What Else Is New?

One of the most well-known moments in Western music is the stark tension of measures 12-16 in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Prelude (1:17-1:50). The theme gets increasingly fragmented, increasingly higher, and always resolves on an unresolved dominant seven. At last, only two notes of the theme are left with no harmony underneath, until suddenly an unexpected chord bursts out of nowhere:









Wagner is taking advantage of the harmonic ambiguity in the third and fourth measures of the excerpt above. The passage can be put into simple chords as follows:









The question mark represents the lack of any harmony. What's this doing compositionally? It's creating a huge amount of tension. The listener is looking for resolution, and instead of giving it, Wagner simply takes away all harmony and leaves a two-note strand of music without any sort of context. While we're waiting for any sort of resolution, he suddenly gives us what we're not expecting—yet another unresolved dominant seven, this time an E-major minor-7 chord.

What's particularly interesting is that this isn't a new tactic. Harold C. Schonberg in his book The Great Conductors points out that "even the most important chords of the nineteenth century—the ones that open Tristan und Isolde—had previously occurred, almost note for note, in Liszt's song, Ich möchte hingehn, composed in 1845, more than ten years before Wagner 'composed' the Tristan opening." But the harmonic ambiguity Wagner uses a few measures later is actually a tactic used much, much earlier by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach in his Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, Flösst, mein Heiland, flösst dein Namen.














Bach, too, is fragmenting his theme, taking away its unresolved harmony, and then surprising us with yet another dominant seventh chord. This can be analyzed similarly:











So, don't bother to do anything new harmonically. Chances are, Bach has already done. As Arnold Schoenberg points out in Style and Idea, Bach was really the first composer to use a tone row. Right there, in BWV 869, the final Fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier! (Erm. Well, you get the idea.)

Bach and Newton

"In August 1750, just days after Bach's death, Agricola wrote:

He [Finazzi] denies his [Bach's] music the effect of pleasure for the listener who would not savor such difficult harmony. Yet, assuming the harmonies [that is, musical structure] of this great man were so complex that they would not always achieve the intended result, they nevertheless serve for the connoisseur's genuine delight. Not all learned people are able to understand a Newton, but those who have progressed far enough in the profound science so they can understand him will find the greatest gratification and real benefit in reading his work."

("Prologue: Bach and the Notion of 'Musical Science'". Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. Christoph Wolff.)

Several interesting things here - the fact that Wolff feels that "harmonies" and "musical structure" are somewhat synonymous in the 18th century German tongue (drawing any tempting conclusions would be unsubstantiated conjecture on my part) and also the fact that, were it a reference to what we'd actually call Bach's harmonies, we wouldn't think of them as complex at all. We've been acclimatized in that respect. If it's a broader "musical structure" that's so complex (such as setting a poetic German text to 9 part choral harmony and two separate orchestras), I see what they mean. Finazzi's still wrong, though. Bach's congregations didn't seem to mind his "difficult harmony" so much, after all.

Good Advice from the Episcopalians (of 1940)

For being the product of a church characterized now by both of these errors, the Handbook for Clergymen, Organist, and Choir Directors accompanying the Hymnal (1940) offers some great advice.

"Those in charge of the music in the small church need to beware of the sin of carelessness. Those with richer resources need to beware lest they become concerned with a 'good show' and forget that the music of the Church is an offering to God, and that its primary purpose is to convey the Word of God and to contribute to the corporate worship of the congregation."

Those are two of the best criteria for judging both music and its performance in church: (1) conveying (I'd get picky and say "representing", but okay) the Word of God and (2) contributing to the corporate worship of the congregation. Especially (2) is an excellent wording - it doesn't mean that all music has to be congregational, but all music has to contribute to the corporate worship of the congregation. This includes a trained choir and the organ playing prelude music. That's appropriate, only insofar as it enhances the congregation's worship.

How Not to Argue about Church Music

There are a lot of common avenues of arguing about Church music that I think are seriously flawed and particularly destructive because they may be arguing for the right music for the wrong reasons. Here I'm simply outlining the ways I think are particularly unwise—perhaps in another place I can begin to outline the ways I think one ought to do it. (The bold affirms what I do not.)

1. Church music must be old. I've addressed this a bit already, but let me restate here. All music is, in a fundamental sense, traditional. It simply depends on what tradition you're plugging yourself into. Any contemporary Christian artists or praise choruses are doing just that—plugging themselves into musical traditions. Similarly, it did not take a thick layer of dust on Bach's manuscripts for his music to become traditional. His music was traditional from the moment he wrote it. It was in the tradition of Praetorius, Schütz, Pachelbel et al.

This is also a theological point. Most famously, but certainly not the only instance of it, Psalm 98 enjoins us to sing a new song to the Lord. More than simply citing chapter and verse is involved here, though. The Biblical principle is that of the Davidic liturgical revolution, where David took the dust-gathering Levitical traditions and started improvising. Peter Leithart in From Silence to Song points out that David seemed to herald in a special liturgical period, where he and the musicians could worship with the Ark of the Covenant face to face. If the Davidic liturgical revolution took place under these circumstances, how much more should music be jubilant, noisy, and, above all, new now that the veil has been torn?

2. Church music must be complex. The voice of the Church past speaks out strongly against this one. That's not an infallible argument, but nonetheless one difficult to reckon with. There is nothing complex about Gregorian chant or a Lutheran or Calvinist hymn or Anglican chant. If you're calling yourself a traditionalist, this is probably not the argument you want to employ. It's also important to remember that contemporary music is difficult for many people to sing along with for a reason—the rhythm tends to be devilishly hard. None of this is to say that Church music can't be complex. The really complex thing here is the issue, not the music.

3. Church music must be Classical. Sed contra. This is one I particularly take issue with. I would say the opposite—Church music needs to be not Classical. Remember what Classical means. Classical doesn't just connote "older", like classic rock connotes Led Zepplin (old, ha, ha, ha), but it also connotes the real Classical era, the era of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. It's no coincidence that these men are one of the first recorded instances of art for art's sake and the use of the stage rather than the altar or the hearth as the background for music. Nor is it a coincidence that the movement that molded the direction Classical music would go was a group of Renaissance men who thought music needed to be less sacred and more like, of all things, the era of Classical drama. More about that here.

Think about it this way. If you have a problem with taking the devil-worship words out of a metal song and putting in great theology, then you should also consider there's a similar (maybe not so drastic) problem with Mozart's Requiem. Think about it—the same compositional techniques Mozart used for his definitively secular symphony he is now using for his ostensibly sacred requiem. If you think that simply slipping in good theology (well, even that's debatable) on top of secular music is in general a bad principle, then Classical music is precisely what you don't want your Church music to be.

This also gets into how you define Classical music, of course, but I think it's vital to understand it as a secular project, not a sacred one. So, this ends up going both ways—music that is truly sacred can't be considered Classical music. This isn't just an arbitrarily subversive category. Church music does need to be culture defining, not culture defined. It necessitates careful distinctions, and the clearest one is between High music that is sacred and High music that is secular. If this involves declaring that BWV 244 is not Classical music in the normal sense, oh well. It's a distinction that still needs to be made.

I'd also like to address, at some point, the concept of music as a mood enhancer. This should be enough for now.

What a Classical Education Does To Your Musical Appreciation

"Peter, she felt sure, could hear the whole intricate pattern, every part separately and simultaneously, each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together." (Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers.)

A convicting quote. He's apparently, by the way, listening to Bach.

Bach's Classical Education

The subject matter [of Bach's schooling] included Latin exercises based on Reyher's Dialogi seu Colloquia puerilia and beginning Greek reading exercises...Leonhard Hutter's Compendium locorum theologicorum, a systematic summary of Christian doctrine derived from the Bible and early Lutheran theological writings, as well as the biographies of Roman leaders by Roman historian Cornelius Nepos and letters by Cicero...historical writings of Roman author Curtius Rufus; Idea historiae universalis, an influential book on world history and geography by the seventeenth-century scholar Johannes Buno; and the latin comedies of Terence. Arithmetic was taught in all classes. (Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician.)

Bach's Raw Material

"It's often said that because Bach requested 16 singers for his choral establishment, he must have wanted at least that number for the St Matthew Passion. But that's a selective reading of the appropriate document because he goes on to say quite specifically that the reason he needs this number is because he has to provide music for services in four churches, each with very different musical requirements. Bach is very frank when he talks about his singers. He says he's usually got four good singers who can sing his more elaborate music, for who are a bit rough but who he can work with most of the time, and several who can just about manage a chorale if he's lucky. The idea that he had 16 virtuoso singers who could sing all his most demanding music goes against all the evidence.... We have to get ourselves out of the mentality of a genius working for posterity and realise that at the end of the day Bach was also working as the head of a school's music department!"

"Bach was above all a pragmatist. He had a small team of more or less talented individuals, but they were trained by one composer in one style over a long period of time. Of course there were moments of frustration, but the image of Bach writing music way beyond the abilities of his players and singers is patronising and far from the truth. Leipzig was no provincial backwater, but the very epicentre of a progressive Lutheranism which proved the most fertile ground for Bach's musical genius."

- Paul McCreesh

Music and the Public Square

While I am the last person to have an unnatural desire to apply Marxist historicism to everything I can get my hands on, it's worth noting that Classical music is, in much of its history, a matter of social distinction. You go to Classical music concerts if you're rich and you can pay for it. These boundaries are largely destroyed in the advent of commercial recording, but even now they still exist. If you want the real taste of Classical music, the live performance, the aspect of the connoisseur, you must go rub shoulders with the city councilmen and the local music theory faculty at a live performance. Maybe your dentist, your family doctor, your French teacher. Chances of seeing the plumber there? Adjuster? Not really that high. It's a bit like golf, but worse.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is worth noting that it can be fallacious when people formulate bombastic apologiai for Classical music, trying to win "back" the younger generation and the majority of people to the aesthetically superior form of music. The problem is, Classical music has never had a wide audience and, quite possibly due to commercial availability, never wider than today. It isn't a matter of getting Classical music back to a position of wide-spread appeal, since it may not have had it in the first place.

On the other hand, not all Classical music is like this. It doesn't seem likely that you're going to hear Brahms' 2nd piano concerto if you're a 19th century Dickensesque inn keeper. It does seem considerably more likely that you hear a Bach cantata if you're an 18th century inn keeper. Bach's music was music that was heard in church and, while, at its more corrupt moments, the Church's liturgy has been a matter of class, music of the church is music that is heard by all the congregation. And, in early Lutheran Protestantism more than anywhere else, perhaps, the music is informed (but not dictated) by the congregants' needs and their level of musical education. These early Protestant churches love congregation-lead music.

I've talked before about the tune that most of us sing O Sacred Head Now Wounded to—it was apparently a German love song. Both his predecessors and Bach himself took this tune and set it many different ways. (And, so did a few composers who came after him, most famously Brahms.) This is an example of the composers of High music lifting folk and popular tunes out of the culture and implementing them in a religious context. I think it would be a little unrealistic simply to attribute that to some already-existing quality in the folk song that merited its use in worship. Bach et al were, to some degree, trying to teach and edify by using something that would be, to most of the congregation, familiar.

Bach is an excellent example, but he's not the only example. As I've mentioned before, Josquin and Dufay do this with the famous tune L'homme arme, just barely leaving the tune recognizable but ubiquitous in their Missae L'homme arme. There's even a rumor that the tune Pange Lingua, to which is set St. Thomas' famous poem, was in fact a Roman marching song.

But does that mean that modern Church music composers should take a "melody" (coughcoughcough) from Coldplay or Regina Spektor and use it as the basis of a Kyrie? Yyyeah, no. That's dubious, to say the least. Not that I have anything against Coldplay or Regina Spektor (that would be appropriate in this post), but the issue is one of apples and oranges. Bach and Josquin were working on generations upon generations of people who had built up a Christo-centric culture. The music that came out of that culture was certainly not sinless and certainly not totally consistent with a Christian worldview. But the music didn't clash with Christian doctrine. Today, we have a totally different field to play on. Inevitably, a song (regardless of the ethos of its authors) that hits the top of the commercial music list is going to clash with the catechesis of Christian worship. That doesn't mean it's not going to work 100% of the time, but it does mean that there are many more issues to weigh in the balance and many more insidious cultural connotations to deal with. Bach and Josquin had a level playing field—they weren't in a battle with the majority of the culture. We are.

When the music of a culture is defined by the music of its Church (I don't think it ever isn't), when, in short, at the center of the public square is the music of worship, the effects on folk and pop music will be drastic. When this happens in Christian Churches, and we all come to hear, worship with, love, and understand the High music of the church, the gap between the aesthetically richest 10% and the aesthetically poorest 10% will be narrowed. But, as usual, it doesn't work to regulate that. It has to happen organically, over the course of generations and academic years and, uh, counterpoint classes. But then we won't be far from the sort of culture that writes quodlibets for a pastime. Everyone will be edified, musically, by being immersed in music they have, over time, come to understand. The give-and-take between the music of the Church and the music of the culture will be such as was not really possible for the majority of the history of Classical music.

Chorale of the Holy Mountain

Liturgical Schizophrenia

Drum muß uns sein verdienstlich Leiden recht bitter und doch süße sein.

So his meritorious Passion must for us be truly bitter and yet sweet.

Where I live, the weather almost always gets drizzly around Good Friday. But the clouds aren't darkening like they are in winter. Usually, Daylight savings has already hit and the sun's angle makes the overcast seem brighter than usual. I can't help but thinking that's appropriate. Rainy weather is sad, but at the beginning of spring, it's bright.

As one wise guy once said, I don't think Bach's music needs justification by the weather. But I still think rainy weather fits it perfectly. J. S. Bach's music for the season of Lent serves its description of "Bright Sadness" so perfectly. And so, every year, my family sits around the couch with blankets and sleeve notes and reads along with the German of the Bach's St. Matthew Passion and glances at the English translation alongside. For whatever reason, it never fails to be a rewarding experience, but something concrete jumped out at me this year.

As usual, a lot of things collided all in a flash in my mind, things that I could momentarily connect, but there's no guarantee that I can do it now, like I'm trying to. That memory of M. C. DenHoed asking him why I sent him a piece of opera, when I had sent him Geduld from the St. Matthew Passion. I was utterly taken aback. Opera and Bach had never even occurred in my mind as overlap. Also, my Latin teacher, correcting a student's translation of "Merry Christmas" - the student had put something like "Happy Birth of Christ", and the teacher wisely pointed out that it wasn't the birth of Christ, it was the feast of the birth of Christ. And this quote of Paul McCreesh, whose recording we listened to this year - "All Bach's music, fast or slow, has an almost visceral connection with the dance. Why should we require the first chorus to be slow and solemn, when it is above all else celebratory? There's an almost ecstatic desire to share in the retelling of the Passion story."

There's tension in any feast like Christmas or Easter or Good Friday. But especially with Good Friday. We're Christians. We're immersed in the Bible and so we know what will happen. Even if we weren't Christians we would still know what happens. The tomb is empty. Prophecy is fulfilled. Things are really glorious. But on Good Friday, we're asked to remember the crucifixion. Our Good Friday services are somber and sad. This really bothers some evangelicals because they can't stand the tension. They think that the faith is all about the Resurrection (rightly), so why bother with the sad stuff? But this only shows that they are remembering Good Friday and its events. Not celebrating them.

Celebrating a Church holiday involves two things. Remembering it as a historical fact through the text that we're given - this is almost like the literal or grammatico-hitsorical level of hermeneutics. We just read the Gospels and refresh our minds as to the events and spend a day on this one and a day on that one. If we had this alone, we wouldn't feel the tension because we would know to just turn the page and read about the empty tomb. The second level of celebration is an allegorical, typological, sacramental and eschatological level. Mary Magdalene, Peter, Judas, and even Jesus are you. Allegorically, insofar as they embody abstract things like humility, restoration, treachery, and perfection. But, even better, you are a type of them. You're Mary Magdalene, a converted disciple who was demon-possessed. You're Peter, constantly showing signs of frailty but becoming loyal once again. You're even Judas sometimes and constantly attaining Jesus. Jesus, especially, is the character you become sacramentally through Baptism and the Lord's Supper and eschatologically, as we become the spotless bride of Christ and become one flesh with Him. Aways down the road.

And this is where that tension comes from. You're simultaneously in the story and out of it. You're a character in the book and you're reading the book. You're Frodo on Mount Doom once again, still as excited as ever - or more so - but this is the eighth time you've read Lord of the Rings. That's what a true celebration of a feast feels like. That's why, as the text to St. Matthew Passion puts it, his meritorious Passion must for us be truly bitter and yet sweet.

In approaching Bach's Passion, it's important to think of yourself as a congregant in the Lutheran Church of the early 18th century. The piece begins with a chorus, flung between two choirs, the first of which says,

Come, you daughters, help me lament. Behold!

The second choir immediately responds,

Whom?

Answered,

The Bridegroom. Behold Him!

How?

Like a lamb.

Then, if you were that congregant sitting in the pew, you would hear floating above the complex polyphony a familiar hymn, O Lamm Gottes unschuldig (O guiltless Lamb of God). This is an amazing moment, because you realize that Bach isn't just making these melodies spontaneously. He's made them exactly so that they would fit inside the hymn.

This language should connote something. If it doesn't, you should be worried. Bridegrooms and daughters is definitely the language of Song of Solomon and the language doesn't disappear throughout any of the piece. Certain arias are almost reminiscent of St. John of the Cross.

I will give my heart to Thee; Sink Thyself in it, my Salvation.

This language, the words of a lover, trips up a lot of modern listeners, primarily because they suffer under the delusion that Bach's music is highly personal. John Taverner remarked that Bach's music “is so concerned with the personal Christ, not the cosmic Christ.” Taverner, however, misses the Lutheranism of the day. In this schizophrenia we've set up, it's easy to see how the woman who sings the aria with Solomonic imagery is you plural. As a congregant, you are participating, along with the rest of the congregation, in a communal act of worship, which is embodied in this soprano singing. We are the Bride of Christ corporately, not individually. What Bach is not doing is setting up an erotic relationship between himself and Christ. We are corporately singing a love song to Christ.

And, you can't mention St. Matthew Passion without mentioning possibly the most famous piece from it (and from a lot of other Bach works). Again and again, the tune to "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" comes up in the piece. But this song was originally a love song. A folk tune. Bach changed that. Is that coincidental?

This corporate nature of the characters within the Passion story is nowhere more potent than in the Passover narrative. Using the exact text of the German Bible, Bach puts the Scripture in a free-flowing recitative.

JESUS
Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.

EVANGELISTA
And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began everyone of them to say unto him,

CHORUS
Lord, is it I?

And, then, immediately, in a familiar hymn tune to the Lutheran congregant,

CHORALE
It is I. I should atone,
My hand and feet
Bound, in hell.
The scourges and the fetters,
And all that Thou didst endure,
That has my soul earned.

When listening to this, it feels a bit like Inigo must have felt when Fezzik put his head in the bowl of cold water and then in the bowl of hot water. Or when your teacher just explained something really amazing that you're having trouble keeping in your head. Things feel like they could pop at any moment. But that's the feeling of this dual reality in the liturgical setting - the feeling of being a character in the book and reading the book. It's like Aeschylus or Sophocles' chorus, but considerably more frightening, considering we believe these things are true. This hymn - It is I - that the Lutheran congregation might have even sung with the choirs and organ - would immediately press the corporate and communal reality of the Gospel into their faces.

This strange tension comes out in more grotesque ways as well. One aria is sung by Judas, just after the chief priests have told him to get lost with his 32 that he wants to give back to them. He sings,

Give me back my Jesus!
See, the money, the wages of murder,
The lost son throws at you,
Down at your feet.

The "lost son" reminds one of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, and, in keeping with the logic of previous arias, we have to assume that Bach wants us to be Judas in the story too. That's rather uncomfortable. But it isn't necessarily untrue. There's the same convincting sting that comes, like the Chorale "It is I." Strangely, however, the aria sung by Judas is perhaps the most exuberant in the entire Passion.

What bothers most people about the St. Matthew Passion is its ending. The final text from the Gospel used is "So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch." And watch is exactly what a Lutheran congregant goes home to do. The final chorus is a solemn and dissonant piece that still retains the dance-like quality of the very first chorus. There's an undeniable sense of let-down and anti-climax. You've stopped it before the eagles have come to pick up Frodo and Sam. And you're waiting until Sunday morning to watch the rest.

But you still come away happy, on one level. And this is why it is not simply a nice thing for us to be joyful and sad at the same time. It's a must. His meritorious Passion must for us be truly bitter and yet sweet. It's sad, obviously, because you are still a character in Christ's Passion, eating with him, putting him on trial, executing him, and burying him. But it's joyful because you know what happens. And, again, this tension is not an optional thing in a liturgical setting. This post is not primarily descriptive. I'm prescribing something, not describing something. This schizophrenia is the Gospel. It must be truly bitter and yet sweet.

(Originally posted on Pontification Ad Nauseam.)

Mood Modality

I was looking through Bach's Orgelbüchlen for a chorale prelude to play on Eastertide. I was surprised by how almost every single chorale for the season and its resultant prelude was in a minor key. And then I was surprised at my surprise. This is a way in which Classical music since Bach has seriously damaged our conception of what modes can express. We naturally assume that if it's a happy occasion we need a major key and if it's a sad occasion we need a minor key. Lost is the notion of an exuberant, zippy, joyful, lusty, minor-keyed piece.

When asked by Stephen Pettitt why he took such a fast tempo on St. Matthew Passion's Kommt, ihr Töchter, Paul McCreesh replied, "All Bach's music, fast or slow, has an almost visceral connection with the dance. Why should we require the first chorus to be slow and solemn, when it is above all else celebratory? There's an almost ecstatic desire to share in the retelling of the Passion story."

This is another area where we need to war against the idea that the solemn and the joyous are mutually exclusive. All parts of the Christian life are required to be both, especially the liturgy.

Art as Adam's Commission

A quote of Birnbaum (the theological "mouthpiece" of J. S. Bach) from Christoph Wolff's introduction to Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician:

"The essential aims of true art are to imitate nature, and, where necessary, to aid it. If art imitates nature, then indisputably the natural element must everywhere shine through in works of art. Accordingly it is impossible that art should take away the natural element from those things in which it imitates nature - including music. If art aids nature, then its aim is to preserve it, and to improve its condition; certainly not to destroy it. Many things are delivered to us by nature in the most misshapen states, which, however, acquire the most beautiful appearance when they have been formed by art. Thus art lends nature a beauty it lacks, and increases the beauty it possesses. Now, the greater the art is - that is, the more industriously and painstakingly it works at the improvement of nature - the more brilliantly shines the beauty thus brought into being. Accordingly it is impossible that the greatest art should darken the beauty of a thing." (Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, pg. 5, "Prologue: Bach and the Notion of 'Musical Science'")

But what does Birnbaum mean? He perhaps believes the natural realm has been affected by the "total depravity" of man's sin. But could he mean when he says that nature delivers us things "in the most misshapen states" that there are things inherently in nature that need the aid of man's art? Is he suggesting the conceited, humanist notion that God needs help making creation "very good"?

Or perhaps this is simply Birnbaum's exegesis on Adam's commission in Genesis 2 to "subdue" or "rule" the land. As one Old Testament scholar puts it, "When God creates the world, it is all good, so Adam does not have to 'subdue' wicked enemies. Still, Adam has to work hard to subdue the world. Even before Adam sins, it is not easy to rule creation. Animals need training, tress are tough to cut, the earth is hard to dig, and rocks are hard to break... He is supposed to find new ways to use what God has made, so that the whole creation serves man more and more... Today, thousands of years later, we are still learning new ways to 'subdue' creation." (Peter J. Leithart, A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament, pg. 51, "Book of Beginnings")