Singing the Church's Song

Schalk, Carl F., Marty, Martin E.

Published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers

Schalk, Carl F. and Martin E. Marty.

Singing the Church's Song: Essays & Occasional Writings on Church Music.
Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2020.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/73921.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/73921

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 Celebrating Music

The trumpet shall be heard on high, / The dead shall live, the living
die, / And music shall untune the sky.
—Dryden, Song for St. Cecelia’s Day

To be asked to speak on this distinguished occasion of the inaugu-

ration of a newly established chair of music is not only a great honor,
it also presents one rather immediately with a particular problem. It is
not unlike being asked to speak about food. One can discuss its color,
its texture, its aroma, its nutritional value—but all that ultimately misses
the point. For in the last analysis, food is not meant to be talked about;
it is meant to be tasted, savored, eaten, and enjoyed. Even the most in-
genious television commercial can show us the sizzle of the hamburger
and the crispiness of the French fries; but what they cannot show—and
what we really want to know—is how do they taste? “Where’s the beef?”
is more than a question of quantity. It is ultimately a question of quality.
It is no different with music, for music is an art which comes to frui-
tion not by speaking about its beauty, proportion, or craftsmanship, but
only in the performance itself and in the listener’s personal engagement
with this art of sound. This presents a particular problem today since the
one we honor in this newly established chair is not one who primarily
talks about music, but one who performs, one who stimulates our hear-
ing, engages our listening, and who ultimately attempts to involve us in
the sound of music itself. And for that words are hardly adequate.
Nevertheless, we can and we should speak about this day and its
importance in our lives, and especially in the life of this community. For
Presentation at the convocation for the introduction of Philip Gehring as the Fred-
erick A. and Mazie N. Reddel Professor of Music, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso,
Ind., October 25, 1985.

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 SINGING THE CHURCH’S SONG

it is important. And the impact of the generosity of the gift which makes
this day possible will certainly be reflected in the lives of all of us here
today, and in the lives of many yet to come.
It is a day for celebrating. And especially in this community it is a day
for celebrating the gift of music: music, that gift which so often permeates
our lives in trivial and inconsequential ways, our too-constant compan-
ion in elevators, supermarkets, student unions, and automobiles; music,
that gift which is also with us in the more particularly profound and
significant events and experiences of life; music, which gives us wings
in times of joy, which buoys us up in times of sadness, which gives us
delight and hope in times of both promise and despair. It is that gift of
music which we celebrate today.
Moreover, it is a day for everyone to celebrate. The celebration is for all:
whether we have trouble keeping the beat, or can tap out a double para-
diddle with ease; whether we have difficulty singing a simple tune, or
can join in the most complex of polyphonic motets; whether our musical
training has been rich and varied, or whether it has consisted largely
of once-a-week piano lessons in the fifth grade in which the teacher’s
challenge was somehow to attempt to bridge the gap between Chopin
and us. It is a day for each of us—and all of us together—to celebrate this
marvelous gift of music. On pitch or off, the celebration includes us all.
It does not exclude a single one.
It is a day for celebrating precisely because music is God’s good creation and
God’s good gift to us all. It is God’s creation. It is God’s gift. And it is God’s
good creation and gift. As such, it is to be received and enjoyed by his
people in praise of the Creator who has graciously given this good gift to
us. Martin Luther understood this simple fact as clearly as anyone:
I would certainly like to praise music with all my heart
as the excellent gift of God which it is and to commend
it to everyone. But I am so overwhelmed by the diversity
and magnitude of its benefits that . . . as much as I want to
commend it, my praise is bound to be wanting.1
Nothing here of Augustine’s scruples at having received pleasure
from this wonderful gift. Nothing here of Augustine’s “floating between
peril and pleasure” as far as God’s good gift was concerned. “Augus-

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 CELEBRATING MUSIC

tine,” Luther pointed out on one occasion, “was a fine and pious man.
However, if he were living today,” Luther gently reminded his hearers,
“he would agree with us.” For Luther, music understood first of all as
God’s good creation and as God’s good gift to man made music next in
importance to theology, made possible its cultivation and enjoyment at
the highest levels of artistic excellence, and gave man the freedom to use
all of music without fear.
Whether Stravinsky or Springsteen, Gibbons, Gershwin, or Gehring,
music is God’s good gift to us all. Whether Mozart or Beethoven, Bach or
Buxtehude, it is first and last a song of praise to the Creator of music, a
song of praise to him who has given man this good and gracious gift.
But music is always a gift for us to use. It is never simply a gift to be
acknowledged and then hung in the closet like an unwanted Christmas
tie. It is a gift to be used in praise of music’s and our Creator. If music
was indeed God’s gracious gift, it was so in order that man might in turn
use it in God’s praise.
Use the gift of music to praise God and him alone, since he
has given us this gift.
And you, my young friend, let this noble, wholesome, and
cheerful creation of God be commended to you. . . . At the
same time you may by this creation accustom yourself to
recognize and praise the Creator.2
The words of the morning office underscore as clearly as possible
this creator/creature relationship. God is Creator, we are his creatures.
So we are called to worship with the words “O come, let us worship the
Lord.” Why? Our simple and direct response: “For he is our maker.”
Therefore, in the words of Ps. 95, “Come, let us sing unto the Lord. . .
. Let us shout for joy. . . . O come let us bow down and bend the knee,
and kneel before the Lord, our Maker.”
But there is still another dimension to be explored.

Music is God’s good gift in order that his name might be praised and
his Word proclaimed to all the world.
No one spoke so clearly and forthrightly about the union of word
and tone to the end that God might be praised and his Word proclaimed

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 SINGING THE CHURCH’S SONG

as did Martin Luther. For Luther, to sing and praise the Triune God
for all he has done for mankind, especially for his goodness revealed
to us in Christ Jesus, was for Luther to proclaim the good and gracious
will of God. The gift of language combined with the gift of music, said
Luther in his preface to Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae, “was only given to
man to let him know that he should praise God with both word and
music, namely, by proclaiming [the Word of God] through music by
providing sweet melodies with words.” For Luther, as for us today, to
“say and sing” was a single concept erupting from the joyful heart of
the redeemed.
From heaven above to earth I come, / To bear good news to
every home. / Glad tidings of great joy I bring / Whereof I
now will say and sing (emphasis mine).3
Not say, and then sing; but say and sing! In contrast to other reformers
who saw music as potentially troublesome and in need of careful direction
and control, Luther—and we—in the freedom of the Gospel can exult in
the power of music to proclaim the Gospel and to touch the heart and
mind of man, and exult as well in our opportunity to “say and sing.”
Today we celebrate the gift of music in yet another way.

It helps us celebrate our lives together in the community of the Church.

It needs to be said again that the Church, before it is anything else,
is a worshipping community. One may disagree about the priorities of
the tasks the Church is always about—mission, education, evangelism—
but about what the Church is, first and foremost, there should be no
question. It is first and foremost a worshipping community centered, in
Gordon Lathrop’s words, around “bath, Word, and table.”
In this worshipping community music holds a place of the highest
esteem. In this community, music—properly used—always unites, bring-
ing together our individual concerns and uniting them in the prayer
and praise of all. In a very practical sense, music is the glue which holds
together the actions of the liturgy. It unites us into one community as
it helps focus attention where it really belongs: on Christ and what he
has done for us. Music divides when it becomes mere entertainment or
when its focus is on lesser or peripheral concerns.

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 CELEBRATING MUSIC

As music unites us and brings us together in praise and prayer, it

addresses in a most direct way the alienation and selfishness of our fallen
world. One may well ponder Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s observation in his
“After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year 1943”4 concerning
the hopelessness and frustration he saw all around him. “One may ask,”
Bonhoeffer remarked, “whether there have ever been people with so lit-
tle ground under their feet—people to whom every available alternative
seemed equally intolerable, repugnant, and futile.” It is especially here,
in the discordant polyphony of our lives and times, that music as God’s
good and gracious gift helps us see the strong and firm cantus firmus
about which all else revolves, that enduring melody, that song which is
Jesus Christ himself.
In this connection I am reminded of the story of the farmer walking
down a path and encountering a little bird lying on its back with its feet
sticking up in the air. “You stupid bird,” the farmer said, “what are you
doing lying on your back with your feet sticking up in the air?” “Haven’t
you heard?” the little bird replied. “The sky is falling.” “Well,” said the
farmer, “do you think you can prevent the sky from falling by lying on
your back with your feet sticking up in the air?” “Well,” the bird replied,
“we all do what we can.” In our world in which the sky seems so often
to be falling all around us, God’s good gift of music helps to remind us
that we are not, as the world may think, shouting forlornly into the bitter
wind. For it is music which helps us to sing the triumphant song of faith
in the face of all doubt, and to sing a song of confidence and trust in the
face of all despair and seeming futility.

Finally, today is a day to celebrate the gift of music as it helps us sing

and dance the faith.
We celebrate today the special joy in the hearts of the redeemed as
through the song of faith we confidently affirm the goodness of all of God’s
creation. To sing and dance the faith with great exuberance is to save us from
the false sobriety and pretentious somberness which characterizes so much
of the Church today. To sing and dance the faith is to bring us into the
presence of the morning stars which sang together for joy before the foun-
dation of the world, and into the company of all the saints with whom we
sing, “Holy, holy, holy, heaven and earth are full of your glory.”

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 SINGING THE CHURCH’S SONG

To sing that song in confidence and faith even now as a worshipping

community can be done only as we hold together the two words which
signify what our song and our music-making are all about: the dogma or
the teaching, and the doxa or the praise. We need to be reminded again
that “orthodoxy” means, first of all, “right praise,” and that the dogma
and the doxa are best held together when we see ourselves first of all as a
worshipping community.
Music and music-making is always a sign. It should be a sign of God’s
continuing goodness, a sign of God who gives us songs to sing, and a sign
of the One who gives art and music to his people that we might glimpse
his beauty, that we might see in this good gift our Creator, delight in his
gracious gift, praise his name, and proclaim his Word to the world.
To be a part of that endeavor is a high and noble calling indeed. It
is a calling which reaches its final and glorious culmination as one day
we join in the music-making of the song of the Lamb at that final feast
of victory:
Worthy is Christ, the Lamb who was slain, whose blood
set us free to be people of God. Sing with all the people of
God, and join in the hymn of all creation: blessing, honor,
glory, and might be to God and the Lamb forever. Alleluia!
Alleluia!5
Amen!

Notes
1
Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, American edition, vol. 53, Liturgy and Hymns,
ed. Ulrich S. Leupold (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965), 321–22 (preface to Georg
Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae).
2
Ibid., 324.
3
Lutheran Service Book #358, st. 1.
4
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
5
Liturgical song text by John W. Arthur based on Rev. 5:12-13.

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