The Secret Chord: Music and the Jews

Norman Lebrecht describes his BBC Radio 3 series Music and the Jews in today's Guardian and begins where Peter Banks and I began in our book The Secret Chord with Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' and the Book of Psalms:

Few, he writes, of those who eventually made Cohen's song such a success 'grasped the leap that Cohen had made into the past':

'In the depths of despair, he had sought the "secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord' across three millennia of human creation, appealing as one lost Jew to an ancestor for the primal gift of music ...

So when Radio 3 commissioned me to make a three-part series about music and the Jews, I made the decision to avoid popular cliches of "Jewish music" ...

I started where Cohen did, in search of the elusive King David: poet, musician, warrior, sexual malefactor and author of a book of psalms that forms the basis of worship for Jews and Christians alike.'

Why not listen to the series, read our book and then compare and contrast!

Giles Fraser has written an excellent column on music in the same edition: 'The best theologians are musicians. And Christianity is always better sung than said. To the extent that all religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, the musicians penetrate further than most.'

In a review of Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God, Jonathan Rée writes: 'Terence Eagleton was a leading member of a group of radical Roman Catholics who launched the energetic but short-lived magazine Slant in the spring of 1964. In a series of rousing articles, he argued that Christians could not be true to the "recklessness" of faith unless they committed themselves to revolutionary socialism, and conversely that Marxist materialism was exhausted, and only Christianity could save it. "Christianity," he explained, is "an extremist belief, extreme and uncompromising in its tolerance and love." Christians must pledge themselves to "live as potential martyrs", battling with "philistine capitalism" for the sake of "real culture" – for a "whole society" in which "the Mystical Body may be realised on the shop-floor" and "Christ can live in fact rather than in word."

Finally, in the obituary of Rose Finn-Kelcey we read:

'Finn-Kelcey was one of the few contemporary artists to tackle the issue of religion in their art. Many of her recent works explored this theme, among them God Kennel – A Tabernacle (1992); Pearly Gate, Souls and Jolly God (all 1997); God's Bog (2001); and It Pays to Pray (1999), a work in which contemporary "prayers" were available from chocolate-vending machines mounted outside the Millennium Dome.

What can God mean today? What is the spiritual in contemporary society, and where can it be found? Finn-Kelcey responded to such questions with a complex mixture of reverence and satire, debunking and venerating, in ways that have lost none of their capacity to surprise.'

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Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah.