In the two lectures which I am to give this year on the service which musicology has given and can continue to give to the Church I propose to touch upon some points which I believe apply today in this country and which should be of interest to the Lutheran organist and choir director.

Let us understand first that musicology is that branch of learning which concerns every phase of music. Not only does it use its scientific tools to discover musical knowledge, but it tries to systematize it as well. There can be no question that every musician possesses a good deal of knowledge in more than one area of music. Moreover, much of the knowledge of a musician may be well organized. The musicologist, however, is “that strange specimen” who applies to music the same methods a mathematician or a chemist applies to his field. You may also call him a researcher.

Musicology embraces an understanding of acoustics, aesthetics, and of music pedagogy, to name but some of its branches. Musicologists are interested mainly in the history and literature of music, branches of musicological endeavor which have contributed to our now knowing a great deal more about the major and minor masters of the past than we used to know, for instance, fifty years ago. Yet right here we should state that hundreds of composers and—what is of special interest to us—hundreds of church-music compositions still lie undiscovered. Many others, even in modern editions, are already covered with dust on the shelves of European and American libraries. Some have been made available to practicing musicians, but many more are waiting for their redemption from dust. Many of these again could play a vital role in our church-music life today.

In the field of musicology we find as many differences in scholarly opinions as advocates of different theories in other scholarly endeavors. We have the type of musicologist who concerns himself with problems—to be sure of greatest importance—concerning Greek aesthetics or medieval notation; we have another who dwells on much more specific data of bygone epochs, data perhaps of philological nature. We have those actively engaged in a type of research which, by its very nature, can have but little to do with the burning questions of our musical life. I am making these distinctions to make sure that you understand my own interest in musicology to be entirely a part of my interest in applied music. Even though the concentration on such scholarly problems as are of urgent interest to present-day composers and performers may be considered as something of an unnecessarily practical or even limited outlook by the “ivory tower researcher,” yet I must maintain that musicology in America today must come to the creative and re-creative musicians lest they remain so much apart from one another that the interests of the scholars and the interests of the musicians would forever be hopelessly separated. My present subject is one which must take cognizance of practical matters. I go even further. In Germany we made hundreds of attempts to bring the discoveries of musicology into closer contact with life in the Lutheran Church, but the success was, on the whole disproportionate to the efforts. The reason was simple: the scholars rarely were sufficiently practical-minded to help the application of their findings along, and the musicians not only remained unaware of these findings, but often were not given the background necessary to study them. This is the reason why, though the German scholars had figured out how Bach’s works should be played and sung, the conductors and singers continued to play and sing them in their own way, and the results of research never came to interest the majority of musicians as much as they did other scholars and musicologists. The result, then, was “art for art’s sake” or “musicology for musicology’s sake.” I believe that instead we must see to it that, as I stated recently, “the threads that run from the library to the church, concert hall, and broadcasting studio should be kept running.” I am willing to continue to argue this point with musicians as well as with my musicological colleagues even though I have done so with only mediocre success before.

Musicology is a child of the nineteenth century. At first such men as Fétis (1784–1871), Kiesewetter (1773–1850), and Winterfeld (1784–1852) are associated with it. Fétis’s writings were of comparative nature. Unlike his scholarly forerunners, he did more than just describe musical history. He evaluated styles, and he compared them with each other. Kiesewetter, too, had a great part in making scholarly attitudes understood. In 1826 the Royal Netherlands Society of Sciences set this question for competition: What were the merits of the Netherlanders in music, principally in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries? This question incited almost a contest between Fétis, the Belgian, and Kiesewetter, the Viennese. The latter emerged the winner. On the other hand, Carl von Winterfeld, who was a distinguished jurist, was almost at the same time busily engaged in the exploration of the music of the sixteenth century. In 1834 he published his book on Gabrieli Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (two volumes plus one of musical illustration). The year 1947 was the centenary of the completion of his great encyclopedic contribution, consisting of three big volumes, Der evangelische Kischengesang und sein Verhaeltnis zur Kunst des Tonsatzes (1843–47). Even though some modern scholars have insisted that musicology began to blossom with Guido Adler and his contemporaries, yet I am inclined to give credit to men like Kiesewetter and Winterfeld. The latter most specifically may be given credit for having made the first contribution to our subject, “Musicology in the Service of the Church.” His many writings make him even today one of the greatest of the scholars in the field of church music.

One could treat our subject by giving a complete history of the contributions which creative musicians in the course of time have made to church music and by then correlating their output with the serious and often tragically futile efforts of scholars to redeem music from obscurity, to make it available in authentic editions, to give critical evaluations, and to pioneer for certain music, in their desire to make it functional in the church-music repertoire. Obviously we cannot do such a thing, which, even if we confined ourselves to Lutheran music, would represent material for an entire course of lectures. A great deal of church music from Luther to Bach, which constitutes the great heritage of the Lutheran Church, is available in many editions, and the musicologists of older generations who have contributed to this availability are numerous. Let me quote just a few of the standard works written on various phases of our field with which I believe a church musician must be familiar when he desires to drink from the fountain of serious research. Wilhelm Baeumker (1842–1905) wrote in 1862 and the following years his work of four volumes on the German Catholic Hymn (Das Deutsche Katholische Kirchenlied . . .), which in more than one respect is a standard work and has often formed a basis of departure for research on Lutheran music. In 1904 and the following years, A. Fischer wrote on the German Evangelical Hymn of the Seventeenth Century (Das deutsche evangelische Kirchenlied des 17. Jahrhunderts). Hoffman von Fallersleben wrote on the history of the German church song (Geschichte des Deutschen Kirchenlieds, 1832) up to Luther’s period. There is to be mentioned E. E. Koch’s “History of the Chorale” (Geschichte des deutschen Kirchenlieder und des Kirchengesanges . . . ) of 1847 and the following years, eight volumes in all, and the “Encyclopedia of Evangelical Music” (Encyklopaedie der Ev. Kirchenmusik) by S. Kuemmerle in four volumes. There is R. von Liliencron’s “Liturgical Musical History of the Evangelical Services from 1532 to 1700” (Liturg-Musikalische Geschichte der Ev. Gottesdienste von 1532 bis 1700), a work which was published in 1893. He is the author who also, in 1900, published his Chorordnung fuer die Sonn- und Festtage des Ev. Kirchenjahres. There is A. G. Ritter with his “History of Organ Playing” (Zur Geschichte des Orgelspiels, 14.–18. Jahrhundert), Rierschel with his book on liturgics (Lehrbuch d. Liturgik, 1900–1909), Schering with his History of Oratorio (Geschichte des Oratoriums), Leichtentritt with his History of the Motet (Geschichte des Motette). There are also other works, by Julius Smend, for instance, on the Evangelical Service published in 1904 (Des evangelische Gottesdienst). There are the contributions of Friedrich Spitta and his more famous brother Philipp Spitta, the author of the great biography of Bach. There is the old Tucher, now one hundred years old, on the Treasure of the Evangelical Hymn (Schatz des evang. Kirchengesangs, 2 vols.), and the more modern work by W. Stahl, which traces the historical development of the Evangelical church music (Gcschichtliche Entwickelung der Evang. Kirchenmusick, 2d ed., 1920). There is, in addition to Winterfeld, previously mentioned, Philipp Wackernagel with his bibliography of the history of the German chorale in the sixteenth century (Bibliographie zur Geschichte des Deutschen Kirchenliedes im 16. Jahrhundert), which was published in 1855, and with his other contributions. And there is the tremendous opus of Johannes Zahn that was published in 1888 and the following years, which traces the melodies of the German Evangelical chorale (Die Melodien der Deutschen Evang. Kirchenlieder, aus den Quellen geschoepft und mitgeteilt, six vols.). In addition to works by Westphal (Das evangelische Kirchenlied, 5. Auflage, 1918), Ph. Wolfrum (Entstehung  und Entwickelung des deutschen evang. Kirchenliedes, 1890), Fr. Zelle (Die Singweise des aeltesten evangelischen Lieder, 1899 to 1900), and many others. There are hundreds of articles in musicological periodicals that testify to the never-tiring efforts on the part of many German scholars to present the music of a glorious past to the musicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to congregations which, willing to accept this music, want to have their worship beautified and appropriately established in accordance with tradition.

It was the tercentenary of the Reformation in 1817 which gave the impetus to some of the earliest of these scholarly efforts. It is impossible here to retrace the preceding gradual degeneration to which Lutheran music had fallen victim in the course of the eighteenth century—a degeneration which, most conspicuously, did not exclude the chorale. In the time of Rationalism the efforts of philosophers and of many theologians were directed at a gradual liberation of the German Christians from the orthodox concepts of their forefathers. Instead of traditional worship general edification was desired. The Rationalists considered the chorales by Luther and his strong and vigorous composer-successors to be of lesser value than those by the minor masters who followed Bach and who used for their melodies texts which were less obliging liturgically and more general and neutral, and more acceptable often to Christians of many shades and varieties. They altered traditional tunes and created new ones which as a rule were of a conviction less strong and surely of a character less artistic. The musically substantial contributions of the second part of the eighteenth century do not lie in the field of Protestant church music, but in other fields. Even though at the beginning of the nineteenth century there was no dearth of hymnbook editions, yet these collections are replete with thoughtless alterations and abound in new melodies at a time when awareness of the tradition was fast diminishing.

Perhaps it required such a sorry state of affairs to make the thoughtful church-music lover eager for reform. The historians in remembering the Reformation believed that Lutheran church music could be given a new impetus by their going back to its very sources. They proceeded therefore to search for the music which had made Luther strong and successful. In 1829 Mendelssohn reperformed Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew. But three years later a new Prussian Agenda appeared, ordered by King Frederick William III, an agenda which found imitation in many churches throughout Germany. When the first scholars submitted the results of their research, new points of view were applied in the selection of music for worship, and problems of interpretation of melody, rhythm, and tempo were debated. A man like Schoeberlein, with his “Treasury of Liturgical and Congregational Singing, 1865–1872” (Schatz des liturgischen Chor- und Gemeindesangs, 3 vols.), made a basic repertoire of vocal music available to a broad public. He was a theologian deeply concerned about the state of music in his Church and sufficiently practical minded to help remedy it.

A great task of organization was awaiting those who were ready to counteract the degeneration of the period of Rationalism with appropriate reforms. The concern was to achieve on a larger scale what Mendelssohn had done with the St. Matthew Passion, to save what was worth saving of the church music written in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, to revive the choir and congregational music in the Lutheran churches, to inaugurate special singing societies, concentrating on the performance of worth-while church music. In 1883, owing to the pioneering of the old musicologists, the German Evangelical Choral Association (Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchengesangverein) was founded, which in our century included close to two and one-half thousand choral organizations, all of which were united in the aim to revitalize music in worship. At the same time the Bach Society and other organizations, like the Schuetz Society, not only were instrumental in the publication of authentic editions that could be used by practitioners, but also inaugurated festivals dedicated to authoritative performances of old music. And yet, despite all these organizational undertakings, it may be said that the German people at large as well as the German church musicians at large remained unaware of most of the musicological contributions, as we have previously stated. The question, then, arises: Shall these old and our new musicological efforts here continue to remain without influence on church music as we hear it today? Or has the time come when the musicians of the Lutheran Church take cognizance of their heritage? If so, what can we do to promote a better understanding of the past and to communicate it to those congregations which are willing to depart from the sweet, sentimental, and pseudoromantic slush that has gradually been sneaked into choral book and organ album?

We are by no means confronted with a hopeless situation. In the American Lutheran Church we have made excellent beginnings. We are gradually making available more and more good music, music that in years past had been relegated to obscurity. We discuss this music in seminars such as ours. We have some of our addresses printed and circulated. We are undertaking special steps to make the pastors aware of our musical heritage. We are likely to do much more constructive work in any one of these endeavors in the future. The outlook is encouraging. But as yet there are not available sufficient vehicles, in my opinion, for the full realization of our good intentions. We need a music journal which would give the leaders in Lutheran music ample opportunity for comments and discussion, which would serve as a stimulus to church musicians, and play a role scarcely to be underestimated in the raising of the musical standards within the Lutheran Church.

Second to that—and perhaps not even second—we need systematic and practical editions of the heritage of the Lutheran Church, the music of the masters who lived between Luther and Bach. Some publishers have made a start—Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, is most active in leading our return to artistic tradition. But it is obvious that we must interest many more publishers in many more publications that will benefit Lutheran worship. Some of this music has already been made available by musicologists in Germany and in German editions, but these editions are either no longer available or, if they are, are articles too expensive for importation. Furthermore, the work of the few remaining musicologists in Germany is likely not to be very fruitful within the next decades. There are some good scholars there still, but they are not granted much leisure time, a prerequisite for research. Then, too, there are forbidding financial conditions which will make it impossible for publishers to have this treasury edited on a large scale. [Since 1947, when this was written, these conditions have materially improved.] Here, however, we enjoy better financial conditions, awakened enthusiasm, as well as authoritative and well-trained guidance. Certainly there must by now exist an adequate understanding for a project which will gradually make the entire treasury of Lutheran church music available for the benefit of all Lutherans. I propose to point out some of the things that can be undertaken by musicologists in furtherance of this project:

The Weimar edition of Luther’s Works, Volume 35, contains Luther’s Lieder. We need that volume in an American edition. There are any number of studies on Luther and his relationship to music which should be made available in translation, including Aug. Jak. Rambach: Ueber Luther's Verdienste um den Kirchengesang (Hamburg, 1813). In order to obtain a clearer picture not only the strictly musico-technical investigations made known to musical circles, but also some studies made by literary historians and others, for instance, those made by Fritz Strich on the subject of the Renaissance and Reformation. The chorale melodies of the sixteenth century have been treated in a great number of special writings. Their rhythms, their melodic variants, their harmonic language all are a challenge to the church musician who does more than merely dish them out, who really knows with what he deals. The chorales as treated in the volumes of the Choralforscher and the hymnologists must be made known to our musicians, and they can be made known best by translations. Perhaps an encyclopedia of the chorale, summarizing the results of the earlier German scholars could be compiled so as to create a basis for choral studies here.

From the earliest days of Wittenberg to the culmination of Lutheran music in the work (over two hundred years later) of the cantor of St. Thomas in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach, there is a tremendous amount of music that we need at once. For instance, the songs for the public schools (Neue Deutsche Gesaenge fuer die gemeinen Schulen) published in 1544 by Georg Rhaw that throw light on one hundred twenty-three (123) chorale motets of the past, German motets in the first part of the sixteenth century. (This is volume 34 of Denkmaeler deutscher Tonkunst, edited by Joh. Wolf.) We need new editions of the chorale books of Rogier Michael, of Calvisius, of Eccard, of Scheidemann, of Vulpius. These are but a few names, but certainly some of them should be available, as, for instance, also Johann Crueger’s Praxis Pietatis Melica of 1647. the most important of all seventeenth-century chorale books, to give the church musician an adequate introduction into the mysterious workings of chorales, chorale editions, chorale settings, chorale translations, etc. Not to lose myself in a mass of detail, let me just offer a few suggestions with respect to attempts at reviving the organ music before Bach. The chief work for the organ of Samuel Scheidt, which for the first time appeared in print in 1624—his Tabulatura Nova—deserves wide recognition. The chorale variations for the organ by Paul Siefert, which have a tremendous coloristic effect, should be accessible. Scheidemann, the skillful improviser, has left us some excellent organ music to beautify our services. Somewhat better known than any of these is, of course, the great Pachelbel, who was active as organist at St. Stephan, Vienna, before playing the Sebaldus organ in Nuremberg. Pachelbel’s works, particularly his chorale preludes, have made him one of the outstanding masters of the entire organ literature. There are the chorale preludes of Böhm, which exercised a powerful influence on Johann Sebastian Bach, and the organ works of men like Weckmann, Reinken, Luebeck, Tunder, Buxtehude, and Bruhns—and yet, despite our familiarity with these names, how much of this most ingenious organ music of all times, all of it written for the church and most of it written for the Lutheran Church, have the Lutheran organists at their finger tips, have Lutheran congregations on their minds and in their hearts?

And then, to turn to some of the vocal music that is our heritage. Here no other name is as outstanding as that of Heinrich Schuetz. Known to many Lutheran congregations abroad, he is practically unknown here and almost relegated to the point of a minor composer in most books dealing with the history of music. And yet what inwardness of feeling, what piety, what daring, what pathos and expressiveness in his motets, vocal concertos, in the Cantiones Sacrae, and in his oratorios and larger works! I for one would advocate that in order to make Schuetz known, and as soon as possible, to all Lutherans, all that has been written about him, or at least most of it, should be translated into English. This would include contributions by Spitta, Pirro, Moser, Einstein, Schuh, and many others. I would at once forecast that if this were done there would come as a result a mighty Schuetz revival, such as we have witnessed in the twenties in Germany. For in Germany, too, there were times when the work of Schuetz had completely fallen into oblivion, but the organization of Schuetz societies gradually reinstated this great master of the baroque in his deserved place. Every year in Chicago there is a performance on Good Friday of the Schuetz Seven Last Words upon the Cross. It is given at the little Kenwood Church, and it is done on the basis of the Schirmer edition, which unfortunately is inadequate. But despite that fact it every year inspires worshipers anew, for it is done in that unpretentious, simple, and forthright manner which always affects the believers. This performance has always seemed to me indicative of how Schuetz would elicit a great response in America were he heard. But beyond this Passion work, and with the exception of a few choral items here and there, we hear little by Schuetz in America. We should hear much more.

And we should hear Scheidt, Hammerschmidt, Rosenmueller, Ahle, Schelle, Kuhnau, most of the Bachs, Weckmann, Bernhardt, Staden, Kindermann, and all the others.

Another matter which concerns musicology and church-music practice alike is that of performance. When musicologists had completed their task to bring to life the commanding works of the past, they simultaneously began to realize that their times, the nineteenth century and the beginning of our century, had lost the emotional and intellectual affinity to the rediscovered scores. Bach, like Handel, wrote scores mainly for his own use, and since the performances were directed and supervised by himself, the notational clue to them is often missing. When Mendelssohn revived the St. Matthew Passion, the question of authentic interpretation became at once a matter of debate. One hundred years after the creation of the great work one began to wonder how it had sounded under Bach’s own direction. Just as little as the great organ works of Bach were heard, and the many cantatas which he wrote, so insignificant appeared to be whatever tradition of Bach performance had been handed down from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.

We cannot adequately cover our subject without entering, even though it must be briefly, the issue of the so-called objective performance versus the subjective. In the extreme, these schools of interpretive thought would be mutually exclusive. The objective school has written on its banner strictest allegiance to the scoring of the masters. This motto sounds simple. Its realization is complicated. The directions which Bach or Handel left us for dynamics and for tempo are most of the time so meager that even if we should like to adhere with the greatest fidelity to their concepts, we often can only conjecture what they were in view of the lack of precise instructions. It is this meagerness of instructions which has given a great deal of publicity to the teachings and claims of the subjective school of interpretation. In the absence of authoritative comments by the old composers themselves, conductors, instrumentalists, and singers in the course of time have seen fit to choose their own dynamics and phrasings. This is the reason why we hear romanticized Buxtehude organ work, a dramatized Schütz Passion, a sentimentalized Bach cantata. It is the reason why the recitatives as they are sung today often reveal that their interpreters little understand the spirit of what they sing. And in chorus work the subjective approach transforms the neat outlines of the sixteenth-century choral music—as heard on recordings—into the excessive dimensions which in the late nineteenth century had become an ideal reflected, for instance, in Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand; the phraseology becomes modern, the dynamics brilliant, the rhythms highly accented, the tempo rubato, etc.

The battle between the objectivists and the subjectivists which began one hundred years ago still continues with the objectivists faulting their adversaries for a lack of scholarship and correct approach no less than the subjectivists accusing the objectivists of a lack of imagination. There can, however, be little question that a reconciliation of these points of view is possible. Our main demand must be that the performing musician concern himself with the problems inherent in the music of the past and with the score in the original. Surely, he cannot profess to be of service to the heritage of the Lutheran Church unless he himself is willing to diagnose all the works which he performs and to which he listens. On the other hand, there is, I believe, a limit as to how far we should go in enforcing the sound ideals of the old masters. One of my teachers more than twenty years ago, representing the dogmatic school of the extreme objectivists, refused to listen to any of Bach’s keyboard music unless it was played on the proper instrument, a harpsichord or a clavichord. This was, of course, a well-meant insistence, but in effect it was disastrous. Many of the pianists who came under his influence shied away from playing the old masters altogether since the number of harpsichords or clavichords was limited and since a learned musician would not deign to listen to a harpsichord piece played on a Steinway. Instead of Bach on the piano, there was practically no Bach at all. Cui bono?

If we concentrate for a minute on the Bach issue in this respect, we must realize that the economy of the instruments used for the performance of the cantatas or Passions is striking. With eighteen to twenty players available, Bach was perfectly satisfied, and if, of these eighteen, nine played wind instruments, he accomplished an ideal in sonority. As regards singers, Bach asked for a minimum of three for each part; and if he had four, he had all he cared for. Yet in the modern arrangements we scarcely, if ever, hear more orchestra players than singers. If we listen to the Christmas Oratorio, we have to use twice, three, or four times as many chorisrers as instrumentalists. The objectivists then complain that the polyphonic lines are no longer audible; they would like to see a proper co-ordination of vocal and instrumental forces reinstated, and we believe that such a demand is legitimate. On the other hand, the subjectivists point to the fact that as a rule the halls in which we perform the music of the old masters today are much larger. It is important, then, that we also take that point into consideration. It is even possible, without destroying the modern attitude of having a chorus that outnumbers the orchestra, to give the instruments a better opportunity in the performance. This can be done by way of seating arrangements and by placing the strings and woodwinds in front of the choir. With respect to the St. Matthew Passion, for instance, there is to be considered that here Bach uses a minimum of twenty-four players, for he demands two orchestras. Since normally his orchestra consisted of about twenty players, we see that it corresponded exactly to the ensemble of the singers. He had about eighteen singers in the Grosse Kantorei. When performing music by older masters, one certainly follows tradition when substituting or reinforcing voices that are either lacking or not too well represented. It is the merit of Felix Mendelssohn that in 1829, when reviving the St. Matthew Passion, he used a small group of sixteen voices, which was about the size employed by Bach at St. Thomas Church. Altogether, in fact, Mendelssohn displayed fidelity to the original. Mendelssohn liked the clarity and gracefulness which resulted from the application of such minute proportions as were historically authentic. Thus he became a real pioneer of an interpretation based upon true tradition.

Mendelssohn’s revival also obtained special significance inasmuch as it led shortly after his death, in 1850 (the centenary of Bach’s death), to the inauguration of a great publication project which finally resulted in a complete edition of Bach’s works. Similar projects were inaugurated for the works of Handel, Palestrina, Lassus, Mozart, Schütz, Purcell, and Haydn. We can say that in practically all of these projects subjectivity fortunately was given little consideration. Even though some of these editions are not all they could be, yet on the whole, a sufficient degree of accuracy was reached, which makes them most useful for reference. In his History of Musical Instruments, Curt Sachs, in comparing the problems of musical performance with those of painting, says: “An outline drawn by Raphael could not be colored with Cezanne’s palette. Only the old instruments, the original ones, can express the eighteenth-century sound ideals with appropriate colors. Harpsichords, gambas, and ancient organs are needed.” Although I believe that this is going too far and that if we enforce the use of the old instruments we would likely hear less old music than is heard anyway, yet insistence on the old instruments surely helps us to recognize the absurdities in many of the arrangements that have become popular and which, let us be honest, most people and, I fear, most musicians, lacking good taste, prefer to historically more legitimate renditions.

When talking about transcriptions, we naturally think of the many made by modern conductors and arrangers of Bach’s organ works. Judged by the objective theory, they are mere barbarisms, but they are also popular, and they can be well done. It is easy to argue that a musicologist should not advocate the scoring of chorale preludes for the organ by Bach for orchestra. It is just as easy to point out that since the public at large hears very few of them on the organ it is useful to transcribe them so as to make them play a more vital role in everybody’s musical experience. But speaking in favor of these transcriptions, I should also emphasize that it is necessary that they be done with the utmost care and artistic discrimination. The Hollywoodian excesses that we hear in those by both Stock and Stokowsky are offensive. But there are good transcriptions available. Why not have them if Bach himself went on record with his own arrangements which are beautiful examples of discriminating and sympathetic rescoring? By way of such detours we may eventually lead more people to desire the originals on the organ.

There is another problem involved. I have heard a great many performances, particularly of church-music works, on old instruments, for which the music was written. Yet the use of these instruments was far from guaranteeing an historically correct execution. It can be shown that even if we do play the old instruments today we shall scarcely ever approach them in the manner in which once they were approached. No matter how conscious a violinist is of his historical obligation, he will not play his instrument in the manner of the old violinists. He will have to make readjustments, and with these readjustments, he will realize his departure from his original aim, which was to play the composition in exactly the same manner in which the old composer heard it.

Continuing to harp on this subject, I must declare that I am not altogether opposed to the use of the romantic organs. We are all grateful to Albert Schweitzer for having reconstructed the Silbermann organ. We are glad that we possess the baroque organ at the Germanic Museum at Harvard University, which has been used for many recordings by F. Power Biggs. We rejoice in the Westminster Choir School organ in Princeton; in that of the Church of the Advent in Boston; in organs such as those built by Holtkamp in Cleveland. These are all instruments which, just like their European counterparts, enable us to perform the church music of Scheidt, Sweelinck, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Krieger, and Bach with all the transparency and clarity that should be theirs. Be that as it may, I certainly would not want our desire for reawakening the heritage of the Lutheran Church to go unsatisfied, for the spread of this heritage would be retarded by an insufficient number of such instruments. What I would rather advocate is that our organists should listen to these baroque organs when authoritative players express themselves thereon, reviving the old masters. In that way they would become style-conscious, and they would approach their romantic organs more correctly. It is an established fact—and we have spoken in our sessions about this before—that, given stylistic sensitivity, it is possible to play a baroque chorale prelude on a nineteenth-century organ very well. As in the case of the harpsichords and the orchestral transcriptions, so also in the case of the organ I believe that one does not need go so far as some of my musicological colleagues have gone. The implications of style are more important than the vehicle. The approach and attitude mean more than ludicrous historicism. Musicology must be applied, and its usefulness must be translated into terms which take on meaning here and now. Even the interpreter whose aim is objectivity finds himself sometimes on subjective terrain. It is then that he reveals his taste and his real background. If he has taste, he will show it in reconstructing an old work with all its idiomatic implications despite the fact that he has a modern instrument and goes to work in a large hall. As a matter of fact, the instruments and the hall to him might likely disappear into the background as he intends to discover the inner language and the intangibles which are never expressed in any notation. It is this discovery of the intangibles which distinguishes the creative and genuine musician from the unimaginative virtuoso and the nonproductive theorist whose interest in music so often and strangely limits itself to the matters surrounding the performance. Music, however, in my thinking means musical performance. All our musicological efforts should become tools of it.

From this discussion you organists and choir directors might easily receive the impression that the musicologists want you to be superhuman monstrosities; that we musicologists want you to have made a complete study of all the theories and practices of music, old and new; that we want you to be acquainted not only with your own field, but with all instruments and voices; that we want you to be not only able practitioners, but also excellent scholars with ambitious projects and a serious attitude toward the systematization of knowledge. However, we do realize very well that a church musician must impose upon himself those limitations which enable him to concentrate on the demands made on him in his particular position. Yet I also believe that the time has come when we must push forward toward the envisioning, as it were, of the desirable type of the Lutheran church musician of the future, and in the ideal state of church-music affairs this artist will have to be a person having scholarly interests as well as a keen sense for practical exigencies.

In anticipating the future type of the church musician we are making practical plans for the thorough and wise education of the young students who now have come under our influence. The manner in which we who teach and train those who now depend on our guidance will determine the future state and condition of church music. It is, then, up to us to set new standards of artistic integrity which include greater thoroughness than has been the daily order in the past. Our education must include intensive orientation in the matters of history and literature of music.

I wish that every one of you could have become acquainted with an artist who until very recently lived in Germany, who, to me, has always appeared as the very fulfillment of the type of personality that would constitute the church musician of the future. This man, to me, was the embodiment of what I should like to call a Künstlergelehrter (artist-scholar), in other words, a man in whose outlook and in whose character the prominent good qualities of the artist and those of a scholar were united. In 1903, Karl Straube became organist of St. Thomas in Leipzig and thus a successor to Johann Sebastian Bach. He was a musician whose work as an artist was all the most ambitious scholar could desire. The eleventh successor to the Bach office, he did not limit himself to his duties at St. Thomas Church. He was the director of the Bachverein, a mixed-chorus society of Leipzig. He was an excellent teacher of the organ. His position at the Conservatory of Leipzig ranked high. He was a conductor of the choral concerts at the famous Gewandhaus, and he finally headed the Institute of Church Music (Kirchenmusikalisches Institut). Having survived the storms of the Third Reich and the Second World War, he was, until his death in 1950, still in Leipzig and still actively engaged in the study of music as a musician who never ceased to be a student.

Straube was the product of a family of pastors and musicians. His father was a harmonium builder, his grandfather at one time a composer of songs. His mother, an Englishwoman, played the piano and was pupil of the distinguished Sir Julius Benedict. Straube automatically tended toward music as a profession. Born in Berlin, he moved already at an early age in the circles of the musical intellectuals and, an example of intellectual precocity himself, began to view all his responsibilities with a critical attitude. Simultaneously he developed an unquenchable thirst for musical knowledge. Even at a time when he was certain to choose the career of a church musician he studied Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruckner, and never ceased to penetrate also into those scores which he did not need to know for professional reasons, but from which he would benefit for his general understanding of music.

Straube, while having a dislike for methodical training on the organ, seized every opportunity to listen to great organists. But with equal interest he heard opera; he watched Muck and Weingartner, in the Berlin Singakademie and Philharmonie; he heard the great violinist Joseph Joachim and enjoyed the performances of great choral works by Siegfried Ochs. In the Berlin Cathedral (Dom) he heard Albert Becker. Later he was completely fascinated by the personality of Hans von Buelow. When in 1895—Straube was then twenty-two—Heinrich Reimann was looking for an organist for the famed Emperor Wilhelm Memorial Church (Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche), he could not think of anybody more versatile in the art than, and superior in expression to, Karl Straube. At that time Straube was not only an already remarkable technician, but he also knew almost all of Bach’s organ music and much of that of Bach’s predecessors. He saw eye to eye with Reimann in the interpretation of old organ music, which both of them played with all the lush colors of the Wagnerian orchestra, both eager to exploit their instruments to the utmost, both, consequently, indulging in the luxurious sonorities and the coloristic effects of the post-Romantic school.

But it was precisely at that time that the awareness of the past began to increase in Straube. His alert and versatile mind soon began to search for the truth of musical tradition. Now he read not only scores, but also books. Through the books he tried to come ever closer to the spirit of the musical works which he had studied. A period of reinterpreting Bach set in. He tried to solve the problems inherent in Bach scores in a manner completely different from the way in which he had started and through which he had made a success. He soon recognized that neither the bombastic grandiloquence of Liszt nor the color orgies of Wagner had anything whatever to do with the intimacy, the sincerity and the piety of Bach.

Far from limiting himself one-sidedly to old music, he at the same time reviewed what the modern composers of his epoch had to say. His friend Reimann had called the Max Reger E Minor Suite, Op. 16, an unplayable work. Demonstrating that it could be played if it could be understood, Straube scheduled it in 1897. His playing of this suite was the beginning of a close friendship between himself and the composer.

Slowly but systematically Straube rose to the position and the reputation of Germany’s organist No. 1. His digging into the past treasuries of the Protestant Church and his inquisitiveness for the new made him of all the organisms of his time easily the one with the greatest repertoire. He taught even Reger how to play the organ, and with the spontaneous spark of his untiring creativity, Reger, in turn, inspired Straube. Straube became a revolutionary. He insisted on obtaining a new organ from his congregation in order that he might be able fully to reveal the beauty of Reger’s “Wie schoen leucht’t uns der Morgenstern.” When the congregation declared that no funds were available for a new instrument, he himself went out to get the money from other foundations, but he ended up by paying a considerable sum of the expenses out of his own pocket so that the organ could be altered.

Straube brought the Bach Society, which had been founded in 1857 by Spitta, Herzogenberg, and Holstein but had almost disintegrated, to a new flowering. He performed Bach’s Passion According to St. John. Having studied meanwhile the history of the work, he emerged in the performance as a purist. Even though he used, instead of the harpsichord the piano, and instead of the lute the harp, he left the orchestral proportions untouched, which meant, for instance, that he retained the clarinets, which had been customary in performances and were then generally considered necessary elements in the “beautification” of the work. Still, all in all, Straube wavered between a musicological attitude and his love of Liszt and Wagner, whose creations proved tempting indeed.

With a fidelity to the work in question unrivaled at that time except perhaps by Hans von Buelow, whose spirit he followed, Straube proceeded to put into his scores precise instructions of phrasing and dynamics. His idea was to eliminate doubts as much as possible. Like his idol Buelow, he was always ready to overlook details in order to arrive at the general mood in the great lines of the works. The Mendelssohn tradition had looked upon Bach arias as music chiefly sweet, happy, calm, dignified, and romantic. At the first Bach Festival in Leipzig, Straube presented the St. Matthew Passion in his own vigorous interpretation. There was more drama in the arias, and the music was altogether stronger, the “turbae” choruses being executed in a dramatic and realistic manner rather than in the smooth and elegant fashion which had been the Mendelssohnian trademark.

At this point of his career, Karl Straube recognized the urgent necessity for the complete re-evaluation of Bach. He removed Bach’s organ music from the sphere of the sentimental romanticists to the more rational of the modernists. He refused to make his original attitude, which was post-Romantic, to stand in the way of his better understanding of Bach’s work. He was ready to change his mind. Thus his Bach festivals turned out to be a series of glorious performances of Bach’s music. They reflected the serious and scholarly attitude and devotion of which Straube was capable because of the revision of his principles.

Indeed, the flexibility of the Straube mind and his sensitivity were paid tribute by the fact that he who had come from Reger and who had once approached the organ in a Liszt-Wagnerian manner was soon elected the leader of the new organist movement toward the principles of which he had made, so to speak, unofficial contributions long before it was launched. This movement found that the registrations and the spirit of the baroque organ could well be restored. In the pursuit of this musicological attitude Straube openly rejected his earlier editions of organ works. He undertook a study of the organ of Michael Praetorius in Freiburg and that of Arp Schnitger in Hamburg. He gradually broke entirely with his past as an organist, and he declared that the organ performance of church music had to be reconcilable with historico-stylistic conditions.

I hope that even this brief discussion of Karl Straube and his ideals makes it clear that the combination of scholar and artist is not just a pipe dream. The Straube case makes clear that whenever artistic imagination is coupled with scholarly integrity, problems concerning the revival and the development of church music need not worry anybody. It is obvious that wherever such a case as that of Straube exists the research of musicologists will not go unheard by practitioners. Musicians groomed in the Straube spirit have tasted the obligations of the scholar. They will arrange and edit old music as it should be done. They will cultivate a broad attitude toward repertoire; they will organize programs which, as those of the Thomanerchor used to do, draw from many areas of choral music. Twenty years ago Straube was the first to perform The Art of the Fugue and, in 1928, The Musical Offering. The baroque organ, which he promoted together with Willibald Gurlitt, Guenther Ramin, and Hans Henny Jahnn, remedied many mistakes that, owing to the old romantic approach, were committed by organists in Germany and in other countries.

In Straube's dedication of the new series of Alte Meister des Orgelspiels, addressed to the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Leipzig, he not only admitted his old errors, but with intellectual clarity and courage explained his changed attitude. He declared that his original approach to the first collection, then thirty years old, had been the result of an emotional romanticism that he now found necessary to discard since it was inadequate for the rendition of old church music. He stated that musicological experience had taught him the necessity for understanding styles and ideas apart from their environments and their idiomatic implications. Such an outlook, he argued, must always benefit art, and art, through such an outlook, can only gain in depth and breadth.

If musicologists, then, are to benefit church music in a practical way, and if church musicians endeavor to apply the research of the scholars to the practice of their profession, we need the same attitude that Straube took. If we can develop this attitude, we may expect new impulses, and our modest beginnings may eventually lead into a greater epoch of musica sacra.

From The Musical Heritage of the Church, Volume IV (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1954). Copyright Concordia Publishing House. Printed by permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Concordia Publishing House.