In his comments about the blessing that contemporary music had received in Pius XII’s encyclical, the Mediator Dei, Virgil Thomson wrote in 1948: “No major musical power is today vowed to musical reaction save the Soviet government and possibly the American films.”^[1] Since neither American film nor Soviet music has made a consistently notable contribution to the music of our time, Mr. Thomson’s observation is still quite possibly true.

The unfortunate fact is, however, that neither has the church made consistently notable contributions to the music of our time, in spite of official Catholic sanction (with certain reservations), and in spite of the fact that Protestants and even Lutherans today find it fashionable to agree that contemporary techniques should be admitted to church composition. The contemporary musical world has demonstrated that it can get along without either the Soviet government or the American films; we are not seriously concerned about them. But as church musicians we regret that the church should get along without contemporary music; and we regret, too, that contemporary music should get along without the church. In part, this concern has a historical basis: the realization that the great religious music of the past was always in the front ranks of contemporary art.

This is the one constant pattern that is discernible in the historical periods that saw the production of the great masterworks of religious music: the continuous exchange of material and device between sacred and secular usage. Under the circumstance of one common, all-inclusive style, sacred and secular music were able to borrow liberally from one another. The ars nova of the early 14th century was primarily a secular movement, but by the middle of the century the motet-ballad style had made its appearance in the church. Luther’s recommendations, including the famous one about the church’s proper attitude toward using the devil’s better tunes, instigated an upsurge of activity within the Lutheran Church. When, through the decisions of the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church attempted to “purify” church music, some of her better composers turned to the marketplace and were provoked into the invention of secular opera. And, in turn, the real originality of 17th-century operatic style caused its adoption for religious usage within 25 years and introduced some of the chief stylistic features of the Baroque era. More recently the modernization of plainchant in the Catholic Church made possible the writing of much of the music of the French Impressionists, although it has failed to influence the production of a first-class piece of church music. In our own century the musicological restoration of the music of Machaut and Dufay has influenced the stylistic practices of such modernists as Webern and Stravinsky.

While the secular music of our century has continued to draw and enlarge upon the materials and devices of both sacred and secular music of all periods, most of the sacred music of our time has persisted in literal simulation of merely some sectarian aspects of the whole art. By the failure of our contemporary religious music to employ the real idioms of contemporary music and by its reluctance to participate in the adventures of 20th-century music, sacred music has come to exist outside the mainstream of contemporary music, tolerated by the musical world as a necessary but insignificant adjunct of the art.

An erroneous conception of what constitutes sacred and secular style has been one of the symptoms afflicting, and limiting, the creative efforts of our religious composers, with the result that much of our contemporary religious music making is, like that of the 19th century, often timorous and unimaginative. It is marked by a sobriety and inexpressiveness that belies our observation of the sacred injunction to make a joyful noise unto the Lord. At its very best it is respectable, but its respectability is induced often by scholarly rather than artistic considerations. The best composers of our time have certainly tended to reserve their more joyful noises for secular occasions.

Although we may acknowledge the fact that there is no basis for such categorization between the sacred and the secular in any of the arts, in practice we have preferred the more comfortable, less problematical, condition of surrounding ourselves with the sacred musical treasures of the past. In doing this we have sought to avoid the crucial problems of contemporary church music.

It is not our main purpose here to formulate an indictment against our situation with regard to contemporary music in the church. The problem is simple to present, and it is as easy to oversimplify it as it is difficult to offer a solution. For the real and final solution to our musical problems is not a purely musical one. With exceptional insight Paul Henry Lang has written: “. . . the problem of church music is the problem of the church itself. We may give correct and highly artistic performances of the great church art of the past, and thereby accomplish a serious cultural deed, but religion is neither retrospective nor archaic, it must be living to inspire a living art.”^[2]

Professor Lang is writing here about the state of church music in the 19th century, but the principles he affirms are completely relevant to the church and its art in any period of time. The problems we face in American Lutheranism today, even in the area of church music, will not be solved if such vital and living spirituality does not exist. And this spirituality, which alone can engender a live spiritual art, is never a conscious attainment for the individual artist by his own reason or strength.

It is beyond our powers, then, to legislate or to pass resolutions about how to write contemporary religious music or to determine along what lines it should develop. We cannot quickly devise by formula something which can be built up only slowly and with much patience; and we cannot impose self-consciously upon music something that can come only from within. The contemporary religious composer’s problems will not be solved by a sudden U-turn decision to write his sacred music in the style of modern secular music, for personal style will also come from within. Music written in a contemporary language can be communicative only if its composer speaks that language with naturalness and conviction and without artificiality.

The problems of the church composer today involve also a great deal more than a simple concern for the practicalities of writing and performance. They are intricately involved with the general and specific problems of contemporary art and culture. We cannot evade these interrelationships anymore than the contemporary church can evade or minimize the difficulties under which it labors in our society. The so-called “mass public” is something new on the cultural scene, uniquely of the 20th century, having been created artificially not only by mass means of communication, but less directly by other forces—political, economic, and social, as well. Since this mass public is basically traditionless and rejects the real values of “high art,” a kind of cultural mediation is imposed by which the forms of high art are imitated and exploited in a zeal to make them more palatable.^[3] The process of satisfying the cultural needs of this mass public has become in our country a major business enterprise. This popularizing of culture has come to include certain phases of contemporary art, so that Picasso and early Stravinsky, to mention two obvious examples, have become eminently salable. But there is little evidence that such mass exposure has improved the real quality of our culture. And since the values of art have come more and more to be measured by their salability, the entire process has made the position of the serious creator more difficult.

Our musical predicament, therefore, whether in or out of the church, is part of the problem of modern culture in general. The purely musical problems of the church composer are basically the ones faced by other composers. The composer of today, writing in the “advanced” idioms, soon discovers that his music has very little to do with the “taste of the majority,” on which most of our contemporary organized musical life is based. Thus the problem of communication, of bridging the gap, between the composer and his hearers is a particularly vexing one during a period such as ours that has seen the revision of the whole syntax of music. The American composer Roger Sessions recently described our present situation when he suggested that “. . . music is undergoing one of its major upheavals, at least comparable to that brought about by the discovery of polyphony in the ninth century, or by the whole set of changes which took place roughly around the sixteenth. Future historians may conceivably find that the present transformation is more profound than either of the other two.”^[4]

These changes, Mr. Sessions seems to imply, define the nature of the profound challenges that meet the composer of today, making necessary therefore “a searching reappraisal not only of traditional ideas, but even of those underlying assumptions which have always been taken for granted as irreducible; for such a situation brings with it inevitably a completely new set of requirements.”^[5]

While some of us may feel that Mr. Sessions’ analysis is rather a sweeping exaggeration, it is evident that no real composer of today can fail to reflect, in some measure, these changes that characterize 20th-century music. The harmonic and contrapuntal anachronisms found in some of our contemporary church music betray a shallow innocence of what has happened to music in our times. The implication here is not that the composer will follow blindly the whims of every current fad, nor that he must be brought into conformity with contemporary styles at the expense of his individuality. On the contrary, if he is a writer of high individuality, this problem will not exist, and his language is more likely to be formed in the idioms of the more advanced techniques of his day. An assumed individuality that is oblivious of the 20th century constitutes a brand of radicalism that amounts simply to an easy escape from the critical problems of contemporary music, and too often such radicalism is grounded in ignorance of these problems. If we are going to reject the techniques of contemporary music, we must have a better reason for doing so than for the reason of our inexperience with their various facets or ignorance of how these techniques can be used. There is nothing wrong with rejecting the composition methods of the 12-tone technique or of serialism or neoclassicism; but this rejection should be made on the basis of a working knowledge of them that can come only with genuine and serious efforts in the actual manipulation of the musical materials.

Thanks to the labors of the musicologists, the composer has available today a greater variety of idioms and formal procedures than at any other time. Most of the procedures of contemporary music can be categorized roughly under the following three classifications:^[6]

1. Neoclassicism, which had its beginning in the 1920’s with the “Back to Bach” movement. Stravinsky and Hindemith were then its chief practitioners, but the aesthetic, which is basically a conscious, personal transformation of an established style of the past, has had its influence on much of the music written within the last 30 years. The approach has come to embrace any era of music history: neo-Renaissance, neobaroque, neoromantic, neoimpressionism, and more frequently even neoexpressionism.

2. Dodecaphonism, which includes any music written with the conscious aim of avoiding the sounds of tertial harmony, or tonality as it is conventionally understood. This is most commonly achieved by the utilization of some form of serialism such as Schoenberg’s 12-tone system. Most of the younger composers of today employ some form of serialism with varying degrees of rigorousness.

3. The use of folk materials, sometimes exotic, either as quotation (as with Charles Ives) or as raw material (as in Bartok and Copland). This divergence of modern style is very apparent, and sometimes confusing, to us today. But with closer inspection these styles become more similar than dissimilar, and we may eventually come to see greater similarities than the glaring differences that often appear on the surface.

There are other, more general, tendencies that characterize the music of our time. There is the widespread urge to control and predetermine every aspect of a piece of music (this is one of the main purposes of employing the serial techniques); the exaggerated belief in the efficacy of musical analysis (as though the music were written with analysis as its objective); and the denial of the validity of what is called “expression” in music (which accounts for the sterility of much neoclassical music). These are attitudes for good or ill that govern the workings of many of our contemporary composers.^[7] Hindemith’s attempt to “prove” musical values on the basis of the overtone series, and the numerous so-called “systems” of composition, are all symptomatic of an age that often equates scientific quantity with aesthetic quality. These are factors, however, that relate to principles and criteria rather than to results. We must not be misled in our criticism of these principles no matter how defective they may seem. Quite unsound principles have often proved most fruitful as working bases for a composer.

This is, then, the contemporary musical scene in which the composer of today, including the church composer, finds himself, and to which he must naturally tend to orientate himself. While the contemporary Lutheran composer has many problems in common with all contemporary composers, and with all contemporary church composers, he also has particular problems that relate to his own situation. These problems, as we have tried to show, are not really separable from the mainstream of contemporary music.

In spite of some of the disparaging allusions that have been made here about our tendency toward overveneration of our glorious past and our unfortunate discrimination against the present, it is possible that the Lutheran church composer is in a comparatively favorable position to produce significant church music today. But to do so he will need to cultivate a proper perspective toward contemporary music on the one hand, and toward the Lutheran traditions on the other. This is possible precisely because we have a tradition by which we can identify ourselves. We are not traditionless as is the new mass public in our society today. We are not traditionless as are many of our artists in the secular field who have lost a sense of spiritual, hence also artistic and intellectual, security. We have, moreover, reestablished contact with this tradition under the leadership of informed musical scholarship.

While we must have composers who are properly oriented toward today’s scene in its many aspects, we must also acknowledge the necessity for a whole musical superstructure within the church, which is a prerequisite to the production of significant original church composition. We must have the musicologists who point to our heritage, and who lead us to a more definitive understanding of it; we must have the music editors who will provide the materials that make it possible to perform and hear the music of our heritage; we must have the publishers who are willing to risk publication of music that is not easily disseminated to a large purchasing public; we must have in our worshipers a sense of liturgical decorum that will admit for church usage the highest art as an expression of man’s devotion to God. And we must have the conductors, instrumentalists, singers, and teachers who are willing to expend time and effort in learning and understanding unfamiliar idioms of the past and, especially, of the present.

Having established such a superstructure (as I believe we have), and having reestablished contact with a valid artistic heritage, we must then also assume the proper perspective about that tradition. To state it briefly, we must cease to regard it academically. An awareness of tradition does not simply imply an antiquarian preoccupation with our musical past, or an imitation of past models in some pleasing form of archaeological reconstruction. Our Lutheran tradition, as the traditional in any art form, has more to offer than a mere means which can be imitated in some form. The real sense of tradition consists, not in preserving a form or a set of forms, but in keeping alive an interest in the solution of contemporary problems in contemporary terms and materials. The great men who created the Lutheran tradition—men like Luther, Walther, Schütz, Scheidt, Buxtehude, and Bach, were men who solved their musical problems in terms that were relevant to their own contemporary situation.

Our tradition, any tradition, is timeless, but the surface aspect by which this tradition is transmitted must be a constantly changing one. The surface aspect, that is, the form, the style, the instrumentation, the materials, and their treatment, the sounds that the music makes, will be rooted in and reflect the time in which the work is produced. As James Johnson Sweeney has written of all the arts in the contemporary scene: “. . . from period to period, from day to day, all art that is not plagiarism must be different in surface aspect from all art that preceded it. And to keep familiar with its living changes we must keep in touch with them. If we do not, we will always be surprised at what has taken place in our absence.”^[8]

The next step forward in music that is destined for church usage, even in the Lutheran Church, is full employment of contemporary techniques. And it will be the truly contemporary composer who will be at the same time the real traditionalist. Our Lutheran tradition is wide enough and vital enough for living composers who can write living religious music for live worshipers.

Cited References and Notes

1. Virgil Thomson, Music Right and Left (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1951), p. 200.
2. Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1941), p. 1008. Italics R. H.
3. William Phillips, “The American Establishment,” Partisan Review. XXVI, No. 1 (Winter 1959), 107–116.
4. Roger Sessions, “Song and Pattern in Music Today,” The Score, No. 17 (September 1956), 73–84.
5. Ibid.
6. There are, of course, other possibilities for classifying the techniques and procedures of contemporary composition. For the sake of brevity and conciseness the present categorization is an oversimplification.
7. Sessions, op. cit.
8. James Johnson Sweeney, “The Literary Artist and the Other Arts,” Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1957), ed. by Stanley Romaine Hopper, p. 8.

Concordia Teachers College
River Forest, Ill.

From The Musical Heritage of the Church, Volume VI (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1963). 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 prior permission of Concordia Publishing House.