This is truly an historical occasion. We are assembled here this week to salvage our immortal musical heritage from the wreckage of the last quarter of a century. In close parallel with the world, we have engaged, particularly during the last twenty-five years, in a fatal process of whole or partial imitation of manners, styles, and philosophies which are foreign to the spirit of the Reformation, of Luther and Bach, and of the glorious organization entrusted to us by the fathers of our Church. Our strong, simple, and yet characteristically Lutheran apparatus in public worship has too often been amateurishly tampered with. Our Lutheran chorale, recognized by all authorities on church music as the most perfect pearl in the necklace of sacred folk song, has been more and more neglected, while anemic and musically low standard tunes have come into favor.

We must all confess to error in some direction; yea, with Paul, each one must call himself the greatest sinner. It shall be the purpose of this meeting to examine our position, and we shall endeavor to find the way which God has historically given us in our branch of the visible Church. Only through prayer and open discussion by a group such as this may we again unite our Church to one pulpit, one altar, one worship.

I would like to set as the keynote of this meeting the words of the Psalmist as we find them expressed in the Ninety-sixth Psalm: "Oh, sing unto the Lord a new song."

In our day we so often hear the remark, "Why must we go back to ancient sources for the church music of our present day? Does not each generation produce the new song suitable to its clime and conditions?" There are those who interpret Col. 3:16 in a literary sense, as if the term new song had any significance as to time. It can be readily shown that the meaning of canticum novum must be interpreted not as to the time of its origin but solely as to its content.

There are some who demand church music which speaks the language of our day. But does our day actually have a "language"? Our time is a period of transition in which a number of styles exist alongside of each other and work against each other. The language of our time is, as at all times of decadent culture, a multiplicity of languages, a Babylonian confusion of languages.

There are still a few—not many—who feel that a Hassler chorale or a good Schuetz motet or a folk song by Isaak or Senfl is timeless. This music is for them timeless because it originated at a time that had much in common with our present day. They live for this music, and the music lives in them. They realize that our feeling for life in many respects has changed, but as they recognize this fact, they are disturbed. And is it not true that we have become somewhat short of breath, more nervous, and dissipated? We have won a world of musical possibilities in the realms of song, harmony, and technique; but we have lost the soul. We have become clever, but our forefathers were wiser. We are more independent, more susceptible, more individual, but, in the same manner also, lonelier and more unstable. If we are seeking a cure for the apparent sickness of our time, a sickness which has also beset our church music, let us seek the cure in the old music of the Church. It will be a cure which cannot be found in contemporary music. It need not be our purpose to turn back the clock of history, but we shall experience the power of this old music in our own souls, and we shall have all reason to expect more from it also for our future.

One often hears such expressions as: "Music is the language which can reveal the unspoken word and can interpret the hidden secrets of the soul. It behooves music, therefore, to speak where human language fails." In a certain sense this is true. Music can come to grips with the emotional side of our life and can reach the depths of our soul much better than words can do. One can say that music has the power for good and for evil. But these statements remain in the realm of the human. Even the so-called higher regions, into which according to the Romanticists music can apparently take us, belong to a sinful world. What no eye hath seen and no ear hath heard and what has come into no man’s heart will certainly not penetrate by means of music. We must be careful not to ascribe to music the possibility of a mediating role between God and man. From us to God there is no way by means of the intellect, by means of our own will, or our own feeling. But there is a way from God to us: "The Word of God, made flesh in Jesus Christ." It is only in connection with this great truth that music can become church music. It is only in connection with God’s revelation to man that church music has any place in our church service.

It is a tragedy for Christianity that the past centuries have misconstrued the Word. What happened to this Word? Rationalism made out of it something for the reason and a vehicle of abstract ideas; in other words, it intellectualized it. Romanticism made it the expression of the soul and gave us a new phrase—the psychology of the Word. Mysticism finally took all the meaning away from the Word, saw in it, according to Carl Heim, only a heap of ashes left from the fire of mystic experience. We need not remind ourselves that the word of the newspapers, of politicians, and of the tremendous literature of our day has experienced a catastrophic inflation, and it is no wonder that the great mass of people no longer know what the Biblical term Word really means.

Now, it is evident that the Word as we know it from continual use is more powerful than music, because it has the power to grip total man. Music as a rule does not touch man’s intellectual side. Does it influence his will power? Does it affect his ethics? Plato definitely conceded to music certain principles which he did not want for the state. Can music make us more honest, more truthful, teach us to know ourselves and control ourselves, make us more social? Hardly. The Word, however, turns to the whole man, grips his intellect, his feeling, and his will. And thus we find that God speaks through the Word to the total man as He has created him, which in itself establishes the prime importance of the Word. Therefore, the Spirit of God and the spoken Word belong together: the Prophets, the Apostles, and the Lord Himself did not make music but—they spoke.

There is no such a thing as a creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) for human beings. All creations grow out of what has gone before. That was the process used by the great masters of evangelical church music, and thus we come to our conclusion. Either the new must grow organically out of the immediate past, as, for instance, the Romantic out of the Classic, or the new must be born out of a meeting with the past, long distant. It is this last possibility which concerns the true creative artist of our time. We know that out of such a meeting there will grow something really new. The Renaissance was no repetition of Classic antiquity, the Reformation no re-warming of the Apostolic period. We know that the Spirit of God will create among us a new spirit and are certain that He does this every day; but we know also that we cannot ignore the theological and musical heritage of the Reformation. A theologian who today refuses to study Luther does not deserve to be called a Lutheran theologian; and a church musician who neglects to study the musical heritage of the Church of the Reformation does not deserve the great honor to practice his art. We look back to the distant past with a will to learn what the past has in store for the benefit of our Church; we look into the future and trust that God will bless our Church, that we shall never cease to receive a new song—in the sense of the Scripture, The Song which is created out of the Word of life and thus again creates a new life.

From The Musical Heritage of the Lutheran Church, Volume I (Valparaiso, Ind.: Valparaiso University, 1945). Reprinted by permission of Valparaiso University.

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