my compositions.

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Source: Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 11–18.

Igor Stravinsky on Creativity and Dogmatic Principles

[6] In fact, we cannot observe the creative phenomenon independently of the form in which it is made manifest. Every formal process proceeds from a principle, and the study of this principle requires precisely what we call dogma. In other words, the need that we feel to bring order out of chaos, to extricate the straight line of our operation from the tangle of possibilities and the indecision of vague thoughts, presupposes the necessity of some sort of dogmatism. I use the words dogma and dogmatic, then, only insofar as they designate an element essential to safeguarding the integrity of [7] art and mind, and I maintain that in this context they do not usurp their function.

The very fact that we have recourse to what we call order—that order which permits us to dogmatize in the field we are considering—not only develops our taste for dogmatism: it also incites us to place our own creative activity under the aegis of dogmatism. That is why I should like to see you accept the term.

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Source: Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 6–7.

Igor Stravinsky on Artistic Taste and Tradition

[57] One cannot force one's self to love; but love presupposes understanding, and in order to understand, one must exert one's self.

The same problem was posed in the Middle Ages by the theologians of pure love. To understand in order to love; to love in order to understand: we are here not going around in a vicious circle; we are rising spirally, providing that we have made an initial effort, have even just gone through a routine exercise. [...]

The faculty of observation and of making something out of what is observed belongs only to the person who at least possesses, in his particular field of endeavor, an acquired culture and an innate taste. A dealer, an art-lover who is the first to buy the canvases of an unknown painter who will be [58] famous twenty-five years later under the name of Cézanne—doesn't such a person give us a clear example of his innate taste? What else guides him in his choice? A flair, an instinct from which this taste proceeds, a completely spontaneous faculty anterior to reflection.

As for culture, it is a sort of upbringing which, in the social sphere, confers polish upon education, sustains and rounds out academic instruction. This upbringing is just as important in the sphere of taste, and is essential to the creator who must ceaselessly refine his taste or run the risk of losing his perspicacity. Our mind, as well as our body, requires continual exercise. It atrophies if we do not cultivate it.

It is culture that brings out the full value of taste and gives it a chance to prove its worth simply by its application. The artist imposes a culture upon himself and ends by imposing it upon others. That is how tradition becomes established.

Tradition is entirely different from habit, even from an excellent habit, since habit is by definition an unconscious acquisition and tends to become mechanical, whereas tradition results from a conscious and deliberate acceptance. A real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone; it is a living force that animates and informs the present. In this sense the paradox that banteringly [59] maintains that everything that is not tradition is plagiarism is true. . . .

Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the reality of what endures. It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to one's descendants.

Brahms was born sixty years after Beethoven. From the one to the other, and from every aspect, the distance between them is great; they do not dress the same way, but Brahms follows the tradition of Beethoven without borrowing one of his habiliments. For the borrowing of a method has nothing to do with observing a tradition. "A method is replaced; a tradition is carried forward in order to produce something new." Tradition thus assures the continuity of creation. The example that I have just cited does not constitute an exception but is one proof out of a hundred of a constant law. This sense of tradition that is a natural need must not be confused with the desire the composer feels to affirm the kinship he finds across the centuries with some master of the past.

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Source: Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), 57–59.

Repost: Jacques Maritain on Sacred Art

Allow me to put before you today some very brief and very simple reflections. You will, no doubt, consider them too simple, but still I hope that they are inspired by good sense.

What I should like to examine with you very rapidly is the present state of relations between Catholic artists and the Catholic public. We must observe right off that in general they are not very satisfied with one another. And as in family quarrels, we must no doubt say here too that there are "faults on both sides," and that each side has some good reasons for complaining.

Just about everything has been said about what is called the art of Saint-Sulpice -- an ill-chosen phrase, it must be said, and one that is very insulting to an estimable Parisian parish, the more so because the scourge in question is world-wide in scope; about the diabolical ugliness, offensive to God and much more harmful than is generally believed to the spread of religion, of the majority of the objects turned out by modern manufacture for the decoration of churches; about the kind of bitter contempt that still reigns in some "respectable" circles with regard to artists and poets; lastly about the absence of taste and artistic formation that makes so greatly to be desired the establishment in seminaries of courses in aesthetics or the history of art such as Pius XI, before his elevation to the Pontificate, organized at Milan.

Yes, indeed; but on the other hand there are a great many parish priests who ardently desire to fulfill the wish of Pius X, "to have their people pray before beauty," and who are trying to rid their churches of the products belched forth from the cellars of religious mercantilism. Yet many of these, we must candidly confess, are not satisfied with what is proposed to them in the name of modern Art. I am clearly not referring to a few superior works, but to the average run of works produced these last few years. Our affection for our friends must not prevent us -- rather the contrary -- from stating what may still be lacking in an effort that in other respects commands our heartiest admiration. And I say that often these parish priests are right, for their office, let's make no mistake about it, is not to encourage the fine arts, but to give the faithful that which answers their spiritual needs, that which can truly serve the religious life of a Christian community. One sometimes sees them driven to fall back in despair upon the art of Saint-Sulpice. Why? Because these products of commercial manufacture, when they are not too disgusting, have at least the advantage of being perfectly indeterminate, so neutral, so empty that we can look at them without seeing them, and thus project onto them our own sentiments; whereas certain modern works, and the most agitated and impassioned among them, seek to impose on us by violence the individual emotions, exactly as they are -- in the brute state, and with all that they have of the most subjective -- of the artist himself. And in praying, instead of finding oneself before a representation of Our Lord or some Saint it is an unbearable torture to receive full in the chest, like a blow of the fist, the religious sensibility of Mr. So-and-So.

The present difficulties, to tell the truth, stem from deep-seated causes, and in the end from the crisis of our whole civilization. Religious art is not a thing that can be isolated from art itself, from the general movement of the art of an age: isolate it, and it grows corrupt, becomes dead letter. But on the other hand the art of a period carries with it all the intellectual and spiritual stuff that constitutes the life of this period; and notwithstanding all the rare and superior qualities contemporary art may possess in the order of sensibility, quality and invention, the spirituality it conveys is often quite mediocre and sometimes quite corrupt.

This is why Christian artists find themselves faced with very grave difficulties. On the one hand, they have to reaccustom to beauty the faithful, whose taste has been spoiled for more than a century past -- and we must not forget that, given the purpose for which it is intended, religious art, as prescribed by Urban VIII on March 15, 1642, and by the Council of Trent, must not have an "unfamiliar" character -- and so it is a question of destroying bad aesthetic habits while restoring a good one: no easy task. On the other hand, in order to recover a truly living religious art, they must lift up, spiritualize, and bring to the feet of God all of modern art: no easy task either. It is true that by this very fact the Christian artist, if he has the genius, is in a privileged position to profit from the whole modern effort.

What follows from all of this? It is only too evident that the Catholic public would fail in an essential and particularly urgent duty if it failed to understand the capital importance of the task undertaken with admirable generosity by so many artists who are working to reintroduce sensible beauty into the house of God, if it did not effectively support them, and if, even when it does not approve of this or that work in particular, it did not surround them with a fraternal sympathy. But it is also clear that Catholic artists for their part must make every effort to understand the legitimate needs of the faithful, for whose common good they are working, and to ascertain, courageously, the proper conditions and exigencies of the task to which they are devoting themselves.

But, it may be asked, cannot certain of these conditions be stated? I think, in any case, that a few elementary truths which force themselves upon us concerning religious art can be disengaged, which, if they were universally recognized, would doubtless facilitate concord between the public and artists. Allow me to attempt to formulate some of them, ones on which, I believe, all of us here are agreed, and which correspond to the common sentiment of all our friends.

First Observation. There is no style reserved to religious art, there is no religious technique. Anyone who believes in the existence of a religious technique is on the high road to Benton. If it is true that not every style is equally suited to sacred art, it is still more true that sacred art, as I said a moment ago, cannot be isolated, that it must, in each period, following the example of God Himself who speaks the language of men, assume, while superelevating them from within, all the means and all the technical vitality, so to speak, that the contemporary generation puts at its disposal. (From this point of view, let us observe parenthetically, it does not seem at all necessary that Christian artists, particularly those who have not come into full possession of their craft, should work exclusively in sacred art. Let them begin with still-lifes, let them accustom themselves to discovering a religious sense in the inevitable apples, fruit-dish, pipe and guitar.)

There are, however, it seems to me, in the technical order, two requisite conditions for religious art as such, granted its special object and the purpose for which it is intended.

1. It must be legible. For it is there above all for the instruction of the people, it is a theology in figures. An illegible, obscure and Mallarméan religious art is as absurd as a house without a staircase or a cathedral without a portal.

2. The work must be finished. I do not mean finished in the academic sense, but in the most material and humble meaning of this word. It is supremely fitting that nothing enter the house of God but work that is well made, complete, proper, durable, honest. This must clearly be understood according to the mode peculiar to the style and the means adopted, but the facility with which in our day one is satisfied with oneself makes it necessary to insist on this point.

Second Observation. Sacred art is in absolute dependence upon theological wisdom. In the signs it presents to our eyes something infinitely superior to all our human art is manifested, divine Truth itself, the treasure of light that was purchased for us by the blood of Christ. It is above all for this reason, because the sovereign interests of the Faith are at stake in the matter, that the Church exercises her authority and magisterium over sacred art. I recalled a moment ago the decree of Urban VIII of March 15, 1642, and the prescript of the 25th session of the Council of Trent. There are other instances. On June 11, 1623, the Congregation of Rites proscribed crucifixes representing Christ with arms updrawn. On September 11, 1670, a decree of the Holy Office forbade the making of crucifixes "in a form so coarse and artless, in an attitude so indecent, with features so distorted by grief that they provoke disgust rather than pious attention." And you know that in March, 1921, the Holy Office forbade the exhibition in churches of certain works of the Flemish painter Servaes.

Here is a point that merits all our attention. Servaes is a painter of great talent, a Christian full of faith, and one can only speak of his person with respect and affection; I am happy to bear testimony to him here. The Stations of the Cross which raised such violent commotion in Belgium gave birth to deep religious emotions in certain souls, nay more, brought about conversions. Nevertheless the Church condemned it, and it is never difficult, even when the appearances and the human procedures disconcert us, to understand the wisdom and justice of the Church's decisions. In spite of himself, assuredly, and not in his soul but in his work, the painter, fascinated by the Ego sum vermis et non homo of Isaias and conceiving his Stations as a pure vertigo of grief, happened to be false to certain theological truths of capital importance -- above all the truth that the sufferings as well as the death of Our Lord were essentially voluntary, and that it was a divine Person who suffered the most appalling human suffering: the pain and agony of His Humanity were handled by the Word as the tool with which He performed His great work. At the same time, for those who cannot harmonize the poor figurations that art places before their eyes and the pure image living in our hearts of the most beautiful of the children of men (in Him, as in His Mother, as Cajetan reminds us in his treatise De Spasmo beatae Virginis, the supreme torments of Calvary, though piercing the mind still more cruelly than the body, left reason intact under the Cross, in full exercise of its dominion over the sensitive part) -- for these, I say, certain plastic deformations, a certain degenerate aspect of the contour, take on the value of an offense against the Humanity of the Savior, and, as it were, of a doctrinal misapprehension of the sovereign dignity of His soul and body.

At a time when the truth of the Faith is threatened on all sides, why be surprised that the Church is more concerned than ever about the doctrinal distortions that can be implied in certain works of art intended for the faithful, whatever may be in other respects their aesthetic value and the salutary emotions they may here or there excite, and whatever may be the piety, faith, depth of spiritual life, and uprightness of intention of the artist who produced them?

May I be permitted however to add that from this same point of view of dogma the base sentimentality of so many commercial products must equally vex sound theology, and is doubtless tolerated only as one of those abuses to which we resign ourselves for a time, considering human weakness and what may be called, adapting a phrase of Holy Writ, "the infinite number of Christians with bad taste."

This ultimate control by theology that I just mentioned, and which presupposes in the artist a true theological culture, clearly does not impose on sacred art any aesthetic genre, any style, any particular technique. We must, however, realize that it communicates to it, as it were spontaneously, certain general directions. Thus the intrinsic characteristics of the object represented have assuredly for sacred art a very special importance: not, certainly, from the point of view of the naturalist imitation of material detail and picturesque appearance, which is more out of place and execrable here than elsewhere, but from the point of view of the laws of intellectual signification. If one reflects on the essential deficiency of the means of expression of human art in relation to the divine mysteries to which these means are applied, on the terrible difficulty of expressing in a sensible matter truths that bridge heaven and earth and unite the most opposite realities, one is even led to think that sacred art, however rich it ought to be in sensibility and humanity, in order to attain to a certain spiritual fullness will doubtless always have to retain something of the hieratic and, so to speak, ideographic symbolism, and, in any event, of the sturdy intellectuality of its primitive traditions.

Third Observation. A last point -- a very simple one -- is that a work of religious art must be religious. Otherwise it is not beautiful, since beauty presupposes essentially the entirety of all the requisite conditions. As Paul Cazin remarked, tell an artist dealing with a religious subject "that he has produced a masterpiece, but that his masterpiece is not religious, and you will pain him greatly. . . ." And Cazin continues: "God alone can touch men's hearts with a feeling of piety before the most miserable chromolithograph or the most distressing daub, as well as before the most sublime masterpiece." That is true, but it does not prevent the fact that normally certain works have of themselves a value, a radiance of religious emotion, of interior illumination, and, properly speaking, of sanctification. Nevertheless, repeating once more what Maurice Denis has said, this does not depend on the subject itself. Nor does it depend, I am convinced, on the recipe of a school and a particular technique. It would be a great delusion to think that clumsy angles and a humble subject matter are the necessary means of expression of a Franciscan emotion, or that a geometric stiffness and dull, austere tones are required in order to give to a work the seal of Benedictine dignity.

There are no rules for giving an art object a value of religious emotion. This depends, on the contrary, on a certain interior freedom with regard to rules. One achieves it only by not seeking it directly, and only by participating, in one manner or another, in the spiritual life of the Saints: something which the common Christian atmosphere of an era of faith made easy for artists, even when, from many points of view, they remained far from the examples of the Saints, but which, of itself and in the absence of exterior aids, requires in the soul the habitual radiance of the theological virtues and supernatural wisdom. And it is necessary, besides, that the virtue of art not remain separate, isolated from this wisdom, because of an insufficient mastery or of false academic principles, but that between the two contact be made, and that this wisdom freely use the virtue of art as a supple and infallible instrument.

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Source: Shawn Tribe, "Jacques Maritan on Sacred Art," Liturgical Arts Journal, September 27, 2019, https://www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2019/09/jacques-maritain-on-sacred-art.html.

John Ruskin's Criticism of Modern Ephemerality

I was doing my usual bit of reading in Mr. Ruskin's works and came across this passage (below) in his (mostly forgotten), The Political Economy of Art (1857). It is about one of the ubiquities of our modern lives, television, or perhaps now, streaming video. In either respect, it is remarkable for its prescience. But, then, such presciences is what makes Ruskin Ruskin.

One note as you start to read. The passage appears to be, for the most part, about woodcuts. But that is an illusion for, as we've learned as these posts have gone on their not always merry way, Ruskin, like other great artists, often worked in allegory, letting his readers have the pleasure of going to that deeper level where not only the more profound meaning lives, but where the greater fun is.

[As we consider the kind of world in which we would like to live and work, it should be noted that, when it comes to the creation of art,] the first great secret is to produce work that will last. Now, the conditions of work lasting are twofold. It must not only be in materials that will last but it must be itself of a quality that will last. It must be good enough to bear the test of time. If it is not good, we shall tire of it quickly and throw it aside; we shall have no pleasure in the accumulation of it. 

So that the first question [to ask of someone concerned about] any work is: “Will it lose its flavor by keeping? It may be very amusing now and look much like a work of genius, but what will be its value a hundred years hence?” You cannot always ascertain this…[but] of one thing you may be sure: that art which is produced hastily will also perish hastily; and that what is cheapest to you now is likely to be dearest in the end. 

I am sorry to say the great tendency of this age is to expend its genius in perishable art of this kind, as if it were a triumph to burn its thoughts away in bonfires. There is a vast quantity of intellect and of labor consumed annually in our cheap illustrated publications. You triumph in them, and…think it so grand a thing to get so many woodcuts for a penny. Why woodcuts, penny and all, are as much lost to you as if you had invested your money in gossamer. More lost, for the gossamer could tickle your face and glitter in your eyes; it could not catch your feet and trip you up. But bad art can--and does: for you can’t like good woodcuts as long as you look at the bad ones! 

If we were, at this moment, to come across a Titian woodcut, or a Dürer woodcut, we should not like it, those of us at least who are accustomed to the cheap work of the present day. We don’t like, and can’t like, that for long! But when we are tired of one bad cheap thing, we throw it aside and buy another bad cheap thing, and so keep looking at bad things all our lives! 

Now, the very men who do all that quick, bad work for us are capable of doing perfect work. Only: perfect work can’t be hurried, and therefore it can’t be cheap beyond a certain point. But suppose you pay twelve times as much as you do now, and you have one woodcut for a shilling instead of twelve pence—and the one woodcut for a shilling is as good as art can be, so that you will never tire of looking at it. And is struck on good paper with good ink, so that you will never wear it out by handling it, while you are sick of your penny papers by the end of the week, and have torn them mostly in half too. Isn’t your shilling’s worth the best bargain?

Not infrequently during the days when I taught regularly, I would ask my students to read this passage, and ask them after if they had seen that it was about television. Most would look back at me, perplexed. But a few would get it right away. These fews [sic], as you encounter them over the years, are the great joy of teaching. We'd then have a general discussion where we tried to determine the value of the video world in which they increasingly live. Before the class ended, I would ask them if they'd be willing to apply, the next time they were tempted to indulge, what I consider to be the great test of anything that's on television (or streaming!): to ask the question, after the indulgence, whether, as a result of that indulgence, they were better human beings because of the experience, where I defined better as smarter, kinder, warmer of heart, more appreciative of the world in which they live, or wiser. Most looked at me, perplexed. But not those few!

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Source: James L. Spates, "Will It Last? Ruskin's Criticism of Modern Ephemerality," http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/spates4.html.

John Ruskin on Taste and Morality

The following is a wonderful application of the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of virtue to culture and taste: a truly virtuous man takes delight in doing the good. A sign of his lingering viciousness is if he still finds it distasteful to do the good. And St. Thomas further suggests that art disposes us either to good or evil by how it affects us.

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Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word ‘taste;’ for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. ‘No,’ say many of my antagonists, ‘taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.’

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their ‘taste’ is, and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. ‘You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do you like?’ ‘A pipe and a quartern of gin.’ I know you. ‘You, good woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?’ ‘A swept hearth and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast.’ Good, I know you also. ‘You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?’ ‘My canary, and a run among the wood hyacinths.’ ‘You, little boy with the dirty hands and the low forehead, what do you like?’ ‘A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch-farthing.’ Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask?

‘Nay,’ perhaps you answer: ‘we need rather to ask what these people and children do, than what they like. If they do right, it is no matter that they like what is wrong; and if they do wrong, it is no matter that they like what is right. Doing is the great thing; and it does not matter that the man likes drinking, so that he does not drink; nor that the little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn her lessons; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday school.’ Indeed, for a short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like doing it. But they only are in a right moral state when they have come to like doing it; and as long as they don’t like it, they are still in a vicious state. The man is not in health of body who is always thirsting for the bottle in the cupboard, though he bravely bears his thirst; but the man who heartily enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each in its proper quantity and time. And the entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

But you may answer or think, ‘Is the liking for outside ornaments, — for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or architecture, — a moral quality?’ Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here again we have to define the word ‘good.’ I don’t mean by ‘good,’ clever — or learned — or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice: it is an entirely clever picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an ‘unmannered,’ or ‘immoral’ quality. It is ‘bad taste’ in the profoundest sense — it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian’s, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality — it is the taste of the angels. And all delight in art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which we call ‘loveliness’ — (we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which deserve to be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being. What we like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open in a bookseller’s window. It was — ‘On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.’ ‘Ah,’ I thought to myself, ‘my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and “Pop goes the Weasel” for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:— he won’t like to go back to his costermongering.’

And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce.

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Source: John Ruskin, "Traffic," in The Crown of Wild Olive. Found at https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/ruskin/john/crown/lecture2.html

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James Spates's comment on the above passage when he was a professor:

On the not too distant past, I often read the Ruskin passage below to my students; after which, I passed out copies of it. I told them they could easily test out what he had in mind. They could go back to their dorm rooms and take a careful look at the posters, art, or pictures they had put on their walls and make a list of them. That done, they could make a second list: Of the music--titles of albums, songs, names of artists--they listened to regularly. Then they could make a third list: Of all the things they had posted on Facebook and Twitter during the past week. After that--always trying to get them to do a little sociology!--I suggested they might go and do the same sort of gazing at their friends' dorm room walls, asking those familiars to create similar lists of their own music favorites and social media "interactions," an request which, surely, these friends, being such, would be more than happy to oblige. (As it turned out, some of these folks weren't so eager to be friendly regarding such requests.) The last step was obvious: After thinking carefully about what was on their own walls and in their lists and comparing these with whatever friends' versions they had collected, they'd have a fairly accurate sense of what their, and these others', tastes were. I can honestly say that not a few of my young reporters reported being fairly appalled at what their taste appeared to be, appalled by what they found, or did not find, on the lists! (It might be useful to generate such lists ourselves.)

Source: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/spates5.html

Kurt Poterack, The Rhythm of Popular Music

The most interesting response to my Principles article, “A People without Melody,” was: “I get what you are saying about melody, but what about rhythm?” The person continued: “Certainly, there is a big emphasis on rhythm in popular music; wouldn’t you say that popular music today excels when it comes to rhythm?” I replied that rhythm is certainly a defining feature of much popular music today; however, the notion that these rhythms are always “excellent” would require a lengthier answer. This essay is my response.

I should say, by means of introduction, that I can only survey what I see as major trends in contemporary popular music and cannot even cover all of these. I very much regret, for example, that I will not be able to speak about that complicated, yet important, phenomenon of swing rhythm. There just isn’t enough space. But what follows will be an honest attempt to critique some of the major rhythmic trends in popular music.

It might be helpful, first, to look at St. Augustine’s definition of music: Musica est scientia bene modulandi. There is some question about the meaning of the last word (modulandi), but a good translation would be: “Music is the art of measuring well.” There is, however, another possible, and very complementary, translation. Taking the word motus (movement), which is very close to modulandi’s cognate word modus (measurement), I propose another translation: “Music is the art of moving well.”[1]

These two connected ideas of the measurement of musical rhythm and the movement that it inspires in dance go back, most famously, to Plato. However, it is important to understand that it is the perceived movement in the music itself that, arguably, inspires the reciprocal movement in dancing. Keeping this in mind, I would like to proceed to what I think is a central, and poignant, question implicit in Roger Scruton’s fascinating book The Aesthetics of Music. The question is: How did we get from “the cheerful and life-enhancing sound of Louis Armstrong” to the “monsters of Heavy Metal”?[2] Or, if I may add, to the modern-day Danse Apache of Gangsta Rap?

Even before Louis Armstrong, there is the equally cheerful and life-enhancing music of Ragtime. Ragtime seems to have been created by black pianists of the American Midwest who took the pre-existing musical form of the march, but “ragged” (i.e., syncopated) the rhythm of the melodies. Syncopation, which means emphasizing normally weak beats or weak parts of beats, was not a new phenomenon—you can find it in classical music. What makes Ragtime different, however, is that it uses syncopation regularly as a normal part of the music.

Is this more frequent use of syncopation something that comes out of Africa? Yes, but there is more to it than that. In Africa, as well as other places outside the West, one can find very complex percussion music of long tradition. It is typical in Africa to hear percussion ensembles playing layered rhythms that create fascinating textures, polyrhythms (e.g., groups of four played against groups of three), intellectually stimulating ambiguities (are these three groups of two or two groups of three?), and, at times, a deliberate obscuring of the beat.

Since such practices are beyond what one would hear even in Ragtime and in Louis Armstrong, where would one hear these influences in American popular music? The answer is that they can be heard in the Latin American music that comes out of South America and the Caribbean—rumba, mambo, salsa—where black slaves were able to preserve more of their musical traditions than in North America. One can also hear this in some of the more sophisticated forms of jazz, particularly the solos of some of the better jazz drummers like “Papa” Joe Jones, Art Blakey, or Max Roach, to name just a few. Speaking about musicians in India, but applicable to African-influenced music, the critic Winthrop Sargeant notes that:

It often happens among Indian musicians that a vina player and a drummer will engage in a friendly contest to see which can confuse the other into losing track of the sam (the beat). . . . The vina player delights in apparently losing himself in the most abstruse counter-rhythms, leaving the listener with an utter sense of bewilderment, only to issue forth triumphantly at the sam again without a hair’s breadth of inaccuracy, and with a sparkle of obvious satisfaction.[3]

If you want to get a sense of this technique in jazz drumming, look at the YouTube video “Max Roach -Solos.flv.”[4] The second solo in that video is a particularly good example of this technique of obscuring the beat for a long time and then re-entering without missing a beat—a technique that is utterly foreign to most popular music today. In fact, the stronger and more obvious a beat is, the more likely are people to call the music “rhythmic,” which is a bit like saying, “2 + 2 = 4” and people responding, “He’s a brilliant mathematician!” So, whence comes this idea that a throbbing, pounding, obvious beat is especially “rhythmic”—let alone “primitive”?

In order to understand this, we have to go to Paris, the night of May 29, 1913, when Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring was premiered. The ballet tells the story of a virgin in pagan Russia sacrificing herself to Nature for the coming of spring. At that time, primitive cultures were a common enough fascination for Western artists and intellectuals going back at least to Herman Melville and continuing through Gauguin’s sojourn in Tahiti. Margaret Mead’s 1925 trip to Samoa should also be included as a cautionary tale of how this Western fascination can involve a certain amount of wish projection.[5]

Now Stravinsky had no agenda, but those famous stabbing, pulsing chords in the Danse des Adolescentes section of The Rite of Spring, which the audience heard that night, were to become forever seared into our modern Western cultural consciousness as exemplars of “primitive rhythm.” To be fair to Stravinsky, this is one section in a very long work, and even these repeated pulse-like chords are accented at irregular intervals that give the rhythm a real subtlety. However, as great a work of art as The Rite is, in my opinion, its faux primitivism unwittingly inspired lesser talents to create everything from cheap slasher movie sound tracks to the mindless thumping of disco music (including, but not limited to, the Village People) to the hand-clapping in Queen’s tribal anthem, “We Will Rock You” (short-short, LONG, short-short, LONG), and a whole lot more.

It is almost as if our culture collectively said, “You see, this is what primitive people do, and we all know that they ‘have rhythm’!” But as I already established, many non-Western cultures have a much more sophisticated sense of rhythm than that. What developed was a musical caricature of the primitive. For example, take Stravinsky’s pulsating rhythm; speed it up a bit; amplify it; put it into the most predictable, symmetrical patterns; spike your hair; wear a torn T-shirt; and maybe vomit on stage for good measure and—voilà!—you have punk rock.

In her book Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, Martha Bayles points out how punk rock was largely created by the impresario Malcolm McLaren. An English fashionista and art-school dropout, McLaren was in thrall to what Bayles terms “Perverse Modernism.” This can be summed up in the French phrase, Épater la bourgeoisie! (Shock the bourgeoisie!), which was a rallying cry among the Decadent poets of the 1880s. It continued through the perverse plays of Frank Wedekind, Dadaism, and into the Fluxus Movement of the 1950s. It was the notion that art had to shock, offend, and unsettle in order to be effective. In this case, popular music was commandeered as a platform on which to pursue this art-school philosophy. Interestingly, the black jazz trumpeter and music educator Wynton Marsalis has a somewhat similar take on Rap, calling it “ghetto minstrelsy.” He speaks of white “safari seekers” saying, “Let’s go into the ghetto and see what the natives are doing.”[6] His point is that in the nineteenth-century minstrel show, the “safari seekers” would have seen what they thought of as rather buffoonish, but lovable primitives. What such safari seekers are tempted to see in Rap today, according to Marsalis, are savage (but lovable, because they secretly want to be like them?) primitives who murder and fornicate without scruple. This is a harsh indictment, and, to be sure, his criticism tends to provoke strong reactions. Nevertheless, it may do this because it hits close to the target. I shall investigate the musical reasons why this may be the case later.

However, before we do this, we need to move on from the faux primitive to what I call the mechanical approach to rhythm. To this end, I will quote Roger Scruton again:

Rhythm plays with regularity, but is not reducible to it: the pulse is both counted and discounted. . . . even the most exact performer will imbue a piece with a minute rubato, and this rubato is the mark of a living organism—the unnoticed vacillation of the pulse. When this rubato is absent—as when someone plays in time to a drum machine or a metronome—it is precisely rhythm that is the primary victim.[7]

Here we return to the notion that musical rhythm is both measurement and movement. If its measurement is too exact, then it won’t actually move us in a human way. As Scruton says in another venue, “one note invites the next into the space that it has vacated.”[8] A note might coyly linger, creating anticipation for the next note, or more quickly cede, stressing the next note’s importance. There is a subtle give and take, just as in human relationships. Music is not strict geometry. When it is treated that way, it has a very different effect. Scruton observes, for example, that “the rhythm in Heavy Metal . . . is shot at you; the rhythm of the [eightsome] reel [on the other hand] invites you to move with it.”[9] He then goes on to discuss the difference between “at” and “with” and how profound this is in human relationships. For example, we all know the difference between a conversation with a close friend and the pushy salesman who talks at us.

One example of this phenomenon in music is the song “Bleed,” by the Swedish Heavy Metal band Meshuggah. It’s not only the song’s unrelenting fortissimo volume and the shouted vocals, but also the absolute rigidity of the accompanimental rhythm. Though there is measurement, there is no true relationship among the individual notes; they are isolated points, pulsations spaced along a timeline. They are like bullets, shot out at us from their evenly spaced places within an ammunition clip. This is why such music is often associated with violent, dehumanizing ideas and images. (I strongly warn against watching the very disturbing video associated with this song.) Or listen to the more anodyne Eurodance hit from the 1990s “What Is Love?” Again, it’s not just the computer-produced sounds; it’s the exactly measured computer-produced rhythms that create the feel of the hip yet impersonal world against which the singer makes his plaintive cry, “What is Love?” The presence of a humanizing, plaintive cry cannot be counted on in all such music.

While it has been common enough over the past century for moralists to decry the “sensuality” in some music, a fair amount of popular music of the past thirty or forty years lacks the rhythmic fluidity to be truly sensual. Often enough, its rhythm is machine-like and rigid. Though there will be the obligatory syncopations—all but required in contemporary pop music—they are the processed, reified product of the digital studio. They do not seduce or tempt. That would be an improvement. Rather, such rhythmic stiffness creates a more impersonal, “objective” effect. And this is also why such music inspires neither the ordered movement that the Waltz would, nor the more sensual, but still relational, movement that the Tango would. Such uncompromising rhythms do not encourage the subtle male-female negotiations, the give and take typical of couple dancing. In fact, as Roger Scruton has observed, it should not surprise us that what Punk, Heavy Metal, and Techno do inspire are “head-banging, slam-dancing, . . . [and] ‘moshing.’”[10]

This brings us to Rap. Where does it come from?

The only thing that we can say for sure is that Rap emerged in New York City in the 1970s, specifically in black neighborhoods in the Bronx. Rap’s musical origin seems to have been the joining of three distinct elements: 1) the beat-heavy faux primitivism of 1970s popular music, 2) the nascent mechanical approach to rhythm that would come to prominence in the 1980s, and 3) certain rhyming games and speech patterns common in African-American neighborhoods (think of “jive talk” and the poetry of Mohammed Ali).

As you can see, of these three elements, only the last is truly African-American. At its most effective, in Gangsta Rap in particular, Rap takes place against a pounding faux primitive beat, often employing that technological cookie cutter that is digital sampling, and couched in an unrelenting ostinato pattern. The effect can be that of Chinese water torture. You do not move with such rhythmic structures so much as submit to them, as one does to a good thrashing. It bowls you over—or you fight manfully against it. The only thing of any musical sophistication is that sometimes the rapper will chant the words in unusual rhythms against the beat, as in the quintuplet rapping of Eminem, in which the man vs. machine nature of the genre becomes most explicit.

How far we have come from the days of West Side Story (1957) when the kids were, or at least aspired to be, “cool.” Tough teenage delinquents though they were, the Jets and the Sharks strove for a certain cool unflappability, which had a concomitant flexibility as well as a natural grace to it. Gangsta Rap is not cool, it is rough, graceless and merciless—masculinity at its most unyielding. I realize that there are other types of Rap, but the tamer the subgenre of Rap is, the more it has the quality of a gimmick, like Fred Astaire dancing to the rhythms of the steam ship engine in Shall We Dance? (1937). While this certainly is entertaining, it is hardly something that would normally endure as a popular music genre for decades. No, it is the rougher, more authentic variety of Rap that holds most people’s attention because it speaks to them. We are dealing with a very significant cultural phenomenon.

Rap, simply put, often draws on the same sort of primitivist and, at times, perverse modernism that Punk and Heavy Metal do. In the final analysis, and despite most of its performers, it is only partially African-American in its musical makeup and hardly African at all. In my opinion, Rap does not even come close to that truly great product of African-American culture: jazz. Thus, the cultural significance of Rap’s deep and widespread popularity needs to be examined more carefully from the starting point of its actual musical structure, rather than from any politically correct (or even well-intentioned) views of ethnicity.

Finally, Rap seems to be a part of the general trend toward verbalism in the popular music of our day. Beginning at least with Bob Dylan, and continuing through Bruce Springsteen to U2, popular music has often been a venue for earnest poets and social critics of modest musical abilities. Dylan at least had the ability to craft a decent enough, tuneful melody; by the time we get to U2 all we have is eminently forgettable musical recitative. Rap drops even this pretense.

In conclusion, I want to stress that I have tried to delineate rhythmic trends in American popular music: the faux primitive, the mechanical, and the African. These are not the only trends, nor do they explain every single piece of popular music. However, these are major, significant trends. So my response to the question at the beginning of the article is that, because of the decline of African influences over the last half-century or so, only a small percentage of rhythm in popular music today could be considered musically “excellent.” On the other hand, the rhythm of much popular music today speaks volumes about where we are as a culture.

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Footnotes:

1. The Latin verb modulari does not itself mean “to move,” though it can mean “to dance” or “represent by dancing.” And the noun motus, as in the phrase dare motus, can refer to “dancing.”

2. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 480.

3. Quoted in Philip Ball, The Music Instinct (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 222.

4. Max Roach Solos (YouTube) (http://youtu.be/F_voXNIsobs)

5. See Derek Freeman, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

6.Bill Milkowski, “Wynton Marsalis: Wynton Throws Down the Gauntlet,” Jazz Times, April 1, 2007.

7. Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 24–25. (https://jazztimes.com/features/wynton-marsalis-wynton-throws-down-the-gauntlet/)

8. Roger Scruton, “Music and Morality,” American Spectator, February 11, 2010.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

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Source: Kurt Poterack, "The Rhythm of Popular Music: Primitivist Slumming in a Machine Age?", Principles 4, no. 1 (2018), accessed December 27, 2018, https://www.getprinciples.com/the-rhythm-of-popular-music.