Abstracts

Music at the Table: Early Modern Commensal Worship in Three Objects (Maral Attar-Zadeh)

“You Have Given Us the Grace to Pray Together in Harmony”: Liturgical Singing as a Criterion for (Philosophical? Theological?) Aesthetics (Brian Butcher)

In the Christian East, unaccompanied singing is the ordinary medium of public prayer. Singing is the way in which worship is enacted: an axial element in the pursuit of the “good life,” religiously conceived. Whether it involves cantors, choirs or the whole congregation, such singing is always a conversation—ideally a three-way communication engaging a deacon, as well as the presiding bishop or priest—raising philosophical questions about the intersection between the psychology/sociology of sacred song, and the understanding and experience of beauty. Chanting, moreover, can be seen (heard!) to bear profoundly ethical considerations, embodying a kind of practical wisdom rarely noticed in contemporary philosophical or theological discourse.

Presence and Absence in Bach’s Ascension Oratorio, BWV 11 (Michael O'Connor)

The ascension of Jesus is a triumphant exaltation to the Father’s right hand in heaven. It is also a sad departure from his disciples that he himself sought to prepare them for. And even though he promised to be with them always, and to send the Spirit to be their Comforter, there is a sense in which his presence—in word and sacrament—is overlaid with absence and longing. This paper explores how both libretto and music in Bach’s Ascension Oratorio of 1735 capture these conflicting feelings.

Rhythm, Rhetoric, and Liturgical Meaning in DuFay's Missa Ave Regina Caelorum (Adrian Ross)

Music and the Ascent of the Soul in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum (Adam Lalonde)
In the Itinerarium mentis in Deum Bonaventure briefly take up Augustine's De Musica, Book VI, in order to explain the ascent of the soul. This paper will provide a closer analysis of how Bonaventure's engagement with Augustine on the topic of musica speculativa opens a more comprehensive understanding of Bonaventure's theological anthropology. These Augustinian insights on music join Aristotelian metaphysics and the spirituality of St. Francis to form a distinctly Bonaventurian conception of human person returning to God.

"By the Waters of Babylon”: Affect and Exegesis in Three Sixteenth-Century Psalm Motets (Aaron James)
The celebrated psalm 137 (136) is a powerful lament in which the exiled Jewish people mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and their captivity in Babylon, and numerous composers have set the psalm to music. Debate among Christian exegetes has historically focused on the imprecatory final verses, which threaten violent revenge on the Babylonian children: "Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock." A tradition deriving ultimately from Origen interprets this verse as an allegory of the spiritual life, in which incipient sins are destroyed against the rock of Christ. The persistence of this tradition can be traced in three psalm motets of the mid-sixteenth century - by Gombert, La Fage, and Appenzeller - whose strategies in setting the text to music point to the continued currency of allegorical reading at a time that it was widely criticized by contemporary theologians.

“Tota Pulchra Es, Maria”: Music, Mary, and the Mediation of the Beautiful (Christina Labriola)

This paper argues that the “way of beauty” exemplified in an aesthetic spiritual theology of the Virgin Mary sheds light upon music’s aesthetic theological relevance in the spiritual life. This has significant repercussions for the role and vocation of the musician within the Church, which might be framed as an extension of the unique mission of Mary, to “bear beauty” into the world.