The Reinvention of Religious Music by Maas Sander van;

Author:Maas, Sander van;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2009-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Glory and the Sublime

The music of the closing chorale in La Transfiguration is, as we have seen, at times saturated “according to quality.” Hence it is characterized as an auditive idol. The mixture of admiration and amazement that this music evokes further testifies to its idolic nature. The way the ear is saturated and completely enthralled by the auditive idol has no precedence, but such fascination for the sound phenomenon is not unaccompanied. It is paired to its opposite, terror. This sensation is caused by the surplus of intuition in the idol. The ear is overwhelmed by the idol and is brought to the brink of its own limitations. The ear is deafened without becoming deaf; it is, in fact, dazzled.

By means of Marion’s phenomenology of the saturated phenomenon, this experience-without-experience or counterexperience was described as a religious experience. It testified to a more or less diluted sense of revelation. The pure gift is manifested in the idol, even though it is veiled by the excessive visibility (audibility) of depthless surface. This leads to a further question. As Marion’s phenomenology pretends to the sheer philosophical and is only developed to open a space within phenomenology for thinking the phenomenon of revelation (and, although this strictly remains the domain of positive theology, of Revelation), the phenomenon of the idol should perhaps be understood as a mere aesthetic phenomenon. Is not the idol, in combining the effects of fascination and terror, the theological substitution or alternative for that other effect of overwhelming transport—the sublime? What is the quintessential distinction that notches the theologizing explanation of this phenomenon (in terms of idol and dazzlement) by Marion, on the expense of the aesthetic notion of the sublime?

The aesthetics of Messiaen’s music very often seem to invoke the sublime. Not only do Messiaen’s titles, motto’s and commentaries refer to classical examples of the sublime, such as starry heavens, the abyss, or alpine mountains; also the very style and design of much of his music is prone to typical gestures toward the sublime, such as the sensation of overpowering, the majestic, and the unimaginable. Messiaen’s music is not only music of beautiful proportion, elegant design, and good taste; it very often seeks to transcend human measure. It aspires to the divine, or at least to the worldly traces thereof, through an arsenal of grand musical gestures, some of which may be quite violent and repellent to the ear. This music brings forth negative forms of representation: it presents that which cannot be presented in positive form (in an analogy from the domain of language: the name of God) through shattered or shattering forms (for example, faltering speech, a fractured language of the ineffable) or by falling silent altogether. Traditionally, the sublime has been thought as that which overpowers the human mind and may be thought to testify to (and perhaps, as Messiaen suggest, lead the mind toward) the ineffable domains of divine mystery.

In Kant’s Critique of Judgment—the locus classicus of modern aesthetics—the sublime is analyzed according

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