I am grateful for John Ahern’s eloquent and insightful essay, and for the wise and helpful responses from Peter Leithart, Calvin Stapert, and Paul Buckley. John’s essay considers the challenge of holding together traditionalism and vernacularism in the music of the church. Most of us who have been a part of a Christian church will have experienced this tension, and especially those who have been directly involved in the music ministries of the church.
It is particularly ironic – and sad – that music should be the site of this tension. For countless figures over the centuries music has been an instance and a figure of right relation between disparate elements. Plato takes music as an image of right relation between the various divisions of society[1] and between the various elements of one’s own self.[2] Boethius makes a similar point in The Consolation of Philosophy, using the language of music: “The world in contstant change maintains a harmony and elements keep peace whose nature is to clash.”[3]
“We–are we not formed, as notes of music are,” Shelley writes,
“For one another, though dissimilar;
Such difference without discord.”[4]
“Music is what unifies” Stravinsky agrees, (quoting the Chinese sage Seu-Ma Tsen).[5]
This unitive power of music is the central theme of De Musica, one of the first texts Augustine wrote after his return to Christianity. For Augustine, the great gift of music is precisely that it demonstrates – more than that, embodies – the way that disparate elements are held together in relation. Indeed it is only by the enactment of this relation between disparate elements that music is possible. At the heart of the experience of music is harmony – a term that Augustine explains through terms like ratio and proportion. And it is through music above all else, Augustine says, that we learn “what proportion is and how great is its authority in all things.”[6]
How does music teach us proportion? De Musica is a study of rhythm, and poetic rhythm particularly. (Years later, Augustine lamented that in addition to this study of rhythm, he also hoped to write a book on harmonia, “but from the time that the burden of ecclesiastical cares was laid upon me, all these recreations have passed from my hand.”[7]) So, how does rhythm work in poetry? A poetic rhythm is made up of a series of pulses – long-short-short, long-short-short, long-short-short – and so on. But how short? Should the short pulse be .37 seconds? Or .21? That’s obviously the wrong question. The “shortness” of the short pulse is determined in relation to the “longness” of the long pulse. “Nothing is large of itself in time or space but only in relation to something smaller,” Augustine concludes, “and again nothing is small of itself in time or space but only with respect to something larger.”[8] The identity of the short pulse arises in relation to the long, and vice versa.
That’s one way that music teaches us about proportion. Augustine sets out another: consider an iambic pentameter (or in the idiom of contemporary western music, think of a waltz, a march, or a bossa nova). Imagine someone performing one of these incorrectly. Perhaps someone performs a waltz so that it sounds like a march in two four time, playing: “ONE two THREE one TWO three ONE two THREE;” instead of “ONE two three ONE two three.” The rhythm is played badly, but not because it includes “bad” beats — as if stressed or unstressed beats were bad in themselves. Both stressed and unstressed beats are correct and necessary in order for any rhythm to be a rhythm. But for the rhythm to be what it is, stressed and unstressed beats must be in right relation to one another. A rhythm just is a particular relation.
Finally, Augustine argues that not only musical rhythm, but the very experience of music as music depends on a kind of harmony. De Musica is written in the form of a dialogue, and in its last book, the master asks his disciple where the order of music comes from. Does it come from “the sound heard, or also in the hearer’s sense belonging to the ears [sensus qui ad aures pertinet], or also in the act of the reciter, or, because the verse is known, in our memory too?”[9] The student answers: “In all of these, I think.” And – the master announces – he is exactly right.
Does music “work” because of the physical, acoustical properties of the sound? Or because of some power of our ears to organize that physical phenomenon? Or does it “work” because it arises from the intentional ordering of an intelligent agent — the one making the sound? Perhaps it is because we have been conditioned by society to like one sort of sound and not another? Or maybe a given piece of music pleases us because of our own private and individual associations? These are the options set out by Augustine. But music, he goes on to argue, not only has room for all of these; it depends upon all of these in their interrelation. The experience of music relies on the external and the internal, the physical and mental, the social and the personal, sense and imagination. What we delight in is just this cosmic harmony enacted in our own experience. And in this way music offers a winsome testimony to the fact that we inhabit a cosmos, not a chaos; a world in which each thing has its place, because God is the “creator of all things, seen and unseen.”
This is an insight that is especially important to Augustine, because it played a vital part in his return to Christianity after some years as a Manichaean. Augustine was drawn to Manichaeism because of the solution it offered to the problem of evil. How can Christians claim that God is the creator of “all things”? How could a good God have created a world that includes bad things? The Manichaean answer is that there are two deities: a good God who is the source of good things and a bad God who is the source of bad things. The insight that allows Augustine to affirm God as the creator of all things, is a musical insight. In the same way that there are no “bad beats” or “bad notes,” there are no “evil things,” but good things that are in the wrong proportion, the wrong place, or the wrong relation:
When accordingly it is inquired, whence is evil, it must first be inquired, what is evil, which is nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order, that belong to nature. (Concerning the Nature of Good, Against the Manichaeans, IV, my emphasis)
Augustine ends up making use of this musical insight throughout his writing. It informs his discussion of time in Confessions Book XI. It stands behind his discussion of sin:
The beauty of physical things is appealing (gold, silver, and the rest), and we sway to what touches the flesh. . . . Sin arises . . . from things like this, only if a disordered fixation on lower goods draws us off from better and higher goods. Confessions, Book 2, II, 10 (tr. Wills, my emphasis)
It directs his discussion of the Trinitarian persons,
But because the Father is not called the Father except in that He has a Son, and the Son is not called Son except in that He has a Father, these things are not said according to substance; because each of them is not so called in relation to Himself, but the terms are used reciprocally and in relation each to the other” — De Trinitate, V, 6.
The heart of Augustine’s insight about harmony and proportion is the same as the point John makes with reference to counterpoint, and that Peter makes using the language of the Great Chain of Being. Each envisions music within a cosmic order in which there is a place for disparate elements, indeed, an order which depends upon difference in relation; in which the beauty of the whole emerges from that variegated unity. Each suggests an understanding of music which not only has place for, but to some extent depends upon the presence of both the old and the new, the universal and the local, the traditional and the vernacular, musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis.
De Musica argues that music is the venue where we most clearly discern how these wildly diverse elements can be drawn together into a winsome whole. Eugene Peterson gravitates naturally to the language of music in his poetic paraphrase of Colossians 1:19-20:
So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross. (The Message)
Music is not the source of this universal harmony, of course. Jesus Christ is the one in whom all things hold together. But according to Augustine, music is one of the clearest witnesses to the truth that all things were made to be held together.
De Musica then, goes beyond suggesting that it’s possible for disparate elements (such as “tradition” and “the vernacular”) to coinhere. Instead, music points to the beauty and necessity of such coinherence. I don’t know if this is exactly the same thing as John’s “Anti-Traditionalist Tradition,” but I think it points in the same sort of direction. It is not only possible for distinctive and dissimilar elements and voices to be joined in music; Augustine argues that it is by such a joining that music occurs. Or we could say (to use language from Peter Leithart’s essay): not only should our church music be catholic; music is one of the places where the catholicity of the church is made available and evident to our senses. In fact, I think this is exactly the reason why Paul urges singing at a climactic moment in his letter to the Ephesians (5:19-21). The song of the church is where we hear the one voice of many voices; the place where those who once were separated by “a dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:14) have been set in harmony. It is the place where we hear the voice of “one new humanity out of two” (2:15).
Paul admonishes us to “sing together” (Eph. 5:19) in a letter all about reconciling estranged communities, and this suggests that John is exactly right to raise the concern that occupies the second half of his essay. It’s a concern echoed by the other three contributors to this conversation as well. “Professionalism and electrification” Calvin Stapert writes, have undermined “the traditional values of communal music-making by turning us into a culture of music consumers.” Discussions of the overtone series, the Great Chain of Being, and Augustine’s theory of musical perception can seem esoteric and far removed from the practical and pastoral concerns of the church musician. But the shared life of human communities is just the concern toward which these concepts and discussions are meant to be oriented. Because “all things whatever and of any size are made from one beginning,” Augustine writes, we may hope that all things may be “joined together in charity as one and one gift from one.”[10]
The great dysfunctions of contemporary American society – loneliness and divisiveness – might be described as failures of the ear. We do not feel heard by one another, nor are we able to clearly and accurately hear those around us. The two icons of modern aural culture are the loudspeaker and the earbud; sound pollution and aural isolation. One represents the domination, the other the radical privatization, of aural space.
How then might we begin to address the tunelessness of contemporary society? I’m grateful for Paul Buckley’s reminder that we keep the “street-level” concerns of the “working church musician” in view. The other participants in this conversation have already made good suggestions toward that end: the singing of psalms, a fresh emphasis on musical education using methods such as Kodály, attending anew to the resources of the tradition. These are all helpful proposals. Here are a few thoughts to add to those already shared, oriented specifically toward the practice of ministry.
First, I think John’s diagnosis also does at least some of the work of a prescription. What should I make of my congregation’s anemic singing, if I am a minister of music? Do I conclude that I’ve just had the bad fortune to work in a congregation of weak singers? That there are too many college students and young people in my congregation? That there are too many old people? Maybe we’ve chosen the wrong hymnal? Do we need to start (or stop) using a worship band? Is the problem the stodgy hymnody — or the superficial contemporary music — that characterizes our church’s worship? I spent the first seven years of my working life after college as a church minister of music, and I considered each of these explanations at various points in that short career. And on a number of occasions, I attended church music conferences or worship workshops where one or another of these diagnoses was advanced. John’s essay makes clear, however, that “what has happened to music specifically. . . . uncannily correlates with the narratives of secularization. . . . It is not a coincidence, that, in an era when industrialism and urbanism have made our social harmony flounder, we also have less literal harmony.”
Indeed, it’s worth noting that the professionalization and privatization of music has parallels in the other arts. Dance, song, visual art, and story-telling have all largely become things done by specially trained people, presented on scheduled occasions, in purpose-built venues, set apart from daily life. Moreover, each has increasingly become something we experience apart from one another, rather than serving as an occasion for shared experience. In more traditional societies, people would sit down at the same time, in the same place, to tell one another their stories. In the age of the theater, people sat down at the same time, in the same place, and listened to someone else tell their stories. In the age of network television, people sat down at the same time, in different places and listened to someone else tell their stories. In the age of streaming video, people sit down at many different times, in many different places,and listen to many different stories. Looking beyond the arts, a number of widely discussed books have drawn attention to the dissolution of community and shared public experience in modern America, from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), to Shelly Turkle’s Alone Together (2017), to Tim Carney’s Alienated America (2019). All of that is just to say, again: the decline in singing is one symptom of larger social dysfunctions, and probably cannot be addressed entirely apart from those larger dysfunctions (that is, simply by introducing a different hymnal, a different arrangement of the worship band, or whatever). I don’t think that would have led my 25-year-old minister of music self to throw up his hands in resignation and despair. Quite the opposite — how encouraging it would have been to know that my church’s musical struggles were not all the fault of some strategic misstep on my part. And how energizing it would have been to see our congregational song as one challenging but vital way of pushing back against larger forces of isolation and dislocation.
Second: it’s helpful and encouraging to recognize that there have been and are these sorts of musical efforts to push back against the privatization and professionalization of music. In my own hometown of Nashville, I’ve watched Keith and Kristyn Getty work energetically to promote both congregational singing and singing as a devotional practice within the home. Their annual Sing! conference focuses explicitly on these themes, and has quickly grown to an event that draws 10,000 attendees each year. There are similar impulses toward singing from those outside the church as well. This past week The Atlantic published an article entitled “People Are Remembering What Music Is Really For.”[11] The subheading reads: “Listening that revolves around headphones, singular geniuses, aesthetic subcultures, and record-industry behemoths is not what’s generating heat right now.” The author (Spencer Kornhaber) argues that in the face of our coronavirus-imposed isolation, many have turned to an older understanding of music: not as a showplace for the parading of celebrities, but as a shared practice for inhabiting communities. Neither the Getty’s work nor Kornhaber’s article represent a comprehensive “solution.” What they indicate instead is that there are many who recognize that the loss of shared song is a problem. Here are allies with whom we might partner and enter into conversation as we think about a way forward.
Third, we can urge our congregations to cultivate silence. As Paul Buckley advises, it may be that the first thing we can offer the conversation is our ears. In a 1930 essay, Arnold Schoenberg worried about the advent of radio and a world ceaselessly bathed in music. “Perhaps this continuous tinkle, regardless of whether anyone wants to hear it or not . . . will lead to a state where all music has been consumed, worn out.” Like city-dwellers who no longer hear the passing cars, music “may no longer disturb; people will be as hardened to this noise as to any other.”[12] We might recall that the daily cycle for much of Christian monasticism is one structured around alternating periods of singing, listening (to scripture or other readings), and silence. These monastics are silent, not simply to rest their ears, but so that they may listen to the voice of God and the song of creation. As Peter Leithart points out in his essay, both the Pythagorean tradition and the Christian scriptures insist that the extra-human creation has a voice. The Bible invites humanity to join, even to lead the song of creation, but it is a song already in progress, a song that extends from the angelic host, through the animal kingdom, to the hills and mountains.[13]
I was traveling overseas when the coronavirus pandemic escalated, and so – as a recent international traveler – for the past two weeks I have been isolated in my basement, while my family lives upstairs. One of the challenges of joining in with “streaming worship services” (I’ve discovered) is that it’s hard to sing when there is no one sitting next to you singing. One feels a little . . . foolish. Modernity has given rise to an aural solipsism in which human beings have come to believe that ours are the only voices sounding in creation. If we are quiet however, and learn to listen to the voice of the created world around us and the sounding of the “heavens that declare the glory of God,” we might feel a little less silly about raising our own voices and joining in.
Fourth, we might study and learn from some of those Christian traditions that have had different encounters with modernity than have (for instance) mainstream Protestantism and North American Evangelicalism. Peter Leithart and Paul Buckley both helpfully mention the Orthodox Church. There are other communions we could consider. I am not a member of an African American church, but I have been a regular visitor over a number of years. It would seem that the relationship between “traditionalism” and “vernacularism” plays out very differently in that community. In many African American churches there appears to be a rich church musical tradition that is both deeply rooted in the history of that community, and also living and flourishing in a contemporary setting, and providing the materials for communal participation, innovation, and improvisation. There may be similar lessons to be learned from Hispanic or Asian American congregations, where “tradition” carries a different set of meanings than it might in a Mainline Protestant or Evangelical church. Calvin Stapert and Paul Buckley both mention the singing schools of 18th and 19th century America which gave rise to the Shape Note and Sacred Harp traditions of the American South. There has been a resurgence of interest in Sacred Harp singing. While there are not many churches where this music remains a living tradition, nevertheless it provides us with an example of a kind of communal Christian song that flourished in a distinctively American idiom.
Fifth and finally, it’s helpful to remember that the meaning of a musical event can’t be isolated from the setting in which it occurs. In book I of De Musica, the master declares that if someone were to sing a happy song at a funeral, they would not be “maintaining right measure,” or harmony — however skillfully the tune were being sung. Here too, “harmony” designates a relation-between; in this case, the relationship between the song and the larger setting. In the context of worship as well, music is one part of a larger liturgical gesture. Music will contribute part of what that gesture might say about the relationship between tradition and the vernacular, but it won’t be the only contribution. To take a couple of odd examples from outside the church, we might ask what sort of relationship is articulated between tradition and the vernacular when David Bowie kneels midway through a rock music festival, in front of 70,000 fans at Wembley Arena, and intones some of the most deeply traditioned words in the lexicon of the West — the Lord’s Prayer?[14] Or when Ralph Stanley takes the stage at the 44th Grammy awards, and sings a folk song written a century before by an Appalachian preacher?[15] Whether we find these presentations powerful or distasteful, in each instance the enactment of these traditional texts speaks of more than “tradition,” simply because of where, when, and by whom they are being sounded. Alternately we might think of the choral singing at the Taize, where the immediacy and “contemporaneity” of the music arises as much from the youthful participants and the outdoor, camp-like setting as it does from its specifically musical elements. Again, the point is not to offer Bowie at Wembley as a model for the church to follow, but simply to observe that extra musical factors are part of the meaning of a musical event. Sometimes the “vernacular” element might be contributed by something other than the music; or there might be occasions when the extra musical element might do most of the work with respect to “tradition.” The meaning of each element within the liturgy will be determined, to some extent, by its place within the liturgy as a whole.
The Nairobi Statement on Culture and Worship[16] sets out four helpful boundary markers for thinking about the church’s relationship to tradition and culture: 1) The church’s worship is transcultural; 2) The church’s worship is contextual; 3) The church’s worship is counter-cultural; 4) The church’s worship is cross cultural. So (I would say): if there is nothing in our worship that transcends or points beyond our own particular cultural setting, that’s a problem. If there is nothing in our worship that bears witness to how the gospel is embodied in this particular time and place – that’s a problem. If there is nothing in our worship that pushes back against the idolatries of our culture – that’s a problem. And if there is nothing in our worship that testifies to the communion of saints, as a fellowship that stretches across time and space – then that’s a problem. But — it probably will not be the case that every element of our worship will do all the work of marking out each of these boundaries in any given service.
To return to De Musica – Augustine insists that the “rightness” or “wrongness” of a given pulse, rhythm, or melody is a function of whether it stands in right relation to the elements around it. A “good note,” “good performance,” or a “good hymn,” will actually disrupt harmony if sounded in the wrong place. If we want to speak of a “universal harmony” along the lines of the Great Chain of Being, then harmony will be determined by right relation between countless realities, with a dazzling number of fine-tunings. It will be a harmony that will include not only musical, but cultural, historical, occasional, interpersonal, economic, and pastoral considerations. The extraordinary reach and complexity of such an expansive harmonization is overwhelming, and in fact, it suggests that the harmony at which we are aiming is ultimately an eschatological reality.[17] This side of the New Creation all of our cadences and resolutions will be partial and imperfect. Of course, we should continue singing (because we are commanded to, if for no other reason), tuning our voices and harmonizing as best we can. But the complex and expansively relational character of harmony means that the healthy practice of church music will require much more than a deep awareness of the church’s tradition and a keen awareness of the cultural moment. Among the many gifts required of the church musician, the first and best will be pastoral wisdom and great sensitivity to the Spirit’s leading.
Steve Guthrie is Professor of Theology at Belmont University in Nashville, where he also helps lead the Religion and Arts and Worship Leadership programs.
[1] Republic, 432a
[2] Republic, 412a
[3] The Consolation of Philosophy, II, vii, tr. V. E. Watts (London: Penguin, 1969), 77.
[4] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychidion, IX.
[5] Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music: In the Form of Six Lessons, tr. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1970), 185.
[6] Augustine, De Musica I, xii, 23, tr. 200.
[7] Augustine, “Letter CI,” The Letters of Saint Augustine, Vol. 1. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Faith, ed. Schaff.
[8] De Musica, VI.7.19 (See also the discussion of this in Confessions, Book 11.)
[9] De Musica, VI, ii.
[10] De Musica, VI, xvii, 56, tr. 375.
[11]https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-has-forced-repurposing-music/609601/
[12] Arnold Schoenberg, “The Radio: Reply to a Questionnaire,” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 147, 148.
[13] I have tried to draw out the parallels and differences between the Pythagorean “music of the spheres” and the singing creation portrayed in scripture, in a way similar to what Peter Leithart offers in his essay. Steven R. Guthrie “Silence, Song and the Singing-Together of Creation” in Tikkun Olam: To Heal the World, ed. Jason Goroncy, Wipf & Stock, 2013.
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANQspcmfhJU
[15] https://www.facebook.com/countrymusichof/videos/10156267727314550/
[16] https://worship.calvin.edu/resources/resource-library/nairobi-statement-on-worship-and-culture-full-text
[17] In fact, the ideas of harmony and proportion dominate Augustine’s description of the Heavenly City, in Civitate Dei, XIX, xiii.
I am grateful for John Ahern’s eloquent and insightful essay, and for the wise and helpful responses from Peter Leithart, Calvin Stapert, and Paul Buckley. John’s essay considers the challenge of holding together traditionalism and vernacularism in the music of the church. Most of us who have been a part of a Christian church will have experienced this tension, and especially those who have been directly involved in the music ministries of the church.
It is particularly ironic - and sad - that music should be the site of this tension. For countless figures over the centuries music has been an instance and a figure of right relation between disparate elements. Plato takes music as an image of right relation between the various divisions of society[1] and between the various elements of one’s own self.[2] Boethius makes a similar point in The Consolation of Philosophy, using the language of music: “The world in contstant change maintains a harmony and elements keep peace whose nature is to clash.”[3]
“We--are we not formed, as notes of music are,” Shelley writes,
“For one another, though dissimilar;
Such difference without discord.”[4]
“Music is what unifies” Stravinsky agrees, (quoting the Chinese sage Seu-Ma Tsen).[5]
This unitive power of music is the central theme of De Musica, one of the first texts Augustine wrote after his return to Christianity. For Augustine, the great gift of music is precisely that it demonstrates - more than that, embodies - the way that disparate elements are held together in relation. Indeed it is only by the enactment of this relation between disparate elements that music is possible. At the heart of the experience of music is harmony - a term that Augustine explains through terms like ratio and proportion. And it is through music above all else, Augustine says, that we learn “what proportion is and how great is its authority in all things.”[6]
How does music teach us proportion? De Musica is a study of rhythm, and poetic rhythm particularly. (Years later, Augustine lamented that in addition to this study of rhythm, he also hoped to write a book on harmonia, “but from the time that the burden of ecclesiastical cares was laid upon me, all these recreations have passed from my hand.”[7]) So, how does rhythm work in poetry? A poetic rhythm is made up of a series of pulses - long-short-short, long-short-short, long-short-short - and so on. But how short? Should the short pulse be .37 seconds? Or .21? That’s obviously the wrong question. The “shortness” of the short pulse is determined in relation to the “longness” of the long pulse. "Nothing is large of itself in time or space but only in relation to something smaller,” Augustine concludes, “and again nothing is small of itself in time or space but only with respect to something larger."[8] The identity of the short pulse arises in relation to the long, and vice versa.
That’s one way that music teaches us about proportion. Augustine sets out another: consider an iambic pentameter (or in the idiom of contemporary western music, think of a waltz, a march, or a bossa nova). Imagine someone performing one of these incorrectly. Perhaps someone performs a waltz so that it sounds like a march in two four time, playing: “ONE two THREE one TWO three ONE two THREE;” instead of “ONE two three ONE two three.” The rhythm is played badly, but not because it includes “bad” beats -- as if stressed or unstressed beats were bad in themselves. Both stressed and unstressed beats are correct and necessary in order for any rhythm to be a rhythm. But for the rhythm to be what it is, stressed and unstressed beats must be in right relation to one another. A rhythm just is a particular relation.
Finally, Augustine argues that not only musical rhythm, but the very experience of music as music depends on a kind of harmony. De Musica is written in the form of a dialogue, and in its last book, the master asks his disciple where the order of music comes from. Does it come from “the sound heard, or also in the hearer’s sense belonging to the ears [sensus qui ad aures pertinet], or also in the act of the reciter, or, because the verse is known, in our memory too?”[9] The student answers: “In all of these, I think.” And - the master announces - he is exactly right.
Does music “work” because of the physical, acoustical properties of the sound? Or because of some power of our ears to organize that physical phenomenon? Or does it “work” because it arises from the intentional ordering of an intelligent agent -- the one making the sound? Perhaps it is because we have been conditioned by society to like one sort of sound and not another? Or maybe a given piece of music pleases us because of our own private and individual associations? These are the options set out by Augustine. But music, he goes on to argue, not only has room for all of these; it depends upon all of these in their interrelation. The experience of music relies on the external and the internal, the physical and mental, the social and the personal, sense and imagination. What we delight in is just this cosmic harmony enacted in our own experience. And in this way music offers a winsome testimony to the fact that we inhabit a cosmos, not a chaos; a world in which each thing has its place, because God is the “creator of all things, seen and unseen.”
This is an insight that is especially important to Augustine, because it played a vital part in his return to Christianity after some years as a Manichaean. Augustine was drawn to Manichaeism because of the solution it offered to the problem of evil. How can Christians claim that God is the creator of “all things”? How could a good God have created a world that includes bad things? The Manichaean answer is that there are two deities: a good God who is the source of good things and a bad God who is the source of bad things. The insight that allows Augustine to affirm God as the creator of all things, is a musical insight. In the same way that there are no “bad beats” or “bad notes,” there are no “evil things,” but good things that are in the wrong proportion, the wrong place, or the wrong relation:
When accordingly it is inquired, whence is evil, it must first be inquired, what is evil, which is nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order, that belong to nature. (Concerning the Nature of Good, Against the Manichaeans, IV, my emphasis)
Augustine ends up making use of this musical insight throughout his writing. It informs his discussion of time in Confessions Book XI. It stands behind his discussion of sin:
The beauty of physical things is appealing (gold, silver, and the rest), and we sway to what touches the flesh. . . . Sin arises . . . from things like this, only if a disordered fixation on lower goods draws us off from better and higher goods. Confessions, Book 2, II, 10 (tr. Wills, my emphasis)
It directs his discussion of the Trinitarian persons,
But because the Father is not called the Father except in that He has a Son, and the Son is not called Son except in that He has a Father, these things are not said according to substance; because each of them is not so called in relation to Himself, but the terms are used reciprocally and in relation each to the other” -- De Trinitate, V, 6.
The heart of Augustine’s insight about harmony and proportion is the same as the point John makes with reference to counterpoint, and that Peter makes using the language of the Great Chain of Being. Each envisions music within a cosmic order in which there is a place for disparate elements, indeed, an order which depends upon difference in relation; in which the beauty of the whole emerges from that variegated unity. Each suggests an understanding of music which not only has place for, but to some extent depends upon the presence of both the old and the new, the universal and the local, the traditional and the vernacular, musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis.
De Musica argues that music is the venue where we most clearly discern how these wildly diverse elements can be drawn together into a winsome whole. Eugene Peterson gravitates naturally to the language of music in his poetic paraphrase of Colossians 1:19-20:
So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross. (The Message)
Music is not the source of this universal harmony, of course. Jesus Christ is the one in whom all things hold together. But according to Augustine, music is one of the clearest witnesses to the truth that all things were made to be held together.
De Musica then, goes beyond suggesting that it’s possible for disparate elements (such as “tradition” and “the vernacular”) to coinhere. Instead, music points to the beauty and necessity of such coinherence. I don’t know if this is exactly the same thing as John’s “Anti-Traditionalist Tradition,” but I think it points in the same sort of direction. It is not only possible for distinctive and dissimilar elements and voices to be joined in music; Augustine argues that it is by such a joining that music occurs. Or we could say (to use language from Peter Leithart’s essay): not only should our church music be catholic; music is one of the places where the catholicity of the church is made available and evident to our senses. In fact, I think this is exactly the reason why Paul urges singing at a climactic moment in his letter to the Ephesians (5:19-21). The song of the church is where we hear the one voice of many voices; the place where those who once were separated by “a dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:14) have been set in harmony. It is the place where we hear the voice of “one new humanity out of two” (2:15).
Paul admonishes us to “sing together” (Eph. 5:19) in a letter all about reconciling estranged communities, and this suggests that John is exactly right to raise the concern that occupies the second half of his essay. It’s a concern echoed by the other three contributors to this conversation as well. “Professionalism and electrification” Calvin Stapert writes, have undermined “the traditional values of communal music-making by turning us into a culture of music consumers.” Discussions of the overtone series, the Great Chain of Being, and Augustine’s theory of musical perception can seem esoteric and far removed from the practical and pastoral concerns of the church musician. But the shared life of human communities is just the concern toward which these concepts and discussions are meant to be oriented. Because “all things whatever and of any size are made from one beginning,” Augustine writes, we may hope that all things may be “joined together in charity as one and one gift from one.”[10]
The great dysfunctions of contemporary American society - loneliness and divisiveness - might be described as failures of the ear. We do not feel heard by one another, nor are we able to clearly and accurately hear those around us. The two icons of modern aural culture are the loudspeaker and the earbud; sound pollution and aural isolation. One represents the domination, the other the radical privatization, of aural space.
How then might we begin to address the tunelessness of contemporary society? I’m grateful for Paul Buckley’s reminder that we keep the “street-level” concerns of the “working church musician” in view. The other participants in this conversation have already made good suggestions toward that end: the singing of psalms, a fresh emphasis on musical education using methods such as Kodály, attending anew to the resources of the tradition. These are all helpful proposals. Here are a few thoughts to add to those already shared, oriented specifically toward the practice of ministry.
First, I think John’s diagnosis also does at least some of the work of a prescription. What should I make of my congregation’s anemic singing, if I am a minister of music? Do I conclude that I’ve just had the bad fortune to work in a congregation of weak singers? That there are too many college students and young people in my congregation? That there are too many old people? Maybe we’ve chosen the wrong hymnal? Do we need to start (or stop) using a worship band? Is the problem the stodgy hymnody -- or the superficial contemporary music -- that characterizes our church’s worship? I spent the first seven years of my working life after college as a church minister of music, and I considered each of these explanations at various points in that short career. And on a number of occasions, I attended church music conferences or worship workshops where one or another of these diagnoses was advanced. John’s essay makes clear, however, that “what has happened to music specifically. . . . uncannily correlates with the narratives of secularization. . . . It is not a coincidence, that, in an era when industrialism and urbanism have made our social harmony flounder, we also have less literal harmony.”
Indeed, it’s worth noting that the professionalization and privatization of music has parallels in the other arts. Dance, song, visual art, and story-telling have all largely become things done by specially trained people, presented on scheduled occasions, in purpose-built venues, set apart from daily life. Moreover, each has increasingly become something we experience apart from one another, rather than serving as an occasion for shared experience. In more traditional societies, people would sit down at the same time, in the same place, to tell one another their stories. In the age of the theater, people sat down at the same time, in the same place, and listened to someone else tell their stories. In the age of network television, people sat down at the same time, in different places and listened to someone else tell their stories. In the age of streaming video, people sit down at many different times, in many different places,and listen to many different stories. Looking beyond the arts, a number of widely discussed books have drawn attention to the dissolution of community and shared public experience in modern America, from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000), to Shelly Turkle’s Alone Together (2017), to Tim Carney’s Alienated America (2019). All of that is just to say, again: the decline in singing is one symptom of larger social dysfunctions, and probably cannot be addressed entirely apart from those larger dysfunctions (that is, simply by introducing a different hymnal, a different arrangement of the worship band, or whatever). I don’t think that would have led my 25-year-old minister of music self to throw up his hands in resignation and despair. Quite the opposite -- how encouraging it would have been to know that my church’s musical struggles were not all the fault of some strategic misstep on my part. And how energizing it would have been to see our congregational song as one challenging but vital way of pushing back against larger forces of isolation and dislocation.
Second: it’s helpful and encouraging to recognize that there have been and are these sorts of musical efforts to push back against the privatization and professionalization of music. In my own hometown of Nashville, I’ve watched Keith and Kristyn Getty work energetically to promote both congregational singing and singing as a devotional practice within the home. Their annual Sing! conference focuses explicitly on these themes, and has quickly grown to an event that draws 10,000 attendees each year. There are similar impulses toward singing from those outside the church as well. This past week The Atlantic published an article entitled “People Are Remembering What Music Is Really For.”[11] The subheading reads: “Listening that revolves around headphones, singular geniuses, aesthetic subcultures, and record-industry behemoths is not what’s generating heat right now.” The author (Spencer Kornhaber) argues that in the face of our coronavirus-imposed isolation, many have turned to an older understanding of music: not as a showplace for the parading of celebrities, but as a shared practice for inhabiting communities. Neither the Getty’s work nor Kornhaber’s article represent a comprehensive “solution.” What they indicate instead is that there are many who recognize that the loss of shared song is a problem. Here are allies with whom we might partner and enter into conversation as we think about a way forward.
Third, we can urge our congregations to cultivate silence. As Paul Buckley advises, it may be that the first thing we can offer the conversation is our ears. In a 1930 essay, Arnold Schoenberg worried about the advent of radio and a world ceaselessly bathed in music. “Perhaps this continuous tinkle, regardless of whether anyone wants to hear it or not . . . will lead to a state where all music has been consumed, worn out.” Like city-dwellers who no longer hear the passing cars, music “may no longer disturb; people will be as hardened to this noise as to any other.”[12] We might recall that the daily cycle for much of Christian monasticism is one structured around alternating periods of singing, listening (to scripture or other readings), and silence. These monastics are silent, not simply to rest their ears, but so that they may listen to the voice of God and the song of creation. As Peter Leithart points out in his essay, both the Pythagorean tradition and the Christian scriptures insist that the extra-human creation has a voice. The Bible invites humanity to join, even to lead the song of creation, but it is a song already in progress, a song that extends from the angelic host, through the animal kingdom, to the hills and mountains.[13]
I was traveling overseas when the coronavirus pandemic escalated, and so - as a recent international traveler - for the past two weeks I have been isolated in my basement, while my family lives upstairs. One of the challenges of joining in with “streaming worship services” (I’ve discovered) is that it’s hard to sing when there is no one sitting next to you singing. One feels a little . . . foolish. Modernity has given rise to an aural solipsism in which human beings have come to believe that ours are the only voices sounding in creation. If we are quiet however, and learn to listen to the voice of the created world around us and the sounding of the “heavens that declare the glory of God,” we might feel a little less silly about raising our own voices and joining in.
Fourth, we might study and learn from some of those Christian traditions that have had different encounters with modernity than have (for instance) mainstream Protestantism and North American Evangelicalism. Peter Leithart and Paul Buckley both helpfully mention the Orthodox Church. There are other communions we could consider. I am not a member of an African American church, but I have been a regular visitor over a number of years. It would seem that the relationship between “traditionalism” and “vernacularism” plays out very differently in that community. In many African American churches there appears to be a rich church musical tradition that is both deeply rooted in the history of that community, and also living and flourishing in a contemporary setting, and providing the materials for communal participation, innovation, and improvisation. There may be similar lessons to be learned from Hispanic or Asian American congregations, where “tradition” carries a different set of meanings than it might in a Mainline Protestant or Evangelical church. Calvin Stapert and Paul Buckley both mention the singing schools of 18th and 19th century America which gave rise to the Shape Note and Sacred Harp traditions of the American South. There has been a resurgence of interest in Sacred Harp singing. While there are not many churches where this music remains a living tradition, nevertheless it provides us with an example of a kind of communal Christian song that flourished in a distinctively American idiom.
Fifth and finally, it’s helpful to remember that the meaning of a musical event can’t be isolated from the setting in which it occurs. In book I of De Musica, the master declares that if someone were to sing a happy song at a funeral, they would not be “maintaining right measure,” or harmony -- however skillfully the tune were being sung. Here too, “harmony” designates a relation-between; in this case, the relationship between the song and the larger setting. In the context of worship as well, music is one part of a larger liturgical gesture. Music will contribute part of what that gesture might say about the relationship between tradition and the vernacular, but it won’t be the only contribution. To take a couple of odd examples from outside the church, we might ask what sort of relationship is articulated between tradition and the vernacular when David Bowie kneels midway through a rock music festival, in front of 70,000 fans at Wembley Arena, and intones some of the most deeply traditioned words in the lexicon of the West -- the Lord’s Prayer?[14] Or when Ralph Stanley takes the stage at the 44th Grammy awards, and sings a folk song written a century before by an Appalachian preacher?[15] Whether we find these presentations powerful or distasteful, in each instance the enactment of these traditional texts speaks of more than “tradition,” simply because of where, when, and by whom they are being sounded. Alternately we might think of the choral singing at the Taize, where the immediacy and “contemporaneity” of the music arises as much from the youthful participants and the outdoor, camp-like setting as it does from its specifically musical elements. Again, the point is not to offer Bowie at Wembley as a model for the church to follow, but simply to observe that extra musical factors are part of the meaning of a musical event. Sometimes the “vernacular” element might be contributed by something other than the music; or there might be occasions when the extra musical element might do most of the work with respect to “tradition.” The meaning of each element within the liturgy will be determined, to some extent, by its place within the liturgy as a whole.
The Nairobi Statement on Culture and Worship[16] sets out four helpful boundary markers for thinking about the church’s relationship to tradition and culture: 1) The church’s worship is transcultural; 2) The church’s worship is contextual; 3) The church’s worship is counter-cultural; 4) The church’s worship is cross cultural. So (I would say): if there is nothing in our worship that transcends or points beyond our own particular cultural setting, that’s a problem. If there is nothing in our worship that bears witness to how the gospel is embodied in this particular time and place - that’s a problem. If there is nothing in our worship that pushes back against the idolatries of our culture - that’s a problem. And if there is nothing in our worship that testifies to the communion of saints, as a fellowship that stretches across time and space - then that’s a problem. But -- it probably will not be the case that every element of our worship will do all the work of marking out each of these boundaries in any given service.
To return to De Musica - Augustine insists that the “rightness” or “wrongness” of a given pulse, rhythm, or melody is a function of whether it stands in right relation to the elements around it. A “good note,” “good performance,” or a “good hymn,” will actually disrupt harmony if sounded in the wrong place. If we want to speak of a “universal harmony” along the lines of the Great Chain of Being, then harmony will be determined by right relation between countless realities, with a dazzling number of fine-tunings. It will be a harmony that will include not only musical, but cultural, historical, occasional, interpersonal, economic, and pastoral considerations. The extraordinary reach and complexity of such an expansive harmonization is overwhelming, and in fact, it suggests that the harmony at which we are aiming is ultimately an eschatological reality.[17] This side of the New Creation all of our cadences and resolutions will be partial and imperfect. Of course, we should continue singing (because we are commanded to, if for no other reason), tuning our voices and harmonizing as best we can. But the complex and expansively relational character of harmony means that the healthy practice of church music will require much more than a deep awareness of the church’s tradition and a keen awareness of the cultural moment. Among the many gifts required of the church musician, the first and best will be pastoral wisdom and great sensitivity to the Spirit’s leading.
Steve Guthrie is Professor of Theology at Belmont University in Nashville, where he also helps lead the Religion and Arts and Worship Leadership programs.
[1] Republic, 432a
[2] Republic, 412a
[3] The Consolation of Philosophy, II, vii, tr. V. E. Watts (London: Penguin, 1969), 77.
[4] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Epipsychidion, IX.
[5] Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music: In the Form of Six Lessons, tr. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1970), 185.
[6] Augustine, De Musica I, xii, 23, tr. 200.
[7] Augustine, “Letter CI,” The Letters of Saint Augustine, Vol. 1. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Faith, ed. Schaff.
[8] De Musica, VI.7.19 (See also the discussion of this in Confessions, Book 11.)
[9] De Musica, VI, ii.
[10] De Musica, VI, xvii, 56, tr. 375.
[11]https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-has-forced-repurposing-music/609601/
[12] Arnold Schoenberg, “The Radio: Reply to a Questionnaire,” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 147, 148.
[13] I have tried to draw out the parallels and differences between the Pythagorean “music of the spheres” and the singing creation portrayed in scripture, in a way similar to what Peter Leithart offers in his essay. Steven R. Guthrie “Silence, Song and the Singing-Together of Creation” in Tikkun Olam: To Heal the World, ed. Jason Goroncy, Wipf & Stock, 2013.
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANQspcmfhJU
[15] https://www.facebook.com/countrymusichof/videos/10156267727314550/
[16] https://worship.calvin.edu/resources/resource-library/nairobi-statement-on-worship-and-culture-full-text
[17] In fact, the ideas of harmony and proportion dominate Augustine’s description of the Heavenly City, in Civitate Dei, XIX, xiii.
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