Alfred Einstein, in his recent book Greatness in Music, makes the statement that under present conditions music finds no place for itself in the Protestant Church. He deals with Bach as one of the musically great but does not mention any other Lutheran as being great. Others have expressed regret over the contempt in which church musicians are held and have laid most of the blame on the musicians themselves. Archibald T. Davison dealt with the problem long ago in his book Protestant Church Music in America. In a personal letter, he also expressed his disapproval of degrees in church music because they usually leave their recipients with a badly deficient general background. This lack can be remedied only by a conventional course in the theoretical aspects of music, if at all. Observation affirms that sound taste in music comes the hard way, as do most other good things. Certainly musicians cannot be made by teaching people to memorize their part in an a cappella chorus, especially if the repertoire is partly questionable or spurious musically.

It seems that the Church has achieved an historic low not only in its music but also in its attitude toward music. Reflection upon that point causes one to ask what has become of the creative capacity and activity so characteristic of early Protestantism. Has the urge died? Have we as a Church looked backward so steadfastly that we have atrophied our ability to focus on the present and the future? Any student of musical history is aware that creativity in music is very intimately bound up with contemporary social factors. Inasmuch as the Church is traditionally conservative and backward looking, can we thank this attitude for strangling creative work by robbing it of the necessary contemporary justification? If the answer is yes, what can one do about it? Certainly we need not expect the Church to let loose of its historic anchors or to discard its carefully nurtured traditions. On ‘the’ other hand, we cannot prevent our generation from being contemporary in its thought or even forward looking.

In the first volume of the Craft of Musical Composition, by Paul Hindemith, it is stated that Bach is out of step with the present times. A sound understanding and appreciation of Bach’s prodigal genius and consummate craftsmanship is also expressed. The same volume indicates that the Church and creative music no longer seek each other’s company. We might answer that Bach was out of step with his own time. Otherwise such men as Telemann would not have outshone him. Hindemith’s organ sonatas are certainly contemporary and equally out of step with the decadent romanticism now current in the Church. Worse, they have no clear affinity with the spirit of the Church. Bach is consonant with the Church in spirit but out of step with current practice and appreciation. There is no current tide of Lutheran creativity. All things point to the consideration that there is no music so suitable to the Church as that which the Church produced, and in the absence of creative work indigenous to the Church in our time we must return to our origins unless we wish to sell our birthright for a mess of pottage.

Unfortunately such a proposition is sure to receive general agreement and equally certain to be impossible practically. Much that is said and written about Bach is purely fatuous. It is a combination of vanity, silliness, and hypocrisy. These attributes are present in much that is said and written about the chorales. Their present disuse is partly traceable to the constant revision of our hymnals to make them agree with the current secular mood and practice. In their present metrical form the chorales are so far removed from their original grace and character that the alteration amounts to a change of idiom. Their innate heaviness has been so exaggerated by their present form that only congregations with a preponderance of Germanic heritage can or will sing them. The struggle to have the chorales used sympathetically is being lost little by little. Terpsichorean hymns are displacing the older type.*

*The writer here refers to the chorale settings as they are found in the hymnbook of the U. L. C. A. and the N. L. C. A. In the Lutheran Hymnal, published in 1941 by Concordia Publishing House and adopted by the Synodical Conference of North America, the Lutheran chorales were introduced in their traditional rhythmic form. Editor.

Our vanity in the possession of such treasures reminds one of a man who owns a rare painting which he keeps hanging with its face to the wall. What we do not own spiritually we do not own in reality. Our position would be less ludicrous if we boasted more about what we use than what we own.

Now, if we raise the issue of the true spirit of Bach’s art, we are likely to come to the consensus of musicological opinion that Bach’s genius shows in the chorales and buds in the organ works, but flowers in the church cantatas. (Not that the technique of their composition is different from the secular ones.) And who of us uses them? Who of us could use them? Our trained church orchestras are very few, and these do not include the instruments without which the cantatas do not deliver what they were conceived to deliver. (Hayes, Old Instrumental Music.) Organ accompaniment is usually impossible because the organ has degenerated into a congregation of solo tones and will not show the contrapuntal lines clearly. Anyhow, such music is accounted as very hard to play because our organists are nurtured in the atmosphere of romanticism.

The situation ought to be redeemed somewhat by our well-known choirs and orchestras, but it is not. The directors of these choirs frequently go at their work as though Bach had written in the idiom of emotional romanticism. They fail to understand that the emotion of the words is written into the music, so they make a futile and destructive effort to gild the lily. It leaves one with the disheartening impression that for Bach to be accorded popular reception he must be misconstrued and mangled. And, again, no one who feels as Bach felt can ever forgive the director of the Philadelphia Orchestra for what he did to the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Worse, the direction of that number on the screen called forth movements characteristic of nothing if not of the snake charmer at a county fair.

What has been said of Bach is true, mutatis mutandis, of other worthy Lutheran church composers. Here is the basic problem of church music. In extenuation of such conditions is the fact that musicians today are more aware of the true intention of the classics than they were a generation ago. What they grasp today will be understood by the layman in the next generation. The director of a popular a cappella choir was asked recently why he did not use any of the classic choral polyphony. He answered that he did not know how to interpret it. His church-music degree did not include such things, and his failure hinged on his inability to romanticize choral polyphony. The concepts of woven rhythms, driving dissonances, and so forth, are foreign to him. The high school choir in the same town recently sang a difficult work by Palestrina and genuinely enjoyed and understood the effort. So the appreciation is not all on one side, and by the same token neither can leadership or acceptance come all from one side.

There is no question but that our standards have risen in the last generation. How did they come to be what they were?

The answer is involved in our cultural heritage. The patriarch of eastern Lutheranism was educated among the pietistic influences at Halle. Pietism is essentially a revolt against formalism which ignores the moral obligations of Christian life. The significant point is that being born with the spirit of revolt, Pietism never learned to judge the time when revolt was no longer in order. Thus it held within itself that which made it capable of going farther than many have been able to follow it. When antiformalism evolves into antiliturgism, then the moral obligation tries to balance the score by evolving into neopharisaism or a tacit doctrine of good works.

Pietism had not reached the seed-pod stage when it first reached our shores and began to function under pioneer conditions. One of its first acts was the arrangement of a church order which its later fruits tried desperately to destroy. Ultimately its own fruits came into direct conflict, which conflict well-nigh absorbed the total energy of the Church for a long while. We summarize in this fashion in order to point out that such could not have been the case had not the Church lost two very important factors in all cultural life. We refer to a sense of heredity and a sense of form.

Obviously it was impossible to maintain a sophisticated artistic heritage under the prevailing. conditions. Economic considerations forced the practice of union Lutheran-Reformed churches. That in turn compelled a dilution of Lutheran forms of worship. The failure of the mother church to provide a missionary for so long assisted in breaking any existing sense of genetic relation. Where liturgical properties collapsed entirely, people came to think of the service as a preaching service. The expression is still very commonly used in reference to a Sunday morning service. The laity lost the art of worship, and the clergy lost their understanding of the reciprocal relation and effect of the liturgy and the sermon. Indeed, having become suspect by virtue of having been the focus of a bitter fight, the service dropped out of catechetical instruction. Thus it lost its legitimate function as the form by which believers expressed the faith impressed upon them by the Catechism.

Having reached that point, need one ask the fate of music directly related to the liturgy or the church year? Emotional romanticism had been wandering around seeking just such a house newly swept and garnished; so, of course, it moved in.

Up to the present, individual congregations have been led to return to their heritage, but by and large there is nothing to report but slow and somewhat spasmodic progress. Much of the effort expended in reform has been and still is really an effort at Anglicanizing. We cannot feel that this move promises anything definite or permanent. The battle to gain correct orientation is not yet won. Observe that our first edition of the Common Service Book contained a setting of the service to a curiously modified form of plainsong. This was omitted in succeeding editions because it was little used and less understood. One gets the feeling that if we will not accept what we have, our alternative is to create a new culture or wallow in nonentity.

In a recent article in The Lutheran an author wrote with more heat than light on the matter of revising our hymnal. Looking over his sponsorship of hymns that are simply unsingable and hymns that just are not hymns, we can observe the shadowy form of the urge to popularize. It is hiding behind the skirts of that disreputable siren who advises that we draw men in even if we lose our soul in doing so. The Church has never been popular, and the popular has never been the Church. The answer does not lie in that direction.

The loss of the sense of form is rather more difficult to trace, but in evidence on more sides. Benedetto Croce’s theory of the aesthetic rests upon the proposition that form rather than content is the positive result of aesthetic experience or activity, and we use the word form as he uses it. The aesthetic issue of our impressions, be they religious or otherwise, appears as form. The content is what initiated the activity. It is sensibility to form in this sense that we are lacking. Modern painting gives us a feeling of being amorphous, as does much modem music. Both types of artistic expression can find a reception only among people who are oblivious to its being a hybrid of chameleon or jellyfish.

In the Church this loss appears to have come about by force of the same circumstances that deprived us of a sense of a heritage. If one starts at the beginning, he sees a service in which liturgy and sermon form a balance. It is to be hoped that the sermon has some elements of form such as introduction, body, and conclusion. But if not, the liturgy has the balance of its sacrificial and sacramental elements, and in addition the grave vitality injected into it by its responsive construction. Naturally, some of these values had to be lost in pioneer life. But farther back in the chain of cause-and-effect relations lies the fact that the Church itself has lost its sense of form. On what other basis could it later have tried to eliminate its liturgical heritage from its culture? And what other force would have seduced it so that it left itself open to charges of rationalism, humanism, syncretism, and what not, in spite of its clearly defined theology?

Now, the music of the classic Lutheran age may be melodic, homophonic, or polyphonic in its technical organization, but in any case it was born in an age that was acutely conscious of musical form along with other forms. It has very little in common with the culture described above. No wonder it is thought of as musicians’ music, just as organists who stick to the classics are considered musicians’ musicians.

The evolution of such conditions took place during the incumbency of certain generations of pastors. Responsibility for it rests upon them and upon those who guided or misguided their education. Amorphous education allows neophyte pastors to explore all the bypaths of philosophical and metaphysical probability before they have well learned their own theological heritage. What they need is a theological stake to which they can tie during their philosophical grazing. Often the curriculum is so crowded with more or less irrelevant courses that the student is never exposed to a systematic survey of generic conceptions. So he graduates wondering what he can believe and ignorant of what the Church does believe. Here is the root from which grow hazy doctrinal ideas and a paucity of something to preach about.

All this is not meant as a detour into the realm of education. It is a suggestion of how the clergy arrived at a state of mind which could tolerate, not to say entertain, theatrical music, attitudes, and antics as a substitute for genuine church music. It cannot be denied that the pastor’s acceptance of the theatrical was antecedent to the congregation’s. He did not know any better. He did not know good from bad. He was not taught in his home congregation by practice and precept, and the seminary did nothing to orient him.

The pastor’s lack of orientation manifests itself most consistently in his attitudes in dealing with music and musicians. His most offensive attitude springs from his lack of humility. He seems to feel that dealing constantly with inspired Scriptural truth has made him an oracle and paragon of erudition in all branches of human knowledge. He has never tried to handle notes and is not aware that to a musician there is something ultimate in their deportment and in their meaning when assembled. His truth is authentic and specific, but the form of truth encountered by the creative musician (or re-creative) in the pursuit of his task is a concrete indication that there is an ultimate reality behind the pastor’s teaching. Why is it that so many pastors are so inconsiderate and insensitive? They seem qualified by nature to stomp roughshod through a garden of roses and still expect the gardener to remain calm and gracious. One can only assume that they do not sense that there is a garden. Unfortunately, if the gardener gives vent to his exasperation, he is accounted hard to get on with and of unstable temperament. He lacks words to say that behind those roses is the mystery of all growing things. Another attitude implicit in some of the dealings between pastor and musician is that the work of the latter is unimportant. This attitude seems to grow out of the pastor’s insensibility to the preparatory and didactic effect of proper music. Perhaps it is true on both sides that, being specialists, both parties see things out of perspective. What the musician wants is not constant fawning or public approbation. It is rather freedom to work and to make the contribution that he can make.

Not the least of the problems in trying to keep a music program going is the frequency with which the musician encounters disorganization and lack of energy in the pastor. Even where the church year is followed, it is usually beyond human capacity to co-ordinate the music with the rest of the service. The reason is that the pastor does not know what text he is going to take for a given day, much less where he is going to take it. On one occasion three choirs in a church were started on the Easter music in the early part of February. That was after several futile efforts to get the pastor to say what he wanted. Three weeks before Easter the pastor presented the director with a completely unexpected program for the Easter season. That another program was in an advanced stage of preparation did not concern him. The director immediately dropped the rehearsed material without being able to say why to the choirs, which naturally angered the most faithful members. They lost interest. The second program had to be put on as best it could, which was far below standard. Then the congregation wondered aloud why the Easter music was so poor.

The limited understanding of the congregation is manifest nowhere so well as at an occasional wedding. Pastoral advice and professional suggestion together are frequently impotent to guide affairs into their proper channel. Music at a wedding can establish an atmosphere of dignity or reflect the gravity of the occasion in the lives of those involved. Too often it succeeds only in being trivial or morbidly emotional. Sometimes one infers that its purpose is to stir those present into a frenzy of erotic anticipation. The more successful such exhibitions are, the less is it in order to hold the ceremony in the church. The incident had better be staged in a ballroom. The light is better there, and one could be certain whether it is the ghost of Wagner or of Mephistopheles that hovers over the proceedings.

The elimination of such conditions will depend upon a long term of training for pastors and people. This training must be administered by persons qualified for the task by instinct, training, and experience. While so engaged, they must be provided a living equal to what they could get elsewhere. Here is where the practical begins to pinch.

Large congregations can afford the services of a competent musician without much question. However, most of the Lutheran churches are not that large and cannot stand the financial burden. Just what are they to do? Just what do they do?

Sometimes a pianist is given limited instruction on the organ, no instruction in church music, and turned loose to make the best of it. Here is one source, of the musical outlook against which we must contend. Maybe the church engages a person who has studied organ seriously. That is usually better, but the same problem exists in a lesser degree. What can the average church do?

The church at large has a great contribution to make through its schools. Many church schools have a music department. For good reasons they are organized so as to meet established academic requirements. They offer courses in PSM and soloist courses. Most of the soloist-course graduates never grace a concert platform after graduation. They become part of a given community and function according to local needs in the light of their training. Their training ought to qualify them for just such service as the Church most needs. If academic requirements stand in the way, they must be ignored or changed. It is the Church, not the academic world that is to be served.

It seems practical, then, that those who do not major in PSM in the music department of a church school should be trained with reference to the needs of the Church and the position they will find themselves in after graduation. Such schools as we have do not turn out concert artists. These must finish elsewhere. Majors in organ particularly ought to be given such instruction as will qualify them to become organist-directors in an average circumstance. Special effort should be made to equip them with a sound sense of taste. Usually the church that engages a good organist or director will not have sufficient funds to pay a second person of equal qualifications. Unequals cannot work well together in any case. Persons taking such a course should be advised that their best efforts probably will not earn them a sufficient living, but must be supplemented from other sources.

There is another contribution that the Church can make through its theological schools. Ministers whom the Church has not adequately trained cannot be criticized for their ignorance. When the home congregation enjoys low-grade music and the seminary ignores its responsibility in the matter, where is the student pastor to learn? It is not desirable that he entertain the same point of view as a good church musician. Certainly he should be able to recognize a hymn tune on sight. He should be helped to realize that music is a scientific art of great complexity about which he knows almost nothing and that what he likes in music may or may not be in place in the church.

The local congregation also has a practical contribution to make. It should wish to hold up its head in musical matters and be willing to assume the responsibility for its cultural position in the community. Of course, its business dealings with its hired servants should be above reproach. It must not force the musician to make bricks without straw.

Many choirs must rehearse in a clammy, cold church or else retire to a small room with inadequate light and ventilation. Here they struggle with poor resonance and an entirely different sort of accompaniment. They learn to base their tempo and dynamics on the percussion effects of piano hammers rather than by feeling and thinking as a unit. The result becomes obvious on Sundays.

The organist is in an even worse predicament. He can work at a piano in reasonable warmth or shiver at the organ, or ignore his own development and go to seed. Many churches where one hears the same things played much too often deserve worse than that. The piano is suitable for preliminary work on organ music, but mastery over organ technique can be gotten and held only at the organ. In summer the closed church is as hot as it is cold in winter. If the organist opens the windows when he comes in to work, the effect will begin to be felt about the time he is obliged to leave. The larger the church, the more that is true.

If the organist must supplement his income by teaching, it is imperative that he have conditions under which teaching and practice are possible. Otherwise he is limited to two three-month periods in the year. The organ cannot be mastered in that fashion, and the undertaking is too uncertain to be depended upon for income.

The congregation also has a responsibility to its members. It is not uncommon to find a church in which no one may touch the organ except the organist. The music committees seem to feel that the cost of running the organ is not justified and that using the organ may damage it. Such activity is something of a nuisance but bears some desirable fruit. It is a great aid to the sympathy with which the organist’s efforts are received. It helps organist and people to grasp each other’s point of view.

Moreover, an organ that is used fairly constantly does not develop action troubles within the normal life of its leathers. A little instruction and supervision may not produce organists, but it does help the congregation to become aware that they are being served by a competent person rather than by an exhibitionist or buffoon.

Remote as it may seem, one of the most trying problems in church music centers around the janitor, the coal bill, and the light bill.

A more serious problem is presented by the church organ. Many of our instruments are simply travesties or caricatures of their ancestors. We must stop buying romantic organs and return to the use of organs built for liturgical music. The music of Bach played on the average organ is a fiasco, and the common man is entirely correct in his rejection of it as it is too frequently played. It reminds one of a casualty at an old-fashioned taffy pull. The fine contrapuntal lines become lost in a muddle of sticky formlessness. How can one expect music created from conceptions of contrasted texture to be playable on an organ whose diapasons sound like factory whistles and whose mixtures sound like air-raid sirens?

Perhaps the most serious obstacle to reform is the church musician himself. With typical human perversity and unteachableness he frequently conforms himself to a woefully obsolete and outworn tradition. He may do so because he has not the character to act upon the basis of new knowledge in the presence of an opposing majority. Or he may seek to curry favor in the right places by sacrificing his musical integrity. Perhaps mental and spiritual inertia is a factor.

Whatever the case, if we wish to return to our heritage and receive a sympathetic hearing, we had better investigate how our music was sung or played by the people who wrote it. We must submit to the evidence rather than be guided by prejudice or preconception. Here is a basic problem concerning which this group should assert its leadership.

From The Musical Heritage of the Church, Volume II (Valparaiso, Ind.: Valparaiso University, 1946). Reprinted by permission of Valparaiso University.

For personal use only.