http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUlS8D8rAIQ

I contend that this one movement expresses the fullest meaning of our lives. And to think that the genius Mozart could achieve this even without speaking a single word…

Regarding songs, maybe we need to bring back the old idea of good taste. Bad tasting food may be very healthy, but there is something wonderful about enjoying the color, aroma, taste, and texture of a well prepared meal or fresh picked fruit.

Pop music tends towards the high on calories and presentation, but low on nutrition for the soul. Coupled with biblical lyrics it is akin to spiritual junk food.

There are certainly better meals to enjoy–and they absolutely need not leave a bad taste to be substantial.

We often hear from those who want to confuse and blur the lines, those who tell us: if sex is inherantly good, created by God, than pornographic art is beautiful, just on it’s own terms, and we as Christians should not be uptight moralists, rather we must appreciate the meaning and beauty of pornography for it’s own sake, or, Idolitry is like the true worship of God–just worshiping something else instead of God–but it is still a valid form of worship–As if God himself were secondary and not central, optional and not necessary to true worship. “Imagine no religion . . .” Screwtape would be proud.

Temet nosce- thine own self thou must know. Understand how things affect you and look at what influences your actions.

Cheers

Ben

(1) The relationship of popular music in America to commercialism and propaganda.

Popular music is written with the intent of being sold. This qualification produces a lot of problems. The sincerity of popular music is rightly questioned, as is the depth or challenge. Music that is wanted by the masses is not necessarily music that is good for the masses. Here music loses its ability to shock or rebuke us, a power that can be effectively used to build virtue. We are not always supposed to be comfortable or pleased with ourselves and our situaton. Music can draw us out of this shallowness just as much as it can lead us into it.

Incidentally, Theodor Adorno rebuked the use of popular music by the hippie movement of the 1960’s because they tainted their message by putting it into a form that supported the economic structures in power that they were protesting. He even went so far as to say that popular music was a form replete with fascist ideology.

(2)Kitsch is not necessarily the harmless pleasure that we think it is.

Kitsch (that is art that is cheap and nonfunctional) has been called by some “a beautiul lie.” I’ll leave it to everyone to debate what qualifies as kitsch; nevertheless, we should beware of music that seduces us into shallowness and mediocrity. What is art telling us about what is real? Is it being realistic about the complexities of life or is it smoothing them over into a blissful landscape that cannot and, even perhaps, should not exist? This is not because there is no beauty in the world, but precisely because there is. Kitsch has a way of becoming not only “a beautiful lie,” but an insipidly ugly and deceptive manipulation. We should ask ourselves the question: Does this describe what is real?

(3) This third and final issue is a warning for future critiques: Do not confuse style or technique with idea!

I myself am training to compose music in the classical tradition and this is one of the truths that has become especially apparent to me. I regularly have musicians ask me questions like: Do you write tonal or atonal music? Which is better? I repeatedly tell them that I write both and that you can’t judge a technique or harmonic structure as being inherently good or evil. This would be similar to Plato’s judgment of the modes. Do they matter? How you use them matters. It is far too abstract to judge technique when you need to consider the actual piece of music and the idea that it is putting across, whether that is merely musical or encompasses other things. This is point that should be made clear from the beginning.