While I disagree in part with some of the author's
pre-suppositions, I find this editorial amazingly insightful.
    Cullie Mowers
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DOES SIMPLE MUSIC FORM SIMPLE FAITH??

Richard Termine for The New York Times
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Published: September 23, 2007
A CEREMONY at St. Patrick¹s Cathedral on Sept. 11 offered some
patriotic music and a few dabs of the classics, but everything else
made me wonder whether I should be listening as a critic or as a
Christian. A lot of liturgical music these days asks you to choose
between the two. 

With its hand-clapping, inspirational, just-folks character, how
different this music is from a tradition that ran from plainchant
through Josquin and Palestrina to Mozart and Beethoven, and finally
to Messiaen and Britten. Without the church to inspire ‹ not to
mention finance ‹ great composers, how diminished the history of
music might seem to us.

Beauty of musical color, elegance of harmony, soundness of
construction and exquisiteness of originality once worked as the
lure that would draw the faltering worshiper nearer. Music, as well
as architecture and visual art, represented heaven to the earthbound,
something dazzling and unapproachable, an advertisement for a
paradise still held at arm¹s length.

The neo-Edwardian anthems and elaborations on ethno-popular culture
at St. Patrick¹s, on the other hand, might lead us to infer from
Bach¹s B minor Mass or Haydn¹s ³Creation² a certain irreligion, a
seductiveness that captures the senses and leads the heart away from
true communion with God. Does simple music form simple faith, arguably
the best kind? Has the Dark One used great musical art to his
advantage? 

Sophisticated music that doesn¹t reach out directly to its listeners
‹ that doesn¹t depend on their response ‹ bears the seeds of its
eventual irrelevance. One reason classical music struggles as it does
today lies with the several generations of composers in the last
century who demanded that audiences understand them rather than the
other way around. 

But music written solely for the comfort of its audience is equally
irrelevant. Pushing ethnic buttons as a form of quick access to the
worshiper¹s attention is only advertising. Easy familiarity acts like
the door-to-door salesman¹s foot in the door, the prelude to making
that sale. 

The Christian, on the other hand, can argue with perfect rectitude
that music is just one more evangelical tool, useful Muzak to accompany
the winning of converts and the reinforcement of faith. Interesting
music distracts the faithful, or so this line of thinking goes.
Interesting music does not tell us to be good or bad. It asks only
to be admired. Getting great music and simple faith together happens,
but with difficulty.

Verdi¹s Requiem, with its visceral depiction of human fright at
Judgment Day, comes pretty close to satisfying both the critic and the
Christian. My nominee for the music that both thrills the senses and
puts into its auditors the appropriate fear of God is the gospel singing
of black churches. The sounds are amazing, and everyone in the building
has something to do with making them.

The church has reason to fear great beauty, hence the effort to rescue
our attention, through plainspoken and deliberately flat-footed modern
texts, from the mesmerizing graces of the Latin Mass or the splendid
poetry of the Anglican Church¹s Book of Common Prayer. I am one small
example, having spent the Sunday mornings of my youth in the Episcopal
Church allowing Thomas Cranmer¹s magical imagery and liquid liturgical
responses to roll off my tongue without a thought to God at all.

One reason that less important music is being written for churches is
that composers have other things on their minds: among them, making a
living. Churches were once the center of life, and centers of wealth
and power as well. Composers thrived in their employ in times when
public concerts barely existed. The rich commissioned liturgical pieces
as their personal upscale rapprochements with God. What money for
composers circulates today is largely in secular hands.

The decline in classical music and the decline of the Roman Catholic
Church have things in common. Musical audiences dwindle and age;
church attendance in Europe has dropped precipitously; and evangelical
and fundamentalist movements in once solidly Catholic Latin America are
growing exponentially. Without the divide between audience member
(parishioner) and artist (clergy), rock ¹n¹ roll, rhythm and blues,
and like species so involve listeners that the audience becomes an
added instrument, singing along or shouting approval. Religion in
country churches is not about intransitive shows of respect but about
energy bouncing back and forth.

In a television interview not long ago the novelist Margaret Atwood
gave as good a reason as any that a recognizably human, touchable God
so engages spiritual seekers. People are lonely, she said. When they
look out at the universe, they don¹t want to see rocks and gases; they
want someone to talk to.

Do we go the other way, approach God as spectators and accept religious
art¹s tantalizing promises of a kingdom of heaven filled with nonstop
Mozart and Michelangelo? Or do we sit down, take our maker by the
shoulder, put beauty in its place and work things out person to person?

Ritual-driven, beauty-ridden Catholics, Episcopalians and Lutherans
may not be doing as well right now as they would like, but history
keeps turning in circles, and they may have their day again.

Meanwhile grab that guitar. Clap those hands.

-- END -- 

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