Music, Modernity, and God: Essays in Listening . By

In this succinct yet rich collection of eight essays, Jeremy Begbie skillfully explores the way that music can inform our theological processing of “modernity.” Begbie is interested in how discussions of music can reflect theologies and “ways of talking/thinking” about God. His signature approach of theologically questioning individual pieces, composers, and even smaller samples of music makes Begbie one of the most innovative scholars in music and theology. The book provides the reader with a wide breadth of examples that demonstrate how this type of theological inquiry might be applied to any piece of music in the world—though Begbie limits his scope to the ecclesial and art music of western Europe. For ethnomusicologists, ethnodoxologists, and arts practitioners working in Christian contexts around the world, Music, Modernity, and God offers important contributions about the way that music can “mean,” the ways that text and multimedia interrelate, and how a piece of music can yield theological and cultural insights through deep questioning. The reader may wonder whether any trace of God can be found in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, or whether theological interpretations should be retrofitted to works that may not have originally been perceived as theological expressions, but Begbie seems to take pleasure in playing with these idiosyncrasies and seeming conflicts. Just as a musical piece becomes “new” again each time it is interpreted through a new cultural lens or in a new context, so Begbie adopts the epistemic context and lens of “modernity” to bring new life to a familiar canon.