Yale Journal of Music & Religion Volume 6 Number 2 Sound and Secularity Article 8 2020 The Secularism of Music Studies Jim Sykes Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Recommended Citation Sykes, Jim (2020) "The Secularism of Music Studies," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 6: No. 2, Article 8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1210 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Secularism of Music Studies Jim Sykes Why does power need glory? If it is essentially force and capacity for action and government, why does it assume the rigid, cumbersome, and “glorious” form of ceremonies, acclamations, and protocols? What is the relation between economy and Glory? —Giorgio Agamben1 Political Theology and Formations of Christianity and the writings of Saint Paul Music History that the classical notion of dike morphed into the broader, “cosmopolitan” ideal of In his book The Kingdom and the Glory, what nowadays we term social justice.5 Giorgio Agamben reconsiders Carl Schmitt’s famous thesis that “all significant concepts Trinitarian doctrine sought to resolve of the modern theory of the state are how God could be complete, infinite, and secularized theological concepts.”2 Schmitt, pure while existing on earth in limited 6 a committed Nazi, sought (as Carl Raschke and material form. Here is Hippolytus’s puts it) “to revalidate somehow the pre- description of this (as summarized by modern assumption that political absolutism Watkin): had its own kind of legitimacy, if it had The Father is one, but he is two persons, the warrant of religious transcendence.”3 Father and Son, and then there is Agamben argues that there is in fact a second a third, the Holy Spirit. The third mediates between Father and Son, first paradigm of sovereignty also operative in in that the Father gives orders which early Christian political theology, the “divine are performed by the logos revealed in economy” or oikonomia (“an immanent the Son. Then the Son, through belief, ordering—domestic and not political in is accorded to the Father as the one a strict sense—of both divine and human who performs the Father’s will. In other life”).4 To stick with Raschke’s summary of words economy, the Holy Spirit, is a Agamben a bit longer, he suggests that the doubly mediating articulation that does not actually reconcile Trinitarian and origins of the second paradigm lie “in Jesus’ Gnostic theology but solves the age- proclamation of the ‘kingdom of God’”: old theological problem of how God’s On the one hand, “kingdom” will is actuated on the earth without (basileia) signifies unconditioned undermining all the elements of God’s divine sovereignty, but as the Great power, such as omniscience, atemporality, Commandment implies, and Jesus’ the will of good resulting in the existence own radically relational interpretation of evil etc.7 of what it means to be a participant in The heavenly army of bureaucrats—that is, the “kingdom,” it also connotes limitless the angels and clergy—act to dispensate, mutual obligations that we have to each other, a form of a familialism reaching manage, and produce the glorification of God, infinitely beyond the limits of blood, making humans aware of his providence, kinship, and any particular, concrete leading ultimately to their redemption “household.” It was under the influence of in the kingdom of heaven. The central Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 119 observation of Agamben’s book is that Being without any further act, represent “the apparatus of the Trinitarian oikonomia through their songs of praise, God’s may constitute a privileged laboratory inoperativity (he no longer needs to act on for the observation of the working and earth).”13 Note the causal power of music articulation . of the governmental in this production of sovereignty—music machine” because it shows modern acts to provide “cover” for the sovereign’s sovereign power in its “paradigmatic form.”8 inoperativity—yet note also that Agamben What Agamben finds in each era is an does not perceive music as doing anything “empty throne” whose power is dispersed, to humans, society, or God here, since managed, and legitimized through glory to music-as-glory is revealed in the end produce consensus. He likens the economy merely to represent divine inoperativity. of salvation to the modern media’s ability (Notice the dichotomies in Agamben’s to produce and retract glory in secular phrase “not of action but of hymn, not of democracies (“the acclamative and power but of glory.”) Paradoxically, music doxological aspect of power that seemed to in this conception lies at the center of the have disappeared in modernity”).9 oikonomia but is noneconomic, without In a stunning argument that should action and without power. give music scholars pause, Agamben “Inoperativity as the dimension most locates music at the very center of the proper to God and man” reaches its early Christian oikonomia. This is because apotheosis in the Jewish Sabbath and music is central to the production of glory Christian Sunday, when all work ceases.14 that is bestowed upon the sovereign by To my ears, the celebration of rest—which liturgy, ceremonies, and acclamations, in churches and synagogues has long the purpose of which is to “cover with featured uses of song to glorify God—is its splendour the unaccountable figure the origin of Western society’s notions of of divine inoperativity.”10 Glory fills the music as transcendence, epiphenomenon, “unthinkable emptiness” left in the wake and an alternative to normative labor. of divine inoperativity (i.e., the empty Musicological scholarship has often located throne), but in so doing, it is also what these concepts in the emergence of the “nourishes and feeds power (or, rather, Western classical canon in the eighteenth what the machine of power transforms and nineteenth centuries, but the value of into nourishment).”11 Thus, Agamben Agamben’s text is not just that he shows asks, “what is a politics that would not be how going back to early Christian political of government but of liturgy, not of action theology allows us to grasp their Christian but of hymn, not of power but of glory?”12 origins. Rather, it is that he demonstrates The empty throne of the sovereign who the signal importance of music-as-glory, is glorified through the divine economy music-as-non-normative labor, and music- that acts on his behalf to redeem humans as-noneconomy to Christian tradition, is fully revealed as inoperative after concepts that (I strive to show in this essay) redemption, when what will remain is “a become firmly integrated into the modern hymnological hierarchy”: the angels, “left Western ontology of music in secular form without act or praxis as God’s will has been but have been much less discussed by completed so that he is, yet again, pure music scholars than the historicization of 120 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) transcendence and the musical works that those who are not Christian on the outside. (I contend) derive from them.15 Consider the political theologist Shane At this juncture, I want to question Akerman’s statement that whether Agamben is not taking a modern the sacred liturgy is . not only a view of music and projecting it onto early public act of the Church, but also one Christian political theology—for surely the that sets itself in opposition to the role of music in early Christian theology is narrowly nationalistic public space of more complex than he makes it out to be. the state. As one moves up the vertical Music’s role throughout diverse Christian axis, participating more profoundly in theologies today is emotive, redemptive, the worship of the angels, then one’s salvific: music transforms the interior horizontal reach is also widened. All of state of a person. For the early church creation is called inward and upward in the participation of the worship of the fathers, though, music’s value lay in large triune God.19 part in the sense of unity that monophonic choral singing facilitated, conceived as a The German theologian Erik Peterson mimicking of the angelic choirs.16 Music describes this ontology of musical was granted as a concession to human salvation in terms that would horrify any weakness, since God does not need singing— ethnomusicologist: “every type of ethnic perhaps music, then, was “nourishment” singing, folk music, and national anthem more for people than for divine sovereign eventually succumbs to its inevitable power.17 The value of music-as-glory lay, I decline.”20 The result is that “it is worship suggest, not so much in its legitimization of that predates governmentality and worship God’s power but in the spiritual discipline that will outlast it.”21 God is eternal it facilitated for worshippers: music in while cultural practices and governance, this conception moves to the sovereign as giving rise to difference and violence, are glory, but it also points from the angels to transitory and ultimately superseded: the individual who pours open their soul “the government is nothing but the brief within the social unit of the choir, offering interval running between the two eternal “one’s whole spirit as incense.”18 and glorious figures of the Kingdom.”22 I suggest music was a critical part of This veneer of music-as-inclusive-inaction the early Christian economy of salvation diverts attention from its active exclusion (and not just a representation of divine of those who think otherwise.23 inoperativity) in at least one other sense.