Monday Morning Music Ministry

7-30-18

A birthday card for Leonard Bernstein.

Recently I compiled notes and gathered thoughts for a memorial service I was asked to conduct for a dear friend, Stephane Irwin, who recently died of cancer. I do almost all my writing, drawing, and sleeping to background music, and on this evening I punched up YouTube on my big screen; found performances of the great funeral masses of Mozart and Fauré to help set the mood … and noticed a clip I had never seen – Leonard Bernstein conducting Mozart’s Requiem.

The Requiem was the last thing Mozart ever wrote (and in fact never was completed); which makes the Funeral Mass a little spooky, at least intriguing. This performance is astonishing. It was recorded in 1988, and by happy coincidence I commend and share it on the centenary of Bernstein’s birth.

“Lenny the Lion” was a kaleidoscopic character in American music. Composer and conductor, he was also a “popularizer” of serious music. When I was a child, I watched his series on CBS-TV, Young Peoples’ Concerts, in which he explained the history and musical essentials of pieces performed on the broadcasts (imagine that on network – or cable – TV today!). He composed operas (Candide), Broadway musicals (West Side Story) and symphonies. He conducted an array of music, and was largely responsible for the rediscovery of Vivaldi and Baroque music. He was a public figure, frequently recalled in a Tom Wolfe essay pandering, in plaid bell-bottoms at his posh New York apartment, to Black Panthers – “I dig. I totally dig.”

He was “out there,” outrageously talented and irrepressible. Many of his musical contemporaries, fellow Jews, were conflicted about performing in Germany after the war. Isaac Stern made a show of boycotting concerts there. Yehudi Menuhin (family name Mnuchin, by the way) and Daniel Barenboim were among those who were comfortable performing in that land of the great composers, to discerning and welcoming audiences.

Bernstein was in the latter group. He chose a relatively minor church in a small Bavarian town – short drives from Munich, Dachau, and Berchtesgaden – to perform Mozart’s sacred works. The church’s design is of the off-putting late-Baroque and Rococo styles of fluff, ornaments, and countless filigrees; but of Mozart’s own time. Other conductors, like Karl Bohm, recorded in the same church.

But my little guided tour here is about more than music’s universality, or Bernstein’s open mind, or Germany’s musical soil.

Note well Bernstein’s conduct as a conductor in this video. He always revered Christian sacred music so much that – when conducting in churches or cathedrals – he carefully explained to his musicians and his audiences that church music, not mere concert music, was the fare. He would broach no applause, before, during, or after the work.

More than that, you will see, he begins with head bowed and a long silence. Praying? Maybe so; his own wife died shortly before this Requiem mass was performed. He ends the performance again with head bowed and almost uncomfortable silence throughout the church. And between several movements, Bernstein paused for seeming prayer or meditation, at one point dabbing his eyes with his handkerchief.

This is sacred music, he said… and says the same to us through the years. Too much Christian music today is performed as, well, performances – with applause, curtsies and bowing, encores and whistling. In or out of church. Worshiping God? That priority largely has become obsolete.

So: in the presentation of 200-year-old Requiem masses, or cantatas, oratorios, or Te Deums – where is the reverence; the original, spiritual intentions? For that matter, in our contemporary churches and their worship services themselves, where is the reverence today?

How many of us attend churches where Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts are encouraged? Where people shuffle in and out, casually chugging from ever-present water bottles? Where – turning Bernstein’s ethos on its head – music is a literal concert performance, no opportunities for the congregation to sing lyrics or do anything other than clap and jump? Where services have the form of spontaneity but deny the power thereof; tightly managed? Where creeds and the Lord’s Prayer are never spoken?

Am I being legalistic? No; I don’t think there have to be neckties and below-the-knee dresses and strict reliance on old hymnals to get to heaven, or present meaningful worship. Or to commune with God among fellow believers.

But neither should 21st-century Christians feel like they are weird strangers to miss… reverence in church. What a concept.

How many of you feel this way; have been smothered by these things; miss the things that I miss? Many of you – I get mail. My messages on “When Worship Music Is Neither” elicit more mail than any other topics here. These are not matters of mere nostalgia. We miss – and, complicitly, make other people miss – the respect, the opportunities for contemplation, the privacy of prayer and meditation, the… reverence of worship services.

Not those of our childhoods, not of Bernstein’s time, nor of Mozart or Bach’s days, but of 2000 years of corporate worship. We can be exuberant, but the core of “reverence” is to revere God. Just because there are no prohibitions of dirty shirts and sandals… should not require us to make uniforms of such things.

Clear an hour, try to ignore the stupid YouTube commercials, and commune with the music linked here. And the liturgical settings. See if you agree how profound it is, and how the period-performance and setting the American Jewish conductor respecting a Christian mass in Mozart’s heimat, can teach us about reverence.

+ + +

Click: Mozart: Requiem
(click icon in lower right for full-screen)

7-20-15

America is a land of many churches.

America is a Christian country.

Do these statements confirm each other? Did they ever? Are they less true today than in the past? The Supreme Court, in an 1894 ruling, declared America a “Christian country.” No “separation of church and state” then – a phrase, by the way, not found in the Constitution or laws, but in a personal letter written by Thomas Jefferson years after he left the presidency.

If you drive around America, you do indeed see churches and steeples galore. Many town-limit welcome signs across America display the shields of charitable organizations, perhaps some population data… and the names, locations, and service times of churches. Placemats in many diners likewise often list the local houses of worship.

Of course, if the churches are empty – or nearly so, or emptier than ever – our open questions ultimately are silly questions. We know from statistics that mainstream churches, Protestant and Catholic, as well as synagogues, are declining in attendance. As traditional denominations wither and shrink, or merge, the evangelical, Charismatic, and Pentecostal churches generally are on the rise.

The crux (no pun intended) of the debate is, regardless of whether the landscape is dotted with churches, or if attendance is up or down… are Americans the people of faith they once were?

Many surveys say No. Fewer people attend worship services. Fewer people identify with a biblical doctrine or tenets. Fewer people claim belief in the One True God of the Bible; fewer people believe that Jesus is the Son of God. Fewer people hold to traditional doctrines of their churches – no divorces, for instance, in the Catholic church; teachings about homosexuality in Protestant denominations. Fewer, in all these cases, than traditionally, even a few short years ago.

I have noticed something about American churches over several decades. I have worked and lived in New England, and in Southern California, and in several parts of America in-between. I have worshiped wherever I have gone. Through my life I have grown – or evolved – from orthodox Lutheranism through the Charismatic Church and Pentecostalism, evangelical churches, “seeker” and mega-churches, and back to a love for the liturgy and strict Bible teaching. From hymns to worship choruses to praise music to gospel songs to Southern Gospel to hymns again.

In a way, I can say I am, in theological terms, an American, plain and simple. An observer and participant in many forms. (American social mobility makes pick-a-church an easy pastime.) I have avoided postmodern churches, and have seldom visited Catholic churches in America, or synagogues or mosques anywhere, but to the extent that America was and barely remains a Protestant nation, I have sat in most sorts of pews. Much as Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself,” not ego-motivated but possessing an open spirit, I have felt the currents of the contemporary life blow through my hair, influence my ideas, and season my words.

From my perspectives I am aware of an anomaly that is widespread and persistent, yet little remarked upon, in American churches. Broadly speaking (yes, a generality), the older and traditional denominations and their churches – think of the Colonial-era, white-frame, tall-steeple churches that dot the New England landscape – largely do not preach old-fashioned and traditional sermons.

Once their walls reverberated with fire-and-brimstone fury. Bible lessons, scripture memorization, strict social codes and moral rules predominated. But today, broadly speaking, most of America’s old “mainstream denominations” and the congregations of New England and the Atlantic Coast, the vestiges of our Founder’s religions, though still using hymnals and following liturgies, preach a liberal theology, “welcoming,” frequently denying the inerrancy of scripture and sometimes even the Divinity of Christ.

Conversely, many of the newer denominations or non-denominational “independent” churches eschew hymnals and organs. They often meet in high-school gyms or local auditoriums. They frequently have no dress code – except, perhaps, virtually to discourage men’s ties and women’s dresses. Drums and guitars; projected lyrics and images; social fellowships, are all parts of these new “churches.”

Yet very often these get-togethers, or para-churches, so welcoming of dress and visitors’ backgrounds, ironically preach hardcore, straight-from-the-Bible, literal interpretations; Adam and Eve, the wages of sin, Creationism, and the necessity of personal salvation.

This irony is mostly that: irony. Yet to the extent it is true, it leads me to another observation. American society, where wide swaths of the landscape have these liberal denominations and social-gospel churches, coupled with a culture that has discouraged the discussion of theological and spiritual matters – except to discourage or deny their truth – has become the Land of Empty Churches. Or irrelevant churches.

How often is the Lord’s Prayer offered in your church anymore? Are the creeds taught and spoken? Is the pastor or priest who delivers a sermon extemporaneously an endangered species? Why do so many clergymen have to write out and read prayers to their God? Is your preaching from the “head” or “heart”? Does your church still require confirmation classes? Can children – and staff members, teachers – defend the tenets of their particular faith? Is there zeal to share the gospel, to engage the “lost”?

Religionists have not merely grown lazy. The culture wages war against us. Newspapers, magazines, television, movies, the entertainment industry, politics, the education establishment, have been run by people, a majority of whom were never Christians or are “lapsed” Christians. In, say, the 1930s, executives in, say, the movie business largely were not Christians… but they respected tradition and realized the value (moral AND commercial) in affirming the traditional culture. No more, at all. And Christians have been swayed.

Religion today is mocked; not merely dismissed, but attacked. Church tax exemptions are the least of Christians’ worries. The assault on Christian heritage now is fierce and unrelenting. Not content with legal civil unions and rights, the barricaders must attack the word – and, of course, concept and sanctity of – “marriage.” Lawsuits and charges of “hate speech” against Christians have accelerated.

This week it was revealed that Planned Parenthood, an agency that receives tax money, harvests and sells the organs of aborted babies. Beyond the horror of the practice, and the widespread defense of it, this confirms that, for the most part, Christianity in America is an obsolete force, a moral irrelevancy, a spent movement in the lives of the American people. These abominations would not be happening except for the moral vacuum created by the wholesale retreat of Christians.

America, the Land of Many Churches, is no longer a Christian country.

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. Men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;

Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

All who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived. But continue in the things which you have learned and have been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them; and that from a child you have known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. (From II Timothy Chapter 3)

+ + +

Click: Ave Verum Corpus

10-6-14

Some years ago I was a guest on a local program somewhere in New England on a National Public Radio station, “The Man and His Music.” Under today’s politically correct strictures, especially on NPR, I suppose the series would be called, “The Person and His/Her Predilections,” or some such nonsense. (Maybe even “His/Her/Its”) Anyway, the premise of the series was to explore a guest’s personality through discussions of musical taste and favorite pieces, in addition to the standard celebrity-interview fare.

We authors or actors or athletes were, naturally, asked to send our choices in advance of the studio interview, and to provide (ancient history, kiddies) cassette tapes of our favorite songs or snippets of music. The hostess was well-versed in music, and could discuss or at least intelligently explore any style of music from any period of history, from Renaissance to jazz.

True to my catholic tastes, as old friends of this column will know, my choices ranged from Baroque to Bluegrass. And at least half the choices, for the two-hour program, were church pieces. Movements from cantatas and masses; traditional hymns; contemporary gospel. The man and his music, right?

It developed that eclecticism was fine for the show, but only so much. Between discussions of my books and travels and hobbies were the musical cut-aways, followed by chats about them. The hostess was glad to discuss the fact I knew several jazzmen who had played with Bix Beiderbecke; and had heard Mozart performed in Salzburg; and that I had been backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. But when my choices were Christian pieces, the conversation turned cold. Invariably we rushed to a new topic.

Not only did those musical clips carry a gospel message, but my discussion – why these pieces were special to me, the putative theme of the series – perforce touched upon what made them special, too, to the composers, performers, and the intended audiences. The stories behind the songs; the messages in the music.

I don’t think it was a particular prejudice of the hostess. Clearly, it reflected the culture at (taxpayer-supported, we constantly are reminded) National Public Radio. But, more, it reflects the culture of contemporary America. The post-modern, post-Christian world.

There is a reason I tie my weekly messages to music. I believe music is the most imaginative language devised by mankind, and always a pulse-reading of the broader culture. My ideas about music are based on those of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They believed that harmony is a somewhat elusive quality that is yet irreducible when achieved: we know it when we hear it. Harmony is to be sought in life as well as in music. Harmony represented the Absolute Truth that Plato knew existed, and whose perfect possession might be impossible for mortals, but whose pursuit is essential for our worthwhile selves. (This philosophical summary three centuries before the birth of Jesus explains why early Christian theologians were called Neo-Platonists.)

Renaissance artists found a “new birth,” artistically, in the arts of the ancients, specifically the Greeks. Sculpture and architecture, principally. Literature followed, though awkwardly; and eventually dance and music, in ideals rather than forms (which were historically obscure until very recently). All through the church age, and finding its apogee in the Renaissance despite an interest in outward Athenian expression, art’s main function was to embody the meanings and purposes of God. Gradually, aided and abetted by political freedoms, the empowerment of the printing press, and a philosophical zeitgeist in the West that morphed from Humanism to Individualism to Selfishness, the rationale for all artistic expression, in all manifestations, changed.

Now, instead of artists striving to please God, they strive to please themselves.

Beginning in music (and speaking very generally) around Beethoven’s time, the artist became more important than his music; the music more important than the One it once served. Beethoven, however, was truly a transitional figure in this discussion; although something of a “tortured soul,” he was a fervent Christian, as were his immediate contemporaries among composers. Hummel, Field, Czerny, and especially Mendelssohn (ironically, a Jew, converted to Lutheran Christianity) were intensely personal in their compositions without rejecting traditional forms, or faith. But the next generation of composers felt it necessary to be rebels in morality as well as in their music. Composers were expected to have troubled personal lives, to bare their souls in their music, and to offer cathartic or excruciating exposures of their selves. Portraits of the artists. Listeners came to assume that artists were tormented. Artistic heroes are encouraged to wallow in personal revelations, the uglier the better.

True in music and painting, it became the norm in all of the arts, and in fact throughout all of society: that the world, our lives, our very civilization, is so rotten and contemptible that we must honor the artists who struggle to express their disdain and their doomed efforts to resist. Honored the most are those who can describe the best what stinks the worst. Of course, then, society honors leaders and politicians who base their programs on similar perceptions of a loathsome society. They can only address the evils (as they see them) of the Old Order with solutions and systems that reject any trace of traditional wisdom.

This explains where we are as a culture, and why we are doomed, I believe. (Really doomed; not the trendy ennui of parlor dyspeptics.) Beyond music, every expression from poetry to politics reflects the fact that we are a people who have cut ourselves off from God. We no longer make decisions – personal or civic, artistic or political – based on God’s Word, on praying for divine guidance, on trusting the faith of our fathers, on seeking to please Him. And – I hope this is obvious – this analysis pertains to all societies and their religions, not only the Christian West. But as a legatee of Western Civilization that crumbles around me, that is what I address today. So should we all.

And I am quite happy to debate which package of factors is the cart and which is the horse. “Art imitates life” is an ancient maxim. Its apposite response (called anti-mimesis) was provided by Oscar Wilde, who maintained that “life imitates art.” But most recently the real challenge – I should say a lucid perception of our world’s post-Christian dilemma – was voiced by the brilliant Russian émigré, the critic Alexander Boot: that among the ruins of Western Civilization that we have come to call home, Art imitates death.

Having ignored, banned, ridiculed, insulted, and rejected God for so long in the post-Christian West, how can we expect otherwise?

+ + +

I could choose a hundred thousand musical pieces, few from the past 150 years, to accompany this essay. I have chosen a video that is in itself a work of art, the DeutscheGrammophon production of the supernal Helene Grimaud playing the second movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concert Nr 23 in A, K. 488. Close-ups of her technique, her sensitive expressions, and nature scenes. God is glorified.

Click: Mozart Adagio

12-2-13

There is an exhibition quietly and modestly making its way across the United States that is one of the most astonishing displays I have ever witnessed. I choose my words carefully – actually, an unbreakable habit of mine, even on good days – but I have been to America’s great museums, as well those of the world, including the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Uffizi, down to treasure-filled Halls of Fame. But currently (until Feb 1) housed in an otherwise ordinary former retail space in a neighborhood of Colorado Springs, is “Passages: The Experience.”

I think the weak link in their chain might be “branding,” since it is impossible to guess the exhibition’s theme from its title. And this is counter-intuitive, since the person behind this exhibition is one of America’s great marketers: Steve Green. The President of Hobby Lobby, Steve recently has been the focus of news – and prayers – because of his determination to resist the government’s ObamaCare guidelines to provide and pay 100 per cent of abortifacients , contraceptives, and abortion procedures for his employees. He and the Green family have sacrificed much to fight this battle, which has this week been accepted by the Supreme Court for a hearing.

“Passages” is an exhibition of Steve Green’s substantial collection of Bibles, illuminated manuscripts, ancient scrolls, biblical relics, and artifacts of the faithful. After Colorado Springs
( http://www.explorepassages.com ) the exhibition will continue its tour to other cities, ultimately top reside permanently in Washington DC.

Papyrus 39

After the Colorado Christian Writers Conference in May, my friend Diane Obbema read about the exhibition and suggested we visit. It was a great day of my life. First, we were impressed by the sheer scope. An iPod audio guide is eight hours long, for visitors who visit every display case and presentation. Cases, captions, actors and robotics, videos and interactive stations. Portions are designed for younger visitors. History comes alive. You see a Gutenberg press, you can pull one’s own prints.

More than that is the impressive display of scarce, often one-of-a-kind, artifacts. The second-largest private collection of Dead Sea Scrolls. Many cuneiform tablets; illuminated manuscripts; the world’s largest collection of vintage Jewish scrolls and ancient Torahs. Wycliffe’s likely Middle-English translation of the New Testament; the majority of the rare Gutenberg Bible; many of the famous early printed Bibles, like the Geneva Bible and the first King James Version. The exhibition’s surprises are… very surprising, and inspiring to see: a letter Martin Luther wrote night before his trial in Worms, half will and testament of the presumed martyr, half a rehearsal of his defiant “Here I Stand’ statement. In another display case, the manuscript copy of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Amazing.

Martin Luther’s Will

This is the story of Christendom – the Church through the ages, managing to survive and spreading gloriously.

There is an overarching story beyond the gospel story itself, yet usually missed by most of us. Often it is willful ignorance or rejection. My mother-in-law was one of myriad, in this land of many churches, who fundamentally doubted the Bible’s authenticity or reliability. “It was written by men,” its first putative offense, and she also indicted its authorship “by many people, over many places, across many years, and through many translations.”

A slippery slope it is, of course, to dismiss the Bible as a collection of fables, or purloined wisdom, or irrelevant stories and lies. And, at first glance in the presence of the Green Family’s collection, the sheer variety of translations and versions can seduce the credulity of an average believer.

But none of us should be average believers! We are indwelt by the Holy Ghost, the same Spirit of the Living God who inspired – literally, “breathed life” into – these scriptures. “The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12). It has advanced despite hideous persecution. It has survived, sometimes, in remote outposts where Christianity was anathema and believers were hounded. It has also at times triumphed, in the worldly sense… inviting corruption and diluting its tenets.

Yes, many men wrote the first lines; and many were there who copied, and translated, and transliterated, and remembered verses, and strove to record the words of Christ and the testimony of apostles and martyrs, who saved the songs of poets, the wisdom of the anointed, and the letters of evangelists. When men first sought to put the Words of God into the languages of the people, they were, for hundreds of years, pursued, humiliated, tortured, and killed for so doing. Yet more than a thousand tongues now have Bibles in their own languages.

… are these prescriptions for error and mistakes, prejudices and bias, carelessness and sloppiness; for local churches and leaders with tempting agendas, to bring distortion? Would it not be logical – with all the people, places, and possibilities over the years represented in the display cases of “Passages” – that, instead of one True Bible of thousands of translations and versions, that there be thousands of competing Bibles?

Yet discrepancies are a tiny fraction, seldom close to any major theological or historical point, and always quickly reconciled. To me, THIS is the evidence of the authority, even inerrancy, of scripture. Tried, tested, true: a living document that is not malleable to suit every generation’s distractions. No: living, to be a vital source of hope, truth, and salvation; a reality to every one in every time and every place.

The texts studied in Northern Africa, in the Fourth Century, say; or the lessons taught in Asia Minor or to the heathen in northern Europe at the same early times; or the sermon themes in faraway Ireland – all are virtually identical to the words of the Bibles we have in our homes today. About what other books can this be said?

To visit “Passages” is inspiring. Yet when Diane and I left the “Experience,” I could not help but see the physical evidence of devotion, scholarship, sacrifice, martyrdom, and enterprise of uncountable saints through the millennia… and not feel a chill of caution.

Is America today capable of such fidelity to the Word of God? Does Western civilization have the loyalty to Christianity that it once did at Saragossa and at the Gates of Vienna? Right now, no.

The Word of God will survive always: axiomatic for the Eternal Truth. But if the Church of Christ dies in what is left of Western Civilization, it ultimately will be due not to persecution by its enemies, but neglect by its adherents.

+ + +

For those who cannot visit the “Passages” exhibition, or until its goal of a permanent home in the nation’s capital, books and other materials are available from the organizers: https://store.explorepassages.com

I have chosen a beautiful performance in a beautiful setting of Mozart’s beautiful “Laudate Dominum.” The text is the entire Psalms 117, shortest in the Bible, followed by the doxology. The music, if I might presume to characterize it so, is by the Holy Spirit, received and passed to us by Mozart. One of his supernal masterworks. The singer is the beautiful – yes, beauty abounds – Katherine Jenkins. The captions are the Latin text and Czech. Here is the English:

Praise the Lord, all ye peoples,
Praise Him, all ye peoples.
For his loving kindness
Has been bestowed upon us,
And the truth of the Lord endures for eternity.

Glory to the Father, Son, and to the Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen.

Click: Laudate Dominum