The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech; and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. Psalm 19:1–4 a.

The whole immense universe of God’s creation is presented to us by the psalmist as the visible and concrete evidence of divine glory to all men, all nations, and all tongues to see and to admire. This grand picture is a communication of the glory of the Creator. No less than five times in these three and one-half verses are terms used which emphasize communication: declare, show, utter, language, speech. It is significant that not in any way is this message given us in human words. Words are only poor substitutes for the eloquent language of beauty. Man has always realized that and has always tried to match in some way his words to the beauty which he sees. Music and all the arts, if properly understood, are the reflection of God’s glory in the heart and voice of man. The appreciation of beauty in this world is therefore a part of that ethos of the Christian life that comes from the realization of the grace of God in creation: and this ethos is, of course, possible only in the life of man who can see this world in the light of redemption.

In the constant battle between man as a sinner and a violator of God’s orders, and man as a believer and a happy citizen of God’s cosmos—and this is the battle within man—in this constant battle we can see the debate of our times about the norms of art. The purely subjective feeds on the nature of man, whereas the truly objective tries to correct this. The reaction to the subjective perversions of beauty has led to pietistic and puritan sterility in art. The reaction of natural man to the bonds of Christian ethics has resulted in unnatural revolt to norms and orders of creation. It is our duty to understand the language of the universe as the psalmist speaks of it, as it is our duty to correct and to improve where we see that the language of art transgresses the boundaries of nature’s glory.

In the question of the relevancy of art in our time we might ask: Has our time enforced its norms and standards in the music of our day, or has the music of our time maintained its own norms? We realize that the very words “norm” and “standard” are obnoxious to the free artist. These words sound too much like clanking chains and prison doors. An artist can get claustrophobia just hearing the word “norm.” He will say: What power, what society, what being has a right to dictate to me what my art ought to be! It must be clear to us that the true norms of art do not set laws. Yet no artist escapes completely the kind of norm his time and his environment and society sets. Every true artist will differentiate conscientiously between norms as historically evident rules and customs, and norms that are inherent in art itself. The historic norms are like the rules that established monocular perspective in painting at about the same time when music was limited to the major and minor modes. These standards are not valid for all times; they are limited, and they tell of a phase in the development of history. They are relevant to a time or phase. The true norms, however, are free of such relativities. Just as truth in religion cannot be relative, so norms are free and make an artist free.

In our time and day the relevancy to music, or the relevancy of music to our time, should be evidenced in a democracy dedicated to the expression of the liberated spirit of the artist, free from and, where necessary, in protest against all trends. It is the need of our time and indeed very much of our culture that the artist born and bound at the same time in the true norm learns to express the very essence of things. Genuine norms are to be discovered in the things themselves (in God’s creation). Art, true and honest, deals with an object in the spirit of truth. All this, however, in the relation of things and art to man, that is, to man true to himself. The essence of man is to be human; anything more or less than human is nonhuman. This is an illustration, also, of the norms of true art. True art is bound by the essence of the object. Works of art are greater than any technical product. A hammer is to serve its purposes, or it is no hammer. But in a work of art, the whole man is addressed by the true essence of the object presented. And because art is relevant to man, true art addresses true man, that is, man true to his essence as a human being. This makes it easier for us to see a horizon. The scope of man is wide and far-reaching. No one can estimate the height and depth and width of man, and no one can exhaust the concept of art of man yesterday or today, not to mention the future. But we can and must attempt to say whether or not the ideal is approached in a specific case.

Criteria that are helpful in evaluating art are hard to establish. Let us say that in any work of art something spiritual-mental becomes sensible, that is, can be seen or heard. The ideal would be that the thought can be fully apprehended. Wherever this relation is not evident, the work of art loses some of the essential value it ought to have. Sometimes the transfer is completely absent and the claim to being art is ridiculous. This can happen in various ways, and the ignoring of these dangers is characteristic of much of the work done by artists in our day. The essential value of a piece of art is destroyed or at least lessened when, for one thing, certain component parts act or appear independently of the whole of the work. Any facet of the opus making itself free from the body of it, and existing by and for itself, is against the nature of art. Again—and this is similar to the defect just mentioned—it is possible that the technical part, the technical excellency of the work, let us say, becomes the end and not a means to an end. In this case also the formal makes itself independent and destroys the spiritual. It is even possible for the spiritual to dominate sufficiently to destroy the formal and sensible.

No single aspect of a work of art can exist for itself, for its own purpose, without affecting the essential beauty of art. Few realize this in our day, and there is little hope that it will be recognized in the future; it is, therefore, in this respect that we must view our time in relation to art. We say this without condemning our time. Our time is more concerned with science. Art is only a minor department, and the Muses appear only amusing to our day. The Muses serve the tastes of man, and here we are back at the beginning again. Our time also claims to have norms and standards, and these standards are proclaimed with a stubborn insistence that “you cannot argue about taste.” Taste rules and will not be cross-examined as to whether it is good or bad. The taste of our day takes refuge in a “fifth amendment.” Taste has the majority on its side, it serves the masses. And so a modern university can present its band at half-time in a football game in the formation of the mushroom cloud and cyclotron with appropriate visible and audible effects, and who is offended? The public sees nothing of the irrelevance and even gross inappropriateness of the thing, especially if the show includes the patriotic motif and does homage to the men who “gave their all.”

Neither technical perfection, nor success (hit tune), nor the grotesque of the accidental dadaistic art, nor the appeal to the inhuman in man is art in any sense. All these things destroy, detract, defame, desecrate! Only there where music or any other form of art succeeds to be to the ear of man (man in the sense of the essentially human) a visible or audible representation of the thoughts and the spirit of man and where man is enabled by the very presentation to translate back again into the spiritual the sounds and sights—only there is art relevant to man, only there is the essence of art. Only when art is a reflection of the message given to man in the heavens of God, only there is the essence of art.

Thus the artist of today is free to be himself and to give himself as a noble and high servant to mankind only when he realizes the norm that is essential to his art. The interaction: Object to spirit of man, and spirit of man to object, gives the artist all the freedom he wants and yet preserves him from the temptations that beset him on all sides.

And so it is finally most necessary that we in our day find the true norms for our work as artists and musicians. It is important that we recognize the fact that God still loves His creation, His cosmos, and that in this world He has given man, who discovers himself insignificant and irrelevant wherever he faces the beauty of true reality, a revelation of his love in the redemptive work of His Son. He who knows of God’s love toward him is the one who does best battle the tendency of his own heart to pervert truth and to blaspheme nature. The true norm of art will honor God in His creation and will do so with a heart humbly cognizant of God’s love toward him.

Theo. Hoelty-Nickel

From The Musical Heritage of the Church, Volume V (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1959). 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.