Music in worship serves many purposes and manifests itself in a variety of expressions. It is used both to praise God and to proclaim the Word; it both expresses prayer and relates the Gospel story. This article examines the various functions of music in worship and describes their implication for the church musician, who is the leader of the people’s song.
What is the role of the church musician? The question can be answered by looking first at the nature of the church’s song. Five headings suggest themselves.
A Song of Praise
The church’s song, especially for Protestants, is most obviously a song of praise. Many Psalms—like Psalm 98, “O sing to the Lord a new song”; Psalm 100, which calls us to “Come into [God’s] presence with singing”; or Psalm 150, where instruments and “everything that breathes” is all exhorted to praise the Lord—give expression to what is implicit throughout the Bible: God is to be praised, and music is one of the chief vehicles for expressing that praise.
Luther explains how this song of praise comes about. “God has made our hearts and spirits happy through His dear Son, whom He has delivered up that we might be redeemed from sin, death, and the devil. He who believes this sincerely and earnestly cannot help but be happy; he must cheerfully sing … ” (Foreword to the Geistlich Lieder of 1545, quoted in Walter E. Buszin, Luther on Music [St. Paul: North Central Publishing Company, 1958], 6). God acts with loving-kindness toward us, and we respond with a jubilant song of praise. That is an essential part of the church’s song from its most formal to its most informal expression.
Karl Barth, one of the most important twentieth-century Reformed theologians, virtually made the church’s song of praise a mark of the Christian community. He wrote, “The praise of God which constitutes the community and its assemblies seeks to bind and commit and therefore to be expressed, to well up and be sung in concert. The Christian community sings. It is not a choral society. Its singing is not a concert. But from inner, material necessity it sings.…”
What we can and must say quite confidently is that the community which does not sing is not the community. (Church Dogmatics, IV.3., second half, trans. G. W. Bromiley [Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark], 866-867)
A Song of Prayer
The song of the church is also a song of prayer. This perspective finds preeminent expression among Roman Catholics and those with more Catholic liturgical forms. The roots of temple and synagogue worship are a sung tradition, as are Christian liturgies of both the East and the West. Gregorian chant, which accompanied much of the Western liturgical tradition, is seen by some as prayer itself (Dom Joseph Gajard, The Solesmes Method, trans. R. Cecile Gabain [Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1960], vii). The Solesmes school of thought even calls Gregorian chant “a way of reaching up to God” and “a means of sanctification” (ibid., 85).
While many who live in the heritage of the sixteenth-century Reformers may wince at the Solesmes perspective because it can easily be seen as works’ righteousness, John Calvin himself considered church song in the section on prayer in his Institutes (ed. John T. McNeill [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960], III:X:31–32.) Luther and the Lutheran church retained the singing of collects and indeed the whole liturgy, and a large body of Protestant hymns are in fact prayers. Though the emphasis may differ, almost all traditions treat music as prayer in some way. That should not surprise us any more than using music as praise should surprise us. Human beings both laugh and weep. Laughter is the incipient form of sung praise, as weeping is the incipient form of sung prayer (cf. Joseph Gelineau, Voices and Instruments in Christian Worship [Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1964], 15-19). The two very often run into one another and cross (see Patrick D. Millar, Jr., Interpreting the Psalms [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986], 64-78).
A Song of Proclamation
The church’s song is also a song of proclamation. The author of Ephesians expressed this by saying, “be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:18–19).
Here it is clear that music is a means by which the words and word of the gospel are proclaimed. Luther referred to the parallel verse in Colossians (3:16) and wrote, “St. Paul … in his Epistle to the Colossians … insists that Christians appear before God with psalms and spiritual songs which emanate from the heart, in order that through these the Word of God and Christian doctrine may be preached, taught, and put into practice” (Preface to the Geistliche Gesangbuchlein of 1524, quoted in Buszin, Luther on Music, 10).
There is often an element of praise in thoughts of this sort. One can easily move from music as proclamation to music as praise without realizing it. Such a leap removes the distinction between these two motifs and tends to collapse one into the other. Usually, since praise is so obvious, it takes precedence.
The use of music to proclaim the word, however, needs to be kept separate, even though the connections to praise can be close. This is true not only for theological reasons but to do justice to the church’s musical heritage. Much of that heritage is exegetical or proclamatory: music helps to proclaim, to interpret, to break open the Word of God. That is in part what happens when the congregation sings. That is why, from ancient times, biblical lessons have been sung or chanted. Motets by Schütz and chorale preludes, cantatas, and passions by Bach are more complex examples of the same intent. Without a kerygmatic (proclamatory) understanding of these pieces, they are incomprehensible (see Robin A. Leaver “The Liturgical Place and Homiletic Purpose of Bach’s Cantatas,” Worship 59:3 (May 1985): 194–202 and J. S. Bach as Preacher: His Passions and Music in Worship [St. Louis, Concordia Publishing House, 1984]).
The Story
Praise, prayer, and proclamation probably move, for many, from the most to the least obvious definitions of church music. A still less obvious aspect of the church’s song is, upon reflection, both the most obvious and the most profound: the church’s song is story.
When the people of God recount the history of God’s mighty acts, they invariably sing. The morning stars “sang together” at creation on behalf of the people (Job 38:7). After their deliverance from Egypt, Moses and the people sang a song (Ex. 25:1–8). The reason for the psalmist’s songs of praise is that God “has done marvelous things” (Ps. 98:1). New Testament canticles like the Magnificat (Luke 1:47–55) and the Benedictus (Luke 1:68–79) are songs that recount God’s mighty deeds. The songs of Revelation tell the story of God’s mighty acts in an eschatological frame of reference. From the beginning of the biblical saga to its end, from one end of history to the other, the story is a song to be sung.
The same can be said of the church’s hymnody. If you were to lay out the hymns of almost any mainstream hymnal in a sequential fashion, you would find the entire story of God’s mighty acts there—from creation through Old Testament history and incarnation, to the church in the world “between the times,” to last things. Individual hymns often tell the story by themselves. “Oh, Love, How Deep, How Broad, How High” is a good example. Music is the vehicle by which the community remembers and celebrates what God has done—which leads me to three points about the church’s song as story.
First, it is sequentially and logically easy to lay out the story of the Bible from creation to consummation as I have just done in the last two paragraphs. In fact, the story is more sophisticated than that, and sorting it out is more complicated. Like our own stories and those of the psalmist, it often begins in the midst of things, with personal laments and personal songs of thanksgiving and with people who emerge on the stage of history with their own struggles and visions. For the Christian, the event of Jesus stands at the center of the story and as its key. It radically alters and fulfills all personal laments, thanksgivings, struggles, and visions, and gradually gives meaning to past and present.
Second, music has a peculiar communal and mnemonic character. A group who sings together becomes one and remembers its story, and therefore who it is, in a particularly potent way. Hitler knew this and exploited the demonic potential of that reality. Whenever the church loses its song, a vacuum is created that the Hitlers among us will invariably fill.
Third, music spins itself out through time just like the story which the song recounts, and just like the worship where the song is sung. As the Eastern Orthodox church knows so well, music “is by nature an event. It is dynamic rather than fixed.” Like the story and like worship and “more than any other art … it carries the possibility of change, of transformation” (Archbishop John of Chicago, et al., Sacred Music: Its Nature and Function [Chicago: The Department of Liturgical Music, Orthodox Church in America, 1977], 2). This means it is peculiarly suited not only to tell the story but to accompany worship as well.
A Gift of God
Finally, the church’s song, like music itself, is a gift of God. Music is a joy and delight with which God graces creation. We do not bargain for it. We do not deserve it. It is simply freely given, there for the hearing, a joyous overflow of creation’s goodness.
This gift can be viewed in many ways. One is the way Luther did it. Oskar Söhngen points out that Luther was forever amazed that music, this “unique gift of God’s creation,” comes from “the sphere of miraculous audible things,” just like the word of God (“Fundamental Considerations for a Theology of Music” in The Musical Heritage of the Church, vol. 6 [St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1962], 15.) This perceptive insight points to music as a gift and to the close relationship between music and words: both are audible, words, amazingly, can be sung, and it is all gift.
A more Catholic approach, like Joseph Gelineau’s, is to call music “God’s daughter,” given to humanity to signify the love of Christ (Voices, 27). Viewed this way, music almost takes on the character of a sacramental sign that points beyond itself to pure love. The Eastern Orthodox church often takes a similar view: that music can “reflect the harmony of heaven” and “can provide us with a foretaste of the splendor of the Age to come” (Archbishop John, Sacred Music, p. 2, 3).
These views always bring with them music’s power to uplift, transform, refresh, and recreate the heart and soul. John Calvin asserts this when he calls music a “gift of God deputed” for “recreating man and giving him pleasure” (Charles Garside, Jr. “Calvin’s Preface to the Psalter: A Re-Appraisal,” The Musical Quarterly 37 [October 1951]: 570). While Ulrich Zwingli in the sixteenth century related the refreshment of music to secular play, thereby allowing music no relevance at all to worship (Charles Garside, Jr., Zwingli and the Arts [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966]), even liberal Protestantism today may call music “revelatory.” Robert Shaw, for instance, when he was installed as minister of music of the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland, Ohio, quoted J. W. N. Sullivan and argued that “a work of art may indeed be a ‘revelation’ ” (Music and Worship in the Liberal Church, typescript, September 25, 1960, 8). Many Christians would disagree with what Shaw means by revelation and worship, but his use of the term revelation shows how all worshiping traditions grapple with the gift of music and with its power.
The Cantor’s Task
A host of theological issues attend these matters. The intent here is not to explain them in great detail. The point is that defining the church’s song under the headings of praise, prayer, proclamation, story, and gift offers clues to the dimensions of the cantor’s task.
Leading the People’s Praise. The cantor is the leader of the people’s praise. The explosive response to God’s grace, in order to be expressed, needs form and shape. Someone has to take responsibility for that forming and shaping, and this is the cantor’s role. He or she has to sense the capacities and resources of a particular congregation, then write or choose music that expresses the praise of God with those capacities and resources. Once the music is composed and chosen, the cantor must then lead the people in actually singing the song of praise.
The song of praise is preeminently vocal. Words are the means by which our praise is articulated, and music is the means by which the articulation is carried aloft so that song gives wings to the words. But not only humanity sings this song of praise. The whole creation is called to join in. Instruments are therefore called to play their part. That part is not only to accompany the voices but to sound alone where fitting and appropriate. The cantor is called to coordinate this and even to play, as talents warrant so that instrumental music relates to the people’s song of praise. Neither instrumental music nor any other music ought to be an afterthought or an unrelated addendum.
Leading the People’s Prayer. The cantor aids the presiding or assisting minister in leading the people’s prayer. The presiding and assisting ministers bear the primary responsibility for the proper prayers and petitions of a particular service, and the pastor bears the ultimate responsibility for the prayer life of a people. The cantor assists in this responsibility in the following ways:
First, the cantor provides the leadership for the people’s litanic responses, spoken and sung. Corporate responses to a pastor’s bids, even when spoken, are incipiently musical—elated forms of speech. The cantor through his or her direct leadership or through training of the choir shapes this response and thereby helps to shape the prayer life of the people.
Second, since some hymns are themselves prayers, the cantor sometimes leads the people in prayer by leading hymns.
Third, the choir also sings some texts that are prayers. In this case, the cantor leads a group who prays on behalf of the people just as the pastor does. This is obviously not a performance before the people; it is rather an act of intercession on the people’s behalf.
Proclaiming the Word. The cantor aids the readers in the proclamatory work of reading lessons. This may on some occasions involve the use of more or less complex choral or solo settings of lessons in place of readings. That is rare for most of us. It should not be normative, although it deserves more consideration than we normally accord it. Where lessons are sung by a lector, the cantor should obviously aid those who do the singing. For most of us, lessons are read. There too the musician has a role we rarely think about, namely, helping readers read clearly. Musicians understand phrasing and the ebb and flow of a line of words. Choral musicians understand diction and enunciation. These are necessities in good reading, which is close to a lost art in many churches and in the culture at large. Musicians can help repair the breach so that lessons can be understood.
The preacher obviously has the primary proclamatory task of publishing the good news of God’s grace and love among us. By careful application to the biblical word and the daily newspaper, the preacher speaks his or her poor human words in the hope that they will be heard as the word of God itself so that the love of God in Christ will be known among us.
The cantor cannot and should not attempt to preach in the same way as the preacher because, first, the composing of text and music and the preparation of music by musicians preclude the preacher’s relevance to the moment, and, second, the preacher can examine detailed relationships in spoken prose in a way that is not possible for the musician.
On the other hand, a polyphonic piece of music or the simultaneous juxtaposition of two texts gives the musician an opportunity to proclaim relationships in a way that is not open to the preacher, who must communicate in a stream of monologue. And, while the relevance of the moment is not the responsibility of music, which is of necessity more prepared and formal, music also has the capacity for breaking open a text in a way spoken words cannot do. In singing a hymn or hearing a Schütz motet or a Bach cantata, many Christians have shared William Cowper’s experience:
Sometimes a light surprises
The Christian while he sings;
It is the Lord who rises
With healing in his wings.
Telling the Story
The cantor helps the people sing the whole story and thereby tells the story. The preacher also tells the story, of course, as does the teacher. Some understandings of preaching would even argue that it is at heart storytelling. There is a sense in which that is true: proclaiming the good news is telling the story of God’s love. But the preacher is always compelled to apply the story to us at this moment so that the searing edge of God’s love can burn its way into our hearts. This requires the context of the whole story, and preaching can only give that context over time or in an ancillary way. The cantor is responsible for the context and the fullness of the story.
This means that the cantor tells the story by seeing to it that the whole story is sung. The lessons, prayers, and sermons for a given service are likely to have a thematic focus. The hymnody, psalmody, and anthems ought to relate to that focus also, but in addition, they flesh out the rest of the story and remind us of other parts of the plot. Over the course of a year, the whole story should certainly have been sung, from Creation to Last Things. This means that doing the same six or ten hymns over and over does not serve the people well, because it keeps them from singing the whole story and omits much of the context the preacher needs for his or her words.
The Steward of God’s Gift
The cantor is the steward of God’s gracious gift of music. Since this gift is so powerful, the steward receives tremendous power as the deputy. That power can easily be misused for selfish ends of ego gratification and personal power. The cantor is called, therefore, to the paradox of using the power which is granted, but of using it with restraint on behalf of God in Christ from whom all blessings—including this one—flow.
That paradox brings with it another. The cantor knows that the preacher or lector can stumble over a word here or there, and still the message will have its impact. To stumble over a note is much more dangerous; the message’s impact will dissipate much more quickly when there is musical error. So the cantor is constantly constrained to attempt excellence and perfection that are never humanly possible. That drives the church musician to rehearse and practice every detail until it is right, for without practice there is the certainty that the necessary perfection and excellence will never be achieved. The paradox is that even with disciplined rehearsing, there is no guarantee. The musician who is at all sensitive knows that when she or he finally gets it right, that too is a gift for which the only appropriate response is thanksgiving.