In discussing the use of music in popular entertainment, it is impossible to not mention the work done by George Frideric Handel.\u00a0 Handel is most well known for his plethora of oratorios, musical compositions akin to operas but without the acting.\u00a0 Though he wrote many secular oratorios, his works based on biblical text have garnered a great deal of attention throughout history; most familiar to us in the modern day is most likely the famous Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah.”\u00a0 Compositions of this type, largely intended to be shared with a public audience in a concert hall rather than a church, raise questions that have been quite common in this course, specifically how much can be added\/subtracted from the original biblical text while still maintaining the text’s meaning?<\/p>\n
Though it can be hard to imagine these works as controversial today, much debate was held around these oratorios in Handel’s time due to questions like the one above.\u00a0 Many religious people in England saw Handel’s mixing of secular music and biblical texts, along with the performance of these works in secular spaces, as acceptable.\u00a0 Outrage of this kind still occurs in our present-day, with many devoutly religious people taking issue with the usage of religious imagery, not even text, by secular artists (most recently Lil Nas X’s “Montero” music video comes to mind).<\/p>\n
Since these controversies have persisted for hundreds of years, it begs a question: does religious text\/imagery have any place in the entertainment sphere at all?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In discussing the use of music in popular entertainment, it is impossible to not mention the work done by George Frideric Handel.\u00a0 Handel is most well known for his plethora of oratorios, musical compositions akin to operas but without the acting.\u00a0 Though he wrote many secular oratorios, his works based on biblical text have garnered… Continue reading Biblical Music in Popular Culture<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9196473,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9196473"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":518,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/pca263fall2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}