The Extravagance of Music

1. INTRODUCTION: AN ART OPEN TO THE DIVINE







The Extravagance of Music



Ancestral Conceptions of Music



The Pythagorean Tradition



The Orphic Tradition



The Extravagance of the Divine



Prospectus







Part One: God and Classical Sounds







2. A GENEROUS EXCESS







The Divine at Work beyond Scripture



The Possibility of Music as Encounter



Types of Aesthetic Experience and Their Relation to Religion



Competing Types of Aesthetic Evaluation and Experience



Religious Perspectives Interacting with Aesthetic Criteria



Music in the Context of Words: Setting Divine Encounters to Music



Interim Conclusion







3. TYPES OF EXTRAVAGANCE







Order and the Music of the Spheres: Haydn, Mozart, and Bach



A Sense of Transcendence: Beethoven and Led Zeppelin



Divine Immanence: Beethoven, Sibelius and Debussy, and the Creed's Incarnatus



Divine Immanence in Nature



Immanence and the Incarnatus est of the Creed



The Mystery of the Divine Life: Minimalism, Bruckner, Liszt and Franck



Transcending Time



Serenity, Majesty, Ecstatic Joy



Specifics: Coltrane on Generosity, Schubert on Suffering, Massenet on Suicide







4. DISCOVERING GOD IN MUSIC'S EXCESS







Giving Sense to the Encounter



From the Human Side: Knowledge and Emotion



From the Divine Side: Developing a Philosophy of Presence



Restraints on Such Experience











Part Two: Popular Music and the Opening up of Religious Experience

5. CULTURED DESPISERS







The Cloistral Refuge of Music



Pop Pollution



God's Love of Adverbs



The Wonder of Minor Experiences



Dancing `with' and Dancing `at'



What Has Graceland to Do with Jerusalem?



Theological Imperialism



Aesthetic Hospitality



The Wandering of the Semantic



One Size Fits All



Too Much Heaven?



Rehabilitating Lightness



The World `in front of' the Text



The Spiritual Assets of Tackiness



Cultural Pessimism







6. SPILT RELIGION







The Listener's Share



Unheard Melodies



Only Connect



Jordan: The Comeback



The Word in the Desert



Post-Secular Popular Music



The In-Between



The Impure Sacred



Oxymoronic Postures



Metaphysical Shuddering



Ontological Exuberance



Ludic Avowal



Subjunctive Explorations



Being in Darkness



The Interlocuted Listener



Secular Forms and Sacred Effects



Musical Hyperbole



The Moment out of Time



The Swarming Forms of the Banal



Homeward Bound



Coda: Being Opened







7. CONCLUSION