PhD extract 3 – The Bible

The following extract shows two ways in which I engage with the Bible in the research. Firstly I talk of the diversity of the bible. I understand that for some Christians plurality is often equated with pluralism. When I talk of plurality I’m talking about diverseness and the vareity present in scripture. Secondly I talk of the relationship that the Bible has with sound.

There are several pluralities within the bible which are relevant to this research. It is written in several genres (e.g. law, poetry, saying, history) and languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek) and it was written across a period of around 1000 years (900BCE – 100CE).[1] There is also a plurality that is complex, problematic and unresolved: What Christians call the Old Testament is for Jewish people, their bible, while the New Testament consists of writings uniquely added for and by Christians, both of which together forms their bible. The naming of the Jewish bible as the ‘Old’ Testament and the Christian additions as the ‘New’ Testament is a plurality which is filled with tension. A false separation between the old and new led to supersessionism, ‘(t)he faulty idea that Christianity replaces Judaism… [that] …led to anti-Judaism within the church and has been the source of tragic and fatal consequences in the history of the West.’[2] The troubling history that accompanies these texts is important because replacement of the old with the new can have horrific consequences. Plurality is accepting the old with the new rather than replacing the old. The terminology of ‘Old’ and ‘New’ is troublesome and problematic but I stay with those terms for its widespread use and also as a reminder of the difficulties that accompany plurality.

The bible has further plurality in its reception. Its original languages do not have precedence in providing access to it, in contrast to Islam where Arabic is considered to be the correct way of accessing the Quran. This means that the bible is experienced around the world through diverse languages. And diverse languages provide diverse sound worlds. (The translation of the bible also resulted in the formation of scripts for previously unscripted languages.[3]) When these pluralities are ignored it can have consequences in the real world in the treatment of women, sexual difference and foreigners. An example of such a consequence is that despite women having a prominent role in the early church, the later church institutions placed women under control and subservience. In the Anglican church women priests were only allowed in 1987. Women bishops are even more recent, 2011. In some denominations women still are not allowed to preach.[4] These circumstances arise from a singular reading of the bible where certain parts are amplified over others. This is further relevant today, as populist movements try to promote the idea of a ‘Christian Europe’ or a ‘Christian Britain’ against a Muslim world, with texts being appropriated for such causes.[5]

Exposing plurality in different ways will form an opening to continually attend to difference without homogenised synthesis or rejection. The plurality of the bible allows for an attention to the differences within it. The plurality of scripture is further underlined by seemingly contradictory texts. In the New Testament there are four gospels, four accounts of Jesus’ public life, with differences between them which have not been fully resolved by successive generations of commentators and academics. Early in church history these differences disturbed theologians and one of them, Tatian (120-180CE), wrote the Diatessaron where he attempted to collect all the text of the four gospels into one single narrative line.[6] Yet the church has stuck to the four different accounts with all its contradictions rather than accept a harmonisation. A similar synthesis was attempted with the Old Testament[7] which also has duplicate and contradictory accounts. Israel Knohl, a Jewish biblical professor says that ‘[t]he anonymous assemblers and editors of the Torah’[8] could have produced a book ‘free of all contradictions and tensions.’[9] Instead, Knohl compares the texts to a chorus and points out:

‘they left us a book in which we find a variety of voices. Though the overarching narrative tends to blend, or perhaps even obscure, for most readers the diverse sounds of this chorus, if one listens carefully, one can hear them.’[10]

The phrase: ‘If one listens carefully, one can hear them’ is particularly pertinent for this project. Listening carefully to hear ‘the diverse sounds of this chorus’ resonates closely with how the practice of Bible Noise engages with the plurality of the bible.

A further reason for using the bible is that in its content and usage it has certain resonances with sound, speech and music which makes it an area for sound research. In the bible texts, God speaks creation into being. It is through speech and listening that God interacts with creation. In a religious matrix where images of God are banned, the language of speech and listening become the primary ways in which God is interacted with. Music, another significant expression of human sound, occupies a significant place within the bible: the books of Psalms, Song of songs, and Lamentations were all written down with the expectation that they would be sung. Music, both instrumental and vocal, was a strong part of the religious institution of the ancient Israelites which is outlined with some detail in the Old Testament.[11] The New Testament, written later (primarily by Jews in the 1^st Century), assumes the Old Testament as its base. It is written around the person of Jesus who is referred to as the Word who was ‘…in the beginning’ (John 1). ‘Word’ from the Greek logos is both utterance and concept in this context.[12] The New Testament does not have as many instances of song and music and can seem to be lacking in the rich sounds of the Old Testament but the assumption is that these sounds are implicit. Songs from the Old Testament are sung in the New Testament (e.g., The song of Mary, the Magnificat in Luke 2 which is an adaptation of different Psalms) and newer ones (e.g. Philippians 2:5-11) are alluded to in these later writings.

Another important facet of the bible to this project is that it was written to be read aloud. For much of history the bible has been accessed by most people through the sound of the spoken voice. Therefore, it is worth interrogating this voice in what it does or does not do. My research attempts to propose a way of accessing plurality through sound; especially accessing multiple voices in texts that previously have been considered authoritative and singular in their meaning.

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[1] John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths (London: Penguin Books, 2020), 33, 261.

[2] Peter Heltzel, Resurrection City: A Theology of Improvisation (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 2012), 11.

[3] The Cryllic alphabet which is widely used in Eastern Europe came out of a need to translate the bible into Slavonic and other Eastern European languages. David Diringer and David R. Olson, ‘Alphabet – Cyrillic and Glagolitic Alphabets’, Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed 22 October 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/alphabet-writing.

[4] Bob Smietana, ‘Accusing SBC of “caving,” John MacArthur Says of Beth Moore: “Go Home”’, Religion News Service (blog), 19 October 2019, https://religionnews.com/2019/10/19/accusing-sbc-of-caving-john-macarthur-says-beth-moore-should-go-home/.

[5] Sociologist Rogers Brubaker explores this as populist rhetoric in Rogers Brubaker, ‘Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Moment in Comparative Perspective’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 8 (21 June 2017): 1191–1226, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700.

[6] David Parker, ‘The New Testament’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible, ed. John Rogerson, 2001, https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780198601180.001.0001/acref-9780198601180-chapter-6.

[7] This attempt was found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of the Qumran Sect of Judaism which existed around the beginning of the common era.  Israel Knohl, The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices (Jewish Publication Society, 2010), 4.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] 1 Chronicles 26 is one of the more detailed descriptions of the priest musicians who played at the temple.

[12] William A. Beardslee, ‘Logos’, in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan and Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford University Press, 1993), 463.

Phd Extract 2 – Aside 1

In the thesis in between chapters I wrote short asides. They were not directly linked to the project yet seemed to have a tacit bearing on it. Here’s the first one.

…My father tried teaching me the keyboard but, as I’ve since discovered, sometimes parent-child relations don’t translate into teacher-student ones! I, however, used to play the keyboard with him. I would play the left while he played the right. Not because it was simpler, but because I was left-handed. I particularly liked Bach, not for his many musical properties but rather that he seemed to give equal importance to the left and to the right.

Through that experience, I became very aware of harmony and chord progression. To such a point, that, melodies were fundamentally boring to me. It was fascinating to hear how notes worked together at the same time, rather than one after another. My musical activity and listening since has, mostly, been in some sense at the back. I sang bass in the choirs, played instruments that were mostly at the back, like bass and rhythm guitar and keyboards. I avoided solos as much as possible, whether singing or instrumentally. It always seemed much more interesting, skulking around the back of the music, subtly changing everything with no one really noticing.

June 2018

PhD Extract 1 – Intro

chandy · PhD Extract 1 Intro

I thought I’d start a series of posts that will be extracts from my Phd. I hope to re-engage with my research and also distil some of the things that I truly like about it. Here are the first few paragraphs of the introduction.

The voice is one of the ways in which Christians engage with the bible. The reading aloud of scripture is a ritual that most Christian groupings undertake as part of their gathered worship. This ritual is normally done with a single voice. I propose that this approach reflects and reinforces a hegemony, where dominant voices diminish and marginalise other voices. In response I engage with the multiplicity and plurality of the bible by using sound art practice, experimenting with the act of reading aloud in different ways. This leads to a polyphony of voices – the intermingling of voices of multiple readers and multiple characters in the texts. This polyphony is one that contextualises voices, where voices can have an effect on each other, since sound is so often contextualised by other sounds.

Contextualisation is often how we make sense of sound and in that resonance of contextualisation I narrate some personal context to introduce and make sense of this project. There are two realities that currently affect me as I attempt to finish this writing. This PhD is being completed while my mother is unwell. Part of her condition is a loss of the conventional ability to speak. She can still use her voice and speak but our shared conventions of language are lost to her. The voice is often connected to language and this project will explore how voice and language carry each other. My mother cannot communicate conventionally but those that listen to her over a period of time can more fully understand what she is communicating. To speak of voice and language is to speak of speakers and listeners. Speaking and listening is a key exploration of this project.

My mother, for the most part, can utter one word: “Ponnam.” “Ponnam” is a word in the Malayalam language that indicates a need to go – it encapsulates the phrase ‘I want to go.’ When my mother utters it, however, it can have several meanings: ‘I want to walk,’ ‘I am too hot,’ ‘I am restless’ and so on. It takes a careful listening and asking of questions to understand what she is communicating with ‘Ponnam.’ The sound of ‘Ponnam,’ which means one thing to most listeners, is now filled with multiple meanings and possibilities. What is happening here is polyvalence, a multiplicity that polyphony alludes to; what seems to be a single thing, ‘Ponnam,’ refers to many things and sometimes many things together: ‘I am uncomfortable, and I would like to sit up.’ Similarly, polyphony often seems like a unity, a single thing, but it is many things occurring together. Distinguishing the differences within, and how they work together, will give a fuller and better understanding of the situation/s we find ourselves in.

I use the word ‘Ponnam,’ a word in Malayalam. The presence of a foreign language points to a difference: a difference of culture, of personhood, of being. Growing up with two different languages, in two different cultures, I have had to negotiate how these differences work with each other with no easy resolution. Living with this multiplicity is personal to me but most human beings must live and engage with some form of multiplicity in their daily living.

An important point of connection with my mother is the reading aloud of the bible. I read aloud to her and we both listen to versions of audio bibles across two languages. The bible is a site of complex interweaving relationships and connections for us. It connects us to the past by evoking memories, remembered stories and phrases; it connects Christians because it is a shared sacred text across the community; it forms identity while also giving the potential to reconstrue identity. The bible, with its multiple books, meanings and voices, is the site of inquiry.