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He said it often in his lectures and throughout his writings. It put iron into the blood! Discussing his hero, Joseph "King" Oliver, he compares the New Orleans cornetist's orchestral sounds to the music of J. S. Bach. He finds very similar musical qualities in the baroque polyphony of the Brandenburg Concertos and Oliver's Creole Jazz Band from the 1920s. Not only the technical structure, but the mood and atmosphere are similar. Especially, he finds in both of them joy, true joy, not romantic escape. In stark contrast to Theodor Adorno's attacks on jazz, which found it "unruly," "rebellious," and "emasculating," Rookmaaker describes it as orderly, harmonious, and full of vigor. The opposite of joy for him is happiness, or the escapism of those who look for depth in the tragic and ruinous. And the ultimate source of true joy, whether in jazz or any other human expression, is biblical Christian faith, which Bach and Oliver shared.
During his lifetime, Hans Rookmaaker guided a great host of students into a strategy for understanding their times and working within their society with courage and creativity. His best-selling Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (IVP, 1970) was nothing short of a ground-breaking study of the surrounding culture, both in its threats and its promises. He dared to make sense of the steps to modern art by noting the general trend from a theocentric world to an absurd universe that lay behind the pictures. Malcolm Muggeridge, himself a returned prodigal, gave it a ringing endorsement on the pages of Esquire. Following in the tradition of the historian Groen van Prinsterer, the theologian-statesman Abraham Kuyper, and the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd, Rookmaaker believed there was a spiritual background to Western painting which was the key to unlocking its meaning. However, unlike amateur attempts to reduce art to philosophy, Rookmaaker led the reader on a visit to hundreds of paintings, writings, and musical numbers, pausing to scrutinize their composition and motifs.
While the clarity of his pages has fooled some into thinking he was merely a popularizer, or, more gravely, that he ran slipshod over the inner dynamics of particular works of art in order to discern their message, the truth is that behind every one of his judgments there was considerable research. It's just that he did not want to miss the forest for the trees. What his critics feared at the time was that he made facile connections between an artistic statement and its philosophical orientation. They worried that he was from a bygone era which had not yet escaped the carelessness and even the paternalism of such judgments.
Perhaps there is some truth to this. In his praise of Groen van Prinsterer, Rookmaaker compares the statesman's history of Holland to the books of Kings in the Bible, because both are able to discern the hand of God in history. So, there is a hint of providentialism here. Still, we have gone way over to the other extreme. Besides often being unfair, there is something sad about our timid refusal to look for meaning in a text. Have we not become jaded in our over-sensitivity to hermeneutics? Have not our critical requirements turned us into snobs of a different kind? When we read the works of Rookmaaker and others in the previous generation of scholars, we are in a different world. The air is full of oxygen. They are capable of enviable lucidity. Sure, they made their judgments, but these were often well considered, delivered without today's required guilt feelings for treading on the wrong toes. They are careful and nuanced in their own way, but full of passion and courage. Besides, the final reason for Rookmaaker's calling as a critic is that he believed in objective truth, while many of his contemporaries were seducing their audiences away from the possibility of truth.
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