Music As Prayer : The Theology and Practice of Church Music 9780199330096, 9780199330089

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M U S I C A S   P R AY E R

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MUSIC AS PRAYER The Theology and Practice of Church Music

Thomas H. Troeger

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3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Troeger, Thomas H., 1945– author. [Essays. Selections] Music as prayer : the theology and practice of church music / Thomas H. Troeger. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–933008–9 (alk. paper) 1. Music in churches. 2. Music—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Church music. I. Title. ML3001.T87 2013 246′.75—dc23 2013008648 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Martin Jean

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CONTENTS

Foreword by Don E. Saliers ix Introduction xiii 1. Music and the Making of Meaning 1 Music and Metaphor 1 When the World Falls Apart 3 Salutary Harmonies 5 The Great Mighty Ocean Tone 8 Plucked from the Universe 10 The Deeper Meaning of Inspiring Music  13 The Whole Company of Musicians 15 Church Organist Declared Greatest Composer 17 How Do You Sing Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus? 20 To What End Beauty? 22 2. The Materiality of Making Music 24 The Stone Age Ancestors of Organists 24 Music that Can Never Be Recorded 26 The Piece You Thought You Would Never Play 28 How Beautiful and Astounding Are the Feet 30 The Freedom of Constraint 32 Silence as the Prelude to Sound 35 The Rhetoric of Breath 38 vii

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Before the First Note: Getting Centered 40 Wrong Notes in a Splendid Performance 42 3. Music and the Landscape of the Soul 45 Study Tour of the Human Soul 45 Musical Hometown 47 An Antidote to Cognitive Imperialism 49 The Necessity of Beauty 52 Children of Process 54 Escaping the Hubris of the Present Moment 56 The Perfect Registration 58 Music for Facing Temptation and Wild Beasts 61 Season of Lament 63 Unacknowledged Healing 65 Plain and Simple, Rich and Complex 67 A Gigue for Everyone to Dance 70 4. Music for the Seasons of Faith 73 Waiting as Blessing 73 Rehearsing for an Epiphany 75 A New Song for Christmas? 77 Song that Blesses Earth 79 New Year’s Resolution: Not Exactly as the Composer Wanted 81 Music Born of Resurrection 84 Index 87

FOREWORD

Anyone who has sung hymns, psalms, or anthems in church knows at some intuitive level that something more than sound has touched them. More than words as well. Of course, there are words Christians and Jews have come to love as in the psalms— words of praise, joy, and trust, but also words of lament and sorrow. Such a language of the human heart is central to praying, whether alone or together. But there is also music—melody, harmony, rhythm, pace, and pitch. When the words and the music combine, something remarkable is released into the stream of human life. As T. S. Eliot observed in the Four Quartets, music heard so deeply that “you are the music while the music lasts.” So we feel and come to inhabit the praise and joy, the anguish and the sorrow. It may then dawn upon us: all this is prayer. Sometimes the ordered sound of instruments prays for us. At other times the fusion of language and ordered sound in voices and instruments is our very act of praying in the listening and the singing. Tom Troeger writes of these things. Known for his vivid preaching and teaching, which are both poetic and therefore musical too, here he takes us with him into a series of themes that evoke and demonstrate how music is prayer. At a time when increasing attention is being paid to music and the human brain, Troeger offers insightful theological and spiritual reflection about music and the whole person. In these deft short pieces he plays ix

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a delightful range of notes that sound what the body, including the brain, takes in. Here we are attuned to music, as John Dryden observed, “plucked from the universe.” If nothing else—and there is so much more in these pages—we learn how music requires and supplies metaphors for faith and our pattern of life experience. On the one hand, the interpretation of ordered sound in church and concert hall draws on metaphor and image to make sense of what we hear and how we are affected. On the other, Troeger shows us how much music itself gives us metaphoric ways to understand faith and life. As Suzanne Langer claimed, music gives us the “morphology of human sentience”—that is, music gives us the pattern of how we experience life in and through the senses and the intellect. In these chapters a great range of themes emerge, from the “chaos monster” to the wedding of heaven and earth. Points of wit and wisdom abound, and we are reminded to honor our teachers of music and all who have gone before us in the long traditions of church music. Mention of the masters are here—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and company—but so are the performance practices that ordinary music makers in a thousand humble places offer. This collection is thus in praise of the great and the small. We need such a guide as the writer of these pieces; each in itself is a bit of a parable of the larger mystery of how music itself is the site of the ongoing dialogue between the God of all creation and human creativity. I trust that you, dear reader, will find, as I have found, a treasure, whether you are a professional church musician (as many of his readers of The American Organist are) or a person in the pew who wants to understand more deeply why the church and synagogue have always come round to sing our prayers. But more,

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there is something here that mediates between religious communities and the larger force of music in the cultures in which we live and flourish. Read and rejoice that a preacher-poet-musician such as Thomas Troeger sets pen to paper to make these mediations available. Don E. Saliers Wm. R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Theology and Worship, Emeritus Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

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INTRODUCTION: MUSIC A S   P R AY E R

I have written these reflections on the theology and practice of church music for organists, choral directors, choir members, instrumentalists, clergy, seminarians, and committees responsible for the worship and music life of congregations. I hope the reflections will help all of these individuals and groups to realize more completely the integration of artistic excellence, pastoral need, theological integrity, and spiritual vitality that make music a profound form of prayer. The reflections originally appeared as monthly columns in the journal of the American Guild of Organists, The American Organist, while I served as chaplain to the Guild from 2008–2012. I myself do not play the organ, but I owe an immense personal and professional debt to scores of organists, choir directors, and church musicians whom I  have heard and with whom I  have worked for over fifty years, beginning with the organist/choir director in the church where I grew up. At a personal level, I cannot begin to count the services of worship in which an organist or choir or soloist helped me to pray, grieve, or rejoice; to rediscover faith or receive inspiration; to find healing; to glimpse the beauty of God; to be empowered for ministry; to be astonished anew by the world of sound; to be grasped by a musical idea; to hear in my

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soul those prayers of the Spirit that sound as sighs too deep for words; to become more attentive to the music that fills the whole of creation; to feel interconnected to an entire congregation listening attentively or singing their hearts out to the accompanying pipes; or to be lost in wonder, love, and praise. In all of these varied ways, I experienced music as prayer. My gratitude to church musicians extends beyond personal joy to the professional satisfactions I have known in playing my flute to organ accompaniment and, as a priest and minister, in planning hundreds of services—not only standard liturgies, but also special services in which the sermon and prayers were built around an anthem, cantata, requiem, hymn, or keyboard work. How delighted I  have been when the church musician would listen to an idea I had and then find the right piece, the perfect registration for something we had already settled on, or some composition I  had never heard but that was rich with musical sonorities and theological depth. When these columns were regularly appearing in The American Organist, I was delighted by the many readers who told me about the creative ways they had used the material: as private meditations, as a way to center themselves before leading a rehearsal, as a devotional reading at the beginning of choir practice, as a way of interpreting the theological significance of music to worship committees, as a stimulus to creative thinking for homilies and services, and as an educational resource for teaching about music and worship. In whatever way you use these meditations, I hope they nurture music as prayer in your own life so that your playing,

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singing, and listening may deepen your love and knowledge of the source of every good and perfect gift. Thomas H. Troeger Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music Ordinary Time, 2012

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M U S I C A S   P R AY E R

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Music and the Making of Meaning

Music and Metaphor I am indebted to my friend and colleague Martin Jean for introducing me to this Kendall Walton quotation that summarizes many of the ways we describe the expressive qualities of music: We call passages of music exuberant, agitated, serene, timid, calm, determined, nervous. We speak of rising and falling melodies, of wistful melodies and hurried rhythms, of motion and rest, of leaps, skips, and stepwise progression, of statements and answering phrases, tension and release, resignation and resolve, struggle, uncertainty, and arrival. Music can be impetuous, powerful, delicate, sprightly, witty, majestic, tender, arrogant, peevish, spirited, yearning, chilly. . . . [As we listen to it] we imagine agitation or nervousness, conflict and resolution.1

1. Jean, in an unpublished lecture, is quoting from Kendall Walton, “Listening with Imagination:  Is Music Representational?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1):  47–61. For a more elaborate discussion of the implications of this for worship and preaching, see Thomas H. Troeger, Wonder Reborn: Creating Sermons on Hymns, Music, and Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press: 2010).

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Walton captures the vividness of the imaginative response many of us have to music. Although there have been schools of thought that stress the purely sonic character of music, for me at least they do not leave adequate room for the dramatic action set off in my imaginings as I sense and create a world of meaning from the world of sound in which I am immersed. If it were all a matter of pure sound, it would be difficult to account for the extreme reactions that many people have to different pieces and different styles of music. Their passion reveals that the music has touched off something inside them at a level of profound meaning. Perhaps this is why music supplies so many of the primal metaphors that are common to our everyday speech. By a primal metaphor I  mean a figure of speech that grows out of the elemental sensory experience of life, such as “the storms of life,” “the dark night of the soul,” or “I’m on solid ground again.” Music is an elemental sensory experience that awakens a host of metaphors that occur again and again in common speech. Consider, for example, how people talk about things being “harmonious” or “discordant,” “the tempo of life” or “the need to improvise,” something that is “finely tuned,” the “major motif ” or “theme song” of someone’s life, “marching to a different drummer,” getting the “rhythm” of an athletic activity or describing how “the beat goes on,” a voice that “pipes up,” “performing your part” in some “well-orchestrated” human endeavor, a “crescendo” of support for someone or some cause, the work of an artist as “variations on a theme,” “striking just the right note” in a talk, the “fevered pitch” of an argument or a conflict that is “finally resolved.” In a similar manner we speak about gadgets that “come with every bell and whistle,” events having more “fanfare” than

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warranted, things really “humming,” an idea that “resonates” with us, “drumming” something into our memory or calling a piece of good news “music to my ears,” “jazzing up,” a party, being “in tune” or “out of tune” with the spirit of an occasion, “modulating” the “tone” of a discussion or the “overtones” of meaning, speech that is “melodic” or “songful” or “slurred” or “percussive,” or a feast that is a “symphony” of flavors. Walton demonstrates how we create meaning from music by the language we use to describe it. But the process also appears to work in reverse:  the sonic properties of music feed many of the metaphors that mark our common speech even when music is not sounding in our presence. I cannot help but wonder if this dialogical process—describing music with dramatic terms and enriching language with musical metaphors—might help us to comprehend more accurately why making and listening to music is an activity so filled with meaning.

When the World Falls Apart If you were to look through the door of my study, you would know at a glance that I am well acquainted with the chaos monster. Books are piled upon books; papers upon papers; and stacks upon stacks on the desk, the filing cabinet, the floor, and the couch. The chaos monster is always threatening to get the upper hand. What about you? Sooner or later, most of us do battle with the chaos monster, if not in our study, then simply in the course of living. We think we have our day organized and know when and where we have got to be. Then suddenly a text message comes in or the phone rings or the computer dings with an emergency we never foresaw.

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Most of us are adept at dealing with the minor intrusions of the chaos monster, but there are other eruptions that shake the foundations of our being: the relationship we assumed would last a lifetime comes to a bitter end, we lose the job we love and have had for years, a beloved friend dies. As if personal crises were not enough, the chaos monster also wrecks havoc with nations and with this planet. Systems break down, political compromise fails, violence spreads, solid ground trembles. What do we do when the world falls apart? Our ancient forebears knew all about the chaos monster. It was a major figure in many of their mythical accounts about the creation of the world. They had various names for the monster: Tiamat, Rahab, Leviathan. Sometimes when their lives were violently disrupted, they would cry out to God and recall how God had vanquished the chaos monster at the beginning of all things. Consider, for example, Psalm 74. Enemies have destroyed the temple in Jerusalem: “At the upper entrance they hacked the wooden trellis with axes. And then, with hatchets and hammers, they smashed all its carved work. They set your sanctuary on fire; they desecrated the dwelling place of your name, bringing it to the ground.” The destruction takes down more than wood and stone. It topples the house of meaning in the human heart, for there is no one around who can interpret what has happened: “There is no longer any prophet, and there is no one among us who knows how long.” How do we deal with devastation that great? In the midst of his fierce lament, the psalmist turns to a hymn that recalls how God conquered the chaos monster at the beginning of creation: “You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan.” The Hebrew word for divided is the same word Moses

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uses when he raises his staff to part the Red Sea (Exodus 14:16). In one word the poet brings together the conquest of primeval chaos and political oppression. But the hymn does not simply recount what God accomplished in the past. The poet goes on to celebrate how creation still belongs to God: “Yours is the day, yours also the night; you established the luminaries and the sun. You have fixed all the bounds of the earth; you made summer and winter.” In the midst of chaos the poet sings a hymn. The hymn does not overcome the chaos—the poet briefly returns to his lament in the conclusion of the psalm. But the hymn stabilizes the poet’s shaken heart by putting it in touch with the rhythms and structures of God’s creation. I wonder how many people contending with the chaos monster have come to concerts, services, or recitals and found the music like the hymn in the midst of the psalm. It does not vanquish the chaos monster, but the pulse and timbre of the music put people in touch with the rhythms and structures of creation that belong to God and that resonate in the heart, providing them with a renewed sense of divine presence and the strength to endure when the world falls apart.

Salutary Harmonies The Oxford Dictionary of Music defines harmony as “the simultaneous sound (i.e., combination) of notes, giving what is known as vertical music contrasted with horizontal music.”2 That is a technical definition that provides no idea of what harmony sounds

2. Michael Kennedy, The Oxford Dictionary of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 316.

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like to the ear. Think of a passage particularly rich in harmonies or of the concluding chord of one of your favorite compositions. Listen to that blended sound resonating in your ear and then re-read the dictionary definition of harmony. If that dictionary definition was all we had, I  doubt that “harmony” would have become such a useful metaphor for so many different domains of experience and knowledge: living in harmony with nature, a harmonious marriage or friendship, reaching a harmonious accord, a harmony of flavors, the harmonies of love, an artist’s harmonious palette of colors, the harmony of the spheres. That last metaphor has a wealth of historically important associations with philosophy and theology. Many biblical interpreters in the early church read Psalm 19 from the perspective of Greek thought. They took the psalm’s opening verses to refer to the music that was created by the spheres of heaven as they circled above the earth in Greek cosmology: The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament* proclaims his handiwork. 2 Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. 3 There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; 4 yet their voice* goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. (Psalm 19:1–4) The early church’s eventual acceptance of music in worship was largely influenced by the thought of Pythagoras as conveyed through the philosopher Plato. Plato believed that “the universe is not only ‘rational,’ it is musical—musical harmony lies at the

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very heart of the cosmos.”3 The resultant principle that making music helps put human beings in harmony with the spheres, with the nature of the created order, returns again and again in the history of ideas about music and its effect upon us. For example, Clement of Alexandria [c. 150–215] taught that “the divine harmony is the creator of Christian unity; consequently, music from human lips was said to express and create unity and concord among Christians.”4 Martin Luther, some fourteen hundred years later, made a similar affirmation: “Anyone who loves music is of good stuff, and whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church music.”5 Two centuries later, Haydn set “The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God” in his oratorio The Creation. We may be tempted to dismiss the insights of our ancestors in light of our radically different understanding of the cosmos. An expanding universe that is 93.5 billion light years wide seems to demolish the harmony of the spheres. However, before we dump the metaphor, I  would suggest that the image has endured for so many centuries not because of its cosmological accuracy but because of its resonance in the human heart. The harmony of the spheres is less a description of the universe and more a revelation about our need to find a way to a state of harmonious existence with ourselves, with one another, with creation, and with

3. Quentin Faulkner, Wiser than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church (Wesport, CT:  Greenwood Press 1996), 34. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to pursue these ideas in depth. 4. Ibid., 66. 5. Ibid., 101–102.

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the very source of our being. Cosmologies will come and go, but the hunger for harmony will persist. Words alone will never feed it. We need harmonies in our ear. Our ancestors were right: there is something wondrously salutary to the soul in the sound of musical harmony.

The Great Mighty Ocean Tone I was re-reading the Yale lectures on preaching that were delivered by Henry Ward Beecher (1871, 1872, and 1873) when I discovered an extraordinary meditation about pipe organs. These were the first lectures in a series that had been permanently endowed to honor Henry’s father, Lyman Beecher. The lectures cover many topics other than preaching.6 They are about prayer meetings and the placement of new ministers, and they offer extensive reflections on church music, including congregational singing and organs. Henry Ward Beecher is rhapsodic about the pipe organ: I look upon the history and the development of the organ for Christian uses as a sublime instance of the guiding hand of God’s providence. It is the most complex of all instruments, it is the most harmonious of all,  it  is the grandest of all. Beginning far back, growing as things grow which have great and final uses, growing little by little, it has come now to stand, I think, immeasurably, transcendently, above every other instrument, and not only that, but above every combination of instruments . . . you 6. The full text of the lectures is available at http://www.archive.org/stream/yalelecturesonpr00beeciala/yalelecturesonpr00beeciala_djvu.txt.

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can combine instruments in such a way as to do some things which the organ cannot do, yet the finest orchestra that ever stood on earth, compared on the whole with the organ, is manifestly its inferior. No orchestra that ever existed had the breadth, the majesty, the grandeur, that belong to this prince of instruments.7 

I am not sure our orchestral colleagues would agree with Beecher. But Beecher is being polemical. He is trying to make the strongest possible case for the organ to people who have in the past either lacked music altogether or had minimal musical resources available. Later in the same volume of lectures, Beecher employs a metaphor that expresses for him the spiritual and pastoral function of the organ in worship: I am accustomed to think of a congregation with an organ as of a fleet of boats in the harbor, or on the waters. The organ is the flood, and the people are the boats; and they are buoyed up and carried along upon its current as boats are borne upon the depths of the sea. So, aside from mere musical reasons, there is this power that comes upon people, that encircles them, that fills them, this great, mighty ocean-tone; and that helps them to sing.8 

I find this metaphor filled with both theological and musical insight. It evokes the gospel stories about fishing, boats, and 7. Henry Ward Beecher, Yale Lectures on Preaching, Second Series (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1900), 118–119. 8. Ibid., 121–122.

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storms. Given that Beecher was one of the preeminent preachers of the nineteenth century, it would not surprise me if those stories—consciously or unconsciously—helped to shape the metaphor in Beecher’s mind. But even more striking to me is his description of the organ’s sound as the “flood” that brings “power” to the people, “encircles” and “fills” them, and “helps them to sing” through its “great, mighty ocean-tone.” His language reveals someone who understands the physical impact upon a congregation of the organ’s sound as it fills the space of the room and calls forth from people the song that is in them. Through this sonic experience the people are “buoyed up and carried along upon its current as boats are borne upon the depths of the sea.” If you have ever pushed a boat off a sand bar or a beach and felt the force of buoyancy, you will understand how precise Beecher’s metaphor is. Buoyancy gives material expression to the spiritual dimensions of the organ lifting us into song. Here, then, is a way to appreciate anew the importance of what musicians are doing when they play the organ for a congregation: the listeners are boats run aground, stuck on shorelines and sand bars far from their true destination. They need the tide—the tide of grace, the tide of the Spirit, the tide of faith—to flow in and make them buoyant once again. The organist provides the “great, mighty ocean-tone” that lifts them up and sets them free.

Plucked from the Universe While reading the biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, I was enchanted to learn that the great theoretical physicist was also a violinist and sometimes even performed at scientific gatherings. After the response of several colleagues to a lecture, Einstein

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declined to provide further comment, saying instead, “ ‘It will perhaps be pleasanter and more understandable if instead of making a speech I play a piece for you on the violin.” He proceeded to perform a sonata by Mozart with, according to Frank [the host of the event], “his simple, precise and therefore doubly moving manner.”9 What a splendid scene this is: one of the greatest scientific minds in history responding to colleagues with music. How do we account for this? Earlier in his biography, Isaacson reflects on why Mozart and Bach were the physicist’s two favorite composers: “What Einstein appreciated in Mozart and Bach was the clear architectural structure that made their music seem ‘deterministic’ and, like his own favorite scientific theories, plucked from the universe rather than composed.”10 I love that phrase “plucked from the universe,” for it captures something that is true of both physics and music. It identifies something that I—in a much less profound way than Einstein!—felt when I was studying physics and playing the flute. Working out a mathematical formula to predict the behavior of bodies and straining to figure out how to phrase a long melodic line of Bach’s gave me a similar delight, and when I figured out either the problem in physics or the challenge of the Bach, the solution seemed so utterly obvious, so self-evident, as if it were in a phrase “plucked from the universe.” It was not something I had discovered or the physicists had invented or Bach had created from his own capacities, but it was something wondrous, beauty springing out of the deep dear core of things.

9. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2007), 272. 10. Ibid., 38.

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Organists know about this phenomenon when they finally get a piece on a particular instrument just right—when the combination of stops, the interplay of the inner voices, and the tempo and articulation all come together, and there is a sense of “Ah, yes, that’s it!” As John Dryden put it in a poem on harmony that Handel later set to music, we sense “each note in justest order placed.” It sounds “plucked from the universe,” although it took hours of work and hard practice to arrive there, just as it took Einstein years of thought experiments and getting some of his formulations initially wrong before the breakthrough moments came. Good preachers and poets are also familiar with this phenomenon through the medium of words. When the sermon becomes a vessel of the Spirit or when the poem captures the right cadence and music of language, it sounds “plucked from the universe.” I can already imagine some readers skeptical about the idea that great music, preaching, poetry, and science are “plucked from the universe.” We live in an age that has become highly attentive to how meaning and art are socially constructed and culturally conditioned. What sounds plucked from the universe in one culture may sound as nothing more than cacophony to another. And yet I find it fascinating that one of the greatest scientific minds of all time had an intuitive feeling about the nature of things that he found to be congruent with artistic and spiritual expression. Instead of arguing about the truth of one perspective over another, such as theology versus science or religion versus art, perhaps it is time we celebrate that the most satisfying accomplishments of these different human perspectives arise from a visionary act, from an imagination that is alive to the deepest dimensions of reality whether they lead us to perceive with delight and wonder the relativity of time and space or the intervals of music or the wisdom of faith. Here then is a prayer for

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all musicians: May your music making reach that wondrous point where it seems plucked from the universe!

The Deeper Meaning of Inspiring Music I recall delivering a series of brief homilies during a service of beautiful anthems, hymns, and organ works. The occasion gave me an opportunity to reflect on why listening to great choral and organ music in a sacred space is not simply pleasurable but restorative and uplifting. We commonly describe such an experience as “inspiring,” which literally means the spirit being poured into us. I began reflecting in greater detail on exactly what happens to my heart and mind when I am inspired, when I listen to music with my whole being, giving myself over completely to the river of sound. As I thought about the matter, I recalled an academic paper by the German scholar Alexander Deeg in which he shares the creative ways that many Jewish rabbis have interpreted the scriptures. Deeg recounts in detail how the rabbis understood the story of Jacob, who dreamed of a ladder between earth and heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it (Gen. 28:10–22). The rabbis’ insights about Jacob’s vision helped me find the deeper meaning of the word inspired and understand more fully why listening to beautiful music can be an act of prayer or meditation that restores and uplifts us. The first thing the rabbis noted is that when Jacob lies down to sleep, the text (in the Hebrew version the rabbis used) says that he makes a pile of stones for a pillow, but when he awakes the pillow is a single stone. The rabbis then came up with a number of possible explanations for what had happened. One is that the individual stones had started arguing about which stone was

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most worthy to support the head of the patriarch. But when the heavenly vision appeared, the broken creation was restored as one stone. In a similar fashion, when we listen to great music, the weary, warring voices that exhaust our energies are stilled and the fragments of the worlds in and around us are restored to a new wholeness. This is what we mean by inspired. The rabbis also noted that the biblical text describes the angels as “ascending and descending” on the ladder. They were surprised at the word order, thinking that angels come from God (descending) before returning to God (ascending). But since that was the word order, they thought it might be a way of indicating that God has already sent Jacob strength, but he is not aware of it when he is awake. Or perhaps the ascending angels represent the profoundest prayers and yearnings of Jacob’s heart that the descending angels then answer. In a similar fashion, when we listen to great music, the profoundest prayers and yearnings of our hearts feel as if they are lifted upward into the presence of one who responds with descending angels. This is what we mean by inspired. Finally, the rabbis noted that when Jacob decides to lie down, he does not choose the place because it is sacred ground. The only reason he settles in there is because night has come and he has been on the run and is exhausted. But when he arises, after the vision granted in his dream, Jacob has an astounding realization: “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.” In a similar fashion, after listening to great music, we often have a new and profounder perception of reality. We realize dimensions of being that we had been oblivious to before: there is a wonder, a glory, and a beauty around and with us that we did not know until the music suffused our hearts and minds. This is also what we mean by inspired.

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May our music making inspire people; may our music gather the fragments of their lives and send up the deepest prayers and yearnings of their hearts and help them to see that the source of every good and perfect gift is with them in whatever place they are.

The Whole Company of Musicians I once attended an organ recital by my colleague Martin Jean that exclusively featured the music of Dietrich Buxtehude (c. 1637–1707). I  was eager to hear this concert because J.  S. Bach—while a young organist at Arnstadt—had walked two hundred miles to hear Buxtehude perform his own music in the city of Lübeck. Although I often listen to Bach, I had never heard an all-Buxtehude concert. Since Martin Jean would be performing on “an organ styled after those of the great North European organ builder Arp Schnitger,”11 I thought his recital would be a wonderful way to enter a sonic universe that had held Bach so enthralled that he overstayed his “paid furlough” from the church in Arnstadt “by two or possibly three months.”12 His superiors were not happy with their young employee, particularly since they also had complaints about how the twenty-year-old Bach “has introduced many strange variations into the chorale, admixed many strange tones, such that the congregation has been confused thereby.”13 

11. “Fanfare: A New Organ for Yale University,” a booklet published to celebrate the installation of a new Taylor & Booty pipe organ in 2007. 12. Martin Geck, Johann Sebastian Bach:  Life and Work, trans. John Hargraves (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2006), 51. 13. Ibid., 49.

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Bach understood his stay in Lübeck to be for his own musical development. As he explained to his employers, he went there “to understand various things in his art.”14 So I  hoped that listening to an all-Buxtehude recital would fill me with the sounds that must have been replaying themselves in Bach’s vivid musical mind as he returned to Arnstadt. Driving home after the recital, I did not turn on the car radio as I usually do. All I wanted was to listen to the memories of the music I had heard and to imagine the young Bach already beginning to consider how he might use and further develop what he had learned from Buxtehude. Reflecting on the snatches of melody and harmony that returned to me from the Buxtehude recital, I began to realize as never before that we hear music before we make music. All musicians are indebted to the musicians who first put musical sounds in their ears. Bach owed a debt to Buxtehude and to a score of other musicians whose work also influenced his own. The more I thought about all the musicians who have preceded us, the more I came to see that we are carrying on a performance that started ages before we played or sang our first note. An image then arose in my mind from my religious tradition that is repeated every week in the common prayer of the church I attend. Immediately before the Sanctus (Holy, Holy, Holy) the celebrant says, “Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name.” I  found myself creating a variation on these words, “Therefore with all the company of musicians throughout the ages including . . . Buxtehude and Bach and . . . let us play and sing to proclaim the glory of your name.” I have written ellipses so you can add 14. Ibid. Bach speaks of himself in the third person.

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the names of musicians before and after Buxtehude and Bach. Who will you put there? Be sure to include your music teachers and those performers and composers who have especially captured your musical imagination and have inspired you to refine your art. You never play or sing alone. Sitting on the organ bench or standing in the choir or the congregation, you are surrounded by a great cloud—the whole company of musicians—and practicing an art that goes all the way back to “when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy” (Job 38:7).

Church Organist Declared Greatest Composer Anthony Tommasini, chief music critic for the New York Times, once wrote a series of articles on the ten greatest classical music composers. He acknowledged all of the limitations of such a question and that even the word classical is problematic, not adequately conveying the richness and dynamism of our musical legacy. Tommasini, a champion of contemporary music, decided he would not consider living composers because “we are too close” to them “to have perspective. Besides, assessing greatness is the last thing on your mind when you are listening to an involving, exciting or baffling new piece.”15  Despite these limitations, Tommasini still wanted to pursue the matter: “I began this project with bravado, partly as an intellectual game but also as a real attempt to clarify—for myself as 15. New York Times, January 23, 2011, Arts & Leisure, pp. 1 and 19. All Tommasini quotations are from this article.

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much as for anyone else—what exactly about the master composers makes them so astonishing.” His project intrigued me, and as I  read his analytical remarks, I  reviewed in my head the music I knew of each composer he discussed, sometimes returning to a familiar piece and listening anew in light of his comments. It was an exercise that deepened my sense of wonder at the impact of great music, not just upon my ears but upon my whole being. In an earlier article announcing his intention to rank the top ten composers, Tommasini had invited readers to respond with their own suggestions and critical insights. And respond they did, in droves! One person wrote: “This is absurd, of course. But here’s my list. And don’t you dare leave out Mahler.” This is Tommasini’s list: 1. Johann Sebastian Bach, 2. Ludwig van Beethoven, 3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 4. Franz Schubert; 5.  Claude Debussy, 6.  Igor Stravinsky, 7.  Johannes Brahms, 8. Guiseppe Verdi, 9. Richard Wagner, 10. Bela Bartok. As former chaplain to the American Guild of Organists, what strikes me immediately about Tommasini’s list is that a church organist is declared the greatest composer in history. Of course, as Tommasini himself demonstrates in his appreciation for readers whose lists differed from his, no single ranking can be taken as the final word on the matter. Indeed, one of Tommasini’s predecessors as chief music critic for the New  York Times, Harold C. Schonberg, has written of Mozart: “More protean than Bach, musically more aristocratic than Beethoven, he can be put forward as the most perfect, best equipped, and most natural musician the world has ever known.”16  16. Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 110.

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But Tommasini has his own reasons for declaring Bach the greatest: My top spot goes to Bach, for his matchless combination of masterly musical engineering (as one reader put it) and profound expressivity . . . In his austerely beautiful ‘Art of the Fugue,’ left incomplete at his death, Bach reduced complex counterpoint to its bare essentials, not even indicating the instrument (or instruments) for which these works were composed . . . On his own terms he could be plenty modern. Though Bach never wrote an opera, he demonstrated visceral flair for drama in his sacred choral works, as in the crowd scenes in the Passions where people cry out with chilling vehemence for Jesus to be crucified. In keyboard works like the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, Bach anticipated the rhapsodic Romantic fervor of Liszt, even Rachmaninoff. And as I  tried to show in the first video for this project, through his chorales alone Bach explored the far reaches of tonal harmony.

Where did all this great music come from? We could rehearse Bach’s biography and the legacy of his musical forebears and name all kinds of influences. But for today I  want to focus on just one:  Bach was an organist—a legendary organist—long before he was famous as a composer. Mastering that instrument must have had astounding effects on the neurons and synapses of Bach’s body and brain. What a blessed thought for those who play and those who love to listen to the organ: playing the pipe organ was one of the significant factors in creating “the world’s greatest composer.”

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How Do You Sing Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus? How do you sing Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus (Holy, Holy, Holy)? How do you approach in music the one whose glory fills heaven and earth? Do you sing it the way Bach does in his Mass in B Minor with the choir nearly shouting the word to the accompaniment of tympani and trumpets? I was moved to ask this question when I preached in a service of worship that featured the requiem of Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998). I  had grown up listening to Bach’s Mass on recordings, and although since then I have heard and preached on many other settings of the Sanctus, it is Bach’s monumental treatment that rings most stubbornly in memory’s ear. So when I first listened to Schnittke’s setting, it took my breath away since the big, muscular sound of many of the Requiem’s earlier movements led me to expect a late twentieth-century version of Bach’s grandeur. Instead, Schnittke’s Sanctus begins with a solo tenor who softly sings a tender, flowing melody. Next, tenor and sopranos sing the same melody in canon, and then the word Sanctus (Holy) is repeated again and again to a weeping motif, a little three-note pattern, a soft-repeated sob. The sob accompanies the tenors as they sing “heaven and earth are full of your glory.” The symbolic visions in the biblical book of Revelation attest that the song “Holy, Holy, Holy” is more than a song of earth. It is also the song of heaven. According to the eucharistic prayer of many traditions, angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven sing the Sanctus. Therefore, whenever a composer sets the Sanctus, the music suggests something about the ultimate nature of reality, telling us what it sounds like at the deep dear core of things.

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Whether or not Schnittke intended it, singing the word holy as a sob suggests that part of God’s holiness is God’s identification with human sorrow. Such an empathic understanding of holiness is in deep harmony with the Christian affirmation that the glory of God is revealed through the Word made flesh, a human being named Jesus, who fully identifies with our brokenness and sorrow. In its original biblical meaning, the holiness of God indicates that God is separate and radically different from us. While God is holy, humanity is unholy, broken, and fragmented—or, to use the word that has fallen to the wayside of common usage, sinful. In the presence of the Holy One, what else can human creatures do but sing Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus to tympani and drums, to music grand and monumental. We need Bach’s setting to remind us of the infinite qualitative difference that separates us and God. But I  am also profoundly grateful to Schnittke, whose Sanctus reveals to me an entirely different mode of praying, of being, of approaching the mystery that lies at the heart of all things. His setting suggests another equally important dimension of the divine: God is not only utterly and completely different from us, but God also identifies with our brokenness and sorrow. God weeps with us who weep and mourn, and those tears are part of holiness just as much as God’s separateness is part of holiness. This is the theological reason that communities of faith need a broad-based repertoire: to keep us in touch with the fullness of God. If you are not theologically inclined, you can still draw on these insights to consider how your music will engage the fullness of the human spirit. Whatever your creed or non-creed, let the tympani and drums, as well as the weeping motifs, sound through a rich and varied repertoire that can nurture the fullness of the human soul, from celebratory wonder to grief.

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To What End Beauty? Some time ago, I  read a book review about the varied ways Beethoven and his music have been viewed in different eras. Although I have lost the review, I have never forgotten its substance. According to the reviewer, there was a time when Beethoven’s music was seen as engaging the noblest powers of the human spirit, a claim that has commonly been raised for other composers in the Western classical canon. The reviewer went on to observe that this commendation of the salutary effects of great music was annihilated by the Nazi’s use of such music to adorn and reinforce their malevolent ends. In a similar vein, two of my students at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music once did a gripping presentation on how the Ku Klux Klan employed many of the most beloved hymns of Protestant churches to justify and celebrate the Klan’s acts of terrorism against people who were not of their race and background. The students urged that churches and other groups become knowledgeable about the “performative history” of pieces in order to realize the problematic associations that may be awakened by their use. Both the book review and the students’ presentation lead me to wonder if there is any piece of enduring music whose beauty has not been misused for nefarious purposes. The question does not apply only to music. As a scholar of homiletics, I can attest that some of the most beautiful and beloved passages of scripture have been used for the worst possible ends: the reinforcement of prejudice and the justification of violence. If we were to eliminate from our musical repertoires and our religious traditions every piece of music and writing whose performative history is clouded

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with misuse, the range of what we might play and preach upon would be decimated. It is true we need to remember that many of our artistic and religious treasures have been co-opted for terrible purposes, but at the same time we need to celebrate how they have also inspired people to act in ways that are just and compassionate and how they have provided solace for the grieving, peace for the disturbed, hope for the despairing, and a renewed sense of wonder for the world-weary. I  think of countless people I  have known who have given testimony to the grace and empowering goodness that has poured into them through hearing or performing beautiful music. I think of the protests against oppression and the movements for justice that have been uplifted and sustained by the beauty of music. Ultimately, we human creatures are capable of using any gift of beauty for the worst and for the noblest ends. Our art needs to stand in the court of ethics not in order to make aesthetic judgments but to assess the ends to which it is directed. But ethics also needs the witness of our art to avoid becoming drearily moralistic. Yes, beauty can be used to ornament evil, but it can also be used to inspire the highest and holiest aspirations of the human heart.

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The Materiality of Making Music

The Stone Age Ancestors of Organists In an article entitled “Flute Music Wafted in Caves 35, 000 Years Ago,”1 archaeologists describe flutes discovered in southwestern Germany. One is a bone flute with five finger holes, and the other two are fragments of ivory instruments that “represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture.” This last phrase leapt off the page because I do not usually associate the Stone Age with the “flowering of music-making.” However, a specialist in ancient music, working with a wooden replica of the ivory flute, “found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes.” The archaeologists speculate that these instruments might have been played to celebrate a successful hunt or to provide music for fertility rites or social bonding. Whatever its precise function, this Stone Age music “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have

1. New York Times, June 25, 2009, A12.

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helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.” The use of flutes thirty-five thousand years before our time gives us a sense of how deeply rooted in the human project is our love of pipe organs. It is a long way from a piece of hollowed ivory with five holes to an instrument with bellows, pedals, manuals, stops, and multiple ranks of pipes, but the fact that our Stone Age ancestors made music with pipes tells us how important such music is to the human soul. I wonder what those Stone Age players would have to say about subsequent developments in the way flutes (pipes) were viewed. Biblical scholars tell us that the flute was considered unfit for worship, with the single exception of Psalm 150, in which the flute— along with everything else in creation—is exhorted to praise God. The instrument was associated with sensuality and pagan rites, and therefore the objection was both cultural and theological. The disapproval, however, was not limited to biblical writers. Plato opposed allowing flute players into his Republic, and there were other classical writers who disparaged flute players because they could not sing while they blew on their instrument, and thus their music lacked the meaning that lyrics provide. I also know from the histories of churches in upstate New York that the introduction of organs in worship often met resistance. Both love and fear of the music that comes from a pipe mark musical history. Whenever I  encounter this kind of ambiguity, I  ask myself what wisdom or insight I can draw from it. What might it mean for organists to know that the music they make has emerged from a conflicted history marked by both love and fear of pipes sounding? The love part is easy for me: I love the sound of pipes playing. But what about the fear? I believe it is part of a larger primary

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anxiety that especially afflicts the religious heart:  will beauty entice us away from God? It is a fear that we find in the early church fathers. I think especially of St. Augustine and his ambivalence toward music and concern with its potential to divert him from the contemplation of divine splendor. Could beauty, could pipes lead us away from God? Yes, but then so can any gift that God has given us. If we say we will not use a gift because it might lead us away from God, then we will not be able to use any gift God has given us! So I say: let us join with our Stone Age ancestors and sound the pipes. Let beauty fill the sanctuary to the glory of God.

Music that Can Never Be Recorded I recall a cartoon I saw nearly forty years ago. A youngster is listening to a symphony orchestra in a concert hall and turns to his parents to observe: “It’s just like stereophonic sound.” Recorded music had preceded the experience of the real thing. It was a prophetic cartoon, picturing what has become the case for a new generation:  technology defines reality and frames our understanding and expectations. But there is also a certain dissonance between the cartoon and our current situation. Back in the 1970s, when the cartoon appeared, audio technology focused on reproducing as closely as possible the sound of instruments spread across a stage, giving us a sense of their placement in the orchestra and providing in “high fidelity” the timbre of their blended voices. I  recall how I  kept trading up my speaker systems, seeking through higher-quality “woofers” and “tweeters” a sound ever closer to the original. Now all of this has changed. Our new electronic devices make

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music more available than ever before, but they also have radically altered the quality of reproduced sound and the nature of our listening. Consider, for example, the difference between listening to music on an iPod and listening to music on a stereophonic high-fidelity system. On the iPod you listen as an individual, confined to the space between your ears, but with the stereo friends can listen together. And what a difference in the quality of the sound! We have gone from high fidelity to a low approximation of the richly nuanced sound of live instruments and voices. I once saw a newspaper article that discussed how people have come to accept the degraded quality of musical reproduction in exchange for its easy accessibility. I can personally attest to this.Years ago, if a church musician asked me to preach on a major choral work, I purchased a recording of it and listened to it on my stereo. But now when I am asked to preach on a work I do not know, I get online, go to Naxos, and listen to the piece through the micro-speaker of my computer. I get an idea of the music:  the melodies, the dissonance, the harmony, the rhythm. They are all there but in such a reduced way. A mighty chorus of voices sounds like squealing mice, and a cathedral organ sounds like a band of tin whistles. Listen to “St. Anne’s Fugue” on your iPod or computer and then go with your musical colleagues and other organ lovers to hear the same piece in a recital in a great stone church with rich reverberation. The sound bounces off the walls and floor; it sets the fibers of the wooden pew you are sitting on vibrating so that your own body is filled with the vibration; and you have an awareness that you live and move and have your being in the sound and through the sound and with the sound, along with everyone else who is listening. You are connected to all

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of them by the breath of the blower and by tone and timbre and rhythm and energy. The music is making you more fully human by reaching into the wholeness of your being as a bodily creature and by helping you to live your communal identity as a member of a group of interconnected listeners. This is the music that can never be recorded. A semblance of it can be reproduced, but it will not be the same music. It will not be the music that reaches to the very depth of our physical and spiritual being. To lose touch with the music that can never be recorded is to lose touch with what the ancients called the music of the spheres. It is the music of the soul, the music of the spirit, the music of our creaturehood; and it is the music we keep alive through live performance. It is a holy and gracious thing to do.

The Piece You Thought You Would Never Play Can you think of a piece of music that you did not like when you first sought to play or sing it, but now it is one of your favorites? Sight reading it, you got only half the notes. There were strange intervals, irregular rhythms, tangled textures, and an obstacle course of technical problems. If your teacher had not assigned it or your choir director had not chosen it or if it were not required for a competition or a degree recital, that first reading would have been the last of it. But then you set to work. You broke it down into manageable parts, playing or singing just one of them at a time, then putting them together. You took it at a slow tempo and marked in accidentals that you were always forgetting. You became an athlete in training for the Olympics, only your practice field was your instrument or the choir you directed or sang in.

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Then one morning in the shower you found yourself humming several of the main themes. The music was working its way into you. It was no longer just marks on a page but song in your heart. You arrived at the point where the pyrotechnics of the piece had become second nature, and your whole being was focused on the musicality of the piece. Now, years later, this composition is one of your old standbys, something you play or sing for the sheer joy of it. This is the piece you hated, the one you thought you would never master—and surely never perform! What happened? If I were a neuroscientist who video scanned your brain each time you attempted the piece and made a running film from the first time you sight-read the music to your final beloved performance, I might be able to trace how cells, neurons, and synapses got activated in new ways as you engaged your whole somatic, chemical, animal being in turning those marks on a page into combinations of vibrating air molecules. It would be fascinating for us to watch such an account of your music-making. But in the end, the most thorough scientific account possible would still not explain the sheer joy of your music making. The scans and the physiological explanations would not be able to capture what happened to your spirit, namely, how satisfaction and joy suffused your entire being through your mastery of music that you first disliked but came to love. As a theologian and musician, I consider such an experience to be nothing less than what it means to grow in the life of the spirit. Whether or not you are theologically inclined, the experience represents an expansion of your humanity, a deepening of your sympathies for a wider range of sonic possibilities, a broadening of your receptive capacities to forms of expression that had previously baffled you.

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Such experience is not limited to those who perform music. It also applies to listeners, who sometimes have to grow into a piece through repeated hearings. Those repeated hearings function in the same way as a performer’s repeated practice sessions:  they are retraining the brain to expand its repertoire of neurological responses, and in the process are helping listeners to grow in the life of the spirit and expand their receptive capacities. We need to remember our experience of mastering and coming to love music that we initially rejected. If we find ourselves baffled by what a performer has programmed, it may be worthwhile to abstain from immediate judgment. Instead, listen with the kind of attentiveness demanded to learn something that first perplexed but later delighted us. Of course, there is music that we do not like when we first hear it, and that we never come to like. But we humans have an amazing capacity to grow, including our ability to expand our musical repertoires—both as performers and listeners—and thus to grow in the spirit. .

How Beautiful and Astounding Are the Feet Many years ago I  was president of the Denver Bach Society, a group that sponsored several concerts each year featuring the music of J. S. Bach. In addition to full-scale performances of the Mass in B Minor and many of Bach’s cantatas, orchestral, and keyboard works, we gave a special presentation for grade-school children. Twelve hundred children filled the Episcopal cathedral not only to hear Bach’s music but to see the master musician himself interviewed by a member of the Denver Brass. We were fortunate to have a radio announcer from one of the local classical stations whose countenance was the very likeness of the 1746

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Bach portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann that peers from the cover of so many musical scores, biographies, albums, and disks. Our good-natured announcer would don a wig, knickers, and a great smocking coat with brass buttons, and Bach would appear before us to the delight and applause of the children. We did two performances so that twenty-four-hundred school children plus their teachers could attend the event each year. There was not an empty seat in the cathedral. The students loved the music, the interview, and the high spirits of the event. At the end of the concert, I and other members of the board would stand on the cathedral steps and shake hands with as many of the children as we could while they returned to their school buses. Many of them blurted out their excitement:  “This was neat.” “I liked meeting Mr. Bach.” “Thank you.” “Awesome.” However, what stands out most in my memory is the year we had enough money to rent a video screen so that all the children had clear sight lines to the organist who otherwise was hidden from view. For the first time, the students could observe him as clearly as they had the other instrumentalists. There were shots of his hands on the keyboard and shots of his feet on the pedals. After that presentation, as the students stopped to shake my hand on the cathedral steps, the single most common exclamation was “Wow! I  never knew someone could play an instrument with their feet. Amazing!” Again and again, children remarked about this with a sense of astonishment and wonder. They simply could not get over the fact that someone could find the right notes with their feet while their hands were on the keyboard. The older ones who told me they played an instrument themselves often asked how the organist kept that many notes straight at one time.

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I received a gift from those children. I  had grown up in churches that had excellent organists, and I  had myself often played my flute to the accompaniment of the organ. I was used to watching organists perform with their feet as well as their hands. Although I  too had been impressed when I  first saw an organist playing close up, over the years it became one of those phenomena I  took for granted, because familiarity with any human accomplishment tends to dull one’s initial amazement. But ever since those children came out of the cathedral I have had a renewed sense of wonder at what organists do with their feet. As I listen to organ professors and their students play the instrument at school, the voices of those astonished children echo in my memory: “Wow! I never knew someone could play an instrument with their feet.” In that moment of renewed appreciation for the artistry of organists, I  find myself making up a variation on a favorite Bible verse of preachers: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” (Romans 10:15). Only now I  find myself saying “How beautiful are the feet of those who play the pedals!” Good news flows into great music, and great music flows from the hands and feet of organists. How beautiful and astounding are the feet of those who play the organ.

The Freedom of Constraint There are notes our voices cannot reach and our instruments cannot play. Even the king of instruments is not the king of every sound. Any one organ has only so many pipes. To sing or to play music is to experience finitude.

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As a flutist, I  had long understood that every musical performer has to deal with finitude. For example, my breath often runs out before a phrase. But I had not extended that same insight about creaturely limitation to composers. I thought of composers as the masters of whatever they were moved to create, until I read the following reflection by Igor Stravinsky: I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me . . . If everything is permissible to me . . . every undertaking becomes futile . . . I shall overcome my terror and shall be reassured by the thought that I have the seven notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal . . . strong and weak accents are within my reach, and . . . in all these I  possess solid and concrete elements which offer me a field of experience just as vast as the upsetting and dizzy infinitude that has just frightened me . . . What delivers me from the anguish into which an unrestricted freedom plunges me is the fact that I am always able to turn immediately to the concrete things that are here in question . . . Whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible . . . Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength.2 

2. Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), 198–199. The quotation originally appears  in Igor Stranvinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), 63 ff.

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Rather then cursing the limitations that he faces, Stravinsky is grateful for how they deliver him from anguish, how constraint aids the creative process. Stravinsky’s observation reminds me of the American poet and essayist Wendell Berry, who writes that poetic form “is a way of accepting and living within the limits of creaturely life.”3 Just as the limited notes of the scale help the composer, so the constraints of literary form help the poet:  “The impeded stream is the one that sings.”4  Organists know well the realities that Stravinsky and Berry are describing. Imagine for a moment you are at the organ trying to figure out the registration for a particular piece. Suddenly a new rank of pipes is magically added to the organ. You start working with its possibilities, but then another set of pipes is magically added and then another and then another and then another . . . You are never able to settle on a final registration because the possibilities are forever expanding, on and on and on into infinity. “The impeded stream is the one that sings.” The organ with a limited number of pipes is the one that plays. The human creature who comes to terms with finitude is the one who lives most fully and most freely. For instead of cursing constraints, such people find in them the impulse to imagine and create new configurations of reality, new compositions, new interpretations, new ways of dealing with the limited materials at hand.

3. Wendell Berry, “Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” in Wendell Berry, Standing by Words: Essays (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 201. 4. Ibid., 205.

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We are at a point in history on this little watered stone we call earth when we human creatures need to come to terms with our finitude as never before. There is only so much air and water and soil and fossil fuel, and to live creatively within these limits is the vocation of all of us: “Humankind finds its true being in improvising on the givenness of the created world with the others who are given to us.”5 Perhaps the art of our poets and musicians—and especially our organists, who do wondrous things with a finite number of pipes—can be a living parable of what it means to live creatively with limitation: We are not free when we’re confined to every wish that sweeps the mind but free when freely we accept the sacred bounds that must be kept.6

Silence as the Prelude to Sound I recall reading an article in the newspaper about an organ that was rescued from destruction. The instrument was moved from one church and rebuilt by another church that had not possessed a pipe organ for many years. I was struck by the clever way the congregation raised money for the project. “For $300, someone could adopt a single ‘chimney flute’ pipe high in the organ’s superstructure. For $100, a donor could adopt a single key on one of the 5. Begbie, 252. 6. Thomas H. Troeger, “God Marked a Line and Told the Sea,” Borrowed Light: Hymn Texts, Prayers, and Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 16.

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console’s three manuals. Adopting a stop knob was cheaper: That cost only $50. Adopting a pedal key was the least expensive: Only $25.”7 Reading those prices, I imagined different members of the congregation listening attentively to the instrument they had helped purchase pipe by pipe, key by key, stop knob by stop knob, pedal by pedal. For as Christ says, “ ‘Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also’ ” (Matthew 6:21). The story of the rebuilt organ and how the congregation raised money for the project got me to asking: what other ways are there to get people invested in the music organists play whether it is in a church or a concert hall or auditorium? It is significant that the word Christ uses for treasure does not mean simply “cash” or “money” or “wealth.” Money can be a treasure, but so can many other things. Think of your children, your best friend, or a beloved pet. Think of a piece of furniture that has been passed down generation after generation in your family. Think of a recital leaflet autographed by your favorite performer. Think of a poem or passage of sacred writing that has brought you comfort again and again in life. Wherever these treasures are, our hearts are there as well. So besides asking people to buy a pipe, stop knob, or pedal, how do we get them invested in the pipe organ? The first thing that strikes me is that those of us who treasure the organ treasure it for its sound: the color, the nuance, the resonance, the sublimity, the gentleness, the brilliance, the contrasting timbres and blending voices. But in a culture that is saturated with sound, how

7. “For Rescued Instrument, a New Life in Manhattan,” New York Times, Monday, January 30, 2012, A19.

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do you help people become attentive to sound, to the beauties and wonders of an organ’s varied voices? Two student advisees of mine recently gave a joint academic presentation that illuminated this very issue.8 They began by examining how the French cinematographer Robert Bresson employed music very sparingly in his films. Bresson did not want to flood his scenes with music that outshone the drama. Instead, he allowed the common sounds of tools and footsteps and passing vehicles to dominate dramatic scenes. With no accompanying music, the action in many cases became almost unbearably tense. But now and then, Bresson would use music, very rich music— for instance, an excerpt from a Mozart mass—and the power of it was amplified by the preceding and following silence. The students moved from the analysis of Bresson to the fear of silence that is often found in worship services. Even if the rubrics call for silence, it is usually quiet for as brief a time as possible. One of the students, an organ major, recounted how often she has been instructed: “Quick. Play something.” Perhaps, then, the first step to treasuring sound is honoring silence. I think of when a conductor lifts the baton and surveys the orchestra before the downbeat, when members of a string quartet raise their bows and gaze around at one another before they begin, when an organist checks the stops and positions hands and feet—in that moment of silence are anticipation, wonder, mystery. Silence is the prelude to sound, sound that is then richly treasured.

8. Amy Munoz and Elizabeth Rodrick. I am indebted to their presentation.

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The Rhetoric of Breath I once attended a concert and master class featuring soprano Emma Kirkby, one of the preeminent singers of renaissance and baroque song, accompanied on lute by Jakob Lindberg. The concert was splendid, but even more intriguing to me was the master class and Kirkby’s work with a young tenor of obvious potential but whose voice sounded veiled and stiff. There was the promise of loveliness in his sound, but somehow the voice did not blossom in the room. The musical phrases, though sung accurately, lacked the flow and pliability that the recitative and aria required. Kirkby began to work with the tenor on his breathing. During the first stage of the process, she did not have him sing but rather had him say the words of the recitative and then the aria. First she spoke phrases from the text, taking dramatic breaths at commas and periods and giving us the “music” of the language, the drama of its pace and inflection. Then she had the student speak the same lines. Once the student’s speech became more “musical,” Kirkby moved from speaking the libretto to singing it, using the same dramatic breathing and inviting the singer to follow. During the process, Kirkby made two striking statements. The first was “Breath is part of the rhetoric.” Rhetoric in this context refers not to inflated political speech (a common meaning of the term in popular American idiom) but rather the verbal strategies of a writer or speaker to engage and win over an audience of readers or hearers. What is striking in Kirkby’s statement is that she realizes how spoken rhetoric is not simply a function of the words but also of where the speaker takes breaths, because a speaker’s pausing and pacing shape how listeners receive and

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process the words. A speaker and a singer need to understand the rhetoric of breath if they are to deliver their speech or their song as effectively as possible. Without learning the rhetoric of breath, the young tenor was not able to realize the full potential of his vocal instrument. Organists do not have to support the tone of their instruments with their breath, but the rhetoric of breath still applies to their playing just as much as it does to other instrumentalists. I think, for example, of the greatest service players I  have heard. What makes their playing such a delight to the congregation? It is the way their playing breathes with the congregation, the way they pause exactly the right amount before they leave the resolved chord to begin the next stanza in a hymn, the way they give shape to a phrase that suggests the inflection of a singing voice, the way they finish a fermata and move into the next motif. Their playing embodies the rhetoric of breath. The second thing that Kirkby said to the singer made specific reference to the nature of the biblical passage he was singing: “You are the prophet here, delivering a prophet’s words.” Then she had the singer step farther from the accompanying harpsichord that was behind him and said: “You need to leave space around you for the breath of the Spirit that comes through the prophet.” With this she made a sweeping hand gesture, suggesting that the rhetoric of breath belongs to those deep impulses of life and spirit that feed great music-making. We who make music are vessels of something larger than the notes on the page. We release into the air a witness to the breath of being itself, and that is as true for organists and instrumentalists as it is for singers. May the rhetoric of breath sound in all our playing and singing.

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Before the First Note: Getting Centered Whenever I am about to give a sermon or lecture or perform on the flute, I first need to get “centered.” Conductors and organists know all about this. Think of choir rehearsals. People arrive with many things going on in their lives: a fight with their boss, a sick child, a job interview, results from a medical test. The amount of mental and bodily energy they have to support their voice on pitch with an unforced, clear sound is not much until they get centered. Or think of performing on the organ. You sit there for a moment and, before the first note, you get centered. You turn on the blower, take a deep breath, release from your mind all the other things you need to do, set your stops, position your hands and feet, and begin. The need to be centered became especially vivid to me when I was asked to preach at a service of worship featuring the Mass no. 2 in E Minor by Anton Bruckner (1824–1896). I read several biographies and books of musical analysis and listened to a fine recording of the work. I found Bruckner’s story to be a parable of what it means to become centered in one’s life and art. Bruckner is one of history’s legendary organists. Upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna, Bruckner said, “I cannot find the words to thank you as I would wish, but if there were an organ here, I could tell you.”9  Bruckner was a devout Roman Catholic. His mother had a beautiful soprano voice and sang in the high masses of their local church. As a small child, Bruckner often sat on the organ bench

9. Hans-Hubert Scvhönzeler, Bruckner (New York: Gossman Publishers, 1970), 99.

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next to his father, who played for the services. After his father died, when Anton was only twelve years old, his mother took him to sing in the choir and to live in the community of St. Florian, a monastery with a magnificent organ. In his adult years, during times of stress and exhaustion, Bruckner often returned to St. Florian to find again his spiritual and artistic center. As one of his biographers writes: St. Florian “reflects virtually every facet of his musical output: the glory of its baroque architecture, cradled in the gentle hillside of the Upper Austrian landscape, the fervor of its cloistered and mystical Catholicism, the sound of the great organ . . .the memento mori atmosphere of its dark and narrow catacombs and crypts.”10  Another scholar, trying to get at the essence of Bruckner, writes about the composer’s attempt to recover “the lost Spirituality of our world.”11 There are dangers in trying to reclaim a lost spirituality. Chief among them is that we might become antiquarians, turning our lives into a costume drama of the past, keeping the customs of our forebears without the juice of their earlier vitality. When we turn to religion and art in order to recover a lost spirituality, we need to open ourselves to new creative possibilities while at the same time honoring the treasures of the past. And that is exactly what Anton Bruckner learned to do through long years of strenuous study. He found his center as a composer who drew upon the great musical traditions of the past, but without imitating them. He blended them with his own harmonies and

10. Ibid., 20. 11. Elisabeth Maier, “A Hidden Personality:  Access to an ‘Inner Biography’ of Anton Bruckner,” in Timothy L. Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw, eds., Bruckner Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 53.

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rhythmic structures. Listening to Bruckner we are simultaneously in touch with much older elements of plainsong and polyphony and his own unique musical idiom. It is as if we hear all at once the great cloud of witnesses from the past and those who are alive and singing for us at this very moment. The next time you find yourself getting ready for a rehearsal or performance, you might recall Anton Bruckner’s life and work. Contemplate the enduring reality you touch when you take time before the first note to get centered, and your music then flows from the deep dear core of things.

Wrong Notes in a Splendid Performance I particularly remember one lesson from years ago, when I was seriously studying the flute. I  was playing for my teacher, John Oberbrunner, a major work that I was about to perform in public. We had agreed that I was to play the piece all the way through, as I  would in the performance, and then he would respond to what he had heard. I  do not now recall exactly what the piece was, nor do I remember the whole of my teacher’s response. But I have never forgotten one thing that he said. I had played a dotted half note just before a rest of several beats, and I  had forgotten that it was supposed to be a sharp, not a natural. During the measure’s rest that followed the wrong note I lifted the flute from my lips and grimaced in disgust with myself before the next entrance. How could I possibly have forgotten that the note was a sharp, not a natural! I had practiced it a thousand times. What was I thinking? Evidently my grimace had been severe enough that it appeared as if I had swallowed something vile and repugnant. My teacher

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spoke highly of the overall interpretation, but he then said something like this: “As someone listening and watching you play, what I will always remember is not the performance, but that terrible face you made after your single wrong note. If you play a wrong note, do not acknowledge it to the audience. Be bold. Play on as if that wrong note were in the score, because you want your listeners to remember the beauty they did hear, not the one brief flaw that was far more amplified in your ears than in theirs.” John Oberbrunner’s words came back to me when I read the following observation of Robert Shaw, the famous choral conductor: “In the very worst sermon, political address, classroom lecture or musical performance, something of value may happen. You can muddle or muffle the words of Isaiah, Lincoln or Galileo, but they will not be silenced.—And in any major musical score there are so many possibilities for error that no one man [or woman] can make them all.”12  One wrong note is not worth a grimace that displaces the memory of the entire piece. I am not arguing in favor of wrong notes but rather for the wisdom of both Oberbrunner and Shaw:  the beauty of great music can survive less-than-perfect performances. This is important not only for our sanity as musicians but also for the encouragement of the many amateurs we work with, who, in a performance-driven culture, may feel inadequate to doing challenging works because they know they will not sound as perfect as the recordings or concert performances that introduced them to the piece. I have heard many imperfect performances of major works by part-time organists, amateur 12. Robert Blocker, ed., The Robert Shaw Reader (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2004), 352.

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singers and instrumentalists, community chorales, and church choirs that stirred me profoundly. Yes, there were some lost entrances, the textures could have been clearer, and the registrations might have been chosen with greater care, but still there was a vitality to the music-making, and by the end I was permeated by the spirit of the work. And is that not our ultimate goal— that the spirit of the work, drawn from the spirit that animates all things, might breathe through our music-making into the listeners’ hearts? Or to put the matter as a variation on the words of St. Paul (2 Corinthians 4:7), we have this treasure of music in fingers and feet and vocal chords that do not always hit the right key or pedal or pitch so that it may be clear that the wonder and beauty of music is something greater than ourselves.

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Study Tour of the Human Soul When I was a teenager, I purchased a copy of a book about J. S. Bach and his music. In the back of the volume, just before the catalogue of his works, were pictures of autograph manuscripts, period etchings of the composer, and some black and white photographs of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig where Bach served as cantor from 1723 until his death in 1750. When I was learning his flute sonatas, I would often open the book to those photographs and etchings and imagine myself playing with Bach accompanying me. It was a fantasy that drew me deeper into the delight I took in his music, and out of it grew the dream that one day I would visit St. Thomas Church and hear some of Bach’s music played in the building where the master himself had performed and conducted. For me, St. Thomas Church was always the top travel spot on this planet. Several years ago, I took a study tour and finally visited the hallowed building, participating in a service of prayer that featured a Bach cantata. But St. Thomas is not the only place I visited. The day before I walked into the church, I visited Buchenwald, one of the Nazi 45

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concentration camps, just a few miles outside of Weimar, the home of the great German poet Goethe. When I  walked into St. Thomas, I  imagined Bach climbing up to the organ loft. But when the music sounded, what flashed upon my memory were not only my childhood dreams of one day stepping into his church but the camp I had visited twenty-four hours earlier. Tears poured down my face as the organ sounded the prelude, tears of joy at realizing my childhood dream of hearing Bach’s music in the church where he had performed, and tears of sorrow at the horror of what occurred at Buchenwald. With those blended tears came the realization that I was on a study tour of something much larger than Germany or any other nation, for the history of every nation has its own mixture of sublimity and terror. In the United States we have only to recall what we did to the native inhabitants of this land or the awful slave traffic. The mixed tears of joy and sorrow that day came from a realization that in visiting Buchenwald and then listening to Bach’s music in St. Thomas Church, I was on a study tour of the human soul and its astounding capacity to produce both evil and beauty. The more I thought about it, the more complex the tour of the human soul became. I recalled how the same religion that inspired Bach to create such exquisite music also fed the anti-Semitism that helped provoke and sustain the extermination of the Jews. It was not just my tears that were mixed, but rather the very realities that shape the life, beliefs, and practices of human communities. They are never purely good nor purely evil. In light of the complexity of the human soul, how then are we to live? The first thing that strikes me is that none of us—no individual, no community, no nation—is ever to be arrogant about

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who we are and what we have done. But in humility we are called to create beauty that redeems life by lifting our hearts and minds to a vision of what we can be by the grace of the one who is the source of every good gift. Listening to Bach and recalling how relatively unappreciated his music was while he was alive, I thought of the courage of his vision, how he kept composing even as his sons judged his musical style to be out of fashion. Though we lack Bach’s genius, we can have his integrity of vision, so that whatever we create or perform awakens in us and in our listeners the highest and holiest desires of the human heart.

Musical Hometown I will never forget when I  returned for a weekend to my hometown forty-seven years after my graduation from high school. The buildings and streets were almost exactly as they were when I left, but no one whom I had known while growing up was there any longer. Yet the place was alive with memories for me. My wife and I walked all around the village, and nearly every street corner and building, nearly every view of the surrounding hills and the lake awakened some story from me. I gave her a guided tour based on personal memories. “They used to flood that sunken, empty lot with water to make an outdoor ice rink in the winter.” “I had a friend who lived there at the mouth of the river. We would get in his row boat and drift downstream to the dam.” “It was upstairs in that colonial house attached to the church that I was baptized as a teenager. I can still picture my history teacher, who was an elder on the church board, holding the water-filled silver basin.” “There is a marker down there on the lake shore to commemorate a classmate who died in an automobile accident the day before his graduation.”

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On and on I  went with the stories, and with the telling of every memory it seemed as though the town were repopulated with the people I had known. When I drove away, I realized that my hometown was not just a place on the map; it was a territory in my soul, a region of memory and association, of persons and events that remained as vivid to me as they were when I first encountered them. It is revealing to expand the image of a hometown in the soul to include the way various pieces of music are so deeply rooted in our hearts and minds such that upon playing, singing, or hearing them we find ourselves spontaneously present at a particular occasion or place. I think of the record my father played again and again as I sat in his lap as a small child, the first full sonata I mastered on my instrument, the hymns my mother sang and played nearly every night after supper, or the aria sung at my wedding. I could go on and on, but they would all be my memories, not yours. You can fill in the pieces of the musical hometown in your own soul. What are the memories and stories that come alive in you when you play or sing or listen to particular pieces of music? What does the musical hometown of your soul sound like? These musical hometowns are precious to us, but just like the hometowns of our childhood, they offer both benefits and liabilities. The chief benefit is their familiarity, the ease we feel in knowing the music, its nuances and beauties, and the pleasure of its rich associations. The chief liability is that, like all hometowns, they are often limited and parochial. Just as we discover that the rest of the world is not like the place we grew up, so too maturing musically means moving beyond the limits of our hometowns to learn melodies, rhythms, harmonies, and colorings that are nothing like what we grew up with.

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When I left for college, I recall seeing the town, the lake, and the hills sinking from sight. I felt sad for a world that I was leaving behind. But when I  visited my hometown all those years later, I found myself filled with thanksgiving both for my hometown and for all the people and events in my adult life that have expanded my vision far beyond what my place of upbringing could ever have supplied. It is the same thanksgiving I  feel for the great musicians in my life who have played the music of the hometown in my soul and who have also introduced me to sonic worlds I never imagined or knew existed.

An Antidote to Cognitive Imperialism The columnist and commentator David Brooks has written that one of the major ways we are changing as a culture is in how we understand human cognition. We are coming to see that our varied ways of knowing need to be integrated. Brooks begins one of his columns by observing that an exclusive focus on rational ways of knowing distorts who we are as human beings. It makes us what he calls “divided creatures.” In a culture of divided creatures, things operate this way: “Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions. This has created a distortion in our culture . . . When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things, like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say . . . Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view. It is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience,

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psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on . . . I suspect their work will have a giant effect on culture. It will change how we see ourselves.”1  To assert that one way of human knowing is the only way or the highest way is what I call cognitive imperialism. It claims to vanquish other ways of knowing on the basis of an unfounded assumption. To give you a feeling for how cognitive imperialism diminishes the richness of human experience and expression, here is a brief mental experiment, based on a presentation I heard some years ago. If you want to define what a tiger is, you can turn to a dictionary and get a description in scientific language: “A large carnivorous feline mammal, Panthera tigris, of Asia, having a tawny coat with transverse black stripes.”2 Or you might turn to a poet: Tiger Tiger. burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye. Could frame thy fearful symmetry? (William Blake 1757–1827) If you are a zookeeper and a tiger is sick, Blake’s poem will not be helpful. And if you want to express the wonder of creation, the dictionary definition falls flat. But if you want to convey the wholeness of tiger, you need multiple ways of knowing. You need both science and poetry.

1. David Brooks, “The New Humanism,” New York Times, March 8, 2011, p. A27. 2. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston:  Houghton Miffline Company, 1976), 1344.

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The so-called new atheists—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—exercise cognitive imperialism. Karen Armstrong points out in her book, The Case for God, that atheists insist—as do fundamentalists of every persuasion—that “there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth.”3  Of course, people of any one group or discipline can be susceptible to cognitive imperialism. But if David Brooks is right, then our changing culture is now engaged in the process of leaving behind cognitive imperialism. Brooks believes that a “richer and deeper view” of human knowing is “coming back into view.” If it is “coming back into view,” where was it in view originally? One of the first disciplines I  think of is music, particularly the music of organists and singers. I recall from my childhood the physicians, medical researchers, and other people of science who made music in and out of church, and I think with admiration of the musicians I have worked with in my adult life who are equally skilled at working in the laboratory, playing an instrument, or singing. Of course, they practice the scientific method, but with equal aplomb they relish the joy of making music. In doing so they provide the perfect antidote to cognitive imperialism: the wholeness of their lives gives witness to the fact that reality is filled with too much wonder and beauty to be reduced to a single way of knowing and being.

3. Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 308–309.

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The Necessity of Beauty During this time of economic distress I find myself reading the business section of the newspaper with a degree of interest I have never before taken in such matters. Being a rank amateur when it comes to economics and often puzzled by the technical terms, I  plow through editorials and analyses hoping to gain at least a small grasp of the causes and possible solutions. But there is always a sharp debate about policies and strategies, and there are even profounder questions about whether or not we ought to try to return to the consumer-based economy that has fed our prosperity since World War II. Amidst all of the financial turmoil and the toll it is taking on millions of families, individuals, and communities, I  did a presentation for an annual organist/clergy dinner. I  spoke, and the group sang hymns related to the presentation. Two of the musicians provided accompaniment. The playing was impeccable—perfect tempi and breath-friendly phrasing. I came away reflecting on all the discipline, years of study, and practice it takes to play with that much artistry. The next day while I was reading about bailouts and unemployment rates, the music was still sounding in my heart. I could hear the playing and the singing of the church musicians and their clergy colleagues. It was a grateful memory of deep beauty. But what does such beauty have to do with the subprime mortgage crisis and home foreclosures? Nothing and everything! Beauty is irrelevant if we are trying to figure out how to navigate these perilous times and how to make wise decisions about our personal finances and our direction as a nation. You can graph financial returns on a chart, but beauty does not lend itself

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to quantification. You can make a judgment on the soundness of an investment based on a reliable rate of return over time, but beauty does not give you a dividend check to cash. Yet beauty has everything to do with reclaiming and sustaining a sense of the eternal significance of human life. When our self-worth as individuals and as a nation has become obsessively intertwined with wealth, we need reminding of other non-quantifiable measures of meaning, such as beauty and the wonder that beauty awakens in our hearts and minds. Beauty and wonder are the very qualities that filled my heart as I sang with those musicians and clergy. Such beauty does not lessen our concern for those who are suffering anxiety and material deprivation because of the financial crisis. Indeed, beauty does the opposite. By renewing within us the irrepressible resilience of the divine vitalities, beauty supplies energy to deal with the strenuous challenges of our time. Beauty does not displace compassion or action; beauty feeds compassion and action. Why should churches budget money for musical instruments, directors, and performers in a time of financial stress? Because, as Christ said to the tempter when he was asked to turn stones into bread, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Every word of God includes not only the petition, “Give us this day our daily bread,” but also the prayer of the psalmist “to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). Of course, we live by bread. Of course, the financial crunch matters to all of us. But we need beauty as much as we need bread. It would be cruel if just when people were desperate for some glimmer of meaning and hope, the church faltered by starving them for beauty. Beauty is balm to the

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wounded and world-wearied souls that are coming to church during these troubled times. When we play or sing or direct beautiful music, we are offering a ministry of healing. Beauty does nothing for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but it lifts the heart on wings of hope and wonder.

Children of Process When I was a teenager, I studied the flute with one of the instrument’s great teachers, John Oberbrunner. I learned all the Handel sonatas and then all the Bach sonatas. I played most of them in church services, and later in recitals during my college years. But when I  began to study theology, I  put the instrument away for many years. Now I am playing again, and I have been revisiting some of those sonatas. They are the same collections that I  used forty years ago, but it seems the music has changed. I play and I find in the music things I  never knew were there before. I  begin to think Handel and Bach must have sneaked out of the cloud of witnesses and fiddled with their compositions in the intervening years. Handel seems to have put more lament in the A-minor Sonata with the great arching triplet lines in the largo, and Bach seems to have poured more sorrow into the opening motif of the B-minor Sonata’s first movement. It seems the faster movements, which I used to play at breakneck speed to show off my virtuosity, have slowed a little. It appears that the composers must have done something to the gigues and gavottes, because I do not recall that they ever before had such a sense of soulful joy that emanates from them now.

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Has this ever happened to you? Have you returned to some beloved piece of music after a period of absence, only to hear things in it you never heard before, to see possibilities for registrations and tempi that make it seem as though the composer has been reworking the piece? Enough musicians have told me stories like this that I  have concluded that to be a musician is to be continually on the way toward a fuller realization of the sonic richness suggested by those flagged notes and measures on a page. We are on the way; we have not arrived. There is always something more awaiting our discovery, something that is in the music yet beckons us onward. To play and sing music, particularly to play and sing in a church, is to feel, to experience, to intuit something of the very dynamic that is part of the journey of faith. These reflections on music as process arise not only from revisiting the beloved sonatas of my youth but also from revisiting a favorite lyric poem by Alice Meynell (1847–1922). In her own day, Meynell was so respected that she was considered for the Poet Laureateship of England. Here is the poem. It is in the public domain and easily available online: “I am the Way”       Thou art the Way. Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,       I cannot say If Thou hadst ever met my soul.       I cannot see— I, child of process—if there lies       An end for me, Full of repose, full of replies.

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      I’ll not reproach The road that winds, my feet that err.       Access, Approach Art Thou, Time, Way, and Wayfarer.4 What a revelation there is in the distinction between “way” and “goal!” If Christ were “nothing but the goal,” then the poet might never have encountered Christ, because she is a “child of process.” We often use the phrase child of to account for someone’s talents or character. By identifying herself as a “child of process,” the poet explains why it is inadequate for Christ to be “nothing but the goal.” The phrase child of process suggests she is always in a state of becoming, always traveling, always moving on. The poet has named something that is true of all of us. We are all children of process, and perhaps that is one of the basic reasons why music matters so much to the church at prayer:  as an art that moves through time, it helps us claim our identity as children of process who need not only Christ the goal but Christ the way.

Escaping the Hubris of the Present Moment How easily we are tempted to think that our present generation is superior to the generations that have preceded us. We learn about cruel practices of the past and judge them as barbaric while congratulating ourselves on being more civilized. We read about the ignorance of the past and dismiss it as folly while priding 4. For a fuller discussion of Meynell’s work, including this poem, see Thomas H. Troeger, Wonder Reborn: Creating Sermons on Hymns, Music and Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 142–154.

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ourselves on how knowledgeable we are. We study tools and machines from the past and describe them as primitive while reveling in the sophistication of our technology. We see fashions from the past and assess them as quaint and dated while admiring the newest style as chic and smart. It all adds up to what I call the hubris of the present moment, an arrogance that fails to see that we share with past generations the same mixture of cruelty and kindness, wisdom and foolishness, beauty and terror. Future generations will find distortions and absurdities in our values, practices, and inventions that never occurred to us. The hubris of the present moment is a spiritual illness because it cuts us off from the wisdom and insights of the past while blinding us to our own inadequacies. We need to be more generous and hospitable to the past in order to gain a deeper appreciation for the humanity of our ancestors, which in turn will put us more in touch with our own humanity—our foibles and failures as well as our gifts. One of the primary ways that the church works to overcome the hubris of the present moment is by celebrating what the book of Hebrews calls the “cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), the great company of people of faith who have gone before us. Instead of judging the past as inferior, we sing, we harmonize, we make music with the past. All the congregation members, all the choirs and directors, all the organists, and all the instrumentalists who have preceded us through the centuries are our musical partners. I have personally experienced how singing and praying with the great cloud of witnesses can lift a person or a community out of the hubris of the present moment. Our church was observing All Saints’ Day during its regular Sunday service. We concluded with a procession out to the columbarium, where we stood while the names of people who had died during the last year were read.

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There were just under four hundred names to be read, including members of the congregation as well as their relatives. My mother’s name was among them. I had always attended church on All Saints’ Day, but on this particular occasion, hearing my mother’s name in the context of so many other names—some known and some unknown to me—gave me a sense of communion between all who grieve and all who have died before us. A sense of interconnectedness filled my heart and lifted me far above the hubris of the present moment, far above the understandable human propensity to think of grief as unique and isolating. Instead, I was surrounded by the whole cloud of witnesses in heaven and on earth. Such experience is not limited to All Saints’ Day. It can happen any Sunday of the year when you play or sing a composition from the past. Through your music-making you give witness to the great cloud of the faithful through the ages, and you thereby lift yourself and others above the hubris of the present moment. As important as it is to our spiritual health to perform excellent new texts and music from living poets and composers, it is equally important to hear from the past, from the gloriously long trajectories of music that keep us from arrogantly reducing our understanding of humanity to the tiny little slice of time that we occupy the earth. Let the great cloud of witnesses sound in your playing and singing!

The Perfect Registration I have always enjoyed hearing organists search for the perfect registration when they sit down to practice a piece of music.

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Sometimes I am playing my flute with them; other times they are playing with a choir or entirely alone. Often, they will talk to themselves, as if they were two people at once: the performer and an independent critic making judgments about the timbre and blend of the sounds. “Let’s try this,” they say as they pull out a particular mixture of stops. Then a few measures later, they lift up their fingers and feet, exclaiming: “No, that will never do. Too much bass. We need a little more brightness.” They push in some stops and pull out new ones. This time they play farther into the piece, but stop once again: “That’s too piercing for this melody.” They sit back on the bench studying the stops, thinking hard, sometimes pulling out a stop, then pushing it back in without even trying it. They sit there cogitating, imagining combinations of sounds in their minds. Eventually light dawns in their face, and they begin playing and the sound that fills the space is just right, oh, so very right! They have found the perfect registration. What is it about this drama of finding the perfect registration that so intrigues me? Is it about music and our passion to get it right? Yes, of course. The human ear and the neurological systems to which it is a gateway can make astounding, nuanced judgments about how to balance reeds and strings, how to highlight an inner voice, how to achieve a sense of pulse. But the sum total of all the musical elements adds up to something more. It is for me a parable of a process in the soul: the search for the perfect registration of all the voices and dynamics that sound in the depths of our humanity. Or to put the matter as the early church father Clement of Alexandria, “The Lord made man [the Lord made woman] a beautiful breathing instrument

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after his own image . . . an all harmonious instrument of God, well tuned and holy.”5  How do we become “an all harmonious instrument of God, well tuned and holy?” How do we find in our lives the right balance of emotion and reason, reflection and action, confession and praise, lament and thanksgiving? The analogy of finding the perfect registration on the organ suggests ways to answer these questions. Organists know that some occasions and some pieces call for big, bold, blaring stops that lift the roof off the place, and other occasions and pieces call for something more mellow and nuanced. In other words, finding the perfect registration is never settled once and for all, but is continually changing. In a similar fashion, the registration of life is continually changing. Tears and grief need to sound in times of tragedy and loss. On such occasions we are not being “too emotional” any more than we are being too loud or brash on the organ when that is what the music demands. But there are other circumstances in life when clear, hard reason needs to be the dominant stop that we employ. The mark of “an all harmonious instrument of God, well tuned and holy” is the capacity to allow the full range of life to engage the full richness of our humanity. I  believe this is what Christ means when he speaks of having life more “abundantly” (John 10:10). His own life embodies such abundance because he calls on the full registration of his humanity, from celebratory meals to tears of grief, from tenderness to anger, from honoring tradition to remaining open to the fresh winds of the Spirit.

5. Quoted  in James McKinnon, Music in Early (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 30.

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Perhaps in this life we will only now and then achieve the perfect registration, either at the organ or on our daily rounds, but when we do—or when we get close to it—what a joy it is to our ears and to the heart of God.

Music for Facing Temptation and Wild Beasts I have always liked the conciseness of the Gospel according to Saint Mark. While other Gospel writers expand and elaborate on a story, Mark’s version is often as succinct as possible. The temptation of Christ in the wilderness, the Gospel lesson for the first Sunday in Lent, is a case in point. Matthew and Luke each enumerate three different temptations and include dialogue between Jesus and Satan. But Mark reduces the story of temptation to a single verse:  “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan: and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him” (Mark 1:13). Wilderness. Temptation. Wild beasts. Angels. In four dramatic images, we feel the strenuous challenge that marks the beginning of Christ’s ministry, and if we allow the imagination of our hearts to be engaged, we view the reality of our own lives at a profounder level. Wilderness. Who of us has not known the wilderness? The wilderness of grief. The wilderness of broken relationships. The wilderness of depression. The wilderness of injustice. We have known these vast, barren stretches in our isolated souls, and we have known them as communities estranged from hope and compassion. Temptation. Who of us has not known temptation in the wilderness? How tempted we are to look out only for ourselves, our

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own needs, and our own survival while ignoring neighbors and strangers, who are as desperate as we are. Mark does not name the specific temptations Jesus faces. Instead he boils it down to three words: “tempted by Satan.” By compressing the matter to so few words, Mark alerts us to the pervasive possibility of succumbing to forces that, although immediately attractive, are ultimately destructive of all that is good and holy in our lives. Wild beasts. Who of us has not been with the wild beasts while tempted in the wilderness? They take many forms: the dreams that haunt our sleep, the corrosive powers that attack our best efforts, the inner demons that thrive in the grey cells of the mind. Our fear of them weakens our resistance to the voice of temptation. “And the angels waited on him.” There were angels in the wilderness? Angels in the face of temptation and wild beasts? Yes, there were angels. Angels are the way biblical writers indicate God’s ministry to human beings. God reaches out with care and comfort even while remaining beyond our mortal comprehension. Once again Mark says it as concisely as possible:  “And the angels waited on him.” Or, as the King James Version translates it, “And the angels ministered unto him.” J.  B. Phillips paraphrases:  “And only the angels were there to care for him.” But where are the angels now? How will they care for us during this time of national and global testing? Although none of us can command angels to appear, I can witness to angels showing up in my own life while I was in the wilderness. Not infrequently it was when I was in church and the organ sounded—sometimes a trumpet stop, sometimes a reed, sometimes the perfect registration to accompany a hymn I have sung since childhood—or the choir performed an anthem that buoyed my soul. There was

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no fluttering of wings, no haloed heavenly creature before me, but there was a renewed resilience in my heart, a lifting of my spirits, a sense of God’s attentive hand. From years of talking to scores of people in workshops and conferences, I know I am not alone. Although they did not use Mark’s exact words, they spoke of times of wilderness when music sounded and the angels ministered to them.

Season of Lament At the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, I used to team-teach with Patrick Evans a course on congregational song as a resource for preaching and worship. The course began with a review of the history of congregational song, examining how poets and musicians in every generation have been continually creating new hymns and songs as theology, culture, and human understanding changed across the centuries. Thus, for example, the hymns of the early church fathers often promote the theological formulations of church councils; the hymns of the medieval church give witness to the mystery of sacramental practice; the hymns of the Protestant Reformation proclaim a recovered understanding of faith and grace; the spirituals of African-American slaves offer a vision of a redeemed world while simultaneously including coded messages about escape from bondage; and hymns of the social awakening call people to action against economic and political injustice. This list does not begin to cover the full richness of the dynamic tradition of congregational song. I often use the analogy of geologists who bore into the earth’s crust and then analyze the layers they draw up to understand the history of what lies beneath their feet. In a similar way, the

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history of congregational song reveals the history of the church’s conflicts, beliefs, practices, and needs. After we examined the varied historical layers of congregational song in the course, we turned to the conflicts, beliefs, practices, and needs of our own time and place in history to ask: what new words and music are required now in order to sing as effectively about the current state of our world as our ancestors sang about theirs? We brainstormed a list of things we need to sing about. Students then wrote hymn texts on any topic they chose. Many worked in tandem, one writing the words and the other composing a musical setting. Some wrote to a standard hymn setting that was well established in their memory banks. The fall semester of 2009 provided a revelation about what was going on in our students’ souls. When all of the texts and settings were handed in, eight of the ten pieces of congregational song were laments! We organized a service of worship that employed all of the students’ work. The service progressed through one lament after another and then concluded with the only two student hymns that pointed toward hope. Even those two were restrained in both their poetic and musical idioms. After the service, which we held in the chapel where our class met, we had a probing discussion about why the lament had prevailed. Each student acknowledged a heartfelt sorrow over the state of the world, our brokenness, and the rancor that now pervades our politics and social discourse. But they also said something else, and it is significant to realize that all of the students, except one, were in their early to mid twenties. They told how helpful they found the service. As one of them put the matter, “It was so in touch with reality as we experience it now. There is a need to lift our sorrow in prayer and music that too often our worship services neglect.”

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Whether you are Christian or of another faith or of no religious persuasion, I believe that through our common humanity all of us can understand what the students in the course were trying to express. We are living in a season of sorrow for the human community, and part of our role as musicians is to help the human heart release its tears so that we might sense anew the resilience of hope that we will never know if we have never wept.

Unacknowledged Healing I once read a brief article that featured a photograph and explanation of “Clinicorgans.”6 These were small, portable pipe organs that were “particularly valuable in orthopedic treatment of hand and forearm injuries, as well as in restoring muscular activities following certain types of hand surgery. The organ was primarily intended for orthopedic and psychiatric use in veterans’ hospitals.” The article reminded me of what an important role music can play in healing. In this case, the instruments were built so the keyboard could be placed in the patient’s lap, and “the weight of the keys was adjustable.” The image of the organ as an instrument of healing awakened in me memories of coming to church fragmented and exhausted, sometimes from grief, sometimes from tragedies that overtook friends, sometimes from the brutal atrocities committed by warring nations and races, sometimes from the sheer intractability of the world’s urgent problems. Then the organ began to play. Sometimes it was a soft, slow, piece on a flutey stop; sometimes it

6. “The Last Page,” The American Organist, January, 2010.

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was something big and brash. But whatever it was, it was a sound that could transfigure light in the darkness in my soul. It gathered the fragments of my being into a pattern of resilience, renewed energy, and hope. It was a healing every bit as palpable as regaining the use of a muscle by playing a clinicorgan. My story is not unique. Scores of people have shared similar experiences with me when I have led workshops on music and worship and when I  have taught courses on the theology and practice of church music. They recall these stories with thankfulness for the musicians whose art had restored their equanimity of soul. I often ask them if they told the musician what had happened, and the answer—with a few exceptions—was no. I do not believe this is for lack of gratitude or even generosity. I think the explanation is more complex. The healing that sometimes comes through music goes so deep that to name it is to acknowledge just how vulnerable the human creature is, just how exposed a soul feels about such matters. As a preacher I am familiar with this phenomenon. Over several decades of preaching, I have now and then received a note or a card about a sermon years after I preached it. The note often includes some qualifying explanation in which the person says, “At the time, I was too moved to speak to you,” or “I felt so tender about this I  did not want to go up to you right away.” But now, years later, the remembrance of it is still in the person, and she or he feels secure enough to signal from their soul to mine what happened. I used to have a colleague in pastoral care, James Ashbrook, who called such notes “periodic reinforcement.” He said, “Every now and then someone waves a flag to you:  yes, I received, yes, I heard, yes, it meant the world to me.” But then for a long, long stretch, no flag is waved, and you wonder: does

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what I am doing really matter? Ashbrook said to me: “For everyone who waves a flag, who lets you know your work matters, there are many, many more for whom it matters just as much, though you will never hear from them.” I believe that is as true about music-making as preaching. So every time you perform music—be it for a religious community or concert venue—trust that there are fragmented people listening with their hearts as well as their ears, and your artistry will bring restoration to them. Some soul will overflow with gratitude for your playing or singing. I hope that at least now and then you might hear back from them, but even if you do not, keep playing, keep singing.

Plain and Simple, Rich and Complex I remember preaching at a week-long series of services that were part of a conference on worship and music. We were fortunate to have an excellent organist, who not only gave fine performances of works from the standard organ repertoire but also provided the congregation with exemplary service playing that encouraged robust yet nuanced singing. Each afternoon, after the services, we had an open discussion with members from the congregation and a panel consisting of the liturgists, musical leaders, visual artists, dancers, and the preacher about the worship of the day, its planning, and its execution. One of our most interesting discussions arose over the wide spectrum of ways that the organist had accompanied the hymns. A pastor started the conversation by reflecting on the congregation he was serving and its organist, who—like the organist at the conference—sometimes provided an interlude after a stanza or modulated

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to another key. The majority of the pastor’s congregation, including the pastor himself, loved these embellishments. But there was a small group of people who protested the practice, claiming it was too much a “performance” and that it called attention to the music instead of promoting the worship of God. The matter appeared to come down to an elemental question. What kind of music is appropriate for worship: plain and simple or rich and complex? It is illuminating to bring a historical perspective to the question. This is not the first time that the issue has emerged for faith communities. For example, in the age of Buxtehude (c. 1637–1707), a period that saw the creation of many beloved organ works, there were fierce debates between those who wanted music plain and simple and those who celebrated music that was rich and complex. Geoffrey Weber writes: Within the conservative wing of Lutheranism, elaborate church music was accepted not only for its power to convey a particular text but also simply as an offering to God. By contrast, the reformers [pietists] favored the cultivation of the spiritual song for use both in church and at home, and argued that other forms of church music should be simple and serious in style, and easily understood by the congregation.7 

Different forms of music—the simple and the elaborate— awaken different landscapes in the soul, different imaginings of the inner world of faith, different intuitions of existence and meaning. Those differences can become highly contentious. 7. Geoffrey Weber, North German Church Music in the Age of Buxtehude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1996), 13.

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Thus the introduction to the Hamburg Melodeyen Gesangbuch of 1604 disparaged the new Italian styles that were spreading into Germany during the early 1600s: “Wherever instead of fine, serious motets and moving psalms and songs that touch the heart, pieces and songs that come frolicking in with a skip are sung by choir with organ, and played with foreign, Italian lascivious leaps and tick-tacks, or strange fugues, [it is] as if one were going to the dance.”8 But a later Lutheran pastor, Heinrich Mithobius at Otterndorf (near Hamburg), answered such objections, defending rich and complex music as a divine gift: “Meanwhile at this time of ours [God] fills many excellent composers with his spirit, who have composed the most magnificent musical art pieces, and proved therein their high understanding and art in music.”9 Notice the different presuppositions here. Those against the Italian style of music are opposed because they want the words to be clear and understandable. But those in favor stress the spirit, the yearning of humans for realities that extend beyond the precise meanings of language. The genius of the organist at our conference is that he provided both. Some of his playing simply lined out the melody, and there were occasions when he dropped out and let the congregation sing unaccompanied. Other times he highlighted and enriched the drama of the music with rich chords and improvisations that took us to places of wonder and beauty. I would hate to settle for only one or the other. There is a time for plain and simple and a time for rich and complex.

8. Ibid., 14. 9. Ibid., 16.

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A Gigue for Everyone to Dance One summer I visited a reformed church in the small rural town of Gasselte, located in the northern Netherlands. A few months earlier the congregation had celebrated its four hundredth anniversary. Jan Vaessen, the pastor, gave me a tour of the church, a plain stone building that can hold about one hundred people. When I walked into the church I was immediately struck by the natural light flowing through the enormous clear glass windows and the prominence of the pulpit, rising high above the chancel and commanding the visual axis of the church. The communion table is a plain, unadorned piece of furniture, and the congregation sits in equally plain wooden chairs with rush seats. On first glance I thought the place to be as pure an example of a classically Calvinistic church as I  had ever seen. Its high pulpit and abundant light symbolized the word of God shining forth with divine truth. But then the pastor pointed to the left of the pulpit where there hangs a list of the Roman Catholic priests who had served the church over many centuries, long before it became a reformed church. Next, the pastor pointed to two large flat stones that people step on as they approach the communion table. These are sacred rocks from the 800s, placed by people who had honored their ancestors long before there was any knowledge of Christian faith in the region. The church and the chancel were built around the rocks so as to preserve them as reminders to the congregation of their ancient forebears who worshipped there before the coming of Christianity. In all the subsequent centuries of being a Christian church, no

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generation had ever removed or paved over those stones. They were an honored part of the sacred place. All of a sudden, the church that I had at first glance thought to be about as pure an example as I  had ever seen of a classically Calvinistic, reformed church was something much more syncretistic, much more interreligious and ecumenical. It was a place where pre-Christians and Catholics and Calvinists met. Jan Vaessen named to me his delight in this blend of supposedly incompatible traditions, seeing in it a symbol of hope for a world that is too often torn apart by believers wanting to maintain the purity of their one true faith. The church has a small tracker action pipe organ placed in a balcony on the back wall:  a single keyboard of four and a half octaves and nine stops. But the sound, oh the sound of that instrument! Because the stone walls of the church are nearly three feet thick and the floor is stone and there is not a single soft, absorbent texture anywhere in the building, the acoustics are extraordinarily resonant. Every note, even at the lowest dynamic, suffuses the building with sound. Jan Vaessen and I climbed the staircase up to the keyboard—a feat in itself given the steepness and narrowness of the steps—and together we played a number of the Handel flute sonatas, he at the organ and I  on the flute. As we played the gigue from the Sonata in F Major, a work that Handel also wrote as an organ concerto, I imagined the ancestors who had gathered around the sacred stones, the Catholic priests and the Calvinistic preachers and their congregations, the angels and the archangels, and all the company of heaven and earth dancing to Handel’s ebullient gigue. Through that vision I had a renewed sense of how music keeps religion from becoming too

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constricted, too purely of this or that persuasion to acknowledge those who are different. The interfusions of musical sound blending in a deeply resonant building keep us alive to how our traditions are intertwined in ways that confound the rigid mind while they renew the most generous and inclusive visions of the human heart.

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Waiting as Blessing When I  was a child, my least favorite season was Advent, the season before Christmas. Why? Because Advent means waiting, and if there is anything that most children cannot do gracefully, it is wait. Why would any child want to wait for gifts? Let’s have them right now! Of course, we adults are also not that good at waiting. Have you ever stood in the grocery store’s express lane where a sign said “12 items,” yet someone whose cart is packed to overflowing was in front of you? Have you stopped at a gasoline station behind someone who could not find their credit card or figure out how to operate the pump? Have you heard the public announcer in an airport say that your flight has been delayed and they will “keep you posted” about when the flight will board? Have you gone to the doctor’s office with great pain and heard the receptionist say, “Wait until we call you.” Have you whipped out your iPhone, eager to get your text messages, only to see the little circle going round and round searching for a connection? The simple fact is this: to live is to wait. Do you want a child to be born? It will take nine months after conception. Do you 73

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want vegetables to eat from your garden? The seeds will produce fruit after the time programmed in their genes. Do you want to master all of the major Bach organ works? It will take years of studying and working on the fingerings, the registrations, the way you hear the multiple voices sounding against each other and coming together. Do you want to sing the Fauré Requiem with your volunteer church choir? It will take several months of rehearsal. You must wait. Not a passive waiting but an anticipatory waiting, a waiting during which you do all that you can do—eating the right way when you are pregnant, weeding and fertilizing the garden when you want to harvest vegetables, practicing the passages that elude you as you strive to master Bach or prepare the Fauré Requiem—but still you must wait. What you wait for is not entirely in your control. There is a coming reality greater than the present moment, a reality for which you hope and yearn but do not command. When you begin to understand the inevitability of waiting, you begin to understand Advent. It may be that you are not Christian or even a person of faith, but if you are human, you can still understand these reflections on waiting. To live is to wait. And this is why as I move toward being seventy years old, I find that Advent is no longer my least favorite season. It is my favorite season of faith. The first Sunday in Advent is the one Sunday I treasure above all others. To hear the aching, yearning plainsong of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is to have a community lift up the highest and holiest dreams of the human heart. We claim our connection to the whole human family: aching and yearning and hoping for redemption from the ugly and brutal ways we treat each other.

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Organists help us to express this hope through long measures of suspensions that lead on and on as they move from key to key, until they finally arrive at the blessed resolution, a foretaste of the long-awaited birth.

Rehearsing for an Epiphany Advent and Christmas:  ’Tis the season of extra rehearsals, the season of getting ready for special concerts and services. When you are a church musician hauling music stands into the organ loft, trying to arrange them in a very cramped space, finding time to rehearse with a soloist, penciling cues into a musical score, and phoning a publisher to express mail you some instrumental parts, you may begin to wonder: is it worth all this madness? It takes such immense amounts of time and energy. But when the moment of performance arrives, whether in a church or a school or a concert hall, there may be an epiphany: a manifestation of the divine, a disclosure of the spirit of a timeless musical work, a revelation that awakens wonder, a light that fills a shadowed soul, a sound that gives wings to a prayer, or a melody that traces the shape of the heart’s deepest yearning. Musical epiphanies lead me to consider anew the epiphany recorded in Matthew 2, the journey of the magi to find the Christ child. We usually think that their journey begins with the appearance of a new star, but their journey must have begun long before the star appeared. In order to spot a new star, they would have had to have studied the sky for years. The first stage of their journey was all the time they had spent mastering the names and positions of the stars already present, so that when a new point of light appeared they would notice it.

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Go out some cloudless night when the moon is only a sliver and look up at the heavens. Try counting the stars and see how far you get. Try remembering where each star is relative to the others. It takes years of concentrated viewing to know what you are seeing, and it is only possible to spot a new star if your nighttime observing is a discipline as rigorous as that of musical practice. Without telescopes and without the ambient light of the modern world, the ancients studied the heavens with attentive eyes. Many of us have received Christmas cards featuring an oversized star pointing to the place of Christ’s birth, but the scriptures do not describe the star that way. The magi simply report: “ ‘We observed his star at its rising.’ ” If the star were extravagant in size and brightness, it seems Jerusalem and Herod would have known about it before the arrival of the magi. And, if the magi themselves had not first studied the skies, they too might have missed the epiphany, the moment of heavenly manifestation that was accessible to them because of their discipline. Let the magi inspire our musical preparations for the season. We are arranging music stands and making pencil marks on our scores and repeating tricky passages again and again because we are rehearsing for an epiphany! To help you keep this in mind, here is a carol in short meter for the season: The magi’s journey starts before the birth star shines. Long years by night they map on charts the galaxies’ designs. They discipline their eyes to such exacting sight

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they spot at once when charted skies emit unplotted light. To realms far off and strange it beckons them to go, a journey that expands the range of ways they see and know. To us, O Lord, impart the magi’s deeper sight: the vision of a seeking heart responsive to your light: Light far and high above yet reaching to the ground, embodied here on earth as love and in a stable—found!

A New Song for Christmas? Every Christmas I write a carol to celebrate the birth of Christ. My wife and I then search for an appropriate card in which we can print the words as our seasonal greeting. As autumn begins, I  wonder if I  still have it in me to create a new carol this time around. Is there anything new to sing about Christmas? Year after year we revisit the story with its patina of familiarity and memory: the stable, the manger, the cattle and sheep, Mary, Joseph, the infant, shepherds and angels, and the riches of poetry and music all these images have inspired. As I begin to meditate and consider what to write, I leap from image to image, figure to figure,

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one beloved poem to another, and one treasured composition to another. What slant is there on the story that we have not already seen? What fresh light is waiting to shine from the well-worn narrative? What melody has not yet sounded that would help us hear the angels again? Most church organists and choir directors have their own keen version of what I am describing. Long before the season arrives, they have thumbed through catalogues or bins in the music store, consulted with colleagues, or attended a reading session. They are looking for that anthem or carol, that prelude or offertory that will sound forth the nativity of Christ with some freshness of harmony and rhythm and help us sense how love is born anew, how Christ is welcomed yet again in every heart that prepares him room. Of course, there are the golden oldies that everyone expects— that is part of the delight of tradition and the season—but there is also the need for the text, the melody, the setting that says this is not only a story of what happened long ago but an event here and now, still inspiring poets and composers, performers and singers. Sometimes in the midst of juggling to find new materials and tending to the details for rehearsals, concerts, pageants, and services, the whole process can become a burden. It feels like anything but preparing for Christ to be born in us anew. Yet when the organ sounds and the choir stands to sing and the congregation receives the music with open ears and souls, astounding things happen: wonder is reborn, faith is strengthened, a vision of hope is awakened, and once again God uses our human music in ways that reveal the Word made flesh among us. Here is a carol I  sent to our family, friends, and colleagues after a year of relentlessly bleak news—personally, nationally,

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internationally. It is a prayer for this fragmented and contentious world and a prayer that the life-giving work of musicians may help people celebrate the hope of divine love born in our midst: I pray a new star shines that guides us through the night to truth confounding our designs for mastery and might. I pray that angels sing and every heart is tuned to hear how love is entering this world we bruise and wound. And when the star grows dim and angels end their song, I pray through us the light and hymn will shine and sound as strong.

Song that Blesses Earth I have always been impressed with the tenacity of birdsong. In the spring, the early morning woodland choir rouses me from bed, but what delights me even more are the birds that hang around for winter and that I  sometimes hear singing even when it is snowing. I am not the only one impressed with this phenomenon. Every December I receive at least two or three Christmas cards that feature a red cardinal, the very bird that I often see and hear on the snow-draped hemlock tree in my backyard.

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Ornithologists have studied the nature of birdsong and how it is used as a means of warning, defense, and courtship, but what interests me most is how singing birds function as symbols in our imaginations of some profounder resilience that we hear in their music. I opened one of my Christmas cards, whose cover featured a photograph of a cardinal singing in a snowstorm, and I read in bold letters: “Merry Christmas!” It seems perfectly sensible to me to move from a singing bird to the celebration of Christ’s nativity. There is nothing in ornithology that would say such a connection has any grounding in scientific fact, but in the world of symbol, song, and spiritual imagination there is another way of being that awakens the soul to rhapsodic extravagance: “Let heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing.” Let heaven and cardinals sing, let heaven and cardinals sing! And why not? Cardinals belong to the realm of nature. The fact of the matter is that birds have a long pedigree in the literary and spiritual imagination of human beings. There is the dove that bears an olive branch to Noah after the flood, the dove that calls to the lovers in the Song of Songs, the Dove that descends upon Christ at his baptism, the nightingale that Keats hears singing in “full-throated ease,” Thomas Hardy’s darkling thrush with “blast-beruffled plume” that greets a new century with a joy the poet cannot muster, and the cardinal on the card that wishes me a Merry Christmas. In light of that great and long tradition of birds and their song, I  offer the following carol in hopes that it might help you play and sing your way through a season that is often challenging

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because of all the extra demands for musical preparation and performance: One crimson bird upon a branch is singing while it snows, and cold and winter dusk advance, on wind that howls and blows. Why does the creature not take flight? Why brave the storm to sing? What prompts its heart to greet the night with ceaseless caroling? The two note tune of this bird’s hymn insists, insists, insists that though the world grows cold and dim hope’s counterpoint persists. It rises through the creature’s voice as song that blesses earth and heralds why the skies rejoice to greet an infant’s birth.

New Year’s Resolution: Not Exactly as the Composer Wanted I was reading a review of a new book about the composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), when I came across this intriguing

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observation:  “His printed scores are full of admonitions to the performers. Musical ideas are marked with emphatic underlinings, accents, and notational and verbal reminders that seem to shout at or plead with the performer to do exactly as the composer wanted. Mahler, long used to dealing with careless or indifferent musicians, appears to have had little faith in the ability of future generations to get his music right.”1  I stopped reading and started reflecting on the agony of the composer as a creator. Mahler had sounds in his head, specific sounds that were inflected and interrelated in particular ways. He had a universe of sound inside him. But how do you put a universe of sound on a piece of paper? Of course, there are conventions for printing one’s musical ideas: a staff, a time signature, notes with flags and notes without flags, chords, single voice lines, and all the other things that can be set out upon a sheet of music. Yet the very phrase “sheet of music” is a paradox. Sound is not on sheets of paper. Music is what we play and sing, what we hear, what hangs in the air and rings on the ear. No matter how many directions Mahler gives—no matter how many directions any composer gives—the instructions will never precisely equal the sound in the composer’s head. I  think of the hundreds of concerts I have attended in my life, many of them featuring pieces that I have heard scores of times in other concerts, on the radio, online, or on a disk or record. Which performance was “exactly as the composer wanted?” I  will never be able to tell you. Nor would anyone else, except possibly the composer, and even the composer’s judgment would be suspect given that the composer has a dynamic, creative mind in which sounds are always shifting 1. “The New York Times Book Review,” October 2, 2011, 8.

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and interrelating in different ways. What an elusive goal it is to play “exactly as the composer wanted.” When we set out to perform on an instrument, sing, or lead a choir, how are we to do so with confidence? I am helped here by the theological insight that creation is more than a once-and-for-all, done-and-it’s-over event. Instead, creation is an ongoing process, something that flows out of the deep, dear core of things, not only in the beginning but after the beginning, continuing in the present and into the future. The composition is not finished when the composer has written the last note and the final direction on the score. The composition is recreated and extended in new ways every time we play what the composer has given us. Yes, we honor what is on the page before us—the harmony that surprises our ears, the figuration that stumps our fingers, the vocal leap that challenges our sense of pitch—but we also honor the music by giving ourselves to the spirit of the piece, to the ineffable and elusive wonder of creating by performing. I have heard great performances of the same composition that were utterly different: they emphasized different inner voices, they took different tempi, and they conceived the entire piece in different dramatic terms. Every time we make music, we are participating in the ongoing work of creation. As we start a new year, it is good to remember this. We often joke about the resolutions we make on January 1, knowing they do not usually last long. But I do not make fun of the impulse that lies behind them: I believe our wanting to start anew is related to the God-given desire to create a better life and a better world with the materials at hand. Every time we play or conduct or sing a composition, there is the possibility that we will strengthen the gracious creative impulse in some listener’s heart. That is one more good reason to keep making music all the year long.

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Music Born of Resurrection Joyful is not a word I would use to describe Mark’s original ending to his Gospel: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). This is Easter? Terror and amazement? Saying nothing to anyone? How can you call this good news? There is no end to scholarly speculation about how the church created and added another ending, the one that stands attached to Mark’s original conclusion. The final verse in the Gospel now reads:  “And they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it” (Mark 16:20). The second ending is the mirror reverse of the original ending. Instead of saying nothing to anyone, Christ’s followers now proclaim his resurrection everywhere. How do we account for this reversal? There are greater scholars than myself who have traced the textual variants and the possible ways this new ending was achieved. Most good study Bibles have helpful notes for those who want to understand the complexities of the issue. But let us turn from these erudite matters to consider a pointed spiritual question: what leads a group of people from terror and amazement, from saying nothing to anyone to proclaiming the good news of the living Christ everywhere? I suppose we could come up with quite a list of things: the witness of brave communities in the face of oppression, fervent preaching, a profound personal experience of the risen Christ in one’s sacramental life. But I want to concentrate on just one major thing that leads people to celebrate and give witness to the resurrection: music.

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I cannot help but wonder if after those women left the tomb in terror and amazement, they later collected themselves—maybe around a table where they shared some wine and bread—and perhaps one of them started singing. Perhaps a psalm. Or maybe it was music without words. Perhaps she just started humming or whistling. But it was a tune that sprang up out of her growing awareness of what had happened. It was music born of resurrection and, being born of resurrection, it expressed the divine vitality that can never be finally squashed or demolished by even the worst this world offers. As the woman sang, hummed, whistled, the others started joining in, until over time their voices were loosened to proclaim the good news everywhere. I acknowledge that this is speculation. But it is speculation based on something I have observed at every Easter service I have attended or led. It is when the organ sounds and people let loose on their most beloved and joyful Easter hymns that I  see faith shining in their faces, and I  sense how they move from terror and amazement to the conviction that will empower them to proclaim the good news everywhere. Christ the Lord is risen and grateful for the music that empowers our witness to the resurrection.

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INDEX

Advent, 73–75 Armstrong, Karen, 51 Ashbrook, James, 66–67 Augustine, 26 Bach, Johann Sebastian Arnstadt years, 15–16 Art of the Fugue, 19 B Minor Mass, the Sanctus, 20–21 Buxtehude, influence of his music, 15–16 Denver Bach Society, 30 integrity of his vision, 47 master composer, 17–19 one of Einstein’s favorite composers, 11 organ, impact on his music, 19 St. Thomas Church Leipzig, 45 beauty, 22–23, 26, 46–47, 51, 52–54 Beecher, Henry Ward, 8–9 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 18, 22 Begbie, Jeremy S., 33, 35 Berry, Wendell, 34 biblical passages Genesis 28: 10–22, 13 Exodus 14: 16, 5 Job 38: 7, 17 Psalm 19, 6

Psalm 27: 4, 53 Psalm 74, 4–5 Psalm 150, 25 Matthew 2, 75–77 Matthew 4: 4, 53 Matthew 6:21, 36 Mark 1: 13, 61–63 Mark 16: 8 and 20, 84 John 10:10, 60 Romans 10: 15, 32 2 Corinthians 4: 7, 44 Hebrews 12:1, 57 Revelation, 20 brain and music making, 19, 29–30 Bresson, Robert, 37 Bruckner, Anton, 40–42 Buchenwald, 45–46 Buxtehude, Dietrich, 15–16, 68 chaos monster, 3–5 Christmas, 75, 77, 79–81 Clement of Alexandria, 7, 59–60 cloud of witnesses (company of heaven), 16–17, 20, 42, 57–58, 71 cognitive imperialism, 49–51 composing, 33, 82 creation, 83

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Index

Dawkins, Richard, 51 Deeg, Alexander, 13 Dryden, John 12 Einstein, Albert, 10–11 Epiphany, 75–77, 79 Evans, Patrick, 63 evil, 22, 46 finitude, 34–35 flute, 24–25 Geck, Martin, 15 Greek thought’s impact on church music, 6 Handel, George Frideric, 71 harmony, 5–6 Harris, Sam, 51 Hawkshaw, Paul, 41 Haydn, Josef, 7 healing 65–67 Hitchens, Christopher, 51 hometown of musical memories, 47–49 hope, 64–65 hymns, 4–5, 22, 63–64 inspiration, 13–15 iPod, 27 Isaacson, Walter, 10–11 Jackson, Timothy L., 41 Jean, Martin, 1, 15 Kirkby, Emma, 38 Ku Klux Klan, 22

lament, 63–65 Lent, 61–63 Leviathan, 4 Lindberg, Jakob, 38 Luther, Martin, 7 Mahler, Gustav, 81–82 Maier, Elisabeth, 41 magi (three kings), 75–77, 79 metaphors and music harmony, 6 interrelationship of music and metaphor, 1–3 Meynell, Alice, 55–56 Mithobius, Heinrich, 69 Mozart, Amadeus, 11, 18, 37 Munoz, Amy, 37 music of the spheres, 6, 28 Naxos, 27 Nazis, 22, 45–46 neurological science, 19, 29–30, 59 new atheists, 51 Oberbrunner, John, 42–43, 54 performative history, 22 pipe organ, 9, 25, 27–28, 31–32, 32–34, 35–37, 39, 58–60, 65–67 Plato, 6, 25 Pythagoras, 6 Rahab, 4 resurrection, 84–85 rhetoric, 38–39 Rodrick, Elizabeth, 37

Index Sanctus (Holy, Holy, Holy), 20 Schnittke, Alfred, 20–21 Schonberg, Arnold, 18 scientism, 51 Scvhönzeler, Hans-Hubert, 40 Shaw, Robert, 43 silence, 35, 37 singing, 38–39, 40 soul, 46, 59, 66 spirit, 29–30, 39, 44 spirituality, 41, 57–58 spirituals, 63 stereophonic sound, 26–27 Stone Age music, 24

Stravinsky, Igor, 33–34 temptation, 61–63 Tiamat, 4 Tommasini, Anthony, 17 Troeger, Thomas H. (hymn texts), 35, 76–77, 79, 81 Vaessen, Jan, 70 waiting, 73–75 Walton, Kendall, 1 Weber, Geoffrey, 68–69 wonder, 53–54

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