THE MUSIC IN FAITH AND MORALITY

Abstract

Many of the greatest achievements of Western music are also monuments of the Christian faith: Bach's cantatas and passions, Brahms' and Mozart's requiems, masses from Machaud to Stravinsky, and much else. But in the daily lives of most Westerners, music seems to belong in quite a different category from the life of faith, and is even more distant from the realm of ethics. These divisions in the cultural universe depend upon assumptions we imbibe at an early age. In my own childhood, for example, it did not take many years of churchgoing to sense that music was tolerated as a sort of amusing stepchild in the family of religion. The bond between faith and morality was clear enough, for the pulpits of the Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches in which I was tutored often thundered with moral exhortation; but those same pulpits seemed to stand at a safe distance from the organ and choir. Often, in fact, a great aisle ran down the center of the sanctuary as if to symbolize the bifurcation, with the preacher on one side and the choir on the other. The two rarely called to one another in happy antiphon; sometimes, in fact, they clashed. In this essay I would like to investigate a tradition in which such a bifurcation between music on the one hand and faith and morality on the other does not exist. This is a tradition in which people are accustomed to hearing preachers sing, so they might well be shocked to find that in Protestant churches preachers and choirmasters frequently quarrel, or to learn that when such disputes erupt, it is inevitably the preacher who has the power to fire the musician, never the other way around. And they would be puzzled to find that all our Wesleyan Universities are dedicated to the memory of John Wesley rather than his musical brother Charles, or that so many religious buildings bear Luther's name, and none Bach's. For theirs is a heritage in which many of the great saints are singers, and the values for which they stand are not merely moral and doctrinal ones but musical ones as well.