Saturday Sonic Shenanigans

Or: Sonic theology is listening as an act of love.

Good morning.

I will be spending most of my day tidying up a presentation I aim to give Parish of The Good Shepherd on the topic of Sonic Theology. There will be a few slides. Mostly, we’ll talk about the “little triduum” and our spiritual soundtrack for the season. The blurb in the bulletin is as follows.

This Sunday, we’ll talk about the theological meanings we make with music in the liturgy and in our lives. As this “sonic theology” is an enormous topic, so we’ll keep it simple by speaking directly to the music we associate with this season. This week we celebrate a little triduum…the Western Christian season encompassing the triduum of All Saints' Eve (Halloween), All Saints' Day (All Hallows') and All Souls' Day is upon us. From Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor to Bobby Pickett’s Monster Mash, from the sacred to the profane, we have a spiritual soundtrack to the season. How did we come about it? How do we pray with the music we encounter? How does the music we choose serve as sonic icons of the Holy One?

This is a really lovely opportunity for me to dive back into what I loved so much about my dissertation work. “Listening as an act of love” is where we end up. It’s from Naomi Cumming’s important work in feminist musicology and semiotics, The Sonic Self. I love that book more than I can say.

Yes, even two years later, I think about my dissertation and the ethic of listening as an act of love. I wish I had some more guidance in putting the dissertation together. I got bogged down in so much other crapola in my writing…too many rabbit holes. I needed someone to come in and say, “You don’t need that chapter. Stop writing about the history of evangelical musicking.” Alas. That’s not what happened. Hindsight is 20/20, no?

At any rate, all listening is an act of love. That love is, of course, contingent on all the things upon which our loves are contingent. Liturgical musicking is no different than any kind of longing, anticipation, desire, affection…unrequited or fulfilled. This interaction becomes symbolic, for example, when we engage the particulars of Christian liturgies. Therefore, the sonic is noetic and iconic. Various musics are sonic icons by which we encounter the holy. All of these encounters are mediated by our cultural situations (see: tastes, etc.) and that includes our likes and our prejudices. This is why the sonic matters. There is more than “lyrics plus musical style” afoot.

At any rate, I’m going to get to work on this thing.

Y’all be excellent to each other.