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Dr. Paul Westermeyer is Professor of Church Music at Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. And in this capacity, he is also the cantor for chapel services there, and has been the national chaplain for the American Guild of Organists and president of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.

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He has too many books to mention, but I will mention that he is currently writing the companion for the new Evangelical Lutheran Book of Worship, commenting on every tune, text arrangement, and author in that new and marvelous hymnal. I hope that while he is here with us, because he is such a delightful conversation partner, that many of you here in this community over these next days will have the opportunity to be in conversation with him, both here at Austin Seminary during the midwinters and later, perhaps, when he is serving as keynoter for the Presbyterian Association of Musicians Conference here in Austin toward the end of this week. Paul, on behalf of both the seminary and the Presbyterian Association of Musicians, I want you to know how glad we are that you are here and how much we look forward to what you have to share.

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Thanks very much. Can you all hear me from here? Yeah? Thank you very much for those kind words.

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It is a delight to be among you, I must tell you, a deep delight to be among you. I sometimes think, however, that when I do lectures of this sort for convocations of this sort, You all know everything before I start. It's the people who aren't here who don't know this.

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But nonetheless, I suppose it's probably important for us to articulate it. My assignment is to talk today about teaching the church's song, and then tomorrow about what the church's song teaches us. What that seems to require is, first of all, a sketch of the landscape, the landscape which we inhabit. This can sometimes, because we're talking about the church's music, this can sometimes sound like an indictment on the church, because we have often forgotten to teach it.

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I want to be honest, but I don't want to be nasty. I would like to-- to the extent that it's an indictment, let us hope it is a constructive indictment. But I think the way to get at it is by way of autobiography. So let me sketch the landscape by means of autobiography.

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When I was about nine years old, I felt called to become an ordained minister. At exactly the... the same point, I became interested in music, studied the violin, studied piano, organ, conducting voice, organized choirs when I was in high school, and so on. But mostly, I found myself asking questions about church music.

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Well, I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. A Germanic background. The College of Music was there. The Conservatory of Music was there.

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Both of those schools are now part of the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. The Symphony Orchestra was there. There were choir directors, organists, singers, instrumentalists. The town is full of musicians.

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My family were active members in one of the city's churches. and we were also involved with other churches in the city. So I knew some fine pastors and I knew some fine musicians. Now, excuse me, if my voice deserts me, pardon me, I keep being attacked by some allergy, but I'll attempt to get through it.

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When I asked musicians and pastors about church music, The same response came from both of them with a little bit different twist. The pastors told me I would get over my musical interests. True.

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The musicians told me I would get over my what I came to understand were theological interests. Neither group seemed to have a clue that there was a body of material which related the two areas. They both knew that music was about technique.

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They knew there was a set of skills to be practiced. And there were churches in the city with fine congregational singing, fine choirs, fine organ playing, and the absence of those, too, as in every city. Both things were there. But I was hard-pressed to discover anybody who thought there was some meaning behind this, other than that perhaps some kind of emotional catharsis took place from time to time.

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But there was no real meaning behind this, and there was certainly no sense of anything to study other than musical technique. When I went to college, the same basic terrain appeared. I went to a school outside of Chicago. Basically, the same terrain appeared, with one exception.

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I had a remarkable music professor, an incredible music theory and music history teacher. His name was T. Howard Krieger. He not only taught those topics extremely well, but he realized that there was something there worth asking about.

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He was a choir director. He's a trombonist and a choir director as well. But he realized that there was something worth asking about, though he himself was not a professional theologian. But he realized there was something that was worth asking about here, and he encouraged my interests.

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He also told me about the program at Union Seminary in New York, where I went to do the Master of Sacred Music degree. At Union Seminary, which had this splendid Master of Sacred Music degree. I do not mean to cast aspersions on it at all.

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It was a wonderful degree. I am deeply, deeply grateful for it. But a friend of mine, and some other friends of mine besides him and I, often mused that at Union Seminary, you had two schools under one roof. And though wonderful things happened there,

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And the absence of the music school at Union Seminary has changed its character immensely, for the worse, I would say, as all of us who are graduates from music school would say. Nonetheless-- Not only graduates of music school, by the way, there are some others who would say the same thing. Nonetheless, there was a sense in which there were two schools under one roof. And the kind of dialogue, the kind of yeasty dialogue that could have happened did not always happen.

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As a matter of fact, it seldom did. You would have a theological class or a music class, and you would say to yourself, now, isn't that interesting? If those two people talk to one another, or if there was some kind of a dialogue between the two topics, we could have some kind of interesting explosions going on. In Lancaster Seminary, where I did the BD, the MDiv,

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There was unusually a wonderful course in worship, a wonderful course in church music, and there was a fine musician. But one has to say that at Lancaster, as in most every other seminary I know about, music is basically a stepchild. For a doctoral program, I found one, a remarkable one, at the University of Chicago, but that's a tribute to the University of Chicago, not to the church or to church music. did the degree under the guidelines and within the structures of the University of Chicago.

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But the University of Chicago encourages any kind of study for which you can make a case. This was not a church music program as such. And it was interesting when I went there, I couldn't figure out where to do a doctoral program, so one of my friends said to me, well, you know, Joe Sittler is there. And Joe Sittler is really interested in this sort of thing, so why don't you talk to him?

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So I went to talk to Sittler. Sittler said, oh, sure, of course. Come, send me your application. So I sent Sittler my application.

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Didn't hear, didn't hear, didn't hear. I called him finally. He said, oh, I'm sorry, Paul. I lost it.

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send it to, I think, Bernard McGinn or somebody. So I sent it and was accepted, and I was going to go and study with Sittler. He retired. So anyway, I wound up doing it with Martin Marty, which was absolutely wonderful.

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I mean, really, really wonderful. But that's because the University of Chicago is such a remarkable place, not because there was a program in place for church music. As a teacher, I have continued to find less supportive environments for the study of church music.

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I am very grateful for the program at Luther Seminary, where I run the Master of Sacred Music degree with St. Olaf College. I'm grateful for the program at St. Olaf College.

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Those are wonderful programs, and there are several others across the country. But there are not many. They're sparse. And my assistant, Kristin Rongstedt, who's very wise about things like this, sometimes compares these programs to Oreo cookies in which the cream gets scrunched.

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Last summer, I was at a conference that asked with trepidation about how many current organ positions in universities would not be filled when the occupants retired. This fall, I was at a conference where defining the study of church music has been on the table. And the question is, is it a discipline of study, or is it something else? Is it a field of study that brings together different disciplines?

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The resources for such conferences and for church music programs are, by comparison with other programs, quite small. Church music programs often get supported by alliances with other programs. That's not necessarily bad, but it also indicates the terrain, the landscape that we inhabit. And then there is the way church musicians are treated.

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Since I was in high school, I have witnessed church musicians being treated badly. And I have to admit that I often asked myself whether I wanted to be part of such a thing. When I got older, I discovered it was worse than I thought. I'm serious.

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I really did discover that. And I discovered it in two ways, especially. As Ecclesiastical Concerns Chair for the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians and as National Chaplain for the American Good of Organists, my desk was flooded with almost every week, literally almost every week while I held those offices. there were some calls from people I didn't even know about some bad treatment of church musicians here, there, or elsewhere.

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Now, sometimes these circumstances are mildly bad. Sometimes there is what can only be described as abuse of musicians, which would not be tolerated by clergy or by other professionals. And what is most bizarre about this is pastors who are proud to know nothing about worship and nothing about church music, but who believe they should certainly be in control.

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Now, I mean, this is really a bizarre circumstance. I know of no other circumstance where somebody presumes to be in charge of the store who knows nothing about it and is proud to know nothing about it. That is a very, very curious circumstance. Now, that very demeanor suggests that there's nothing worth studying, that church music really is not worth worrying about, that there's no center to it.

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And the problem is compounded by colleges or universities where church musicians-- those of us who teach in them-- have colleagues who think that we're paranoid and that we make the whole thing up. And I tell you, we're not. I mean, maybe we are paranoid.

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I don't know. But we are not making this up. And I should add one more interesting dilemma-- how positions are announced or advertised. Last Friday, I came back from teaching at St.

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Olaf and was in my office working, and my assistant, Chris Rongstad, walked in, and she said, I wish pastors would understand what these sound like. Now, I should tell you that she and I compile a list of every position, every church music position that we know about in the United States, part-time, full-time, whatever. She keeps an electronic list of it.

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She keeps a list on the bulletin board. She keeps it up to date. So we see lots of these things. Now, like pastoral positions, some of them are idiotic.

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I mean, you expect the pastor or musician to do absolutely everything conceivable, superhuman tasks in a whole list of them. So that's one thing that's idiotic, but that's true for pastors as well. But for the church musician jobs, they often say something like this one, She started reading to me. The successful candidate will have a bachelor's or a master's degree in church music and be able to do-- and then there's a brief mention of something musical.

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And then it says, but the person needs to be able to relate to other human beings, lead, and then you have a whole series of human relations issues that follow, paragraphs. effectively saying the musical piece is really not very important. Now, it is certainly the case that you need to be able to relate to human beings. You need to be able to do all the things that anybody who works in a church ought to be able to do.

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I discovered in your own history-- what is it? Smoot and Dabney, at the very beginning of your history, had something to do with the fact that the seminary went out of existence in 1895 after being started in 1894. So I mean, I'm sure that's not the only thing, not only their relationships, but apparently that was part of it.

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And I have discovered other relationships in your history, the same as every seminary in church history, where not working together is disastrous. Of course, of course. You need people who are leaders and who work together and all of that. But

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You can't allow the substance of the discipline to be evaporated and say, that's all we need. And in church music positions, that's what often happens. Other sorts of interesting things happen in church musician positions also. A few years ago, I saw a position that was advertised and couldn't quite figure out what it was about.

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And then a couple of my students and graduates said to me, what's this-- this job about? It's a full-time job. I said, I don't know.

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I'll call. So I called the pastor. The position lays out 10 responsibilities. It took you until you get to eight or nine until anything is said about music.

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What you have are the first seven or so that say, the person will organize X, Y, or Z and talk to the church council. The person will take a survey about X, Y, or Z and talk to the church council. So I said to the pastor, you know, this sounds like a sociologist, not like a musician. What's going on?

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He said, well, it sounds as if somebody who runs a car dealership or who was an insurance salesman or somebody like that wrote it, right? I said, yeah. He said, well, that's what happened. OK.

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Fine. The puzzle is that music gets scrunched, like the cream in the Oreo cookie, or gets left out. If church music is of some value, it needs to be central in job description. Now, none of what I have just described is basically about bad people, except in the sense that we're all sinners.

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And yes, of course, we are. And one has to say, there are jerks who are musicians, there are jerks who are clergy, and there are jerks who are members of the church. Yes, right. Some musicians have figured out how to manipulate things, and they have created demonic dynasties, to be sure.

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But they are few, because you need just the right personality, and you need the right set of circumstances to pull that off. there are more pastors than I wish there were who are proud to know nothing about worship and music and yet think they should be in control and they do cause all sorts of havoc they really do but they almost invariably crash land almost invariably at some point there's a disaster and there are alligators among the laity It's true, who likewise can cause massive problems until their communities finally have had enough and stop them. And the whole business stops then.

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Or they don't get stopped, and then the musicians are forced to leave. Those people can loom very large, all of them. And they can create bedlam and hostilities. And we know about them because they get publicized.

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But by and large, they are a small minority. The puzzle here, it seems to me, is that what we are dealing with is basically systemic. The issue is not fundamentally bad people, it's a systemic issue. issue.

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And you can isolate all kinds of reasons for it: immigration, rationalism, pietism, hardened confessionalism, amateur expectations, lack of money, unwillingness to spend money on music, jealousies, lack of competence or lack of self-esteem at various levels, and among various people who are not always the musicians, et cetera, et cetera. That is grist for another lecture, not for this one. That is all there, and I'm aware of it. Here we have to do with the reality that this landscape that I have sketched is fundamentally systemic, not a matter of bad people.

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How to proceed? There are two choices. One is to say, that's the way it is, and then we whine about it. And musicians do that.

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And by the way, that's not all bad. I mean, to get it out. At music conferences, musicians have to get it out.

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They have to talk to somebody. But standing around and whining about it isn't the solution. The second option is, what do we do about it? I would like to choose the second option and say, what do we do about it?

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But let me first just mention this uncanny reality. I'll come back to this at the end. Though there is much that militates against church music, and against church musicians, and against the study of church music.

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I realize that. Here is the crazy thing. The church always finds a way to sing. The church almost invariably finds a way to sing.

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Now just hold on to that, and we'll come back to it. OK, now the question is, what is required? What are we to do about this? First, theology and music.

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This is not rocket science. This is really not rocket science. The largest portion of what the church has sung and sings is the Psalms, as you who are Calvinists know very well, better than the rest of us, except for the Benedictines. Really, you and the Benedictines know about that, right?

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And you teach us a lot. The biggest thing the church sings, the center of what the church sings, for Lutherans as well, for all of us, is the Psalms. The Psalms, as Luther said, are the cradle in which Christ is laid, the Bible in miniature. And the Psalms open up the entire theological encyclopedia.

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But They also open up the entire musical encyclopedia because the psalms, which represent the faith in miniature, cry out to be sung. That is to say, the faith cries out to be sung. So two things follow.

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One, those who study theology, if they're responsible, have to include music in their study. Two, Those who study church music, if they are responsible, have to include theology in their study. But it's not rocket science.

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It seems to me it's very obvious. Theologians are not required to know the detail of music's theory or practice. They do not have to get at the detail that musicians have to get at. Musicians are not required to know the detail that professional theologians have to get at, but both.

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if they are responsible, have to know something about the other terrain. They have to know its dimensions and contents, at least in some way, and they have to know where to go to study it. Church music is eviscerated when pastors tell students they'll get over their concerns for music, or when church musicians tell students they'll get over their concerns for theology. or when either group fails to recognize the legitimacy of the other and how the health of the church depends on both disciplines and the interdisciplinary nature of the two disciplines.

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This is an interdisciplinary discipline, and we need to recognize that reality. And we are the poorer when we don't recognize it or study it. Why is church music eviscerated? I think the fundamental reason for both groups is because music gets regarded the way the culture regards it.

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And how is that? Music is a tool to sell things. In that perspective, Christianity itself is regarded in exactly the same way as a commodity to be sold. Now, if those are the presuppositions, there is not much to study.

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All you have to do is figure out the techniques of manipulation. And we as a culture do that very, very well. We know how to sell stuff. How do you sell stuff?

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You sell stuff by music, and you ally it to sex. And you put music and you put sex together, and you sell things. And the church, when it buys into that perspective-- and in the church, it buys into that perspective as well, not only music, but sex. I can point you to a church where some years ago I went, sexy lady under spotlight with a band behind her trying to sell us Jesus on Sunday morning at a Sunday service, right?

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Sexy lady. It's always a sexy lady on the stool, right? Not an ugly lady, a sexy lady. Right?

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I'm serious about that, right? Who, with music, trying to sell us something. When you think that's the business of music in the church, there's nothing to study except the techniques of manipulation. If, however, church music, as Calvin and Luther and Pius X and the whole bunch for 20 centuries have known, if church music is about the glory of God and the edification of humanity,

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or the whole life before God as the Psalms suggests that a lifetime is not going to exhaust this kind of study I presume that we're talking about the second understanding where music has substance it's about the glory of God and the edification of humanity and it cannot be exhausted in a lifetime of study there are two parts then to the teaching of music in the church they're equally as important one is to teach music The other is to teach what music carries, namely words, or more broadly theology. Where does this start? It starts with worship.

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Church music is not a cut flower science. It does not happen in the hothouse of music. It does not happen in the hothouse of a theological school. It happens in the church at worship, from which musical and theological schools learn, and then contribute their gifts.

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Let me say that again. It happens at worship, from which music and theological schools learn. We learn from the worship, and then we contribute our gifts back to them. From cradle to grave, the church sings at its worship.

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From cradle to grave, the church that is wise studies about this singing in Sunday school classes for children and for adults of all ages, in forums, in conferences, in lectures, in bulletins, in newsletters, on web pages, and in every other venue one can possibly imagine, from cradle to grave, The church that is wise in its local settings-- I'm talking about the parish church in its local settings-- studies about church music. It studies biblical, theological, and historical themes related to church music. It studies music theory, history, and practice, and yet does not do this in professional and arcane ways.

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It does it in the ways normal baptized people with no particular expertise in these areas can understand. And I can tell you they know and want to learn about it. I do forums in churches about these topics. And very often the response is, how come nobody ever told us that before?

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And it is not arcane in the kind of stuff that you're going to do in a music theory class. in a college. It's the kind of stuff that normal human beings can't understand and want to know about. And those of us who teach this stuff can figure out how to say it to those sorts of people.

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And they understand almost immediately. It's impossible for me to even comprehend churches, the topics that some churches want me to talk about. They say, Come talk about the Brahms Requiem. All right.

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Now, that's not about worship. That's about the oratorio tradition. That's not worship. But the Brahms Requiem is not just the

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simplest thing in the world to understand, right? I mean, that takes some doing. Or they'll say, come and talk to us about a bach cantata, which does, of course, relate to worship. OK, that's worship-- schools before colleges.

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In schools related to the church, more detailed study than in the local church is obviously possible. Am I doing something wrong here? In schools related to the church, more detail than in the church itself is possible. In public schools, things are more complicated.

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There, however, since so much of the world's music has been and still is dependent on the church, church music, in fact, gets studied. Whether we like it or not, it's out there. What Christians need to do is to help people get a perspective on this. And by that, I do not mean that the church goes into the public schools and tries to control things.

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Christian faith welcomes all kinds of perspectives, welcomes truth wherever it comes from, even welcomes falsehoods that need to be unmasked. But the way we get at this is not by trying to control the public schools and force them to do what we think they ought to do. The way we get at it is by helping... students figure out what makes things tick.

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The secular schools can't tell them that. They have to avoid that. In my town, I've had many contacts with the University of Minnesota with folks there who want to talk about doing a program with us together. It never gets off the ground because you've got church-state problems that you've got to deal with.

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So the secular schools can't do that, but we can in the church. A public school may not explain a theological context or the context of a hymn or an anthem that one of the groups in the public school sings, but someone in the church can help students figure that out. Churches can play off what public schools do and, in their study, help schools make sense of it. Now come colleges and universities.

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I was talking about public schools before colleges and universities there, basically. Now colleges and universities. Here, though, it is dicey and confusing. There is sometimes more latitude for music in public universities than there is in public schools below the university level.

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Church people in various places have to negotiate this as they are able. Public institutions have made and can make enormously fruitful contributions to the study of church music. But again, the church cannot expect that nor control it. What it does have a responsibility for and can control is church-related colleges, church-related colleges and universities.

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I just a couple of years ago did a lecture about this at Notre Dame. Let me just summarize what I said here first. If what I said about worship is true, then the first thing that church-related schools have to do is build worship into their schedules. Let me say immediately, this is not about how many people will come.

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The numbers will widely vary, will widely vary over long stretches of time. This is about integrity. This is about the integrity of the church and the church-related school. The Christian church worships regularly in local assemblies and in its educational institutions and where two or three or two or three hundred or two or three thousand are gathered together, Christ is in their midst and we are called to do this.

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Some years ago a chaplain at a church-related school managed to get the school to abolish worship The chaplain at a church-related school managed to get the school to abolish worship. Why? Because not everybody in the school was coming, only a couple hundred.

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Now, I didn't make this up. I did not make this up. Now, that is not only stupid and idiotic. It is stupid and idiotic.

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I mean, it is, period. It also flies in the face of the nature of a church-related school, and it makes the study of church music impossible. It destroys the study of church music. It destroys the study of all kinds of stuff in the process.

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The church-related school, first of all, has to build worship into its schedule second. Church musicians need to be called by the church-related college. Whether or not their church music responsibilities are full-time or part-time depends on the school and the circumstances, but they need to be there. They are called to do what church musicians are always called to do, learn the Christian faith in the dimensions and the contours of the tradition they are serving of that particular college.

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and then develop their skills as musicians and musical leaders. And that means leading the congregation, which does not practice, and leading the choir, which does. You realize you have two parts to church music, basically. You've got the congregation, which is a really strange group.

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Really. I mean, think about this. The congregation is a group, basically, of non-musicians who sings without practice, right? Really, that's what it is.

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And the musician has to lead it. That's the job. That's the job. And then the second thing the church musician does is to lead a group that does practice.

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And the group that does practice is called to lead the congregation and to do what the congregation cannot do. And let me just say parenthesis here, choirs who come at the beginning of the service and dump their load and leave are not carrying out their vocation. Their vocation is to leave the congregation.

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So church musicians just do what church musicians do. That's what they do. Third, a college's responsibility is to study, to teach, and to learn. The music of the church is an obvious part of this study, learning, and teaching.

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At least one course devoted solely to church music should be present, I would say. More than that is probably too much to expect in most undergraduate college curricula, unless you have a church music major. But there are a host of other related courses. which can be fashioned into a curriculum for church musicians and for those with such interests.

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Let me just name some. Music theory, music history, applied music, a worship course of its present, it may not be, theology, philosophy, ethics, history, sociology, psychology, language courses, math, computer courses, and business courses. which include the whole world of commerce and how music is related to it. Let me say immediately, I am not suggesting here that music is the means by which you manipulate things.

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I'm saying music is a discipline of study which takes into account all of that stuff. And it's a discipline or a field of study that can be squashed into oblivion if you don't put that stuff together coherently, but you can put it together coherently. Again, this is not about a marketing ploy. If you turn it into a marketing ploy, forget the whole business.

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You don't need the church. You don't need worship. You don't need church music or college or church-related colleges for that. Seminaries and other graduate schools.

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At seminaries and at graduate schools, we need programs for church musicians. where in addition to a broad spectrum of biblical, historical, theological, and pastoral courses, programs of both theory and practice swirl around three basic topics: worship, the normally unrehearsed singing of the congregation, and the rehearsed singing and playing of choir, organ, and instrumentalists. For church musicians, this is best defined as applied musical study allied with theological study. And by theological study, I mean this whole breadth of everything I've been talking about.

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It can move toward more applied or toward more theory. And there need to be places for composers, for music historians, and for others who may not be practicing church musicians, but who do their craft and do their research, and by doing it, serve the church's musical needs. That work needs to be done at master's and doctoral levels to include the kind of detail and to keep the engagement of such programs going that these kinds of things presume.

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Now, I should say, the part for composers is a bit complicated. My program, for example, Master of Sacred Music program, is to train musicians who are leaders in the church. right? They sing and lead the song of the church.

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My program, therefore, can't really admit composers. I feel very bad about that. We've had a couple composers who it would be wonderful to have. We need programs of studies for those kinds of people, too.

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The people in St. Olaf and I, when we do auditions, always struggle with this. What is it that we should and should not admit here in terms of a discipline and in terms of people? And it's very complicated.

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The church as a whole, not just us at one little place, need to think about this. Pastors need to include some of this in their study at seminaries. But here's the deal, friends. They need to know what is involved in this discipline, and they need to know that it is not their vocation.

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It is not their vocation. Seniors who come to me and all of a sudden discover hymn writing, and having had no preparation for it, suddenly believe they can become hymn writers, text writers, or suddenly believe they can become tune writers, suddenly at the end of their careers. I mean, that's crazy.

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It's not their vocation. Their vocation is for word and sacrament and the pastoral and all the other stuff that comes from that. The musician's responsibility is for music. And what pastors need to know about is enough of the terrain to figure out what's going on out there and know they have a colleague with whom they can work.

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But it's not their vocation. In addition to all this, there are what might be called continuing education conferences. These are the things that we musicians attend at summers, during the summers, or as will happen now, with Thorne Allen Hess going here. They cover a wide range of topics and expertise.

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They serve to keep us alert to what's going on. They provide refreshment. And most of all, they provide the wisdom of colleagues. As in all, study.

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That's very, very important. As a matter of fact, this may be more important than anything else for most other disciplines. I have to say, the teachers that I had at Union Seminary were amazing. One of my MSM.

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I am deeply grateful for them. But I have to say, I am equally grateful for my colleagues. I'm going to do a hymn festival in a couple of weeks with one of my colleagues who graduated with me, and he's in Tucson, Arizona now. people like that.

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We keep in touch, and those people are all over the world, and they have taught, each of us has taught one another all sorts of stuff. Ito Lo is another one of my colleagues who did Sound of Bamboo, the Asian stuff. I mean, we learned a lot in the process of educating ourselves. when we're doing the degree, but then also beyond that.

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OK, now what I have just done is to sketch the breadth and the study of church music and the places where it needs to happen. Now I want to suggest another way to get at this topic. I have often told students that if you really want the best possible seminary education, you can do it in miniature. go to a university where there is going to be a study of a Bach cantata.

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It does not matter if the person is a believer, agnostic, atheist, whatever. It doesn't matter. Because when they start to study a Bach cantata, they realize what they have to get at. Same is true if you want to know what the study of church music entails in miniature,

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Think about what studying a Bach cantata will call you to do. Let me detail the things. One, history. You will need to study history under three headings.

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Church music, you need to locate Bach and the history of the church's music. In the history of the church, secondly, and in the history of the world. So church, music, world. Robert Shaw, you realize, said Bach is the greatest creative genius in the Western world.

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And the B minor mass is his greatest achievement. Now, I know somebody's going to say, what about Shakespeare, and what about Luther, and what about Calvin, and what about-- et cetera. And I understand those are all-- you can raise those questions. But Bach is very important.

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It's not only Bach, however, what Bach represents is church music. You can do this with any church music person or piece. It will not be as good. I guarantee that.

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But nonetheless, it represents something here. And you're going to study history under all three of those headings. Two, worship. You cannot avoid worship.

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You have to figure out where Bach's cantata fit in Leipzig, an 18th century Leipzig, in the worship of that particular place. Then you've got to figure out what worship looked like in Leipzig. And that immediately forces you to say, what did it look like before? What did it look like after?

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And how do you compare it with worship in other traditions? Calvinist, for example. Third, you have to do biblical study. Because invariably, a biblical text or biblical texts are involved in the cantata.

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And even if they're not precisely involved, they're implied. Languages, form critical study, and every other kind of biblical study you can possibly imagine are immediately called into play. Fourth, theological study. The Bible is interpreted and the worship of the church is related to a particular strand of the church's history in a Bachantata or in Calvin's Geneva or in wherever you want to have it.

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You've got to figure that out. This is not just sort of cut flower out there nowhere. It relates to a particular strand, theological understanding, and you've got to figure out where that comes from, where it's going, and how that all relates. Fifth, you cannot avoid the problems of translation, at least if you're doing this cantata in some language other than German.

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Sixth, if you're doing it in German or if you're doing something else in English, you still have language to deal with. You've got to deal with poetry. Immediately, you have to deal with poetry. Seventh, you cannot avoid hymnody and its poetry in many languages, so you're dealing with hymnody, generally.

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Eighth, you cannot avoid texts of choral music and the languages that they bring with them. Ninth, this is no particular order, you realize. It's just laying them out. Ninth, musical technique is necessary to perform the piece.

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You cannot avoid the center of the problem, namely practice. You've got to do the music, and you have to have the forces necessary to do it. If you need an oboe, you need an oboe. And you need somebody who can play it.

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And if you need a singer, you need a singer. If you need a choir, you need a choir, et cetera. Ten. Musical technique includes not only technique in a general sense, but in a specific performance practice sense.

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How is the music performed in the Baroque? If you're doing a 19th century piece, how about the 19th century France, or Italy, or wherever? How do we perform it today? How do the two relate?

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And how do you want to handle that whole issue? That doesn't mean we have to do exactly what the Baroque did. Normally, I've understood that Baroque pitch, for example, is less than 440. It's 415 or something like that.

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I just had a record. I did a Bach cantata in my little tiny church. I'm not the cantor, but my cantor asked me to do it. So we did cantata 150.

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I got a cantata, a recording of Bach's cantata 150 in Japan. You know the Japanese do these things really well. And the pitch was jacked up to something like 460. So, I mean, I don't know what that there's no discussion in the CD about why that happened.

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But you've got to figure that stuff out. The pitch doesn't all stay the same. Eleventh, the choral and instrumental music of the whole church is immediately before you. The whole spectrum is there.

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Twelfth, so is the congregation's music. The congregation's music is implied. Bach assumes the congregation's singing. He doesn't write for the congregation.

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He writes for the choir. But he assumes the congregation's singing. And for most places, your tradition assumes the congregation's singing only in Geneva. No choir whatsoever.

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You've obviously changed your mind about that. Right? But you see what I mean? You're immediately looking at the whole tradition and saying, OK, we've got these two pieces to deal with.

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Thirteenth. You have to assemble the requisite forces and rehearse. I implied that when I said musical technique is necessary, but that means not only musical technique for the individual oboist, it means for the whole group. You have to practice as a group.

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Fourteenth. You need to analyze the score, which is more than musical details and notes. What are the musical and theological plots that are going on here? How are they related?

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What is embedded in this score that cannot be heard? What does the whole thing mean? Now, for Bach, this is very interesting. As you probably all know, 14, 1, 4 is BACH numerically.

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JS Bach is 41. 41, 14. Bach embeds those numbers in his scores. Now, you can never hear that.

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You can never hear that. but you discover unbelievable stuff, theological stuff that's being told you by Bach, quietly, and you probably should know that. There are a whole bunch of other details, however, that you can hear about how the piece is shaped. What's the form like?

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15. What about pastoral care? We never talk about this. We never talk about this.

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To be human is to sing. To sing in the church is especially to be human and to be redeemed. We respond to something incredible here. This is about pastoral care.

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I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a psychologist. I did not discover this by doing anything except being a church musician. A person who is raped cannot sing. I do not mean cannot sing metaphorically, I mean cannot sing.

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I know somebody's going to tell me there are exceptions. Yes, there are exceptions. But I discovered this is a church musician. Somebody can't sing.

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And the church comes to me and says, she can't sing. Why? Well, who knows? She can't explain it, can you?

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You ponder a little bit. You find out she's been raped. This tumbles out in my classes at the seminary. To get back to singing is incredibly difficult.

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It takes incredible work. The health of a congregation has something to do with its song, a lot to do with its song. We want to talk about music in terms of styles. This music will attract that person.

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This music will attract that person. What is your favorite hymn? Doesn't make a hill of beans difference. Your favorite hymn is irrelevant.

00:51:11.930 - 00:51:22.090

What about the community? What about the pastoral care for the community? What about what we sing as community? What works in community?

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Those are questions we simply avoid, and they are all over the place in our music. Sixteenth, what is implied by the church's teaching for this piece? Seventeenth, what are the ethical dimensions? of this piece.

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And there are always ethical demands. And the ethical demands are in two places, for the neighbor and for the whole common good. They're different, but they're implied. What about aesthetics here?

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That's the 18th. What kind of proportion is involved? What craft? What does beauty mean?

00:51:55.950 - 00:52:26.310

19th, what is implied about the community in relation to the individual, which the Psalms will also teach us? 20? What about any of this in comparison with other places? Ambrose in fourth century Milan, Charlemagne, Hildegard, Michaux, Peratin, Luther, Calvin, John or Charles Wesley, 18th century Methodism, Thomas Helmore, 19th century Anglians, megachurches, the church today in Japan, Argentina, today, the Iona community, the emerging church, et cetera, et cetera.

00:52:26.310 - 00:52:35.790

The whole business is implied. All right. What I have just sketched out for you is a huge topic. I have no illusions about it.

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I have no illusions about this at all. In some sense, everything that I have mentioned is present somewhere, somehow. We would be better served if we could, however, organize it. And we could organize it in such a way that from cradle through graduate schools, it would happen and we're not simply hit and miss.

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This would require denominational and ecumenical cooperation with denominational flavors expected. We are all worried about our denominations going to disappear. Whether they disappear or not, it seems to me, is irrelevant. Your lectures, H.

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Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture lectures, tell you that the denominational flavors, whether or not the denominations stay, are going to remain. I mean, that's a very important book, which you have spawned. And it has all kinds of musical implications. And what we need to do in our study of church music is to figure out the ecumenical stuff, as well as the individual flavors that go with it, and then boldly, but with humility, contribute them to the ecumenical whole.

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It's not a matter of beating up on one another, and Lutherans aren't beating up Presbyterians. It's you guys beating up yourselves. and me beating up ourselves. Lutherans beat up Lutherans, Presbyterians beat up Presbyterians.

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We need to have enough breadth, enough humility, enough bold humility to say, look, we've got to study this together and contribute our flavor to the ecumenical whole. Now, whether or not we do this, here's the amazing thing. This is the last thing I'm going to say. It seems that no matter what, the church has sung and will sing.

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No matter what obstacles are thrown against it, no matter how much church music is neglected, no matter what the church sings. The question is whether or not the church will study what it sings and run out the implications of its song, its sounding form in the world, and whether we will take up the song responsibly or not. The question here is no different from the question asked of the church at every other one of its vocational junctures. Will we rise up in our generation and take up our task responsibly or not?

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Will we think about it, provide resources for it, train people who have the requisite talents, work at it, give it our best shot, be what we are called to be, do what we are called to do? This is not rocket science. It's simply doing what the church is called to do in this matter, as in every other one. And all the areas are related, and I hope to say something about that tomorrow.

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Thanks.