In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction and Translation
  • Paul Colilli (bio)

Pierangelo Sequeri (born 1944, Milan) is considered one of Italy’s leading theologians and musicologists, as well a composer of sacred music. Sequeri is a priest in the Archdiocese of Milan and professor of fundamental theology at the Theological Faculty of Northern Italy, where he is also the dean. As well, he is the founder and president of Orchestra Sinfonica Esagramma. Along with a body of sacred musical compositions,1 he has published numerous books and articles that pivot on understanding the significance of theology and the practices that flow from it within the context of the contemporary world.2 In all of its brevity, “Music and Resurrection” is a distillation of some of the major themes of Sequeri’s thought. To begin with, Sequeri is critical of new theology’s attempt to talk about the existence of God by means of a postmodern or secularized philosophy. By doing so, theology compromises the role of revelation and faith in any discussion about the existence of God. As a solution to this situation, Sequeri argues for the restoration of the anthropological elements of knowledge (emotion, desire, love, imagination, and action), with the view of connecting “knowing to the affective, ethical, symbolic and ritual life.”3 Music plays a key role in sounding the depths of this knowledge. In fact, for Sequeri the Western musical tradition has a cultural history of [End Page 417] thought due to the “spirituality of the sensible” which arises from the biblical accounts of creation, incarnation, and personal faith.4 The sacred in music creates a decisive space where one becomes cognizant of belonging to a specific time or age in history. Moreover, a musical event is one that allows us to “re-listen live to the history of emotions that brought us to this point.”5

In brief, Sequeri invokes a return to a more informed understanding of music on the part of theology precisely because the “musical,” a term he employs often, has, if one listens carefully, the capacity to play a prophetic role by announcing the Resurrection. That is not by means of verbal signs but rather through the trustworthiness of affectivity.

Below is my translation of the Italian text Professor Sequeri originally submitted to the Toronto Journal of Theology, followed by the original.

  • Music and Resurrection
  • Pierangelo Sequeri (bio)
    Translated by Paul Colilli (bio)
Abstract

Theology should concern itself more seriously with music. Music contains signs of life that nihilism was not able to cancel. From the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, in the age of the secularization of art, all of the great musicians confronted the themes and works of the religious tradition in their major works (from Wagner to Henze, from Schönberg to Andriessen, from Strawinskj to Messiaen, from Skriabjn to Gubaidulina). This essay presents the passage of music from the Romantic “religion of art” to the contemporary “ethics of dissonance.” With W.T. Adorno’s thesis in mind, a vision of music as the capacity to redeem the signifier from nihilism is proposed. Music restores power and beauty to the divine gift of the human capacity to signify. In this way, it gives new hope to words, to gestures, to the representation of reality.

Keywords

music, art, nihilism, redemption, beauty

From the point of view of culture, our age is one of a consciousness kept alive by the exegesis of death. The strongest thrust for a theoretical analysis of spiritual objects—the aesthetic, ethical, and religious ones—appears to arise from the celebration of their death. The meditatio mortis (contemplation of death) keeps them alive in philosophy, even if they are thought of as our past, which will never return. Or perhaps it is philosophy that feels it can remain alive only if it deals with aesthetics, ethics, and religion, even if it is only to say that they are dead. Otherwise not even philosophy, perhaps, would be alive. We thus have the “death of art” (Hegel), the “death of God” (Nietzsche), and finally the “death of the subject” (Foucault). In the so called post-contemporaneity (the name post-obitum [after death] that we have already given ourselves...

pdf

Share