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.

Airbrushed from Art History: An update

The revised index to my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series of posts is as follows:
1 - Introduction I
2 - Introduction II
3 - Traces du Sacré
4 - Symbolism I
5 - Gauguin and Bernard
6 - Vincent Van Gogh
7 - Maurice Denis
8 - Symbolism II
9 - Jacques Maritain
10 - Albert Gleizes
11 - Sérusier, Severini and Gleizes
12 - Couturier, Régamey, Bell and Hussey
12a - Victor Kenna, Moelwyn Merchant and Bernard Walke
12b - Graham Sutherland and Jacques Maritain
13 - Expressionism I
14 - Expressionism II
15 - Reconciliatory art
16 - Australia and Poland
17 - Abstract art
18 - Ireland and Malta
19 - Divisionism and Futurism
20 - Contemporary artists
21 - Africa and Asia
22 - Icons
23 - Wallspace
24 - Albert Houthuesen
25 - Stained Glass
26 - Self-Taught artists
27 - Conclusion

Additions to the series and related posts are as follows:

Airbrushed from Art History: Peter Fuller
Airbrushed from Art History: Polish Painters in Post-War Britain
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 1 - Dean, Fujimura, Reinhardt and Emin
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 2 - Walter Navratil
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 3 - Caribbean and South African Art
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 4 - Daniel Siedell
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 5 - Marcus Reichert
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 6 - Lord Harries on Christian Faith and Modern Art
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 7 - Coptic Art and Mexican Retablos
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 8 - The Pilgrim Project
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 9 - Christof Schlingensief
Beyond Airbrushed from Art History 10 - Indian Art
Anselm Keifer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali
Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali (2)
ArtWay Meditation: Reto Scheiber
Being in the World: Charles Lutyens
British Design 1948 - 2012 and 1948 Olympians
Commission: contemporary art in British Churches
Clay as Earth and Flesh - Stephen de Staebler
Emil Nolde: Inner religious feeling
Forsaken: Marlene Dumas
Howson does not shy away from the role that Christianity plays in his work
Is the Art world anti-Christian?
John Piper and the Church
McCahon, Baxter and Hayman
McCahon, Baxter and Hayman (2)
Moreau, Rouault and Chagall in Paris
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
Reaching Beyond - Smith and Moore
Seeing in new and different ways - John Dillenberger
Spirituality in Contemporary Art
When was the last time you saw an explicitly religious work of contemporary art?
William Congdon - The Sabbath of History
Cocteau Chapel: Notre Dame de Jerusalem
Matisse Chapel: Chapelle du Rosaire Vence
Musée National Marc Chagall
Notre Dame de France and the murals of Jean Cocteau

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Bill Fay - Be Not So Fearful.