Apprehending the Music of Being
Having written in my last two columns about the work of two more accessible composers—Franz Schubert and Gabriel Fauré—I set out to consider how to commend the remarkable work of a little-known Franco-Flemish composer from the sixteenth century. In listening attentively to Masses, motets, and Magnificats by Nicolas Gombert (c. 1495 – c. 1560) over the past few weeks, I came to appreciate how the expressive complexity of his work exemplified some important truths about the nature of meaning in music. So before considering what he accomplished in some of his works, it will be helpful to set my considerations in a larger context.
Christ the Creative Meaning
Readers of Touchstone are likely to agree that we are not living in a golden age. There are crises aplenty, meriting a large array of descriptive adjectives: political, economic, social, spiritual, ecclesiastical, and so on. One way or another, each of these angles of vision embodies what Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has called “the Meaning Crisis.” It’s not a new condition: Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning was published in 1946. An important article by Owen Barfield titled “The Rediscovery of Meaning” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1962. Some of Barfield’s concerns were echoed in philosopher William Barrett’s 1979 study, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization.
All too rarely is the crisis of meaning recognized as an effect of the un-Christening of the West, of the modern assumption that we can understand the world and ourselves without reference to Christ. Not just without reference to God or the gods but to the One who is before all things, and in whom all things hold together. The crisis of meaning can only be addressed adequately by moving beyond generic religious terms toward Christology, since Christ is the font of meaning. To reject him is to abandon meaning.
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Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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more on music from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
Bach's Cantata BWV 106, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbesteZeit (God's time is the very best time) by Ken Myers
more from the online archives
30.5—Sept/Oct 2017
The Christian Cure for What Ails Modern Politics by David Bradshaw
31.5—September/October 2018
Errands into the Moral Wilderness
Forms of Christian Family Witness & Renewal by Allan C. Carlson
33.2—March/April 2020
An Architectural Sign of Mere Christianity by Michael Ward
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