October 23, 2011
DUST TO DUST:
The Water Is Wide (Mark Sprinkle, 10/23/11, BioLogos)Listening to this recording of The Fretful Porcupine playing "The Water Is Wide" online is a very different experience than being in the room with the duo and other audience members for a live performance. Nevertheless, the diversity of readers of this post does recreate one particular aspect of being with Jake Armerding and Kevin Gosa presenting the music in person: in both settings, some hearers are familiar with this very traditional and well-known folk tune as just that, but many others' first association with the melody will be the cross of Christ, as those hearers recognize the music as the Christian hymn "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross." At the live performance, that latter group may have wondered if this pair of avant-garde bluegrass/jazz players was surreptitiously proclaiming the story of Jesus' death and resurrection in the midst of a show at the Infinity Hall performance space, or merely hearkening back only to an 18th-century tale of woe. The truth is most likely "both," and in that very fact the Fretful Procupine gives both audiences a complicated gift--an example of the way that in music, as in all life, adaptive reuse is a way to wring the most meaning out of both the material and symbolic forms we discover in the world. [...]
What's interesting here is not just the idea that one can strip a symbolic, expressive musical form of its "original" meaning and impose an entirely new regime of meaning upon it, but the way such a change is often not a wholesale substitution but a transformation--the old meaning becoming part of the new meaning, even when that first is superficially left behind. This is particularly appropriate when thinking about the Water Is Wide/Wondrous Cross pairing, because the lamentation quality of the original tune reinforces in the newer symbolic environment the idea that what makes the cross of Jesus "wondrous" was precisely its horror--and that our very God would submit Himself to it for our sakes. That tension is one of the deep and terrible mysteries and ironies of the Christian faith.
But even more than just affirming that the cost of our redemption was high, remembering (or learning) the various texts that "O Waly, Waly" accompanied before Watt's hymn was paired with it gives us a beautiful contrast between the character of human love and commitment (fickle, inconstant, self-serving) and the character of divine love (constant and self-sacrificial). In other words, the hymn setting preserves not only the musical structure of the song, but even part of the meaning of the first--lament and sorrow over love--but in a new context, with a new framework of meaning. The lament itself is transformed without being lost, and turned to mark the distinctively Christian tension between sacrifice and redemption through a greater love than that of mortal men and women.
Precisely because of this kind of expansion rather than replacement of meaning, our appreciation of this or other hymn tunes ought not decrease when we realize that they may have had secular or even profane origins (think of the drinking songs used by Charles Wesley), or be limited to merely rejoicing that such vulgar forms have been redeemed. Instead, we can celebrate and marvel at the way such beauty and new work has come directly out of something that seemed either unrelated or even in opposition to our life in Christ. This dynamic of renewal is, after all, exactly what we celebrate when we affirm that God's grace is extended to us, and our own covenantal responsibility fulfilled by God himself, through the horror of the cross of Jesus.
By analogy, then, this instance of expressive "exaptation" in the art of worship has something to tell us about how we might think about the science of biological and even human origins--of how the scientific accounts of the history and relatedness of life on earth express the character of God. Most generally, we should see that it need not degrade or debase the biological world (much less humanity) as God's creation to proclaim that we were made from lesser materials and that we share so much of our physical make-up and history with creatures in whom we may not see much to celebrate. It is, after all, the very power of God to remake what is base into what is glorious through often surprising and unexpected means.
Posted by oj at October 23, 2011 10:32 AM
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