Peter Leithart encapsulates John Ahern’s essay as a call for “the harmonization of tradition and vernacularism in church music. Hold to the old, even while singing a new song.” That brought to mind something I read decades ago. Musicologist Walter Wiora noted that “Homer, Hesiod, and other poets invoke the Muse at the opening of their works to aid memory and inspiration” (The Four Ages of Music). In ancient oral societies the singer needed memory because he was the repository of knowledge. His songs told the stories that conveyed the history, traditions, and laws of the culture, the knowledge and wisdom of the ages. Without memory everything would be lost. So the people were not craving to hear something new from him; they wanted what was traditional. They did not want “creativity;” they wanted faithfulness and reliability. But the singer also needed inspiration. He not only needed to deliver faithfully what he recalled from his store of knowledge and wisdom, he also needed to deliver it in such a way that it would speak to a particular audience at a particular time in a particular place. His song needed to be both old and new, traditional yet contemporary. It needed to have present “purchase” as well as ancient “authority.”
“Hold to the old, even while singing a new song.” It also made me think of C. S. Lewis’s characterization of the Middle Ages as the ages of authority.
When we speak of the Middle Ages as the ages of authority, we are usually thinking about the authority of the Church. But they were an age not only of her authority, but of authorities. If their culture is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctor. . . . This is one of the things that differentiate the period almost equally from savagery and from our modern civilization. (The Discarded Image)
I bring up Wiora’s and Lewis’s pictures of the distant past because they highlight the difference between us and them with regard to the tradition side of the tradition/vernacularism binary. Neither the ancients nor the medievals had a problem with tradition. They cherished it and held it tightly. Abandoning tradition was unthinkable. We, however, live in a time that has seen a long dissolution of tradition reach its climax. Our culture has increasingly viewed tradition as old, obsolete, and discredited. Far from being cherished, it is now seen as something to be discarded, and discarding it presents an easy solution to what John calls the “intractable problem that faces liturgy and music in the modern American church.” Without tradition tension with the vernacular would vanish, but the church would vanish with the tradition. We need to hang on to the “living faith of the dead” in order to keep our faith from becoming the “dead faith of the living” (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition).
The history of church music is a long story of hanging on to the traditional while also adopting “a language that has modern purchase.” At first—that is before musical notation—the situation was similar to that described by Wiora. Every performance of a chant required memory and provided opportunity for inspiration. Every performance of, say, the introit for the Easter Mass was some mixture of tradition and innovation. But after Charlemagne the situation became more like that described by Lewis. Charlemagne established what we now call Gregorian Chant as the liturgical music for the Church throughout his vast empire, and thanks to the invention of notation, it remained fixed in the liturgy for centuries. But notation, along with the widely spread legend that Pope Gregory had received the chants by divine inspiration, discouraged improvisational inspiration by the singer. In its place it brought compositional inspiration. Soon after the establishment of Gregorian Chant as the official music of the Church, chants began to pick up newly composed accretions in the form of tropes and sequences. Traditional chants and the contemporary tropes lived together in harmony. And when, at about the same time, a radically new type of music was developed—namely polyphony—in most cases it was the result of composing newly invented melodies to be sung simultaneously with a traditional chant melody called a cantus firmus. The cantus firmus principle proved to be an effective way of harmonizing tradition and vernacularism for a long time, not only in the Roman Catholic Church but in branches of Protestantism as well, as John illustrated in Bach’s setting of Wachet auf, and as Peter illustrated (in f.n. 1) in Bach’s spectacular setting of “Credo in unum Deum” in his Mass in B Minor.
For medieval and Renaissance composers, Gregorian Chant was the “authority.” For Bach and other Lutheran composers, even to this day, the chorale (and occasionally chant) was and is the “authority.” I agree with John that the use of the cantus firmus principle is still a viable method for harmonizing tradition and vernacularism, at least in congregations that are still familiar with traditional chants, chorales, or hymns. But since such congregations have become increasingly rare, its applicability is limited. A strong tradition of singing traditional psalms, hymns, chorales, and chants is a necessary condition for a balanced harmony between tradition and vernacularism, whether by way of the cantus firmus principle or some other way of combining the new and the old. Without that, the vernacular notes will overwhelm the traditional notes in the chord.
John makes a similar case for needing a strong tradition of singing (specifically psalm-singing) in the context of a different problem—the problem of professionalism and electrification undermining the traditional values of communal music-making by turning us into a culture of music consumers. Of course, promoting psalm-singing and traditional hymnody requires more than simply seeing to it that our hymnbooks contain a substantial quantity of such material. There needs to be substantial use of that material, and as John points out, a coherent strategy and approach to teaching it. He recognizes the difficulty in bringing this about and points us to the way the early American colonists overcame the difficulty. They employed the same basic strategy that the 16th-century reformers (both Lutheran and Calvinist) used: they focused on teaching the children.
Teaching the children needs to be done not only in the church but also in Christian homes and schools. And that education needs to extend beyond the children to adults, and it must include more than the development of skill. It must emphasize the old notion that music is more than entertainment and individualistic expression of emotion. It must teach the traditional view that our singing is to God, with our fellow worshipers, and with all the saints throughout the world together with the saints and angels in heaven. As a versified translation of the Te Deum puts it:
Holy God, we praise your name. . . .
Hark, the glad celestial hymn
angel choirs above are raising. . . .
Lo, the apostolic train
joins your sacred name to hallow;
prophets swell the glad refrain,
and the white-robed martyrs follow. . . .
Or as John’s pithy quote from Tinctoris says: music “makes the Church Militant like the Church Triumphant.”
The same vision of the Church making music in worship is depicted on the frontispiece of a large collection of church music by Michael Praetorius (1571-1621). Along the bottom an organist is surrounded by wind instruments. Up along the sides, in the galleries, are singers and string players. Continuing upward the picture flows without break into heaven where the saints who have gone before join with the angels and the elders and four living creatures around the throne singing to the Lamb that was slain. The Church needs to relearn and reclaim the truth of the old vision sung in the Te Deum and depicted in the Praetorius frontispiece.
Calvin Stapert is professor emeritus of music at Calvin College
Peter Leithart encapsulates John Ahern’s essay as a call for “the harmonization of tradition and vernacularism in church music. Hold to the old, even while singing a new song.” That brought to mind something I read decades ago. Musicologist Walter Wiora noted that “Homer, Hesiod, and other poets invoke the Muse at the opening of their works to aid memory and inspiration” (The Four Ages of Music). In ancient oral societies the singer needed memory because he was the repository of knowledge. His songs told the stories that conveyed the history, traditions, and laws of the culture, the knowledge and wisdom of the ages. Without memory everything would be lost. So the people were not craving to hear something new from him; they wanted what was traditional. They did not want “creativity;” they wanted faithfulness and reliability. But the singer also needed inspiration. He not only needed to deliver faithfully what he recalled from his store of knowledge and wisdom, he also needed to deliver it in such a way that it would speak to a particular audience at a particular time in a particular place. His song needed to be both old and new, traditional yet contemporary. It needed to have present “purchase” as well as ancient “authority.”
“Hold to the old, even while singing a new song.” It also made me think of C. S. Lewis’s characterization of the Middle Ages as the ages of authority.
When we speak of the Middle Ages as the ages of authority, we are usually thinking about the authority of the Church. But they were an age not only of her authority, but of authorities. If their culture is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctor. . . . This is one of the things that differentiate the period almost equally from savagery and from our modern civilization. (The Discarded Image)
I bring up Wiora’s and Lewis’s pictures of the distant past because they highlight the difference between us and them with regard to the tradition side of the tradition/vernacularism binary. Neither the ancients nor the medievals had a problem with tradition. They cherished it and held it tightly. Abandoning tradition was unthinkable. We, however, live in a time that has seen a long dissolution of tradition reach its climax. Our culture has increasingly viewed tradition as old, obsolete, and discredited. Far from being cherished, it is now seen as something to be discarded, and discarding it presents an easy solution to what John calls the “intractable problem that faces liturgy and music in the modern American church.” Without tradition tension with the vernacular would vanish, but the church would vanish with the tradition. We need to hang on to the “living faith of the dead” in order to keep our faith from becoming the “dead faith of the living” (Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition).
The history of church music is a long story of hanging on to the traditional while also adopting “a language that has modern purchase.” At first—that is before musical notation—the situation was similar to that described by Wiora. Every performance of a chant required memory and provided opportunity for inspiration. Every performance of, say, the introit for the Easter Mass was some mixture of tradition and innovation. But after Charlemagne the situation became more like that described by Lewis. Charlemagne established what we now call Gregorian Chant as the liturgical music for the Church throughout his vast empire, and thanks to the invention of notation, it remained fixed in the liturgy for centuries. But notation, along with the widely spread legend that Pope Gregory had received the chants by divine inspiration, discouraged improvisational inspiration by the singer. In its place it brought compositional inspiration. Soon after the establishment of Gregorian Chant as the official music of the Church, chants began to pick up newly composed accretions in the form of tropes and sequences. Traditional chants and the contemporary tropes lived together in harmony. And when, at about the same time, a radically new type of music was developed—namely polyphony—in most cases it was the result of composing newly invented melodies to be sung simultaneously with a traditional chant melody called a cantus firmus. The cantus firmus principle proved to be an effective way of harmonizing tradition and vernacularism for a long time, not only in the Roman Catholic Church but in branches of Protestantism as well, as John illustrated in Bach’s setting of Wachet auf, and as Peter illustrated (in f.n. 1) in Bach’s spectacular setting of “Credo in unum Deum” in his Mass in B Minor.
For medieval and Renaissance composers, Gregorian Chant was the “authority.” For Bach and other Lutheran composers, even to this day, the chorale (and occasionally chant) was and is the “authority.” I agree with John that the use of the cantus firmus principle is still a viable method for harmonizing tradition and vernacularism, at least in congregations that are still familiar with traditional chants, chorales, or hymns. But since such congregations have become increasingly rare, its applicability is limited. A strong tradition of singing traditional psalms, hymns, chorales, and chants is a necessary condition for a balanced harmony between tradition and vernacularism, whether by way of the cantus firmus principle or some other way of combining the new and the old. Without that, the vernacular notes will overwhelm the traditional notes in the chord.
John makes a similar case for needing a strong tradition of singing (specifically psalm-singing) in the context of a different problem—the problem of professionalism and electrification undermining the traditional values of communal music-making by turning us into a culture of music consumers. Of course, promoting psalm-singing and traditional hymnody requires more than simply seeing to it that our hymnbooks contain a substantial quantity of such material. There needs to be substantial use of that material, and as John points out, a coherent strategy and approach to teaching it. He recognizes the difficulty in bringing this about and points us to the way the early American colonists overcame the difficulty. They employed the same basic strategy that the 16th-century reformers (both Lutheran and Calvinist) used: they focused on teaching the children.
Teaching the children needs to be done not only in the church but also in Christian homes and schools. And that education needs to extend beyond the children to adults, and it must include more than the development of skill. It must emphasize the old notion that music is more than entertainment and individualistic expression of emotion. It must teach the traditional view that our singing is to God, with our fellow worshipers, and with all the saints throughout the world together with the saints and angels in heaven. As a versified translation of the Te Deum puts it:
Holy God, we praise your name. . . .
Hark, the glad celestial hymn
angel choirs above are raising. . . .
Lo, the apostolic train
joins your sacred name to hallow;
prophets swell the glad refrain,
and the white-robed martyrs follow. . . .
Or as John’s pithy quote from Tinctoris says: music “makes the Church Militant like the Church Triumphant.”
The same vision of the Church making music in worship is depicted on the frontispiece of a large collection of church music by Michael Praetorius (1571-1621). Along the bottom an organist is surrounded by wind instruments. Up along the sides, in the galleries, are singers and string players. Continuing upward the picture flows without break into heaven where the saints who have gone before join with the angels and the elders and four living creatures around the throne singing to the Lamb that was slain. The Church needs to relearn and reclaim the truth of the old vision sung in the Te Deum and depicted in the Praetorius frontispiece.
Calvin Stapert is professor emeritus of music at Calvin College
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