What is Absolute Music?

Roger Scruton has a most interesting answer to this question in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition. He writes about people wanting a pure music, like pure Mathematics - music for its own sake, music without external influences. He goes on to say that this is impossible, pointing out that music is more than its sounds and structure - our experience of it is a vital ingredient.
The opposite of absolute music is thought to be program music - music that tells a story, or is inspired by a picture or poem. And music that accompanies or is accompanied by words - sung or spoken - can’t be absolute music. Wherever music is subservient to other art forms, or linked with them, the additional ingredients mean it is no longer just music.
When I was a child, I discovered that my father’s limited experience of orchestral music (presumably from his school days) meant that he thought that symphonies were always telling a story. When I was listening to my record of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony which my Uncle Dave gave me, he would ask “And what’s happening here?” as if I could tell him that the loud part is all about say, a group of men fighting a battle.
Some composers do attempt to tell a story with their music, of course - such as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony which has titles for each movement:

1. Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside
2. Scene by the brook
3. Merry gathering of country folk
4. Thunder, Storm
5. Shepherd’s song. Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm.

But attempts to tell a story with a piece of music can be unsuccessful. Would we have thought of the same program, if we had not been told? Or, does it sound rustic to us, because of all the music we have learned to associate with pastoral settings?
In a chapter in Fritz Spiegl’s Book of Musical Blunders and Other Musical Curiosities, titled after Stravinsky’s famous saying: Music expresses nothing, he tells the story of Victorian composer Francesco Berger composing a piano piece with a strict bar-by-bar musical program, but keeping it to himself. He played the piece to three of his fellow composers and asked each to write down what he thought the music portrayed.
The first, a Welshman, said in perfect seriousness, that the piece meant “Daybreak as seen from the lowest gallery of a Welsh coal-mine.”
The second declared it depicted a boar hunt in Russia.
The third thought the piano piece suggested an enamoured couple whispering love vows.
But Berger said he was trying to illustrate “The discovery by Pharaoh’s daughter of the infant Moses in the bulrushes!”
Spiegl also tells us about the time a lady told Richard Strauss that she could picture a succession of the hero’s conquests in his Don Juan tone poem. Strauss couldn’t resist asking her, if she’d noticed that one of the girls had red hair!

Review of Discontinuity to Continuity by Benjamin J Merkle

I’ve been fascinated by the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, since I was given this topic as a First Year assignment at Kenmore Christian College, Queensland over forty years ago. Twenty-five years later I read The S. Lewis Johnson festschrift Continuity and Discontinuity: Perspectives on the Relationship Between the Old and New Testaments, and continued to think about questions like

1. Are Christians are expected to obey the ten commandments and other Old Testament laws? 2. How are the church and Israel related?
3. Is the bride of Christ the new Israel?
4. How should we interpret the Old Testament? If we try to do this literally, what do you mean by “literally?”

I think these topics are worth all Christians pondering. So when I came across Benjamin J. Merkle’s Discontinuity To Continuity: A Survey of Dispensational and Covenant Theologies, I was eager to read it and explore these important areas once again.

In this book, Merkle says he wants to help us to know what we believe, appreciate the views of others, recognize that our own theological system is not perfect, and strive to be a person whose views are derived from the Bible.

He subdivides Dispensationalism into Classic [Scofield, Darby, Chafer], Revised [Ryrie, Walvoord, Pentecost] and Progressive branches [Blaising, Bock, Saucy]. Covenantalism is further sorted into Progressive Covenantalism [Gentry, Wellum, Reisinger, Zaspel], Covenant Theology [Kline, Palmer Robertson, Horton], and Christian Reconstructionism [Rushdoony, Bahnsen and North] subgroups.

He then seeks to answer four key questions about each group, based on the writings of its own exponents:

1. What is the basic hermeneutic?

2. What is the relationship between the covenants?

3. What is the relationship between Israel and the Church?

4. What is the kingdom of God?

At the end of each chapter, he gives an assessment of positive and negative points about each of these ways of interpreting the Bible. Dr Merkle says he has tried to describe each theological system and silence his own opinion.

He has produced a useful handbook, which employs the Logos Bible Software engine well. You can quickly jump from one system to another, making comparison easy. The use of the one framework for each chapter helps the reader to see how the systems differ. But that also makes the book predictable and not a gripping read!

The way the book is structured makes Classical Dispensationalism and Christian Reconstructionism appear to be extreme, and Progressive Dispensationalism and Progressive Covenantalism to be the middle ground views. The treatment of the various views seems to be reasonably even-handed, and the author has enlisted the help of folk who adhere to each system to ensure that he has dealt with their preferred interpretations fairly. But he seems a lot more critical of Dispensational views and Recontructionism than of the other views.

One valuable feature of the book is its articulation of Progressive Covenantalism. This view was being promoted at the turn of this century in books such as Tom Wells and Fred Zaspel’s New Covenant Theology. Stephen Wellum and Peter Gentry have written or, edited several books about this recent expression of an important aspect of biblical theology, but settled on this present term because they were dissatisfied by some statements by promoters of “New Covenant Theology.” Their somewhat ugly term Progressive Covenantalism seeks to “underscore the unfolding nature of God’s revelation over time,” while emphasising that “God’s plan unfolds through the covenants and that all of the covenants find their fulfillment, telos, and terminus in Christ.”

Merkle would appear to have distilled the hundreds of pages written about this new way of looking at the relationship between Israel and the Church, between the Old and New Testaments, and between the various covenants into a handy and useful summary. The advantage of Progressive Covenantalism is that it embraces some of the good ingredients in Dispensationalism and Covenant Theology, providing a middle way that also seems to be much more clearly derived from the Bible itself, and not imposed on it.

I received this book in Logos Bible Software format free of charge, but was not required to give a positive review.