Re: why play wagner?


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Posted by Rick Denney on July 05, 2002 at 11:29:46:

In Reply to: why play wagner? posted by gc on July 03, 2002 at 22:38:19:

Before we can answer your question, we have answer this one: Does music have religious (or, if you prefer, social) value?

I believe that it promotes an attitude of reception, and in so doing improves worship (or civility). That's why we sing hymns in church, and why we sing songs and anthems to heighten our emotional attachment to a cause (as the song "We Shall Overcome" did during the civil rights movement). But I don't think that it has religious value one way or the other beyond what the receiver contributes, any more than a fine landscape painting or photograph does. That I enjoy a fine landscape photograph from Ansel Adams doesn't mean that I support everything he intended in his environmental agenda. He was an atheist, but I'm not and I see God's handiwork in his images even if he doesn't.

(You are free to think that this is delusional on my part and I promise not to be offended.)

It seems to me that most attempts by doctrinaire artists to force beliefs into their art bring failure to that art, even as (or, if) it brings success as polemic. Art cannot serve two masters. Wagner's compositions are so successful as music that any doctrinal belief that he may have intended to infuse is lost. Thus, it succeeds as art and fails utterly as polemic. Eventually, the polemic is forgotten, even by those who can understand the words--their meaning is just ignored.

I believe that music feeds the soul, which is quintessentially human, and therefore distinct from the spirit, which is supernatural. Religious beliefs are the domain of the latter. The two are linked only by the hearer. If you are a believer in God, music is the creative act of created beings made in the image of the Creator, and necessarily bears that influense even when unintended by the merely human composer. The best examples I can muster are the sacred works of Vaughan Williams. They definitely heighten my own religious experience when heard in the proper context, but only because I have those religious responses in the first place and bring them to the music. Vaughan Williams was an atheist-turned-agnostic, but that doesn't rob his music of the hand of the Creator--even though that hand is applied to me.

Rick "expecting to be misunderstood" Denney


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