An Inflectional Paradigm of Classical Music as a Religious-Aesthetic-Mythical-Ethical Fourfold
This is an interdisciplinary attempt at a paradigmatic description of the spiritual dimension of music which passed through several ages defined here as religious, theocratic, aesthetic, mythical and ethical. The distinction between the ancient and medieval understanding of music as constitutive of the universe (Plato), of divine inspiration or teleology (the Middle Ages) and the modern secularization and aesthetic turn is generally agreed upon, whereas the exploration of mythical symbolism as a reaction to the dry materialism of the post-industrial age or the existence of an ethical finality in the music of postmodernity are working hypotheses of our research paper. We are trying to identify an ethical finality in the heterogeneous picture of eclectic New Age practices or minimalist and other vanguard experiments of the postwar period.
Keywords: sacred music, the ethical turn, postmodernist spirituality, emancipation of pop music, secularization of church music
