The End of Good Music? Sexual Selection, Fourier's Harmonics, and the Theological Vocation of Sacred Sound
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper proposes an original interdisciplinary argument concerning the theological and moral character of sacred music, operating at the intersection of evolutionary biology, acoustic mathematics, cognitive neuroscience, and systematic theology. Its thesis is fourfold and interlocking. First: the dominant trajectory of contemporary popular religious music reflects, whether consciously or not, the operative values of Darwin's sexual selection hypothesis, privileging biological display over theological formation. Second: Joseph Fourier's decomposition of complex sound waves into a fundamental frequency and an infinite series of harmonics provides an analytically precise framework not previously deployed in the theology of music. The fundamental determines pitch, corresponding to a musical work's propositional content; the harmonic series determines timbre, corresponding to its formative character—and it is the latter, not the former, that determines what kind of soul a music produces. Third: the functional asymmetry of hemispheric processing in the human brain corroborates what the theological tradition from Boethius through Luther to Ellen G. White has consistently maintained, that music reshapes the mind according to its own character and is therefore never morally neutral. Fourth: in dialogue with Jeremy Begbie's temporal theology and Nicholas Cook's account of music as social practice, the paper argues that sacred music's deepest vocation is not the expression of present feeling but the ordered anticipation of eschatological resolution—and that music which systematically short circuits this anticipatory structure is not merely aesthetically impoverished but theologically deformed. The paper concludes that genuine recovery of sacred music requires a reorientation of first principles: from biological display to theological formation, from the gratification of desire to the anticipation of eschatological resolution
DOI: 10.17613/267ck-5az14
Author: Mboya, Grold Otieno
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7140635730