Session 9(a): Music and Wickedness

Session 9a: Music and Wickedness
Chair: Andrew Power

Evil Unveiled in Opera With a Long Title
Agnieszka Tworek
Yale University, USA

“We have to be like that blind man who was a photographer by trade. He had a camera but he wasn’t taking any photos with it. He was taming the universe,” writes Armand Gatti, a French playwright and director whose initiation into theater took place in a concentration camp. Gatti takes upon himself the role of this blind man, using theater as an attempt to tame and confront the past as well as an effort to resurrect specters and let them speak. As in many of his works, this author visualizes the evil of World War II and renames the worlds that vanished erased by unspeakable violence in Opera with a Long Title, the play he directed in Montreal in 1986. Evil is articulated already, though indirectly, in the title which consists of a long list of names of prisoners who perished in Plötzensee Prison, along with the year and the way they died. The stage action of the play is subordinated to the narrative activity of recounting the past which is unspeakable.
Although “Cain’s eye is watching” and the guillotine is at work in the Triangular Prison (modeled on Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison) that occupies the center of Opera with a Long Title, the prisoners – resistance fighters in the opposition to the Nazi regime – continue to struggle. While waiting for their beheading, they create an opera dedicated to hope. In the world of annihilation and terror, victims struggle using words as their only weapon and, silenced, they sing in sign language. Gatti’s Opera suggests the ways in which language can become a powerful form of resistance against evil even if it is only the language of silence.

“Get Your Kicks on Route 666,” Or “Why the Devil Has All the Best Tunes:” Trekking Through the Darker Side of Heavy Metal Music
Frank Faulkner
University of Derby, United Kingdom

With a daytime of sin and a nighttime of hell Everybody’s going to look for a bell to ring … all through the night.

This Paper will examine the well-known phenomenon of heavy metal, evil and devil worship; from Black Sabbath to Led Zeppelin’s legendary guitarist Jimmy Page, through to Death Metal, Deicide, Metallica and Megadeth, the genre has consistently and morbidly dwelt on issues of death, Satan, sex and the seamier pernicious side of life. The lid on heavy metal’s uncompromising attitude was (in)famously opened with the trial of UK metal band Judas Priest in the United States, for alleged inciting the suicides of two young teenage fans. Before, and since, the stigma of unreconstructed evil has consistently bedevilled (sic) this non-mainstream but nonetheless perennially popular musical form. Accordingly, this text will explore the issues, personalities and peculiarities of heavy metal to investigate the claims leveled against it; it will do this by unearthing the origins of this type of musical expression to discover its fascination amongst the young, and why it has endured for the better part of four decades. It will then arrive at suitable conclusions.

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Evil as Good, Good as Evil: Contemporary Christian Music and Loss of Religious Identity
Pamela Rossi Keen
School of Interdisciplinary Arts, Ohio University, Ohio, USA

The prophet Isaiah condemns, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.” Evangelicals in the United States have garnered much attention since their recent power play in the U.S. presidential election. The seeming moral clarity with which they view politics may be found in their view of worship practice, too. Their worship style is not as “traditional” as their morality. This is not simply an aesthetic preference; rather it is the result of the vilification of more orthodox practices in favour of the new. In this paper, I consider the aesthetic irony of the denigration of traditional and classical music as idolatry—hence sin—and its alternative, the attempt to service “felt needs,” the gratification of which is considered to be good. The art approved by many evangelicals, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), is seen as good, or that which is a fitting means by which to encounter God. I will illustrate in this essay how CCM actually undercuts the goal of bringing a worshiper into contact with the God of commonly claimed theological tenets. If separation from God is evil, then CCM may in fact be a more appropriately labeled as evil. I base my argument on a Platonic aesthetic: the imitation of God’s attributes lead to God; and a theocentric anthropology, which affirms the claims of Augustine: humanity originates with God and finds fulfillment in God. This consideration of church music calls into question broader matters, such as: How does lack of theological education and the cult of the contemporary actually teach Christians to understand good as evil and evil as good in their approach to art, worship, and God? As this interdisciplinary project is the initiation of a larger study of art in American evangelical worship, I hope to elicit suggestions from the broader scholarly community.