Books+ Fall 2024
Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
I joined a church choir about a year ago. I've sung in choirs most of my life, on and off, some extremely high level, others a bit less so. But this is just a local church that happens to have a great music director and some talented musicians on top of a tremendous sincerity, all a short once-a-week walk downhill from my house. It's been interesting to sing pieces and texts in their originally intended location and time rather than in a secular choir; like a person, you learn a lot about a text or melody when you meet its family and home.
I'm embarrassed to say I've gotten more than I bargained for, though. As moving and glittering as my earlier musical experiences have been, singing close harmony in this plain, wooden house of God has blindsided me with its ability to rip open and bleed me. I resent it now as much as I crave and accept the need to grieve what I can barely describe, there in the safety of major thirds.
Which brings me to Tom Holland's Dominion. Holland is the co-host of the dead-charming The Rest is History podcast. The book is not unlike a podcast in that it's a series of vignettes that together tell the story of how foundational Western concepts emerged through the story of Christianity. If you think you know everything there is to understand about how Christianity has shaped you, the United States, and the West, I applaud you. Truly. Because even if we think we do, most of us have no idea how intertwined the most ordinary, non-religious, assumptions we make about the world are bound up in a Christian worldview, from the Western approach to scholarship to the structure of a family.
It's this last bit that made me think about musical thirds. Around the time that the idea of a family changed, as Holland argues, from that of a patriarch supported by his wive(s), children, extended family, and servants/slaves, etc. to a man and a woman who were to be equally valued and their beloved children (world-shaking, revolutionary notions at the time), music also changed in the West. Holland doesn't discuss this bit, and I wouldn't expect him to; he already covers an enormous sweep of history and subjects. Nonetheless, isn't it fascinating that you can hear Christendom's embrace of this radical idea of family in the parallel rise of thirds and homophonic chord progressions (i.e., close harmony) in music during that time? Listen to this piece from the 1300s and then this one from the 1500s to hear the difference.
My understanding is that the ancients and early medieval Westerners used to think the major third interval was disturbing. Yet, as Christianity helped form the Western world, the major third became prevalent in a way you don't hear in many (most?) other cultures. We take it for granted now. The cold combative perfection of polyphonic perfect fifths and fourths in early music sounds remote, if orderly; this is not a world where you can take close, loving relationships for granted. Even more interesting, if you study music theory now, you learn that Western music developed a rule that composers should avoid parallel fifths in part because of the idea that all voices in the choir should have singable lines. Now that's a revolutionary idea about human relationships in and of itself, wholly bound up in the new Christian worldview.
I could go on. The fugue, the orchestra, etc., as expressions of human relationships and ways of thinking. But mostly what I want to point out is that the reason that I, like so many other people in the West, can feel so moved when surrounded by utter strangers singing in close harmony--a potentially disturbing idea in the abstract, you must admit--is that it is a potent form of closeness rooted in the ideas that rose with Christianity. It is Joseph and Mary, the Madonna and Baby Jesus, the Father and Son, the loving God, etc.; in other words, relationship archetypes that send millions of Americans to therapy every year when they are silent or discordant.
Sing the trinity of a root, a major third, a perfect fifth, and an octave again in tune, and you will hear harmonics--perhaps even a major third--the universe singing along with you. Sing the chord a bit less polished, though, and you'll still feel at home. As Holland might say, these are Christian experiences, even when they're not.