Don E. Saliers - Music and Theology

Music, wrote Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, "is so powerful a thing that it ravisheth the soul, the Queen of the senses, by sweet pleasure... And 'tis not only men that are affected... All singing birds are much pleased with it, especially Nightingales... and bees amongst the rest...." Time would fail us to speak of the whole realm of music in the natural world, and the vast range of pleasure music brings to human beings. Anyone who loves music has experienced this "ravishing of the soul" at one time or another.

But there is so much more to be said about the power of music for the mind and heart, as well as for pleasure of the senses. Nicholas Cook, a musicologist, writes wonderingly, "If a few combinations of pitches, durations, timbres and dynamic values can unlock the most hidden contents of [the human] spiritual and emotional being, then the study of music should be the key to an understanding of [human] nature." I hope to show how music may also be a key to the understanding of Christian theology. In the final analysis, music and theology may require one another. I aim to explore what is at stake in such a claim for the human intellect and heart, for body and soul.

This brief book arises from a life-long love of music and music making. Half a century as a church musician and forty years as a teacher of theology and worship have given me a broad ecumenical appreciation of the issues addressed in these pages. Music in the context of worship brings forward questions about how music is related to language about God. Yet music outside church and synagogue may also "sound" theologically relevant aspects of life. What have music and theology to do with one another? Much more than we may first assume.

As a teenager, I vividly recall playing piano for Wednesday night prayer services for evangelical congregations, and violin and clarinet in a small Sunday school orchestra in a Methodist congregation. Hymns and songs were essential to how persons in those churches conceived God. "How Great Thou Art" expressed, for many, their very experience of God in awe and wonder. For others, the classical hymn "Holy, Holy, Holy" framed their biblical picture of God. For others, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" expressed the heart of their faith. It was clear to me, even then, in how they sang and how they talked about God, that hymns carried much of their theology.

At the same time I was drawn to the chanting of Mass (then still in Latin) at the local Roman Catholic parish. There I found mystery in the fusion of gesture, symbol, and the sound of chant. Singing and accompanying school choirs gave me early exposure to a much larger world of choral literature. Later, during high school I formed a jazz trio, and soon began to play for dances with my father's dance band. This Saturday night and Sunday morning musical dialogue raised other issues about how music functioned in people's lives outside church. This led me to experiment with jazz settings of John Wesley's Morning Prayer, and to search for jazz settings of sacred texts. These I found in Duke Ellington's sacred concerts and Dave Brubeck's Light in the Wilderness, not to mention Leonard Bernstein's Mass. This yeasty mix yielded occasions to think about the connections between so-called sacred and secular music.

Learning to play sonatas by Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart; Chopin's Etudes;