ABSTRACT
Is music morally neutral? This chapter explores what it would mean to describe music itself – as opposed to the texts, contexts, or intended effects that surround it – as inherently sacred or profane, and what this might mean for Christian worship. The author engages questions of taste and ‘appropriateness’ in music and the contemporary religious influence of the idea that harmony is inherently good and dissonance is inherently bad. A focus on soothing and resolved music – as opposed to pieces which court discord and the diabolus in musica of the augmented fourth – encourages a popular fantasy that Christian worship, so the author suggests, must resist. Discord can give voice to the unresolved, apparent silence of God before an unjust world, and – like the jazz and blues tradition – tell the necessary ‘truth about hell’. Reflecting on the stories of Holocaust survivors, scenes from the film The Shawshank Redemption, and modern accounts of music as torture, the author explores the dramatic shifts that function can have on music and its received meaning. Music is profane, Winkett suggests, if it points only to itself, rather than embracing worship’s proper vocation: to point beyond, ‘into the eyes of God’.
