From the Last Trumpet to the End of the World: Music in the Apocalyptic Mode

I read Music in the Apocalyptic Mode, edited by Lorenzo DiTommaso and Colin McAllister, in October 2023 while taking a course on apocalyptic literature with Emmanouela Grypeou at Stockholm University.

What stayed with me was not the basic definition of apocalyptic literature, which was already familiar, but the book’s demonstration that apocalypticism can migrate across media, periods and social settings while preserving a recognisable structure of meaning.

The volume moves from the medieval Song of the Sibyl and Dies Irae through Bach, Telemann, Wagner, Schoenberg and Messiaen, then into African American spirituals and blues, Rastafari, Bob Dylan, rock, hip-hop, Brazilian protest music and Grimes.

The conceptual move is simple but powerful: catastrophe itself is not enough. What matters is the interpretative structure imposed upon it. History acquires direction. The present world is judged as defective. A deeper reality is disclosed. Crisis becomes meaningful because it belongs to a larger movement toward judgement, destruction, liberation or renewal.

From there, the individual examples become much more interesting.

The Song of the Sibyl shows how apocalyptic expectation migrates out of text and into liturgy, music and performance. Its roots lie in a sermon attributed for centuries to Augustine but now assigned to Quodvultdeus, where the Erythraean Sibyl joins biblical and Christian figures in announcing judgement. The Sibyl’s prophecy concerns the Second Coming, yet it becomes embedded in the Christmas liturgy. Advent therefore holds together Nativity and judgement, first coming and second coming, beginning and end.

That conjunction is more than a curiosity. It shows how apocalyptic expectation can be ritualised until it becomes part of the annual structure of Christian time. Apocalypse is no longer something one merely reads. It is sung, processed, staged and periodically re-entered.

The Dies Irae develops another striking transformation.

It begins in the register of cosmic catastrophe: trumpet, judgement, opened books, the dead summoned, hidden things revealed. But much of the hymn is not really about the destruction of the world. It is about the anxiety of the individual standing within that destruction.

The decisive shift comes when the singer moves from description to supplication: save me, place me among the blessed, do not consign me to the flames. The cosmic apocalypse contracts into personal judgement.

That helps explain why the Dies Irae could survive so effectively outside its original liturgical context. Its apocalyptic force is not merely spectacular. It is existential.

Bach offers almost the opposite movement.

In the Michaelmas cantata discussed by Markus Rathey, apocalyptic battle imagery gives way to intimacy. Angels begin as combatants in a cosmic struggle, but the work ultimately turns toward the individual believer asking those angels to remain close. The great conflict in heaven resolves into protection, repose and personal trust.

This is a useful reminder that apocalypticism is not always loud.

The end of history can be translated into the emotional scale of one person approaching death.

Wagner was one of the cases that most broadened my understanding.

The Ring becomes apocalyptic not because it copies Revelation, but because its political and mythic structure depends upon the destruction of an exhausted order.

Kimbell traces how Wagner’s revolutionary politics, his engagement with 1848 and 1849, and his successive rewritings of the ending transform Siegfried and Brünnhilde into more than mythic heroes. They become agents of historical rupture.

In early versions, Siegfried is already cast in redemptive terms and Brünnhilde’s self-sacrifice points toward liberation from the ring’s power. Later, the destruction of Valhalla enters explicitly into the work. The old divine order itself must end.

This is where the concept becomes politically useful.

Apocalypticism no longer means waiting for God to destroy the world.

It becomes a way of imagining the destruction of a social and political order whose continuation has become intolerable.

Wagner therefore secularises apocalyptic structure without emptying it.

There is still corruption, crisis, a privileged insight into the true nature of the world, a redemptive rupture and the possibility of a transformed order beyond the existing one.

Schoenberg pushes the logic even further.

Here apocalypse is internal to the history of music itself.

McAllister interprets the breakdown of functional tonality and the “emancipation of dissonance” as an apocalyptic and transfigurative event. For centuries, Western art music had organised itself around tonal hierarchy, tension and resolution. Schoenberg does not merely alter that system. He removes its necessity.

The old musical cosmos loses its law.

Dissonance no longer requires redemption through resolution. Tonal gravity ceases to govern the whole. McAllister explicitly draws an analogy between this liberation of musical elements and the exhortatory, liberating function of classical apocalyptic literature.

That is one of the most intellectually daring arguments in the volume.

It treats apocalypse not as represented content but as formal rupture.

The music itself undergoes an end of the world.

The chapter on African American spirituals and blues shows apocalypticism functioning in yet another way: as a language of justice for people living within an order experienced as radically unjust.

Revelation’s promise that the present world will be judged acquires obvious force in the context of slavery. The existing hierarchy may appear absolute, but apocalyptic thought denies that it is final. The slaveholder is powerful only within the present order. Judgement belongs elsewhere.

The chapter argues that spirituals draw heavily upon death, deliverance, the New Jerusalem, divine judgement and the destruction of the earthly order, but these motifs are inseparable from the historical condition of enslavement.

This gives apocalyptic hope a double function.

It promises another world, but by doing so it also delegitimises this one.

The future judgement becomes a moral verdict on present power.

What is particularly interesting is that the same imagery survives in the blues, even after the musical setting becomes nominally secular. Floods, storms, death and impending doom remain intelligible because the underlying symbolic repertoire survives the transition from sacred to secular form.

Messiaen then overturns the popular meaning of apocalypse almost completely.

Andrew Shenton’s chapter stresses that for Messiaen, apocalypse means revelation rather than Armageddon. The destruction of the world is secondary. The real subject is what lies beyond it: eternity, resurrection, celestial order, light and the heavenly city.

This is especially important for understanding Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

The title can sound catastrophic if read through the modern everyday meaning of “apocalypse”. But for Messiaen, the end of time is not simply disaster. It is the end of temporality as a condition of existence.

Music then faces a theological problem.

How does an art that necessarily unfolds in time represent a state beyond time?

That is a much more interesting question than whether the piece merely depicts the end of the world.

Messiaen’s rhythmic and harmonic language becomes an attempt to make eternity perceptible within a temporal medium.

Bob Dylan presents another kind of continuity.

The chapter on Tempest argues that Revelation is not simply one source among many but an organising framework running through the album. Biblical numerology, judgement, catastrophe, memory, mortality and impending rupture recur across songs whose musical idiom remains firmly rooted in American folk and blues traditions.

The point is not that Dylan writes Christian apocalypse in a straightforward sense.

It is that Revelation remains culturally available as a way of making catastrophe intelligible.

The sinking of the Titanic, social decay, personal mortality and historical exhaustion can all be placed inside a symbolic universe inherited from biblical apocalypticism.

The chapter on Land of Confusion makes perhaps the book’s most transferable point.

Nothing is inherently apocalyptic.

A plague is not apocalyptic merely because it kills many people.

A war is not apocalyptic merely because it destroys cities.

Climate collapse is not apocalyptic merely because it threatens civilisation.

They become apocalyptic when interpreted through a worldview in which events disclose the hidden truth of history, reveal corruption, identify opposing forces and point toward an approaching resolution.

This distinction between event and interpretation is crucial.

It explains why the same event can be medical for one person, political for another and apocalyptic for a third.

The event remains the same.

Its meaning changes with the worldview through which it is read.

That also explains the book’s movement into contemporary popular culture.

DiTommaso’s idea of “superflat apocalypticism” describes a world in which symbols have become radically mobile. Biblical imagery, nuclear war, ecological collapse, AI, angels, demons, revolution, dystopia and ancient prophecy can be pulled from different traditions and recombined almost instantly.

The original contexts disappear.

The structure remains.

A music video can therefore be intensely apocalyptic while being theologically incoherent.

That is not necessarily a contradiction.

Modern popular culture often does not inherit systems intact. It inherits fragments.

What I found most useful in Music in the Apocalyptic Mode was precisely this recognition that apocalypticism survives not because every age repeats Revelation, but because the underlying pattern is extraordinarily adaptable.

In one setting it becomes liturgy.

In another, personal judgement.

In another, revolutionary politics.

In another, a break with tonal hierarchy.

In another, the hope of enslaved people that the moral order of the present cannot endure.

In Messiaen, it becomes an attempt to hear eternity.

In Dylan, it becomes a vocabulary for historical exhaustion.

In contemporary popular culture, it becomes a portable symbolic grammar.

The content changes.

The structure migrates.

That was the conceptual connection I had not seen so clearly before reading the book.