Harold Best - Music Through the Eyes of Faith

T his is a remarkable book. I can best communicate what is remarkable about it by simply quoting a few words from the introduction. The author, Harold M. Best, a professor of music widely known and honored in his profession, has just been talking autobiographically about the ways in which, for most of his life, his love for music of a wide variety of different sorts made for tension in his life. People around him and his own inner voice told him that most of what he liked was bad; commitment to quality in music requires the rejection of musical pluralism. He then says this:

... in these later years of my profession, I find myself laughing and whole again, musically happier than ever, celebrating this vast expanse of sonic creativity, longing with all my heart to be a world musician as a living part of being a world Christian, and delighting in teaching all of this renewed good news. I find myself wanting to dance through a Pentecost of musics, excited as never before, rejecting older, narrower, restrictive canons, continuing to embrace the musics they exclusively praised, while rejoining other musics I had for too long turned my back on.... Yet there is a significant amount of music that I simply cannot bring myself to enjoy, because even though I revel in diversity, I strive for personal excellence. In other words, I still make choices, and I truly believe that there is music of poor qualityfar too much of itright alongside the good music.

Those words give clear hints of what is remarkable in this book: A vivid style; a deep and wide knowledge of the field of music combined with a love of performance, an insistence on the importance of excellence combined with an extraordinary breadth of musical taste and a courageous celebration of humanitys music in all its diversity; a deep and unashamed piety combined with theological sophistication.

What Harold Best sees when he looks at music through the eyes of his deeply felt, reflective, and generous Christian faith is an extraordinarily rich and exciting panorama. He tackles the tough questions that come to mind when people of faith reflect on music; when hes not entirely satisfied with the answers he proposes, he tells us so. He strives for wholeness, integrity, between his life of faith and his life in music. But I predict that what will stay with the reader of this book longer than the memory of intellectual stimulation and longer than the memory of religious seriousness is the memory of celebration: a person of faith and learning celebrating great music in all its diversity.

Nicholas Wolterstorff
Yale University

MUSIC TASK FORCE MEMBERS

Anton Armstrong

St. Olaf College

Karen DeMol

Dordt College

Charlotte Kroeker

Whitworth College

Ken Medema

Brier Patch Music

Richard Stanislaw

King College

Paul Westermeyer

Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary

John Worst

Calvin College

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD MEMBERS

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Yale University

David Benner

Redeemer College

Richard Bube

Richard University

David Allen Hubbard

Fuller Theological Seminary

Karen Longman

Christian College Coalition

Ann Paton

Geneva College

Timothy Smith

Johns Hopkins University

Richard T. Wright

Gordon College

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in a stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;
Landscape plotted and piecedfold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Any tone can succeed any other tone, any tone can sound simultaneously with any other tone or tones, and any group of tones can be followed by any other group of tones, just as any degree of tension or nuance can occur in any medium under any kind of stress or duration. Successful projection will depend upon the contextual and formal conditions that prevail, and upon the skill and the soul of the composer.

Vincent Persichetti