Colloquium Presentation Workshop

28 Sept 2016

Mark Schultz, Weston Jennings, Victor Gan

PROFANING THE SACRED: TRANSGRESSIVE APPROACHES TO THE MASS

If the mass is the central Christian sacrament, what might it mean to perform it
transgressively? More than just the ripples in the non-Christian pond that the cultural
and musical history of the mass has given rise to, might we see a dialectical process
where our understanding of the sacred through the music and performance of the
mass is radically challenged, subverted, collapsed (or even recovered) by encounter
with other languages of human experience? We explore this question using mass
settings that all stretch traditional notions of sacramental aesthetic to near breaking
point: Bernsteins

Mass in its relation to popular culture and Judaism, Ferneyhoughs

Missa Brevis through its abstracted academic aestheticism, and Diamanda Galas Plague
Mass by its cacophonic, seemingly blasphemous appropriation for social protest.
Visions and Versions of the Sacred
What does the Sacred do? What is it for?
How do we recognize it?
What does it sound like / look like / feel like?
What is its vocabulary?
If there is a common vocabulary of the sacred: how does this help or hinder our
apprehension of the Sacred?
The question of the Other or of the Outside -- Rilke:

Beauty and terror.

Transgression
Is there a difference between sacrilege, profanation, transgression and blasphemy?
Is there room for faithful transgression?
In what ways might we speak of transgression as giving (greater) access to the sacred
or of opening a space in which the sacred can be re-imagined or re-experienced?
The Mass
A characteristic instance of Christian sacred.
Structures, tropes, terrains.
What does it mean to perform the Mass transgressively? What can be recovered for
Christianity or for our notion of the sacred by considering transgressive approaches to
the Mass?
What is a transgressive approach? The recovery of the sense of the Other, the Outside,
the Stranger, the Queer.
Becketts idea of staining the silence.
Analysis of Examples
Which Mass?
Whose Mass?
Why Mass?
What, if anything, is meant to be transformed?
How is it transformed?