{"id":263,"date":"2010-10-21T23:34:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T23:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/2010\/10\/21\/the-atheists-guide-to-religious-music\/"},"modified":"2010-10-21T23:34:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-21T23:34:00","slug":"the-atheists-guide-to-religious-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/2010\/10\/the-atheists-guide-to-religious-music\/","title":{"rendered":"The Atheist’s Guide to Religious Music"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For some reason, a melody from Messiah<\/b> popped into my fingers in ballet class today. “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.” I’m pretty sure that He doesn’t, but that doesn’t stop me from loving the piece of music. What better way to express one’s love of a thing than to mangle it up pretty good? (I played a fragment of the tune in truncated form, repeated, with an improvised ‘bridge,’ and certainly not in Handel’s tonality.) The ballet exercise did not seem to be an even phrase of eights, or there was one too many to make up a square 64. No matter. And there was some sort of misbehavior on the dance floor which added a distraction. Also no matter. I got home and fished the score off of the IMSLP<\/a>. I printed the two pages I needed and read the piece down on the pseudo-piano. It’s the tonality of E major, folks. Four sharps, and wolfish in the old Werckmeister<\/a>. I love the bit where the ‘worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.’ Nowadays, we’d at least funk it up for the gothic bits. Handel keeps it sunny. It’s an odd mentality. The first reading reduced me to a lover’s fit, but I sobered up on the second, faster reading. Picking a tempo in between, my third reading got the whole thing out of my system. Besides, the cat was not liking the racket. Even though, in my flesh I can see the God in this music, I can’t be saved, though worms destroy this body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some reason, a melody from Messiah popped into my fingers in ballet class today. “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}