Handling Dissonance

“Stearns’s Handling Dissonance boldly and deftly enacts an intellectual exchange between a contemporary trinitarian theologian and one of the most profound composer-theorists of all time. Renovating the concept of unity as inherently bound up with multiplicity, the study enriches theological thinking through musical models and fertilizes musical thinking through theological principles.”


—Matthew Arndt, University of Iowa School of Music





“In Handling Dissonance, Chelle L. Stearns gives us new language and a new way of thinking about a Trinitarian conception of unity and its relation to such ideas as materiality, substance, particularity, and freedom . . . This is an engaging and important book for theologians and music scholars alike.”


—Mark A. Peters, President, Society for Christian Scholarship in Music





“Compellingly argued and incisively theorized, Handling Dissonance is a sustained attack on faults in the underlying principles of Schoenberg’s aesthetic theology, and a foil for redemptive meditation on Colin Gunton’s Trinitarian theology—a true landmark in interdisciplinary thought.”


—Bennett Zon, Durham University





“Chelle L. Stearns’s Handling Dissonance is a fascinating study of Schoenberg’s ‘aesthetic theology’ . . . Schoenberg’s understanding of unity—one that dissolves particularity in itself—is placed up against Gunton’s and Begbie’s concepts of unity that celebrate the particular and allow it to thrive. The book will be of value to students of music theory and philosophy as well as theology.”


—Jack Boss, University of Oregon