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This book explores the ways in which music can engender religious experience, by virtue of its ability to evoke the ineffable and affect how the world is open to us. Arguing against approaches that limit the religious significance of music to an illustrative function, The Extravagance of Music sets out a more expansive and optimistic vision, which suggests that there is an 'excess' or 'extravagance' in both music and the divine that can open up revelatory and transformative possibilities. In Part I, David Brown argues that even in the absence of words, classical instrumental music can disclose something of the divine nature that allows us to speak of an experience analogous to contemplative prayer. In Part II, Gavin Hopps contends that, far from being a wasteland of mind-closing triviality, popular music frequently aspires to elicit the imaginative engagement of the listener and is capable of evoking intimations of transcendence. Filled with fresh and accessible discussions of diverse examples and forms of music, this ground-breaking book affirms the disclosive and affective capacities of music, and shows how it can help to awaken, vivify, and sustain a sense of the divine in everyday life.

The Extravagance of Music

1.            INTRODUCTION: AN ART OPEN TO THE DIVINE

    The Extravagance of Music

    Ancestral Conceptions of Music

The Pythagorean Tradition

The Orphic Tradition

    The Extravagance of the Divine

    Prospectus

Part One: God and Classical Sounds

2.            A GENEROUS EXCESS

The Divine at Work beyond Scripture

The Possibility of Music as Encounter

Types of Aesthetic Experience and Their Relation to Religion

Competing Types of Aesthetic Evaluation and Experience

Religious Perspectives Interacting with Aesthetic Criteria

Music in the Context of Words: Setting Divine Encounters to Music

Interim Conclusion

3.            TYPES OF EXTRAVAGANCE

Order and the Music of the Spheres: Haydn, Mozart, and Bach

A Sense of Transcendence: Beethoven and Led Zeppelin

Divine Immanence: Beethoven, Sibelius and Debussy, and the Creed's Incarnatus

Divine Immanence in Nature

Immanence and the Incarnatus est of the Creed

The Mystery of the Divine Life: Minimalism, Bruckner, Liszt and Franck

Transcending Time

Serenity, Majesty, Ecstatic Joy

      Specifics: Coltrane on Generosity, Schubert on Suffering, Massenet on Suicide

4.            DISCOVERING GOD IN MUSIC'S EXCESS

Giving Sense to the Encounter

From the Human Side: Knowledge and Emotion

From the Divine Side: Developing a Philosophy of Presence

Restraints on Such Experience

Part Two: Popular Music and the Opening up of Religious Experience

5.            CULTURED DESPISERS

The Cloistral Refuge of Music

Pop Pollution

God's Love of Adverbs

The Wonder of Minor Experiences

Dancing 'with' and Dancing 'at'

What Has Graceland to Do with Jerusalem?

Theological Imperialism

                Aesthetic Hospitality

                The Wandering of the Semantic

                One Size Fits All

Too Much Heaven?

                Rehabilitating Lightness

                The World 'in front of' the Text

                The Spiritual Assets of Tackiness

Cultural Pessimism 

6.            SPILT RELIGION

The Listener's Share

Unheard Melodies

Only Connect

Jordan: The Comeback

The Word in the Desert

Post-Secular Popular Music

The In-Between

The Impure Sacred

Oxymoronic Postures

Metaphysical Shuddering

Ontological Exuberance

Ludic Avowal

Subjunctive Explorations

Being in Darkness

The Interlocuted Listener

Secular Forms and Sacred Effects

Musical Hyperbole

The Moment out of Time

The Swarming Forms of the Banal

Homeward Bound

Coda: Being Opened

7.            CONCLUSION