Muzyka ducha

Abstract

In order to define the semantics of the kind of music that evokes sacrum from the indescribable sphere of profanum (the spirit of music) and the sphere of the musical art that manifests sacrum (the music of the Spirit) Rev. Krzysztof Guzowski compared three conceptions of the theory of music. They are as follows: the echo of the cosmic quality and proportion in Augustine, the spiritual resonance of the human subject in Hegel, and the semeiotic circle between the composer, a directed creative process, and the recipient. On the grounds of the analogy with the knowledge about the Holy Spirit, the truth has been shown that the human world and the Divine world, the spiritual beauty of the world and the Divine beauty, tum out to co-exist in their mutual openness and creative interpenetration. Sacrum has been shown in the Christian perspective as a kind of encounter in which the personal God comes half way to meet the human person (in creation and redemption, personal nature and grace). The author wanted thereby to elucidate the theological view of the new musical genres and their practical adaptation to religious ends: the sphere of sacredness in music cannot for sure be formally limited by the kind of music that is performed during the Liturgy. The theological view, more than the purely speculative one, dismisses doubts as to the potential range of sacrum in music: the more sacrum, the more room there is for sanctum in man. The recognition of sacrum is not only the domain of reason but of the whole human person. There is no rigid boundary between profanum and sacrum, especially in music, in particular that the obstacle in the spiritual sphere between that which is Divine, and that which is human, is sin and not knowledge. It is sin that becomes the battlefield of competition for the “semantic” ranges.