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discussion

a conversation about music and history

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dan
Jul 10 2005
10:56 pm

grant and i have been having an e-discussion about music and history, and various related topics that we thought might be interesting to some cino readers, so we decided to post the conversation here. Of course everyone is welcome to join in.

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anton
Aug 16 2005
12:13 am

Dan and Grant,

I have been following your conversation with interest, and I don’t want it to come to an end. Perhaps I’ll throw in a few questions and see what happens.

Last Sunday I preached my first Psalm. Taking my que from Calvin, who says that the Psalms present an anatomy of the soul, expressing almost every emotion imaginable, I tried an approach I hadn’t tried before. I tried to bring the congregation into the mood of the psalmist. In Psalm 12 David’s mood is one of righteous anger at the injustice and atrocities going on around him. Rather than describing David’s situation, I tried “mood-matching” if you will.

I’ve got a lot to learn about bring a congregation into a particular mood (it’s hard!), but it seems to me that that is the value of music for history. It captures the mood of the spirit of the age. I’ve appreciated when professors or teachers play the music of a time period: it really brings history to life. “Oh, so THAT’S what it was like!” To use the tired old cliche, it allows history to be caught rather than merely taught.

To get myself back on task, my question is this: why are you seeking possible alternatives to written accounts of history? Why not rest satisfied with the example of some who supplement history teaching with music? Why ALTERNATIVES, not SUPPLEMENTS to history?

I know this is a basic question, but hopefully it will help those of us listening in to gather where you guys are coming from.

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grant
Aug 17 2005
02:15 pm

See, but written historical narratives in the modern sense have their own mood(s). Unfortunately, many historical accounts offer a cold, scientific, clinical examination table type mood, which is partly why it was easy not to see the Native Americans’ side of the story or to empathize with those who weren’t in the mood to go along with Western Progress. Our historical accounts have their own moods that determine how we experience the ages of the past. When you listen to music in a history class to tap into the mood of that time, this is good past-teaching. But the arts are often seen as “supplemental” to scientific history and this is the problem. I’m wondering if there might be a better method for taking account of our past that would include the arts within it, not as a supplement (art as separate from science).

As I’m writing, I’m even wondering if a more “musical” sense of history might help to bridge the gap between Western and Eastern worldviews. The East has not really had the “historical” sensibilities of the West, but I think the East might be able to relate to a more spiritual method of history’s “naming of the spirits”. I think, ultimately, the problem I’m having with history, even a more post-modern philosophy of history, is that it has become de-spiritualized. Yeah, we have moved from Modernism’s objectivity to a more subjective approach, but I believe we’ll still get a distorted and limited story if historians are not equipped to do their work in the right spirit. (See what I mean? Subjectivity is itself a kind of spirit. The historian in this spirit will not see certain contrasting spirits in a truthful way, making it necessary for us to talk about how a truthful spirit ought to be cultivated in the historian’s community, so that all spirits can be described truthfully).

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dan
Aug 18 2005
12:43 pm

Grant, are you saying that there is only one true way to describe the spirits of various ages? And that only historians of a particular stripe can truthfully do this? This seems to me a modernist approach. It would exclude all the historical truths that can be gleaned from historians (and musicians) describing spirits in a spirit you disagree with.

I’m not sure why we’re talking about describing spirits anyway. I think it’s impossible to understand the life of someone who lived 300 years ago “truthfully”, much less the ethos of an entire generation or civilisation. Heck, we don’t even understand our own very well. So what’s this business about capturing historical truth? We can catch glimpses which may be true, but claiming to understand the true truth about the past is a bit much. Even music can only transport us back in time using the vehicle of our experience and imagination.

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dan
Aug 18 2005
01:14 pm

I find the evolutionary argument you put forward earlier about the survival of the strongest spirits more than a little problematic. What if the Aztec spirit, (whatever you mean by “spirit”) was a good one, strong in its own way — but the Spanish conquerors had horses and guns along with a violent perversion of Christianity and thus destroyed the Aztec empire, slaughtered in the name of Christ, built churches everywhere, destroyed art and burned books. Does that mean that the Spanish “spirit” was stronger and thus more worth having and remembering?

I may have misunderstood what you’re saying, but I utterly reject the notion that only what is remembered was worth having. Sometimes the things that are remembered are much less important than the things that were forgotten. Check out what Jesus said about the people (spirits) that are the most important and you’ll find that the kind of people he loves most are the ones who are most likely to be forgotten.

Historians of the last 30 years have paid much attention to the kind of people who Jesus felt are most important: the poor, the disenfranchised, the powerless, the meek, the injured, the weak. These were largely ignored in histories written before 1960 but are now starting to figure in some history textbooks used in secondary schools. These historians are uncovering “spirits” that were forgotten but are definitely worth remembering. Some powerful spirits (such as ones that led to slavery, genocide, “pre-emptive” wars, and unjust economic systems) destroyed “spirits” that were worth remembering, but they’re forgotten because they were replaced by the ugly spirit of the conquering force. I reject the notion that what is, is better than what was, merely because it is.

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grant
Aug 18 2005
08:20 pm

Yeah, I left the “strong” in there, eventhough it deserved a disclaimer. But I didn’t feel like going into it, just then. I meant “strong” in the way you’re defending. Not in a Darwinian sense, but for me “strength” in the sense of what is and will be ultimately victorious over and over again, like Jesus Christ showed himself to be stronger as Love than the Jewish or Roman perceived “strengths”, legal or military.

My point about “truth” is that something must be forgotten in order for us to zoom in on the main or important events. Any kind of truth claim is a willful forgetting of something. As individual historians pick out what they think is worth remembering and forgetting, they themselves are guided by spirits. So this is all a very spiritual exercise. As we are describing a spirit 300 years ago, we are interacting with it again. This is why I love music as a model. It is the past re-performed in a new way. I suppose you could say that writing about the past is the same thing.

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dan
Aug 18 2005
09:34 pm

i agree that leaving things out is absolutely necessary for any truth claim, but you’re still arguing that the spirit that survives is the strong one, right? Thus the spirit that doesn’t survive is worth forgetting? Anyway, perhaps this is a tangent, but I thought it was important to address. I’m willing to accept your spiritual militarism — survival of the best spirit, if I may label it such. Though I don’t think in those terms.

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grant
Aug 19 2005
12:58 pm

Accepting the role of spirits in the work one might do as a historian means that even if we forget an event or a culture wrongly, the spirit may emerge again, forcing us to deal with it. I think that’s what is happening in the Middle East right now. The clash between East and West evident in the Crusades never was really resolved. Though the West believed (and still believes) we had resolved it with the Treaty of Westphalia and the idea of the sovereign state and a weaker church, this old demon is rising up again and we have to deal with it again, opening up history in new ways.

“Strong” spirits worth remembering. Again, with my definition of strength, I believe that the Modernism spirit is not the strongest spirit. It does not have the strength to endure forever, and is therefore weaker than that spirit which will live on eternally. Does that mean we should forget it? No. We should remember it in the right way, just like the Jewish Holocaust ought to be remembered from a certain perspective. The idea of forgetting is not to forget whole cultures, but to take from them what ought to be remembered, what ought to live on—essentially, what is in that living spirit (the model of this is in ancient Rome, when the conquering leader would hire historians to retell the story of Rome, this time making the new Caesar the hero of the story and erasing the names of the vanquished…and the living spirit of Greek and Christian culture was strong enough to outlast them all).

There is a responsibility here. I don’t know if the subjectivist view of the historian’s task takes this responsibility seriously enough. This is kind of what I want to know. Because I’m not in actual historian circles, I am only speculating about how some of the contemporary philosophies might play out for current historians. I’m guessing from my limited exposure to English criticism that it would be tempting also for historians to use Derrida (and others like him) as an excuse to do history as some sort of game, a plaything of the individual who brings only her own self to the world, making reality from her own viewpoint just because she can, throwing a bunch of ideologies together so that something new and original comes out, thus becoming publishable etc. Not only is this not Derridian, it does not take the prophetic task of the historian seriously enough.

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grant
Aug 20 2005
05:54 pm

I just realized what you were warning about, dan, when you were talking about the problem of thinking there’s one true way of describing historical events. I don’t want to say there is only one way of describing historical events. I think we need to be truthful to the spirit that we’re describing, which requires historical analysis that is in the right spirit. A dry, academic, “objective” factual account, may not be in the spirit of the age we’re describing, so there’s a disconnect, a built-on falseness to the account that prevents us from really understanding the events as they transpired at the time. Of course, there is no way that we can experience an event exactly the way it actually happened at the time, but I think media like fiction, visual art, cinema, music etc. may possibly be a more accurate account at times than a written “non-fiction”, and perhaps therefore more truthful. Tolstoy reminds us that when we look at a battle in a Napoleonic War objectively, it’s hard for us to understand why a Russian general didn’t attack when he should have logically attacked. But imagining what the spirit of the army must have been at the time, after a long hard day of battle against a mythical figure like Napoleon, might open up more understanding of why things happened the way they did.

The question of “truthful” history though, is maybe worth pursuing some more. How do you define false historical accounts, Dan?

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dan
Aug 29 2005
09:45 am

I haven’t encountered many historians who see writing history as a game, but what postmodernism has brought is a consciousness of the author’s place as creator of stories. Of course there are still those who see history as a science, ie figuring out what really really happened, but I’d say that most are at least somewhat aware of themselves as actors in the histories they are writing. As for a prophetic role, I’m not sure that’s necessary for all historians, but there are definitely some who take this seriously. For example, environmental historians are able to show how modern environmental problems relate to historic problems of the same. This can give us a greater understanding of a society’s historic relation to nature and hopefully a greater understanding of contemporary environmental causes and effects.

How to define truthfulness? Surely “the facts” have something to do with it. If a historian is making stuff up or fudging the numbers, he’s not being truthful. But it goes far beyond that of course. You can give the same facts to 100 different people and each one will construct a different story using those facts.

A novelist can make up facts, but must still construct a true story if she wants to connect with the reader. A historian must use facts to construct a true story, which is much harder (at least if you want it to be true AND interesting). Aristotle felt that fiction was more true because, for the novelist/playwright/screenwriter, the facts wouldn’t get in the way of the truth.

All that to say…I don’t know how to define truth. And I’m not sure it’s necessary to define it in words. People feel it if something is true or not. But I do know that what is true today will not necessarily be true 200 years ago or 200 years from now. The historical truth of one era is likely to become the dated (and perhaps offensive) narrative of the next era just as todays kids generally don’t “get” the truth of The Who and Bach. Also, there may be someone writing history today who is considered a bit batty, but in 30 years she may be considered genius. I think I have a somewhat democratic sense about what truth and falsehood might be.

So to keep the conversation moving forward, Grant, tell me what you see as the practical outgrowths of what you see as bad history and good history. And how does this relate to Avril Lavine, Coldplay, and Arcade Fire?

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anton
Aug 30 2005
02:19 am

Perhaps I can be of assistance at this point by sharing what I’ve learned about how postmodernism interfaces with and shapes historiography. By and large the death knell has been sounded some time ago for the scientific/objectivist/positivistic view of history-telling. No one espouses the old modernist view anymore for fear of being proven a fool.

Unlike Dan, I have encountered quite a few historians who see history-writing as nothing more than a game. In my historiography class at UTD I was shocked to see one student claim Nietzsche’s view of history-writing (put overly simply, History is written by the conquerors) as his own view, and then to hear our professor agree with him. We are hopelessly laden with ideologies, and all we know about the past is likewise colored/masked by the ideologies of those who created that information.

This view is not rare. It is a loud voice in the field of ancient Israelite history. Philip Davies, for instance, argues that what we know as ancient Israel is nothing more than an “intellectual construct” imposed upon the past by Jewish and Christian believers. K W Whilelam argues that secular historians can write more reliable history than is found on the pages of Scripture, and calls for the death of biblical history. A third historian, T L Thompson, goes further and boldly denies that there ever was an ancient Israel. He writes, “This we do know.” Their scholarship is shamefully irresponsible. They make bold claims without supporting them. Why bother? One ideology deserves another.

Thankfully this view is on the extreme of a continuum. Others take Gadamer’s bridge over Lessing’s Ditch. A guy named William Davies, for instance, calls upon historians to be better readers of history. Ancient texts should be read in light of their many contexts, and readers should try not to impose on text the unique presuppositions of their own context. Other historians (Provan, Long, and Longman) says history is the telling and retelling of unverifiable (read: unscientific) stories. It requires the reader of history to trust unverified and unverifiable stories/testimonies of others (read: not according to the demands of the scientific method).

It is due to historians’ like these that, while I am intrigued and sympathetic, I’m not yet convinced we need an alternative to present historiography. We vitally need an alternative to the positivistic view of history-writing, but there’s some good historiography out there that attempts to answer the profound defects of history under the tyranny of the scientific worldview.