Religion as Dirt in Contemporary Musicology - and Religious Studies
“I’m reading Johann Arndt.”
Many years ago, I heard a scholar of seventeenth-century music say this as part of a response to a question at a conference of the American Musicological Society. Now, Arndt was an early seventeenth-century Pietist Lutheran writer, whom one could easily read for spiritual edification and growth. But the vocal delivery of the musicologist’s statement was an unmistakable establishment of distance between the speaker and the spiritual. I have no idea what her private religious beliefs are, whether she was performing the kind of split subjectivity that I sometimes experience when I have to change from my theologian hat to my religious studies hat1 or whether that statement was an expression of a general disavowal of religion and spirituality. But what was loud and clear in the delivery of the statement was a sense that “religious belief/affect does not belong here.” The way the vocal delivery was so much a part of the meaning of the statement reminds me of how once, while I was on a first date, three Evangelical Christians shared the plaza with us and it was body language alone - they were out of earshot - that communicated their Evangelicalism undeniably. I thought, maybe even said, “they’re going to pray,” and ten minutes later, they were praying right there on the plaza. So, there’s something to investigate about how non-verbal communication makes truth claims, but here I’m more interested in the kind of truth claim embodied in the scholar’s authoritative assurance that she was not going to be seduced by Arndt’s pietism.
This incident came to mind this week when I got to page 2 of Laurie McManus’s Brahms in the Priesthood of Art, a book I am generally enjoying immensely. But it took her just over a page to get to this: “Broadly speaking, the currency of an art-religious ethos into the period after the failed social revolutions of 1848 and 1849 demonstrates the continued currency of music’s supposed mystical power even in the face of technological and scientific progress” (emphasis added). Despite the fact that many people throughout history have made connections between music and mysticism, McManus quickly lets us know that she is drawing a firm line between them. Rather than investigate mysticism and its varied interpretations, McManus simply assigns it to the realm beyond academic/scientific respectability. I wrote in an earlier post about how the musicologist Carolyn Abbate had to address the “embarassment” of mysticism in her unpacking of Vladimir Jankelevich’s thought - this flanking move speaks to a widespread sense that musicologists embrace the idea that “we” are modern, secular people, liberated from the shackles of religion. Fascinatingly, when I was in college, I picked up on a very clear stance of classical musicians and musicologists toward Vatican II’s modernizing efforts that simply translated back into the general idea that religion holds back musical progress, a perspective that later made learning about Vatican II from the perspective of liberation theology a mind-blowing experience.
McManus draws on the work of the feminist historian Joan Scott for her understanding of gender, but glides past Scott’s work on the gendering of secularism as masculine. Scott noted a widespread assumption in the aftermath of 9/11 that people were thinking with a rigid association of Islam with women’s oppression and secularism with women’s equality, and this association distorted the stories we could tell about the past, our diagnosis of the present, and our plans for the future. Based on her historical investigations, she argues that “it is very clear that the gender equality today invoked as a fundamental and enduring principle of secularism was not at all included in that term. In fact, gender inequality was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. I go further to suggest that Euro-Atlantic modernity entailed a new order of women’s subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics.”2 Another example of secularism as restricting women’s rights is the effect of the American Revolution on women’s rights in Catholic Maryland. Before the Revolution, women had the right to exercise power of attorney in their own name, but under the laws of the new Republic, these rights were revoked through the establishment of a secular government that understood maleness as a prerequisite for citizenship.3 Mexican women seem to have intuited this connection between women’s subordination and secularism because it was specifically Catholic women who ensured that Mexico remained solidly Catholic after the Mexican revolution that had a decidedly anti-clerical ethos.4 That this was fighting fire with fire is clear enough in retrospect, but adds evidence to Scott’s argument. Scott does not argue that religion is really less patriarchal than secularism - it’s the mental habit of lining a bunch of terms into solid columns that she’s attacking.
McManus does acknowledge the nineteenth-century feminization of religion and analyzes how it set the terms for women’s performances of Brahms,5 but I found the way she positioned herself outside and above the discourse she’s describing to be in itself a kind of negotiation of shifting terms where she wanted to speak from a feminist, secular perspective about a moment we’ve supposedly moved past. The implication that the feminization of religion entails the masculinization of the secularism that undergirds the academic space from which she writes goes by unnoticed.
Nowhere is it clearer to me that musicology depends on an implicitly gendered model of religion/secularity than in the fact that everything Fred Maus says about how music theorists establish masculinity in relation to music can be applied how musicologists generally talk about the spirituality of music. It was fun revisiting this article with fresh eyes (it was foundational for my first publication, an essay developed out of a paper I wrote for him). Maus analyzes the metaphors in music theoretical writing to unearth its unspoken assumptions about gender and sexuality. He writes, “If male music theorists find themselves engaged in a listening activity they find alarmingly feminine, they can try to cheer themselves up by writing about music in ways that they and their readers can regard as masculine. The manly writing is the compensation, and screen, for the unmanliness of the listening.”6
Maus unpacks the language of music theorists to show that theorists feminize listening through analogy to penetration. Sonic penetration is something that music theorists apparently both enjoy and are ashamed of. But as St. Teresa of Avila reminds us, penetration can also be a powerful metaphor for religious experience:
Our Lord was pleased that I should have at times a vision of this kind: I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form. This I am not accustomed to see, unless very rarely. Though I have visions of angels frequently, yet I see them only by an intellectual vision, such as I have spoken of before. It was our Lord’s will that in this vision I should see the angel in this wise. He was not large, but small of stature, and most beautiful—his face burning, as if he were one of the highest angels, who seem to be all of fire: they must be those whom we call cherubim. Their names they never tell me; but I see very well that there is in heaven so great a difference between one angel and another, and between these and the others, that I cannot explain it. I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God.
If musicologists and music theorists sometimes hide their love of music behind the driest prose imaginable, and if that stance is linked to a distrust of both erotic and religious experience, the disavowal of religion in religious studies is an even stranger phenomenon. There is a growing number of scholars who want religious studies to be the scientific study of religion, to the extent that it is the only field I know of where one can find people who are are motivated by actual contempt for their object of study. I remember a tweet some time back that illustrated Maus’ diagnosis of masculinity in scholarship perfectly. A young scholar of Western representations of Hinduism tweeted out umbrage that religious people were allowed to participate in the American Academy of Religion. “These are the people we’re supposed to be studying!” According to him, religious people should be objectified, not participants in a conversation. If you had any doubts about how this need to objectify relates to masculinity, the majority of his twitter feed was aggressive commentary on Mixed Martial Arts. Lest this example be seen as anomalous, I remember a friend who worked for a major corporation was dipping her toe in theology and attended an American Academy of Religion meeting - she came back to me saying, “I saw more mansplaining here than I ever see at my corporate job.” This trend has me running harder into the arms of theology, generally speaking.
This week, I re-read a paper I wrote in grad school using Kristeva’s concept of abjection to analyze and queer the character Ottone in Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea. It’s this concept of abjection - the constitution of the self through disavowal of what it must cast off (poop is the prime example) - that makes me think of religion as the “dirt,” the “out-of-place” matter, of academic subjectivity. This idea of religion itself as “dirt” is fascinating insofar as regulating pollution has been a foundational feature of many religious phenomena. If sexuality has been one of the primary zones of that regulation, it’s interesting to see how that pattern of abjection persists in an upside-down way in secularism’s disavowals of spirituality as it tells itself it is the true champion of gender equality and sexual liberation.
This habit I’ve developed of moving between the discursive realms of religious studies and theology in different contexts is a kind of postmodern perspectivism that is in profound tension with the Quaker insistence on a single standard of truth and that’s a topic to ruminate on another day.
Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 3. Emphasis in original.
See Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Ruether, In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), 20-21.
Margaret Chowing, Catholic Women and Mexican Politics: 1750-1940 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2023).
Laurie McManus, Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century Musical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 100-111.
Fred Everett Maus, “Masculine Discourse in Music Theory,” Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), 273.