Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship

Musicology as Catholicism and Nationalism in fin-de-siècle France:
Revisiting Pierre Aubry and the Modal Theory
Peter Mondelli, University of Pennsylvania

A century ago, Pierre Aubry was amongst the foremost scholars of 13th-century music. Although many of his editions are still indispensable reference works, Aubry is now best remembered in music departments around the world for the extraordinary circumstances surrounding his death. The now-disproven myth of a dual with his rival Jean-Baptiste Beck persists, continuing to draw attention to the theory that sparked their public feud: the modal theory. Now completely dismissed, this theory posited that troubadour songs were sung in the modal rhythms of contemporary northern French polyphony. It was, by our standards, amongst the worst musicological ideas that either of them ever had, making it all the more curious that they would both not only think of it at the same time, but also fight to take credit for it.

This paper will attempt to revisit the modal theory more sympathetically, rereading it as a product of a discipline ideologically bound to Catholicism and nationalism. Aubry’s theory offers an opportunity to assess historically the benefits and pitfalls of one music scholar’s balance between his faith and his academic work. By situating Aubry and the Institut Catholique de Paris in the contentious world of Third Republic religious politics, we can better understand the goals of the modal theory in terms of a desire to balance faith with philology and historicism. This paper will focus especially on the impetus behind the apparent need for a sounding past – a past made present – and its religious and political implications.

Stoicism, Indic Religion, and Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 132
John Paul Ito, Conservatory of Music, Lawrence University

Beethoven was a man of contradictions. He showed predilections both for developmental processes in which established material gradually dissolves and for surprising formal ruptures that introduce new, highly individuated material. And despite a deep resonance with stoic philosophers and, in his later years, a fascination with similar thinking in Indic religion, he retained a fondness for the sort of deus ex machina happy ending to which a good stoic ought to be entirely indifferent.

These contrasting impulses are woven together in his string quartet op. 132. The issues are raised most pointedly in the Heiliger Dankgesang, and especially in the disjunction between title and music. The title is often understood to imply a theistic God who intervenes in the world on behalf of his creatures, though if the convalescence is understood as common and not special grace the words also make sense from Christoph Christian Sturm’s more deistic perspective. What the title is not compatible with is a stoic understanding of a world soul to which all individuals return at death and of a detached resignation with regard to earthly affairs as the goal of the truly wise. And yet this stoic/Indic conception seems more consistent with the music. Even the Neue Kraft fühlend sections are distanced by trills and registral extremes, and in the dissolving of the chorale Beethoven evokes a timeless state of transcendence. Here there is little room for a theistic personal deity who is the apotheosis of the individual and to whom the day-to-day ultimately points, for in this case transcendence and loss of individuation are tightly bound up in one another.

Seen from this perspective, the quartet’s many abrupt disjunctions take on new meaning, especially as close attention to the first movement reveals a process of gradual formal dissolution similar to that of the third. That the movement ends with renewed energy, and that the quartet as a whole ends on a note of happiness for which there is little if any preparation, shows that the quartet reflects its composer’s contradictory perspectives on the workings of the world.

Oratorio as Sacred Music in Nineteenth-Century Paris?
Sarah A. Ruddy, Washington University in Saint Louis

During the nineteenth century, French composers and librettists truly seized the genre of oratorio for the first time. The number of new French oratorios rose dramatically, especially during the Third Republic, causing le Ménestrel to report on February 7, 1875, that in Paris, “the vogue is decidedly for oratorio.” Among these works were quasi-staged operatic-sounding productions in which drama was favored over any sort of piety.

These modern oratorios prompted critics to grapple with the problem of defining sacred music. In 1887 and 1888, two articles were published in widely circulated Parisian newspapers to address this issue: Camille Bellaigue’s “La Religion dans la Musique” in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the three-part series “Musique Sacrée et Musique Profane,” written by Albert Soubies and Charles Malherbe and published in le Ménestrel. These authors raise two important points.

First, Bellaigue notes that modern sacred music is and should be decidedly dramatic, that is, more operatic than its predecessors. He believed it should reflect what he called the French person’s new experience of Catholicism, which emphasized love over faith, imagination over belief, human expression over dogma, and drama over liturgy. Echoing Bellaigue’s ideas, Soubies and Malherbe ask why, when musical expression is constantly changing, is sacred music “condemned to immobility.”

Secondly, Soubies and Malherbe raise the issue of the composer’s intention. They conclude that it is not the resulting composition that makes music sacred, but rather the intention inherent in the compositional process. Comparing sacred music to prayer, they suggest that, “it is from the conscience that it should be produced and not from [choice of] language.”

Bellaigue, Soubies, and Malherbe challenged their readers to widen their definition of sacred music. As an epilogue to a discussion of these authors’ ideas, this paper will briefly confront their influence on oratorio productions and the critical press of Third Republic Paris.