Music and the meaning of Creation

Related reading and listening

• The physical beauty of music — Music can be likened to a cathedral, says professional guitarist Gordon Kreplin, when it creates through silence and sound a meditative space into which one may enter and encounter God. (14 minutes)
• Counterpoint as a “spirited discussion” — In this essay, John Ahern explains the beauty and order of counterpoint, the accumulation of multiple melodies that come together in a harmonious whole. (20 minutes)
• The Decline of Formal Speech and Why It Matters — John McWhorter examines the reasons behind the decline in articulate speech and writing in the late 20th century, and the implications of this change across many areas of culture. (55 minutes)
• The relationship between prudence and reality  — In this lecture, Ken Myers explains how the virtue of prudence is fundamentally connected with a deep and anchored understanding of reality. (54 minutes)
• Constructing your Favorites List — Ken Myers describes the new ecosystem of Mars Hill Audio’s membership/partnership program and shares clips from five recent lectures released as Bonus Features. (26 minutes)
• Festivity and the goodness of Creation — Drawing on Josef Pieper’s ideas, Ken Myers explains why the spirit of festivity is the spirit of worship, and that “entertainment” is ultimately an artificial, contrived, and empty effort to achieve festivity. (25 minutes)
• Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
• In praise of a hierarchy of taste — In a lecture at a CiRCE Institute conference, Ken Myers presented a rebuttal to the notion that encouraging the aesthetic appreciation of “higher things” is elitist and undemocratic. (58 minutes)
• No neutral view of the cosmos — Ken Myers argues that Christians need to recover a “whole-earth discipleship” that enables them to think Christianly about all areas of life, including public life. (50 minutes)
• Friendship and life together — In a lecture at Providence College, Ken Myers explores how the concept of friendship, which used to be central to political philosophy, was banished from considerations of public life as the state was exalted over society. (53 minutes)
• How music reflects and continues the created order — Musician, composer, and teacher Greg Wilbur explores how music reflects the created order of the cosmos. (55 minutes)
• Developing a Christian aesthetic — In the inaugural lecture for the Eliot Society, titled “Faithful Imaginations in a Meaningful Creation,” Ken Myers addresses the question of the relationship between the arts and the Church. (59 minutes)
• The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
• Genealogy of a work of praise — For Good Friday, Ken Myers tells the history of the text and music behind the popular hymn, “O Sacred Head, now wounded.” (27 minutes)
• Pierced feet, wounded side, bloodied head — As Passiontide begins (the coming Sunday), Ken Myers introduces listeners to Membra Jesu Nostri, an hour-long cycle of seven cantatas written about 1680 by Dieterich Buxtehude (1637–1707). (16 minutes)
• Martyrdom and music — To mark the feast day of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, we offer an interview from 2004 with composer J. A. C. Redford and poet Scott Cairns about their work together on an oratorio based on the story of Polycarp’s death. (15 minutes)
• In dulci jubilo — Ken Myers introduces some of the music for the season composed by Michael Praetorius (1571–1621), best known for his settings of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen (“Lo how a rose e’er blooming”) and In dulci jubilo. (18 minutes)
• Earthly things in relation to heavenly realities — In this lecture, Ken Myers argues that the end of education is to train students to recognize what is really real. The things of this earth are only intelligible in light of heavenly realities. (59 minutes)
• Maximalist music — FROM VOL. 8Dominic Aquila explains how — unlike the minimalist composers John Cage and Philip Glass — Arvo Pärt uses purity and simplicity to point beyond the created world to the transcendent Creator. (6 minutes)
• Turn to the Lord your God — Ken Myers introduces musical settings from the book of Lamentations, traditionally sung during Holy Week. (26 minutes)
• Music without emotivism — Julian Johnson discusses how novel, historically speaking, is the idea of complete relativism in musical judgment. (33 minutes)
• Music, passion, and politics — In this interview from 2001, Carson Holloway discusses his book All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics, which summarizes the dramatic chasm between the classical and modern views of political ends and of musical means. (45 minutes)
• The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that capture some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (15 minutes)
• The music and the notes are precious — Ken Myers encourages an understanding of the Church as a particular culture that should be nourished and sustained, and then describes the history of an Advent hymn written by St. Ambrose. (27 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 154 — FEATURED GUESTS: Felicia Wu Song, Michael Ward, Norman Wirzba, Carl Trueman, D. C. Schindler, and Kerry McCarthy
• Stabat Mater dolorosa — Ken Myers offers some thoughts on the aesthetics of sympathy, and introduces some of the musical settings of the remarkable medieval poem known as “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” (23 minutes)
• Passions before Bach — In preparation for Holy Week, Ken Myers presents a whirlwind music history lesson with musical examples from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. (22 minutes)
• The mysteries and glory of Christmas and its music — Ken Myers presents examples of music from five centuries that captures some sense of the astonishing fact of the Nativity of our Lord. (26 minutes)
• Renaissance music for Good Friday — In a special Feature for Good Friday, Ken Myers shares settings of passages from the Book of Lamentations and of the Tenebrae Responsories by Tomás Luis de Victoria. (18 minutes)
• Meditative music for Passiontide — At the start of Passiontide, Ken Myers introduces listeners to works by the Renaissance composer Orlande de Lassus which highlight the theme of lamentation. (18 minutes)
• The Incarnation presented in music — Composer J.A.C. Redford talks about the theme of the Incarnation as musically presented in his choral symphony for Christmas entitled “Welcome All Wonders.” (23 minutes)
• Music for St. Cecilia’s Day — Ken Myers introduces several poems and related musical compositions that celebrate the heavenly gift of music and thereby honor St. Cecilia. (21 minutes)
• The Mystery Sonatas of Heinrich Biber — Baroque violinist Fiona Hughes reflects on Heinrich Biber’s 15 “Mystery Sonatas,” each of which corresponds to one of the mysteries in the life of Jesus and Mary that focused meditative devotion. (14 minutes)
• Roger Scruton: Music as an Art — Philosopher Roger Scruton explains why there are some things — music in particular and art in general — which one can’t rightly or fully perceive without making judgments. (32 minutes)
• Origins and attributes of Handel’s Messiah — Calvin Stapert explains the origins and character of Handel’s Messiah and describes the work as a Christocentric theological response to the nascent deism in the society and church in Handel’s time. (19 minutes)
• Six recent books worthy of note — Ken Myers shares a summary of six recent books that we want our listeners to know about but whose authors we won’t be interviewing. (15 minutes)
• St. Paul’s conversion set to music — Mendelssohn biographer R. Larry Todd provides a context for appreciating Mendelssohn’s work in the context of his life and faith. (24 minutes)
• The inevitability of escalating public animosity — With excerpts from books and lectures by Alasdair MacIntyre, Oliver O’Donovan, and Wendell Berry, Ken Myers argues that modern political theory has guaranteed increasing levels of public conflict. (19 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 130 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jacob Silverman, Carson Holloway, Joseph Atkinson, Greg Peters, Antonio López, and Julian Johnson
• Cadences which break (or mend) the heart — George Steiner on the mystery of musical meaning
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 128 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Crawford, Carlo Lancellotti, James Turner, Rod Dreher, Mark Evan Bonds, and Jeremy Beer
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 127 — FEATURED GUESTS: Christopher Shannon, Kevin Vanhoozer, Oliver O’Donovan, Rebecca DeYoung, Thomas Forrest Kelly, and Calvin Stapert
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 124 — FEATURED GUESTS: John Fea, Robert F. Rea, John C. Pinheiro, R. J. Snell, Duncan G. Stroik, Kate Tamarkin, and Fiona Hughes
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 123 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nicholas M. Healy, Christian Smith, James K. A. Smith, Esther Lightcap Meek, Richard Viladesau, and Jeremy Begbie
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 107 — FEATURED GUESTS: Victor Lee Austin, Ellen T. Charry, Anthony Esolen, Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Allen Verhey, and Calvin Stapert
• Robert R. Riley: “The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” — Robert R. Riley contrasts two sets of assumptions about music, and introduces two 20th-century composers who rejected the metaphysics of chaos in their compositions: the Danish composer Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams. (43 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 88 — FEATURED GUESTS: Diana Pavlov Glyer, Michael J. Lewis, Steve Talbott, Darryl Tippens, Everett Ferguson, Alexander Lingas, and Calvin Stapert
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 80 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stephen A. McKnight, Tim Morris, Don Petcher, Vigen Guroian, Paul Valliere, and Calvin Stapert
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher