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VIOLENT, authoritarian and fascist regimes often target artists, musicians, and the arts themselves — this is something we see East and West, ancient and modern. The latest outbreak of what Talking Heads called “Fear of Music” seems to be taking place in the Middle East, where the Islamic State is destroying drums and other musical instruments because they are somehow “un-Islamic.”
The site Epic Times has a photo and brief description. (I think the story was broken by the UK’s Daily Mail.)
Instrumental music, it appears, is not music to the ears of ISIS. In one of the group’s almost daily releases of propaganda imagery, black-clad militants in eastern Libya are shown presiding over the destruction of a number of musical instruments. Saxophones and drums go up in smoke as the group torches them in the open, drumming up fear in the process.
This is — let me be clear — appalling. It’s especially weird since some of my favorite musicians are soulful Sufis (see RT, right) or other kinds of Muslim sect. (Ted Gioia’s n
ew book Love Songs looks at how the music of Andalucian Moors shaped the contemporary Western love song.)
But this censorious spirit exists in our own Judeo-Christian and Anglo-American world. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans were violent religious fanatics who smashed the stained glass in churches and tore out the pews where chorale groups sang psalms. (The aesthetic was considered idolatry or “Roman.”)
The Nazi’s chilled expression with their Degenerate Art show; Stalin nearly destroyed Shostakovich. I’m old enough to (barely) remember the record-burnings of the “disco sucks” movement. American Christian maniacs burned Beatles records after John Lennon’s Beatles-are-bigger-than-Jesus remark.
These were all reasonably brief movements. But one lasted significantly longer: The early Christian war on secular music, which lasted for hundreds of years. I spend a lot of time digging into this for my book — it’s an almost literary example of “the killing of the creative class” — though very little made it into the final Culture Crash. Here’s a bit of it, though:
Jupiter-worshipping imperial Rome was often suspicious of artists, but the early Christians could be downright hostile. As Christ’s following spread from a small cult in the Levant into the Roman mainstream – becoming the official religion in the 4th century – its value system and roots in the very different Hebrew culture, created a tension with Roman’s public spirit.
Clement of Alexandria, in the late 2nd century, warned of the “indecency and rudeness” that musical instruments deliver, and condemned the man who “rages about with the instruments of an insane cult. We completely forbid the use of these instruments at our temperate banquet.” And it wasn’t just public performances of music that upset the early Christians: Because music often accompanied pagan sacrifice and religion, those performing music at home were suspected of worshipping idols.
Saint Jerome, the Roman Christian priest, made no secret of his attitudes in his writing. “Drive out the singer like a criminal,” he wrote in one of his epistles. “Cast from your house all women lyricists and harpists, the devil’s choir whose songs are the deadly ones of sirens.” His attitude toward writers shows how far things had come from the Golden Age: “The songs of the poets,” he wrote, “are the food of demons.”
Much of the creative class, then, began to be exiled from respectable society as Christianity takes over the Roman empire in the fourth century. “Whoever performs in a theater or is a wrestler or a runner, or a music teacher or a comic actor,” reads a canon of Hippolytus, “or who teaches savagery or a priest of the idols – none of these may be permitted to attend a sermon until they have been purified from these unclean works. After forty days they hear a sermon. When they prove themselves worthy they will be baptised.” Dancers, actors, and especially a “woman who dances in taverns and allures people by her beautiful singing and her deceitful melody” – as the Canons of Basil put it – didn’t fare much better.
… For hundreds of years – until the 12th century – Christian fathers forbade the use of every instrument but the church organ. Other instruments – especially the lyre and pipes – were associated with the very paganism that the Catholic leadership was trying to stamp out. For much of the Middle Ages, all secular music was forbidden.
Are all these repressive Christians — like the rocker disco-sucks crowd — as bad as ISIS? Of course not. Do our Western bad deeds excuse theirs? No, again.
But let’s remember that the anti-aesthetic impulse is not unique to Middle Eastern fanatics: We’ve experienced — and perpetrated — it too.
UPDATE: Now these dipshit fanatics are burning books and sacred manuscripts, here.
The arts in America were strongly altered by the HUAC purges. The social consciousness of American art during the 30s never returned. Through heavily funded secret front organizations in the 50s and 60s, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA moved the American cultural landscape to the right. The lack of public arts funding, and the totalizing strictures of unmitigated capitalism, probably narrow cultural expression more than religious fundamentalism, though their efforts overlap.
Baylor University forbade student dancing until 1986. Some Southern Baptists disagreed with such a “progressive” loosening of moral standards. This is from a website of a dissident written in 2009:
“Though there are godly Southern Baptist people, the homes of the average church members are too often filled with rock music (secular and “Christian”), immodest dress, R-rated videos, and many other marks of a gross love of the world. Southern Baptist coeds have volunteered to pose for Playboy magazine (Mercer University, 1985). Many SBC schools are known as wild party schools, and the student fornicators and drunkards are not disciplined. Worldly dances are held on the campuses of many SBC-connected schools. Hundreds of SBC congregations host “Christian” rock concerts. More than 35 years ago, Evangelist John R. Rice warned, ‘The lewdness of the modern dance is now excused and the worldly viewpoint accepted in most Southern Baptist colleges” (‘Dancing in Southern Baptist Colleges,’ Sword of the Lord, Sept. 5, 1969). The worldliness in the Southern Baptist Convention has dramatically increased since then and the conservative renaissance has done nothing to stem this tide.”
The Bible is pro music and pro musical instruments, so it is sad to read about the over-reaction of Christians in this regard over the centuries. For a little balance, though, consider the beautiful music produced by monks with their chants, classical music by Handel and Bach, religious friendly square dance/ barn dance music in early America, and modern Christian music of many varieties. As for secular vs. religious music, I think that is a complicated area and beyond the scope of this forum. But even some secular people have complained about the lyrics in certain modern music (such as misogynistic rap songs) and how it will negatively affect young people listening to it.
From “Delighting in the Trinity”, by Michael Reeves…Christianity has always had a special love affair with music. Scriptures are shot through with music, as is life in the Church. John Dryden, the seventeenth century poet, tried to explain why it should be so in his “A Song for St. Cecelia’s Day” (she is the patron saint of music)…
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
“Arise ye more than dead!”
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry
In order to their stations leap,
And music’s pow’r obey.
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason (octave) closing full in man.
Copyright 2012, p 58
And one more quote from Michael Reeves “Delighting in the Trinity” ..page 59…
“It is from the heavenly harmony of Father, Son, and Spirit that this universal frame of the cosmos – and all created harmony – comes. To hear a tuneful harmony can be one of the most intoxicatingly beautiful experiences. And no wonder: as in heaven, so on earth. The Father, Son, and Spirit have always been in delicious harmony, and thus they create a world where harmonies – distinct beings, persons or notes working in unity – are good, mirroring the very being of a triune God.
The eternal harmony of the Father, Son, and Spirit provides the logic for a world in which everything was created to exist in cheerful conviviality, and which still, despite the discord of sin and evil, is so essentially harmonious. The fourth century theologian Athanasius thus compared God the Son to a musician, and the universe to a lyre: ‘Just as though some musician, having tuned a lyre, and by his art adjusted the high notes to the low, and the intermediate notes to the rest, were to produce a single tune as the result, so also the Wisdom of God, handling the universe as a lyre, and adjusting things in the air to things on the earth, and things in the heaven to things in the air, and combining parts into wholes and moving them all by His beck and will, produces well and fittingly, as a result, the unity of the universe and of its order.’ And such thoughts have inspired many a Christian musician.”
Copyright 2012.
Yes indeed, art matters!
Mr. Osborne and Mr. Dodds make excellent points here. Re the latter, I would certainly not want to be without the music of Bach, or or Sam Cooke’s Soul Stirrers, or Doc Watson’s religious songs, etc.
As for “Christianity has always had a special love affair with music” — simply not true. Not even close. The church kept music schools and chorales open, but also hunted down and persecuted musicians it feared were secular, destroyed instruments, spread rumors about how evil musicians were, etc. Early Christians associated instrumental music was the pagan culture they were trying to squash, and took it on musicians and music itself.
My mother in law was raised in a Protestant fundamentalist cult and was forbidden to dance, listen to secular music, play cards, etc. — this was not that long ago. It was very close to Cromwell– and this was the 1950s and ’60s.
I am not an as much of an expert regarding music in church history as you are. But Christians against music sounds like more of an exception than the rule. Maybe the sticking point is secular vs. religious music. But thank you for the history lesson.
To be clear: Early Christians banned pipes and stringed instruments for CENTURIES. Not really an exception.
I’m hardly an expert, but it’s all been documented by music historians. I’m not one, but Ted Gioia, who is both a music historian and a pious Catholic, describes some of this is his wonderful new book Love Songs: A Hidden History
I’m currently in Florence. The Italian guide book for the city is 880 pages of single spaced, fine print. At least 600 pages are devoted to art commissioned by the Catholic Church. Even most of the work commissioned by the Medici’s was religious and for the church. Michaelangelo, Titian, Leonardo and on and on. The artistic wealth created by the church boggles the mind. The Duomo here is one of the most eternal works humans have ever created.
Last night I heard an organ concert in one of the Florence’s countless, huge churches. The organ was simply fabulous – probably 40 or 50 registers, one set of copper pipes sticking straight out like trumpets. From the contrapuntal perfection of the early motet composers performed in the great gothic cathedrals, to the antiphonal works of Gabrieli written for St. Mark’s in Venice, to timeless works like Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, the church has created more of the great musical monuments of Western culture than any other institution.
It is only fair to say that the church has been one of the greatest censors of art in history, and also one of its greatest creators. The latter far outbalances the former. I say this, even though one of my works was banned from a church concert. The authorities in charge said the work, based on the the Book of Revelation, could only be performed in a general purpose hall next to the church. The entire audience had to get up and move to the other building to hear my piece. The church guides the people, artists guide the church….
My hotel here in Florecne is next door to Dante’s house, a fellow who created a fairly well-known religious work…. Off to Sienna today to see more religious art…
You’ll certainly get no argument from me about the glories of Renaissance Italy… I honeymooned in central Italy, about a decade ago, and you see what happens when the church and state power get behind culture. Even as an agnostic, I found the Vatican Museum probably the most mind-blowing visual art experience I’ve ever had.
Was Christianity’s support for the arts better/bigger than its repression of the arts? Hard to quantify — seem to me a radically mixed/ complex picture and the subject certainly deserves a book of its own.