Elvis, Bach, and their respective Bibles

The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments.

For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: “Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true.”

The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer’s inspiration.

Blogs like the Chant Cafe and colloquia like those of the Church Music Association of America are introducing a new generation of worshipers to this tradition.

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Interestingly, though, something of the same sort is also discernible in the writings of the Australian Pentecostal preacher and author named (perhaps coincidentally, maybe by grace) Barry Chant.

Here in the early 21st century, Chant wrote in “Retuning the Church”:

an unhealthy number of new songs focus more on rhythm and harmony than melody … Whereas a half century ago, Christians sang songs in which there were disciplined rhythms and rhymes, and both melody and lyrics followed an obvious orderly pattern, today’s rhythms are more likely to be disruptive and disjointed… ‘feeling’ is what matters. So the pulsating rhythms throb through our beings, the compelling beat makes our bodies respond and the intellectual or biblical content only needs to be sufficient to justify calling what we are singing ‘Christian’

But hey, this discussion goes back a while… Back in the mid fourth century CE, St Basil the Great wrote:

The passions born of illiberality and baseness of spirit are naturally occasioned by this sort of music. But we must pursue that other kind, which is better and leads to the better, and which, as they say, was used by David that author of sacred songs, to soothe the king in his madness. And it is said that Pythagoras, upon encountering some drunken revelers, commanded the aulete who was leading their song to change the mode and to play the Dorian for them. They were so sobered by this music that tearing off their garlands they returned home ashamed. Others dance to the aulos in the manner of the Corybantes and Baccantes. Such is the difference in filling one’s ears with wholesome or wicked tunes! And since the latter type now prevails, you must have less to do with it than any utterly depraved thing.

And yet hey, hey — L’homme armé was a pop song in France around the time of the Renaissance — yet composers from Josquin to Benedict’s beloved Palestrina based settings to the Mass on its tune…

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The single piece of recorded music that I play most often for myself is Sara Mingardo‘s rendering of the recitative O selger Tag in rehearsal with John Eliot Gardiner, which is mercifully available on DVD.

On that same DVD, just after Mingardo has concluded her luminous performance, Gardiner quotes Bach as saying “Nota Bene: Bey einer andächtigen Musique ist allezeit Gott mit seiner Gnadengegenwart” — and then comments:

Now I find that very, very significant. That he’s saying wherever there is devotional music, God with his grace is present. Which, from a strict theological point of view is probably heresy, heretical, because it’s saying that music has an equivalent potency to the word of God. And I think that in essence is why Bach is so attractive to us today because he is saying that the very act of music-making and of coming together is, in a sense, an act which invokes the latency, the potency, the potentiality of God’s grace, however you like to define God’s grace; but of a benediction that comes even in a dreadful, overheated studio like Abbey Road where far too many microphones and much too much stuff here in the studio itself, but if one, as a musician, puts oneself in the right frame of mind, then God’s grace can actually come and direct and influence the way we perform his music.

Aaaaaaah….

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