Music at home

“Since the demise of the medieval scenario in which human beings were seen as inhabiting a God-given order, Western culture has found it increasingly hard to come to terms with the notion of the created world as our intended ‘home.’ Music is less and less thought of as tuning into and respectfully developing an order we inhabit as bodily creatures and instead is increasingly identified as a purely human enterprise, a humanly devised means of shaping sounds for our own interests, a tool of human communication, expression, and persuasion. The idea that music might also be able to elicit something of the character of the cosmos (and through that testify to the Creator) will in many quarters today be treated with disdain, with a cynical smile at best.

“It is not surprising, then, that one of the most critical questions to emerge in our discussion so far is this: to what extent is music grounded in or obliged to be faithful to a world we did not make, a world that we did not fashion but that is in some sense given to us?

(Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, pp. 186–87)

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