Musical Practice and Practical Theology

One of the pleasures of practical theology for me has been the freedom to learn about practice in different environments and to bring that learning ‘into’ the theological estimations of practice ingredient to practical theology — and to experiment with how practical theological discourses, in turn, facilitate learning about the goods of life that ‘other’ practices generate.
I recently experienced another moment of such interaction when I was reading H. Stith Bennett’s meticulous sociological study of the practice of rock musicianship, _On Becoming a Rock Musician_ (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1980). Bennett argues that the practice of rock musicianship is dependent on the cultivation and exercise of a sonic imagination, or as he puts it, a “recording consciousness.” Rock musicians come to see themselves and be seen by others as musicians in part because of how they have learned to hear (and attempt to duplicate) recorded sounds produced under “studio” conditions–a rarefied atmosphere that becomes a template for what is hearable in the head as a starting point and continual reference for practicing by oneself or in a band.
Bennett writes, “The interaction between the aura of the studio environment and the ear/mind/musculature system of the human organism can produce a specialized way of imagining sounds.” “I will refer to that imagining process as the recording consciousness… By virtue of exposure to recordings [it] allows people, as a purely mental activity, to multi-track, alter dynamics, achieve reverberation and delay effects, equalize according to frequency, and manipulate signal-to-noise ratios, and to sequence, splice, and edit their musical ideas.” (pp. 128-129) – He criticizes concepts of imagination that are built on recourse to visual images as insufficient to explain musicianly practice in the rock scenes he studied.
On reading this passage, I immediately thought of a litany I had invoked in the preface to the paperback edition of my book _Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are With What We Buy (New York: Sheed and Ward, 2007). There, what I wrote is something like a display of sonic consciousness concerning Christian scriptures as ingredient to Christian practice. I wrote, “I no longer think such a weird multi-story as the New Testament can be accessed with stability from one clear direction. Read and heard as poems, dreas, adventures, aggressions, love letters, ‘reports;’ read and heard by believers, half-believers, disbelievers, nonbelievers; read and heard in the Greek, the Latin, the translations of translations–of translations, and never in the ‘original;’ read and heard by those in need of rescue, insight, salvation, wisdom, amusement, distraction, argument, survival, answers; read and heard between the covers of other sacred texts, amidst other ancient Christian writings, amidst one’s memories of childhood, amidst the incitement to explain one’s life, or through the need to change it; read and heard in varieties of sequence, out of sequence; read and heard backwards, set to music, in a cave, to one’s future self, to an animal, to someone dying. Yes, I use the New Testament tactically in [this book] in a plateaued attrition with and against other American Christians, but I do not really know what it means.” (p. xi)
Until I looked this up today, I had forgotten that the dedication at the front of the book, to my wife, is 1 John 3:8 backwards: “love is God / for God (know not) does love (not does) / whoever”. Bennett, in short, has helped me see how much of my thinking and practice of scriptural invocation is informed by the way I’ve learned to work from my “recording consciousness” as a musician, my connatural working from possible-sounds-in-the-head (or, “read and heard” as I wrote). It makes sense; I’ve been a practicing musician for more than 30 years–longer than I’ve been a theologian.
For Bennett, this sonic consciousness is ingredient to being able to satisfactorily “play.” Practical theology poses to Bennett’s work questions about how musicianly practices contribute to lived accounts of ultimate reality and the quality of relationship to, and impacts on, the larger world that those accounts allow. At least that’s my thinking right now. What practice literature or environment have you found important for developing your work in practical theology? How has it helped?
–Tom Beaudoin, Fordham University
PS: Here is a YouTube video featuring some of the recorded bass sounds that have informed the content and form of my “recording consciousness.” Bennett observes that recorded music is neither “natural” nor exactly “reproducible” by practicing musicians, but serves as a palette for hearing what can possibly happen when musicians “play.” There are evident parallels to practical theology on this point as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj7AX55bbak