Abstract Current theological narrations of the story of modernity typically ignore music, despite its ubiquitous role in modern culture and the ways in which music has been intertwined with modernity’s ambivalent relation to the Christian concept of God. In conversation with musicologists and music theorists, this collection of essays aims to demonstrate that the practices of music and its discourses bear their own kind of witness to some of the pivotal theological currents and counter-currents that have shaped modernity—that music has been affected in distinctive ways by those currents, and in some cases may have contributed to forming them. In addition, it seeks to show that in some cases, music is capable of yielding highly effective means of addressing and moving beyond some of the more intractable theological aporias which modernity has bequeathed to us. Particular attention is given to the complex relations between music and language, and the ways in which theology, a discipline involving language at its heart, can come to terms with practices which are undeniably coherent and meaningful but which nonetheless operate in ways that in many respects are quite distinct from language.
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