The Offence of Beauty in Modern Western Art Music
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2013, Vol 4, Issue 4
Abstract
In recent decades, beauty has become a largely unfashionable, even offensive notion within art and philosophy. As Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, has pointed out, this offence has a twofold sense. Firstly, the ‘beautiful’ has been dismissed as philosophically insignificant in comparison to the ‘sublime’ by an intellectual tradition tracing itself back to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Secondly, the making of apparently beautiful art has, especially after the Shoah, frequently been regarded as ethically offensive in the face of suffering in the world. The present essay discusses how these two critiques of the beautiful find themselves reflected in twentieth and twenty-first century musical aesthetics, with particular reference to the writings of Theodor W. Adorno, and asks what solutions have been found by composers of Christian sacred music in the Western tradition confronted by this ‘taboo on beauty’.
Authors and Affiliations
Peter Bannister
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25339
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel4040687
- Views 297
- Downloads 15
“Show Us Your God”: Marilla Baker Ingalls and the Power of Religious Objects in Nineteenth-Century Burma
This essay examines the unusual evangelical work of Marilla Baker Ingalls, an American Baptist missionary to Burma from 1851–1902. By the time of her death in Burma at the age of 75, Ingalls was known as one of the mos...
Quilting the Sermon: Homiletical Insights from Harriet Powers
Sermons come in a variety of forms. For Harriet Powers, an African American artist and former slave who lived from 1837–1910, sermons took the form of quilts. Unlike most quilts crafted during her lifetime, Powers’ qui...
Rethinking Material Religion in the East: Orientalism and Religious Material Culture in Contemporary Western Academia
This paper reviews the historical development of the modern discourse of “Orientalism” and the emergence of material culture as a self-reflexive theoretical transition in the West. Further, it investigates new types of...
Piercing to the Pith of the Body: The Evolution of Body Mandala and Tantric Corporeality in Tibet
Buddhist tantric practitioners embrace the liminal status of the human body to manifest divine identity. In piercing to the pith of human embodiment, the tantric practitioner reconfigures the shape and contours of his/...
Bickmann, Claudia. “The Idea of a Highest Divine Principle— Founding Reason and Spirituality. A Necessary Concept of a Comparative Philosophy?” Religions 3 (2012): 1025–40
The author wishes to add the following correction to her paper published in Religions [1]: Reference [28] on pages 1035 and 1040 should be [27] and the citation to [27] on p. 1035 should be removed. The author apologiz...