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lassical and Romantic music, what follows is one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever embarked upon - producing some of the most profound insights I’ve ever had.

The graphics did not carry over, but I am attaching a pdf of what follows that has everything, including the graphics, if you’d prefer to read from there.

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well… evidently this produced some controversy, and a couple members of my family took me to task, seeming to think that I was implying there was no beauty among other religious traditions..

my response is below:

“Sorry this took me a bit to respond to… to clarify first, Perennialism isn't just the thought that all religions have something to offer, or even that there is some underlying thread to most religion's base theology that speaks to a type of underlying universal intuition of the divine. If it were just that, I would mostly agree. And for that matter, even the brightest Christian minds of antiquity would agree... there were certainly saints like St. John of Damascus, among others, who could see some validity in the works of Ibn Arabi or Maimonides or Shankara. [my point here is not that St. John of Damascus knew Shankara, but that he, like other famous apologists of the faith, were familiar with the metaphysical grammars of other religions and would engage with aspects of other metaphysical systems when advantageous]

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Various religious traditions would define music as a manifestation of the harmony of the cosmos and the contingency of all things. Therefore, song joins together speech (itself a mediation of “heaven” and “earth”) and music: a marriage of the divine and human, the transcendent and the imminent, heaven and earth. The very concept of a harmony and contingency of all things harkens back to underlying neo-Platonic concepts about the emanation of the cosmos from the “One” as explicated in Plotinus (an influential figure not only in philosophy, but also in the mystical traditions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and quite possibly Vedantic Hinduism).

Whereas one may assume that contemporary academia’s opposition to such claims (and with them the implicit universality of music, the reality of the immaterial, and the possibility of an intrinsically spiritual telos of music) - via a post-modern adoption of a strict materialism and a Nietzschean hermeneutic of suspicion against all hierarchies (and with that especially the concept of one overarching ontological hierarchy)- is itself a logical conclusion of (albeit also a reaction against) the philosophies of the 18th century Enlightenment, the work of one Enlightenment era philosopher, Johann Hamann - while sharing with postmodernism a skepticism against a priori and a posteriori knowledge, a rejection of the possibility of an independent “pure reason”, and an affirmation of language as the basis of epistemology - provides an alternative to the empiricism and materialism of the time (and the implicit nihilism of our own) and affords the possibility of a return to the understanding of music and song concatenate with the aforementioned mystical traditions.

Johann Hamann (1730-1788), hailed by Goethe as the “brightest head of his time,” was one of the most influential philosophers of the 18th century. Though drastically underrepresented in current scholarship (most likely due to his enigmatic, sibylline style and overt dogmatic allegiance to Lutheran Christianity), much of contemporary thought can be traced genealogically back to Hamann. For example, Derrida’s monomania for the deconstruction of language was an outgrowth and response to the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose semiotics was influenced by the work of Johann Gottfried Herder, who, in turn, was Hamann’s student and friend. Hamann’s work on language served as a critique to the transcendental idealism of Kant and provoked responses from Nietzsche, Hiedegger and Wittgenstein. Both Kierkegaard and Goethe claimed to be highly influenced by his thought, (Kierkegaard taking particular influence in the birth of “existentialism” and his writings about the “Knight of Faith” and Goethe taking influence from Hamann’s esoteric style) and his rejection of what he deemed to be a disembodied asceticism of transcendentalism (with its implicit rejection of any veracity to sense-perception) played a heavy role in the development of the proto-Romantic “Strum-und-Drang” movement.

To understand his philosophical significance, it may be beneficial to recount briefly the circumstances which gave rise to his religious conversion. In 1756, Hamann traveled to London on behalf of his friend Christoph Beren’s trading firm. Although the exact purpose of the trip remains mysterious, it is clear that he was operating in some diplomatic capacity on behalf of the city of Riga and that his negotiations included meeting with the Russian ambassador. These negotiations subsequently failed, and Hamann (already surely depressed from the untimely death of his mother immediately preceding the trip) proceeded to accrue a substantial amount of debt. Depressed, with failing health, in the aftermath of his professional failure, Hamann proceeded to read the Bible from cover to cover and had a dramatic conversion experience.

Upon his return to Königsberg, Berens elicited the help of none other than Immanuel Kant to make an attempt to dissuade Hamann from his newfound religious zeal and re-convince him of the ideals of the Enlightenment. They went so far as to recommend that Hamann consider spending some time translating portions of Diderot’s “Encyclopedia”. Hamann was unconvinced, although this interaction did initiate a life-long convivial (albeit sometimes awkward) relationship with Kant. Concerning Kant, Hamann later wrote to Herder, “Leaving aside the old Adam of his authorship, he is a genuinely obliging, selfless and, at bottom, good and noble hearted man of many talents and merits.” In fact, Kant was responsible for procuring employment for Hamann in the tax office of Frederick the Great, and would later allow Hamann’s son to attend his lectures for free.

Kant has become such a pivotal philosophical figure that virtually every subsequent philosopher has had to contend in one way or another with his work. Hamann is no exception. Frederick Beiser has even suggested that Hamann’s Metacrique “has a strong claim to be the starting point of post-Kantian philosophy.” As we shall see, the disagreements that Hamann had with Kant produced some of the most profound insights in his oeuvre.

One of the most important aspects of Hamann’s thought is concerning the nature and origin of languages. Hamann was initially trained as a philologist, and according to Betz knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, English, French, Latvian, Arabic, Spanish, Portugues and Chaldaic. Along with Rousseau and Vico, he believed that poetry was historically prior to prose. (Vico’s tome, the “New Science,’‘ posited that human history constituted of three epochs: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age corresponded with development in language and epistemology, with the age of the gods corresponding to poetry.) Hamann wrote “Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race; just as gardening is older than the cultivated field; painting - than writing; song - than declamation; parables - than syllogisms; barter than trade.” In this same vein, Rousseau argued in his “Essai sur l’origine des langues,” “It is neither hunger nor thirst, but love, hatred, pity, anger, which drew from them the first words.” However, for Hamann, who saw the world as the creation of God, ontologically held together through “logos”, poetry was more than the manifestation of the effluence of passions, but rather a human response to the divine language of creation.

It should be noted furthermore, that when Hamann says, “song precedes declamation,” he is in fact making the implication that music itself is the basis of both language and epistemology. Elsewhere he writes, “The oldest language was music, and, next to the flat rhythm of the beat and the breath in the nose, it constituted the original bodily archetype of all measure of time and its (numerical) proportions. The oldest script was painting and drawing and, as such, was just as soon occupied with the economy of space, its limitation and determination through figures. Thus, through the overflowing and persistent influence of the two noblest senses, sight and hearing, upon the entire sphere of understanding, the concepts of time and space came to be as universal and necessary as light and air for the eye, ear, and voice, such that space and time, even if they are not ideae innatae, nevertheless seem to be at least matrices of all intuitive knowledge.” Therefore, all of Hamann’s aesthetic and epistemological insights about language make explicit implications for a philosophical understanding of music/song.

Some of Hamann’s most influential writings on language come from his letters to Herder, the “Herderschriften.” In 1772, Herder entered, and subsequently won, the Berlin Academy’s essay contest on the origin of language with his essay “Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache.” Whereas one may assume that Hamann would have been proud of his former student, especially considering that both of them shared an understanding of language as the mechanism of rationality, an evaluation of poetry as preeminent, and similar theologoumena stemming from their shared Lutheran heritage, his writings nonetheless demonstrate a sincere disappointment in Herder’s essay. In Hamann’s estimation, Herder, while attempting to provide a naturalistic explanation for the invention of language, had neglected a theology of divine condescension (a metaphysical position of Hamann’s that posited the cosmos as a perichoresis of Creator and creature, a perpetual descent of the divine and ascent of the human, a cosmic kenosis and theosis). Another immensely popular hypothesis on the origin of languages by the philosopher Süßmilch, (to which Herder was reacting) had posited that language was of completely supernatural origins. Herder was, in a zeitgeistliche fashion, attempting to provide an alternative natural explanation. Yet for Hamann, the dichotomy between the two positions was a false one, for as Betz writes, “for Hamann there is no need to think of the natural and supernatural explanations as mutually exclusive,” and “Herder’s naturalistic explanation had unwittingly opened the floodgates to a purely secular understanding not merely of language, but also of reason.” Since Hamann’s application of Humean skepticism to epistemology necessitates either an acceptance of nihilism or a return to a traditional faith (as we shall see later), and since Hamann sees a secular epistemology constructed upon the foundation of a “pure reason” as a proton pseudos, then Herder’s naturalistic explanation of the origin of language unwittingly provided a catalyst for a philosophical line of reasoning that ends in nihilism.

Hamann’s other indispensable work for understanding the nature of language is his “Metacritique” of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. For Hamann, the very concept of a “pure reason” is a false premise, for, because of language, “there is.. only reason within a tradition of interpretation.” Hamann writes, “invention and reason already presuppose a language, and can be conceived as little without the latter as arithmetic can be conceived without numbers (betz 231).” It was Kant’s very blindness to the central importance of language that allowed him the misfortune of using language to dupe himself. For Hamann, to claim that anything is a priori, and thus transcendental and isolated from the senses, is to invoke empty forms and to ignore that such dialectical oppositions are intrinsically reconciled with the miracle of language itself. As Betz writes, “In other words, like a good magician, Kant makes things disappear: he brings the phenomenal world to a transcendental vanishing point that is the object of thought alone, a pure transcendental noema = x.” Hamann wrote to Herder, “He (Kant) was very intimate with me, despite the fact that last time I made him a bit bemused by approving of his Critique but rejecting the mysticism contained in it. He had no idea how he got to be a mystic.” John Betz explains the implications of this critique in a manner worthy of quoting at length:

To be sure, Kant claims to be making room precisely for faith by marking off reason’s proper limits. Hamann’s point, however, is that faith cannot be bracketed out even for methodological purposes, since it is involved from the outset in all our reasoning. What is more, as Hamann profoundly grasped, the very attempt to separate reason from faith (and from the testimony of history and the senses) is ultimately inimical to reason itself, since reason is suddenly forced to do what it cannot…: namely, ground itself. The result, as Hamann foresaw, is a crisis of reason, which having now to bear the weight of so impossible a task, is tempted in one of two ways to commit theoretical suicide: either by embracing nihilism (and filling the void with noble lies of the will to power) or by capitulating to the service of purely immanent, pragmatic technological ends.

In conjunction with this statement about the epistemic centrality of faith, Hamann was fond of quoting Hume (a joint influence upon both he and Kant), “that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.” Although it was apparent that Hume wrote this with antipathy towards religious belief, Hamann took it as an unwitting pericope of wisdom, analogous to Caiphas’ exclamation that “it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.(John 11:50 KJV)” For Hamann, this quotation effectively demonstrates that because nothing is purely objectively knowable, everything is contingent upon some form of faith. In Hamann’s own words, “Our own existence and the existence of all things outside us must be believed and can be made out in no other way.. What one believes, therefore, does not have to be proven, and a proposition can be ever so incontrovertibly proven without on this account being believed.”

Hamann’s reappropriation of Humean skepticism also served the telos (as would later postmodern philosophy) of critiquing scientific materialism. For Hamann, all science was hermeneutical. Not even the scientific process could become independent of a tradition of interpretation, for all thought is intrinsically derived from language. His intention was not a complete rejection of modern science, but rather a criticism of “treating phenomena as untruth (as Nietzsche too points out in his critique of the concept of ‘appearance’.” This precludes the capacity to see the self-revelation of the divine through sense-perception, which for Hamann, is a fundamental aspect of phenomenological reality. Far from being a rejection of rationality as such, if one accepts the claim that rationality is contingent upon language, then locating rationality within a faith tradition is in actuality a defense of rationality.

Hamann, therefore, shares with the postmodernists a rejection of pure rationality as such, an understanding of language as the basis of epistemology, an evaluation of language as the mechanism of unity within cultures and communities, an understanding of reason as a function of language, and a skepticism of a priori and a posteriori knowledge.

However, there are also some profound disagreements between Hamann and postmodernism. First, the telos of the postmodern project has to be differentiated from that of Hamann’s philosophy. Any deconstructive force can serve either towards the restorative purgation of a thing or towards its complete abolition. Fire can burn away the dross from silver, or destroy an entire town. For Hamann, all of his critiques served the purpose of restoring a cosmological vision of beauty that was grounded within a particular understanding of the Christian evangel. His admonitions to Kant and Herder attempted to serve the telos of preventing a philosophical descent into nihilism. He seeks to avert the individual from the modern project as Lyotard so aptly describes it, “Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality.”

While sharing with Nietzsche an assessment of the Enlightenment’s castration of artistic creativity, he nonetheless posits a vision of the world sustained through the divine humility (the most repugnable of virtues to Nietzsche) of the God who voluntarily suffered execution upon a cross. While sharing with Hiedegger a common epistemology that called into question modernity’s roots in Descartes, (he says, “Not Cogito; ergo sum, but vice versa, and more Hebraic: Est; ergo cogito”) and an almost apophatic ontology (just as Hamann sees the world as divine kenosis, Heidegger speaks of the self-emptying and “nihilation” of Being), he rejects the nihilistic ethical implications of grounding being in nothing. Finally, while he shares with Derrida a suspicion of metaphysics and the rejection of the belief in a logical apprehension of any given thing apart from the mediation of language, he nonetheless rejects Derrida’s conclusions that language is ultimately the totality of existence. Betz summarizes, “The nihilism of postmodernity is but the flipside and inevitable result of the ‘pure reason’ of modernity - there is arguably little difference between them. Indeed, postmodernity merely makes explicit what was implied by the modern severance of reason from prophetic tradition.

The vision that Hamann promulgates, in contrast to the nihilism of postmodernity or the vapidness of the Enlightenment, is, while being explicitly Christian, not entirely dissimilar from that vision afforded in various other religious/philosophical traditions. For, despite a few passages which tend to lean towards a nominalism, Hamann’s emphasis on perichoresis, kenosis, theosis, and the music of the spheres seem to display an underlying neoPlatonism that is also philosophically fundamental to Sufi, Jewish, and Vedantic thought.

It is clear that Hamann had some exposure to neoPlatonism. As Betz writes, “Hamann already had a knowledge of the Fathers through his early study of Rapin, as well as of the ancient philosophies of Plato and the Neoplatonists, e.g., Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus. According to Nadler, however, none was as important to him as the “wise man”, Philo, whose works he had acquired no later than 1763. “ Furthermore, it is apparent that there are numerous Platonist overtones in his work. Sperling writes, “Hamann then accepted the Platonic view that there is a realm more permanent and stable than the realm of becoming in which we sensory creatures live. His anti-Platonism consists of his insistence that human thought is unable to ascend by means of dialectic, but must, rather, accept a passive role, receiving a symbolically mediated message. Piety, for Hamann, is attunement to the symbols in which this eternal truth is expressed.” and… “Hamann, attributing his own view to Socrates, certainly thought some mediation was involved between the divine and human realms. He wrote, ‘human life appears to consist of a series of symbolic actions through which our soul is able to reveal its invisible nature, and brings out and communicates an intuitive knowledge of its effective existence outside of itself’”.

One of the pivotal components of a neo-Platonic paradigm is the concept of an ontological hierarchy. As identities stack up into higher identities, one eventually arrives at the fountain of all existence, the Plotinian One. For example, the legs of a chair constitute the chair, which in turn is part of a room, which is part of a house, a city, country, planet, galaxy, etc. until one arrives at the highest identity (the “One). Being the fundament of existence, yet beyond comprehension, language fails to explicate the “One”, and must therefore speak in an apophatic manner. This type of negative theology is seen both in the writings of the Eastern Orthodox Church Fathers (for example, in the Philokalia), as well as in the writings of Ibn Arabi in the Wahdat al-wujud.

The concept of hierarchies of identities have also found particular relevance in dealing with modern enquiries into epistemology. Dr John Vervaeke, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, in explaining the manner in which minds group qualia together, has popularized the term “relevance realization” to deal with the problem of combinatorial explosion (the intractability of a problem due to its hypercomplexity). Because our minds are affronted perpetually with infinite multiplicity, they necessarily group smaller things into larger identities, imbuing them with greater or lesser meaning, and thereby constructing hierarchies of relevance. These epistemic hierarchies that Vervaeke speaks of, mutatis mutandis, are parallel to the ontological hierarchies as explicated in Plotinus and Iamblichus.

Whereas many religious traditions conceive of reality as derivative from the “One”, the manner of such derivation provokes a multiplicity of metaphysical speculations, such as the monistic metaphysics of Shankara or the qualified non-dualism of Ramanujah. Nonetheless, in some manner, all of reality is imbued with a higher, mystical meaning, as it is in some manner the emanation of the Divine.

The early Christian theologian, Dionysius the Aeropagite, relates these metaphysical concepts with a discussion of beauty (perceiving Beauty as one of the Divine Names), “Beauty [an epithet for God] unites all things and is the source of all things. It is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside them to have beauty. And there it is ahead of all as Goal, as the Beloved, as the Cause toward which all things move, since it is the longing for beauty which actually brings them into being.”

Concomitant with the emanation of reality from the Divine is the return to the Divine. Hamann writes, “Let us never forget that the nature, whose existence we receive from the breath of life, belongs intimately to God, is closely related to him, that it therefore can reach perfection and happiness in no other way than that it returns to its origin, its source…” The cosmological theologies of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor are but logical conclusions from this neoPlatonic idea of emanation and return.

Further, this mystical vision of reality affords the individual the possibility of union with the Divine. For Dionysius, the telos of the ontological hierarchy is theosis, “to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with him.” Hamann also writes, in his “Reflections on church hymns,” “Just as God condescended to us, in order to be like us in all things… so should man be exalted, rapt above all finite creatures and transfigured into God himself. God became a son of man and heir to the curse, death, and fate of human beings, so should man become a son of God, a sole heir of heaven, and be as closely united with God as the fullness of divinity dwelled bodily in christ… He himself became a human being in order to transform us into gods.”

The contemporary theologian David Bentley Hart, draws an allusion between this cosmic vision and musical polyphony. “One might best characterize the properly Christian understanding of being as polyphony or counterpoint: having received its theme of divine love from God, the true measure of being is expressed in the restoration of that theme, in the response that submits that theme to variation and offers it back in an indefinitely prolonged and varied response (guided by the Spirit’s power of modulation). It is the promise of Christian faith that, eschatologically, the music of all creation will be restored not as a totality in which all the discords of evil necessarily participated, but as an accomplished harmony from which all such discords, along with their false profundities, have been exorcised by way of innumerable “tonal” (or pneumatological) reconciliations.”

Therefore, in conjunction with this cosmic vision, Hamann’s philosophy of language, and therefore music (as previously demonstrated), is but an iteration of the larger harmony of the cosmos. The concept of the creation as harmony and music is found so ubiquitously in Western Tradition that it defies cataloging. It is found in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Plato’s Republic, Boethius, Gregory of Nyssa, the book of Wisdom, Macrobius, Idisdore of Seville, Clement of Alexandria, Milton, Purcell, Sir John Davies, and even Shakespeare. Pythagoreanism as well as neoPlatonism emphasized this concept.

What effect does this vision have upon the individual soul? David Bently Hart relates, concerning Hamann’s vision of reality and music, “the true knowledge of God in creation - the true analogy - lay in a childlike rapture before the concrete and poetic creativity of God, in the task of translating the language of that creativity, and in the rearticulation of that language in poetic invention. In the experience of beauty, even now, we recover, in some measure and at some moments, this paradisal theme. Nicholas of Cusa remarks that eternal wisdom is tasted in everything savored, eternal pleasure felt in all things pleasurable, eternal beauty beheld in all that is beautiful, and eternal desire experienced in everything desired.”

We can therefore see that song as a combination of words and abstract music, is thus a metaphorical marriage of heaven and earth, a mediation of the divine and the human, and thus a fractal of Hamann’s mystical vision of reality.

Sufi thought speaks similarly of music’s analogue to a higher mystical reality. Rumi’s “Song of the Reed” relates to the Hadith Qudsi, which states, “I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created the world that I might be known.” The implication is that all of reality is a self-revelation of God, and Rumi’s song is but an iteration of that. The Sufi, Inayat Khan, expresses, “Music is nothing less than the picture of the beloved,” and again,“Music is the beginning and the end of the universe. All actions and movements made in the visible and invisible world are musical. That is: they are made up of vibration.”

Likewise, in Jewish mystical thought, music also takes on a similar role. Moshe Idel writes, “The song is therefore, no different from the divine influx. It is a mode of the divine produced here below; when sent on high, it becomes purified in a manner reminiscent of the ascent of the astral body in the ancient mystical forms of literature. In other words, the song is a spiritual energy, a way to respond to the divine with a human activity that affects the union between the two higher sefirot.” Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, “all melodies are derived from the source of sanctity from the temple of music. Impurity knows no song, because it knows no joy, for it’s the source of all melancholy.”

What are the implications of this understanding of music? One potential definition of music is therefore: song without words. However, this leaves such music as abstraction without embodiment, or heaven without earth. If language is the basis of reality, then something is missing in music that draws no allusion to speech. Analogous to the use of tonal music in predominantly atonal compositions, so too speech is reserved for the apex of musical pathos even within predominantly instrumental works, especially among the high Romantic composers. Despite hours of horror and disgust in Wozzeck, when Berg desires to pique musical affect, he resorts temporarily back to tonality and clearly utilizes the pathos of d minor. So too, Beethoven in his ninth symphony, Mahler in his second (amidst many other examples) evoke the use of poetry and language to create the pinnacles of Western Romantic music. Even Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, though without sung words, draws such strong allusions to melodies associated with folk songs and requiem texts, that the audience could not help but applaud for forty-five minutes upon hearing the work (which, in the estimation of Rostropovich, may have very-well preserved Shostakovich’s life). Would the symphony have had the same impact without drawing allusion to the implicit poesy?

Such a vision also makes explicit the utility of Schenkerian analysis. If music images higher metaphysical patterns, such as an ontological hierarchies, then one can expect to see within great musical works a continuity of thought, a cogency of musical affect. It is precisely Schenker’s peeling back from the foreground to background that makes such an implicit hierarchy that one can practically reduce a piece of music to a single cadence. Each cadence is stacked, with varying significance, into another, higher cadence. The understanding of this concept is invaluable to the performer, especially when approaching longer works of great significance.

This too has implications for the articulation of baroque music. Both French and German have a sense of “inegalite” in their keyboard articulation. This articulation differential makes clear a hierarchy of beats, with some beats weak, and some strong. Furthermore, the performance practice is to differentiate with varying degrees of tenuto, the different cadential points with regards to their implicit significance in the overall hierarchy of cadences.

Finally, Hamann’s vision of music has profound theological and philosophical implications. As discussed above, it provides an alternative to the nihilism of postmodernity, and an entry into an aesthetic of beauty. Betz writes, “Accordingly, human poesis is never something purely subjective, but always already a participation in the expressive language of creation; and as such it provides ‘a metaphysical insight,’ as Beisser points out, into the nature of reality itself.” Ultimately, it affords a vision of hope. I end with a final quotation from David Bently Hart, “ Beauty seems to promise a reconciliation beyond the contradictions of the moment, one that perhaps places time’s tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning, a balance between light and darkness; beauty appears to absolve being of its violences.”

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Dr. Alexander Lingas — musicologist, conductor, and Founding Director of Cappella Romana — joins Matthew Wilkinson for one of the most wide-ranging conversations in the history of the Pursuit of Beauty podcast. From reconstructing the lost sounds of Hagia Sophia to conducting Byzantine chant at King Charles III's coronation, Lingas has spent 35 years at the intersection of sacred music scholarship and performance. This is the definitive interview on the Byzantine chant tradition, its history, its revival, and its future.Lingas traces the full arc of his career: growing up in a Greek Orthodox parish in Portland, Oregon; doctoral studies in Byzantine chant at the University of British Columbia under Dimitri Konomos; a Fulbright year in Athens studying under the legendary Lykouros Angelopoulos; postdoctoral work in Oxford under Metropolitan Kallistos Ware; and nearly two decades teaching at City University of London. Along the way he founded Cappella Romana — now in its 35th year — which has become the world's leading ensemble for Byzantine and medieval Orthodox sacred music, as well as the music of the Christian East more broadly.The conversation goes deep into the musicology. Lingas explains the difference between the "new method" notation introduced in the early 19th century and the medieval Byzantine notation it replaced, and what it means to take a "what you see is what you get" approach to manuscripts that haven't been performed in 500 years. He unpacks how Capella Romana's landmark recordings — Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia, the St. Catherine's Sinai Vespers, Cyprus and Venice in the East — were constructed from manuscript sources, and why this music rarely finds its way back into parish worship. He also gives an extraordinary account of the calophonic chant style of St. John Koukouzelis and the Byzantine ars nova of the 13th and 14th centuries — a sacred music tradition so sophisticated that it eventually transcended text altogether into abstract vocables, which Lingas connects directly to the Hesychast theology of divine energies and angelic liturgy.Other topics include: the full history of Lykouros Angelopoulos and the Greek Byzantine Choir and their foundational role in the modern chant revival; the Romanian, Serbian, and Transylvanian chant traditions and how they diverged from the Byzantine mainstream; the contested question of the organ in Orthodox worship and the difference between a cappella practice and a cappella doctrine; the music of Tikey Zes and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; the Appalachian music project and its theological and musicological problems; Arvo Pärt and the Odes of Repentance recording; collaborative work with composers Robert Kyr and Einojuhani Rautavaara; and the grants, publications, and institutional infrastructure that sustain this work.Near the end of the conversation, Lingas reflects on his recent retirement from Cappella Romana after 35 years, his involvement with the Institute of Sacred Arts at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, and his experience at the coronation of King Charles III — where he served first as a liturgical consultant advising on how to represent the Orthodox traditions of Prince Philip, and then as the director of the Byzantine choir that performed at Westminster Abbey.This episode is essential listening for anyone serious about Orthodox sacred music, Byzantine chant, the theology of beauty, liturgical theology, or the history of Christian worship.

In this conversation, William explains the important distinction between the Western rite, the concept of "use," and the word "chant" itself. He walks through how Salisbury's scribes produced such detailed and thorough liturgical books in the 12th and 13th centuries that their system became the standard for roughly 80 percent of English churches. He also discusses the York and Hereford uses, how they compare to Sarum, and the practical reality that very few musical manuscripts survive from those traditions.

One of the highlights of this episode is William's live vocal demonstrations of the differences between Sarum chant and standard Gregorian chant. He sings the Sarum and Roman versions of the Orbis Factor Kyrie and an Agnus Dei to illustrate how the melodies share a common origin but diverge in specific intervals and melodic turns. He also demonstrates the Sarum psalm tones, the York gospel tone, and a fascinating St. Stephen's Day prose featuring extended melismatic singing on a single vowel.

William shares his perspective on performance practice, arguing that medieval liturgy was a full-time daily activity, not a polished concert performance. He draws an unexpected parallel between plainchant and jazz, noting that both traditions thrive on variation, personal interpretation, and a refusal to be pinned down to a single "correct" version. He also addresses the Abbey of Solesmes and the way their editorial choices may have smoothed over legitimate regional diversity across the Western chant tradition.

The conversation covers the sheer volume of medieval liturgical material that has been lost or abandoned since the Reformation. William demonstrates this by showing the seven volumes needed just for Sarum Matins throughout the year, compared to roughly half that for the Roman Tridentine tradition. He explains how both Protestant and Catholic reformations drastically simplified worship, and how the Franciscan preference for simpler liturgy influenced the Roman books that became standard after the Council of Trent.

William also explores the surprising connections between Sarum chant and Anglican chant, showing how Renaissance composers like Thomas Tallis based their harmonized psalm chants directly on Sarum psalm tones and their modal endings. He discusses fauxbourdon, the use of drones, the role of the organ in medieval worship, and the Neumae, which are modal melodic codas sung at the end of psalm groups during Matins, Lauds, and Vespers.

For anyone interested in starting Sarum chant at their own church, William offers practical advice. He suggests beginning with a simple communion chant in English accompanied on the organ, or introducing an English Kyrie or Agnus Dei from the Sarum repertoire. All of these materials are available for free download at sarum-chant.ca. He has also published printed books in two English styles, one following the Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible tradition, and one following the Douay-Rheims Bible for those with a Roman Catholic sensibility.

The episode wraps up with a discussion of organ music, including William's love of Tournemire's L'Orgue Mystique, his experience studying with Gerre Hancock, and Matthew's own background in organ performance in Charleston, South Carolina, at St. Michael's Church, which has a historical connection to Johann Pachelbel's son Carl Theodore.

Website: sarum-chant.ca

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes how music is made and distributed, a deeper question emerges: does it matter whether art is human-made? And if it does, how would we even know?

Jordan proposes that we are entering a moment where “human” itself becomes a genre. In a culture increasingly saturated with synthetic media, authenticity may soon require verification rather than assumption. We explore what it would mean to certify music as human-made, why audiences may begin to seek out verified human art, and how trust breaks down when reality becomes difficult to discern.

The conversation expands beyond music into larger philosophical territory—identity, meaning, technology, and the collapse of shared standards of truth online. We discuss why existing institutions and platforms are poorly equipped to address these challenges, and why purely technical solutions are insufficient without deeper human and moral foundations.

This is not a conversation about resisting technology, but about placing it in proper order. Music, art, and creativity are not merely outputs; they are expressions of human agency, soul, and responsibility. When those foundations erode, culture follows.

If you care about art, philosophy, and the future of human creativity in an AI-saturated world, this episode is for you.

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We talk very candidly about the real problems choir directors and church musicians face: how to work with aging voices and the infamous “old lady wobble,” why volunteers will forgive almost anything except being in a mediocre choir, and how to make hard musical decisions without wounding the people you serve. Allen opens up about the role of the conductor as a pastoral presence, not just a technician, and what it means to love your choir enough to tell them the truth and still keep their dignity intact.

From there we move into bigger questions about sacred music, text, and belief. Can you perform Bach’s passions with integrity if you do not actually believe what the text proclaims? What does it mean to teach and conduct explicitly Christian works in a secular university setting? Allen shares how he navigates these tensions at UNT, and why wrestling seriously with the words we sing is essential if the music is going to do the spiritual and human work it was written to do.

We also explore the thorny question of singing music from other religious traditions, from Holst’s Hymns from the Rig Veda to Sufi and Hindu devotional repertoire. How should Christian musicians think about programming this music, and what responsibility do we have given the embarrassment of riches in our own tradition’s choral literature?

If you are a choir director, a church musician, a choral singer, or simply someone who cares about the intersection of beauty, truth, and the people in your choir loft, this conversation is for you.

In this episode:

• How to lead volunteers who desperately want to be good, without bullying them

• What to do with aging voices and the “old lady wobble” in a church choir

• Why singers will not forgive you if they or the choir are mediocre

• The conductor as pastor, not just time beater

• Teaching and performing explicitly Christian music in a secular university

• Can you sing sacred texts with integrity if you do not believe them

• Should Christians sing music from other religious traditions

• The spiritual vocation of choral music in a disenchanted age

Allen Hightower, Matthew Wilkinson, choir, choral music, church music, sacred music, university choir, aging voices, old lady wobble, choral conducting, choral pedagogy, Bach, Rig Veda, faith and art, Christian music, UNT, Pursuit of Beauty podcast.