Art and the Sin of Apathy

September 10th, 2010

On Monday through Friday I wake up at 7:00am, make a latte or some coffee, and spend the first hour or so of my day with God.  My wife wakes up at 8:00, I spend some time with her over breakfast and a little more coffee, and we’re both off to work by 8:45.  The job I have isn’t great, but between our two incomes we make it just fine.  Plus I very much enjoy the people I work with and building relationships with my co-workers has proven to be a very positive part of my life.  At 5:00pm I punch out and head home where my wife and I make dinner and discuss the intimate details of our young lives together.  On Wednesday nights we go to prayer meeting at our church.  On Friday nights we spend time building relationships with people in our church over dinner and games to start the weekend during which we take care of our domestic logistics and rest from a productive week of work and study (we try to learn more about various subjects with our spare time with the resources available to us).  This is the way our quiet and beautiful life together has been for some time now, and although children or unexpected changes may shape our life differently in the foreseeable future, for now things are stable and there is no reason to alter anything in any way.

For those of you who haven’t realized that I haven’t actually been describing my life, welcome back to reality.  I have only been describing the life I long for in my weaker moments.  While its a perfectly plausible and very happy reality for many people my age, I am unable to pursue it because of the task that God has clearly set before me.

Retain the image I have set before you and take it to its logical conclusion.  A happy couple with no real ambition outside of loving God and loving others.  They have a good marriage with no pressing needs or concerns; just two people living comfortable in the presence of God.  Let this comfort go on long enough and eventually their passion for life will fade.  Scripture will become words, the redundancy of work will not bring fulfillment, relationships will become stale.  How can this be kept from happening?

This is one of the best apologies I can give for undertaking this seemingly masochistic pursuit of music composition.  What better way is there to look at specific aspects of the world in a fresh way than through a form of expression that uses a completely universal and wonderfully unique method of creative communication?  What a fresh and wonderful way of portraying the noise of our distracted culture John Corigleono presented in Circus Maximus.  What a beautifully passionate and hopeful outlook on death Takashi Yoshimatsu presented in his “Fuzzy Bird Sonata”.  How do people fight their apathetic outlook without various forms of artistic expression helping them attend to existence in ways they’ve never considered?

At this point I feel the need to discuss apathy.  First of all, it’s a sinful attitude to be indifferent towards God’s creative work which is part of his glory.  If it’s a sin to be indifferent to creation, how much more to be indifferent to his word, his will, or your fellow man for whom Christ died?  Is God an apathetic being in regards to anything?  Since he is not, we cannot be either and art keeps us from this sin.  Apathy is a powerful temptation because it is a seemingly useful tool for acquiring happiness (or a cheap substitute for it).  One way to eliminate pain is to stop caring about the part of you that is in pain.  You get upset with politics so you stop caring; life gets a little easier at the expense of something important.  Thus apathy leads to bliss which is an “emotion” enjoyed by fools.

So then, apathy is to be avoided at every level.  Care deeply about God, people, the created world, and the dark powers that work against them.  Do everything in your power to maintain your passion for good.  But how?  Well, as I was saying, perceiving the world in a variety of different ways will help you to continue caring.  Keeping a fresh perceptive on the whole of life will keep you from the sin of apathy and help to bring you into a full and rich awareness of the wonderful life that God has given you.

Sorry if I sound pretentious, but the fine arts (by that I mean work that actually attempts to say something worthwhile) are more important than the football game. Spending an hour with great art will open your senses to new ways of perceiving creation, people, God, and your own life in wonderfully rich ways.  Do consider it.

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Aesthetic Education; Loving God

July 22nd, 2010

So far this series of posts has dealt with matters of intellect, enhancing people’s awareness of the world, and their overall cognitive abilities.  To the academic world these are matters of significant consequence (Although I am quite certain that I have not persuaded anyone).  But now that we’ve defined our terms and unpacked some sensitive concepts it is time to apply them to things of great consequence to the church and her members.

Getting to know God and becoming more like Him should be a Christian’s chief concern in life. Following His commands is a given, and not sinning would be a very simple task provided we grew to love God with all our hearts.  There are two methods that God as given us to grow closer to him: general revelation and special revelation. Special revelation is God’s word given to us through the prophets and any teaching or analysis done that originates from scripture.  The church handles the word of God quite effectively for the most part, and I have taken a lot from the teaching I have received.  But, unfortunately, simply teaching the word only goes so far and the intense division in the church we have today bears witness to this.  The word of God is only part of the picture, and for the church to not teach general revelation as much as it teaches special revelation is to limit the church’s perception of God’s glory and majesty along with the deep knowledge and wisdom that result from studying his creative work both aesthetically and analytically.

To only study the word is like getting to know a person only by talking to them.  When I first met Liz (my fiance) we got to know each other initially through conversation, but as our friendship deepened conversations by themselves only went so far.  We started to experience life together; listening to a stream together, attending to a specific part of the sky, running, going to the symphony, studying pedagogy, and countless other activities enhancing not our factual knowledge of one another, but in a profound sense our aesthetic understanding of one another.  I didn’t ask Liz to marry me because of the factual knowledge about her that I had accumulated; it was because of the things I had learned abut her aesthetic characteristics in between conversations that I fell in love with her.

Do we somehow expect our relationship with God to develop differently?  How is it that He can give us such a clear picture of what kind of relationship he wants with us using marriage and we (mostly) ignore it?  Just as it is impossible to fall in love with another person by talking it is impossible to fall in love with Christ only by studying the Bible.  You have to spend time with him outside factual knowledge and dive into the richness of his creative work.  By enjoying other people’s perceptions of that work, creating representations of your own perception, and perceiving his wonders first hand, you will gain an aesthetic understanding of our Savior beyond words.  This is when and how you will fall in love with Christ.  Feel free to memorize every word of the Bible, but until you learn to actually perceive Him in the world around you, you cannot know Him well enough to love Him.

Now, when it comes to the study of scripture, it’s impossible to even understand the depth and beauty of the Bible until you’ve experience life with God.  Much of he factual knowledge in the Bible is rooted in the aesthetic understanding of the world.  I, for example, was bored to tears trying to read the major prophets until I had composed the Dark Process since that was how I learned to understand a large work rooted in emotion rather than story.  Several symphonies and concertos by various composers also acted as gateways into the major prophets for me.  But this isn’t even the best part; I met with God and glorified his name in the midst of these aesthetic experiences that also enabled me to enjoy His Word.  So it hasn’t been the Bible alone that has caused me to love God, it has been the perception of His creation through the lens of Scripture which I gained through an understanding of creative work..  That said,  I also want to make it clear that the lens of scripture is vital to the accurate perception that draws us to worship.

Aesthetic education teaches the believer to learn about God through general revelation.  It is through God’s gift of his creative work perceived through the lens of His word that we will learn to love Him.  Therefore opportunities for aesthetic education in the church are essential to foster a passionate and unifying adoration of our Savior.

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Posted in Education, Faith | 6 Comments »

Professional Musicians?

May 2nd, 2010

I want to make something very clear before I start:  Some people have recently confronted me with the fact that many people don’t believe that there is a God (or that he is not who he says he is).  A few people have even unfriended me on Facebook out of anger because I say what I know to be true (How’s that for religious tolerance?  I could understand leaving my website group, but wow…).  They think that my approach to reasoning through these discourses is flawed because I assume that everyone agrees that God exists. The thing is, if we are going to be held accountable for the things we did here on earth after we die, and if God did reveal his word to us which we are expected to obey, and he did make the atoning sacrifice so that our sins could be forgiven provided that we believe and behave in accordance with that belief, then that changes everything.  To not mention God in my arguments would be to say things that I don’t believe to be true.  If you want to say anything about how to live life at all, you have to choose whether you’re living for yourself, or living for the Creator.  I happen to know God, and I happen to talk to him every day through prayer and the study of his word.  I don’t simply think he exists; I know he does and I’m in very good company.  I will never post anything outside this context.  Moving on…

Not professional in the sense that one is trained and very good at what they do, but simply in that one makes most of their income from writing and playing music.  My new CD, Purpose, is hopefully coming this June (although it may end up being later since life keeps happening) and it has been causing me to reflect very deeply on the purpose God intended music to serve.  Each purpose that I’ve considered while writing the music for this project does not seem to require the existence of professional musicians.  While the project itself proves that a very high artistic level is pleasing, it is being done by students who will probably never make the majority of their income from performing or composing.  If I myself stay the course I am on, I will never be a professional composer but I will be a teacher.  For some time now I’ve been bitter about this and have had a desire to make a valiant attempt to work out a way for professional composers to actually exist to the extent that I could hope to become one.  But I’m beginning to see that the purpose of music can be fulfilled without people generating most of their income from it.

At this point we have to establish what purpose God originally intended music to fulfill.  My subjective explanation is that the all encompassing purpose of music is to communicate difficult concepts decisively and in a different way.  For example, I was told by many people that my abortion piece provoked tears.  This indicates to me that the music effectively communicated what I intended, which was to depict abortion for what it is.  Obviously, God has blessed that work with the ability to communicate its intended message very effectively.  To me this is a clear demonstration that music can teach us things that can be difficult to express in other ways.  That piece taught me personally just how awful and devastating abortion is, and yet I’ve perceived countless hours of very good presentations devoted to the subject.  Once I finished that recording and listened to it, I understood  the situation much more clearly than I ever had previously.  “Music is communication.”

In order for this purpose of effective teaching/communication to be fulfilled, musicians being paid is not at all a prerequisite.  Replace my proposed purpose with something else and you will most likely be able to reach the same conclusion.  Extensive knowledge and skill is a prerequisite, but myself and all of the people I call my peers are already fulfilling these purposes and none of us are making a living by making music.  Apparently music’s purpose is being fulfilled without any significant amount of money being paid.

I suppose I must now address how I justify undergraduate and graduate level studies while knowing that my education is relatively useless for generating a larger income.  As believers, since when has anything God led us to do been for the sake of our own selfish pleasure?  Since when has God called us to make an enormous commitment like college in order to indulge our desire for more wealth?  My education in music composition has not been for the sake of me generating an income, but rather to serve by effectively communicating truth that can’t be expressed in any other way.  I would not be able to write like I do had I not had the training that God clearly called me to endure.  Graduate study has been the only way for me to be prepared to serve the church in the way that God wants me to serve.

Don’t just give a gift, be a gift.

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