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Affective Devotion
James Altena on Church Music as Facilitating Worship
A few months ago, as associate editor for the classical music magazine Fanfare, I reviewed a CD of music for the services of Holy Communion and Morning and Evening Prayer at an Anglican cathedral in England. While it includes a few traditional hymns and works by Thomas Tallis and Henry Purcell, most of the contents are given over to premiere recordings of compositions by several contemporary British church composers, including the cathedral's current choirmaster. The performances are exemplary; the recorded sound likewise. Yet, the compositions themselves bother me. While all of them are cast ostensibly in tonal or neo-tonal idioms, and are well crafted in purely technical terms, their thematic and harmonic character was of a sort that I find intensely irritating, even disturbing, when present in ecclesiastical music, though not necessarily in secular concert music. Why?
About a year ago I read a passing remark by a fellow critic, who said he didn't understand why religious believers thought that all church music had to be "pretty." He clearly believed that such music should not differ in any way from music written for the concert hall, including being written in more "progressive" or "advanced" idioms. That critic was also quite clearly neither a churchgoer, nor even a religious believer, something which I believe has everything to do with his attitude and which gave rise to two reflections.
First, a decidedly odd conceit is involved in non-believers presuming to tell believers what sort of music they should be writing and listening to for their acts of worship. Second, music for the concert hall and music for the church are respectively created for two very distinct spheres and purposes: aesthetic enjoyment and religious devotion. The former encompasses a far wider net of possibilities; I may go to a concert to hear familiar favorites or to be stimulated and even challenged by the novel and unexpected. But when I go to church, my objective is entirely different: I do so to worship God, to speak to him and to seek to hear what he has to say to me in return. The intense focus involved in so doing must not be subject to extraneous disruptions and distractions.
Different Modes & Effects
C. S. Lewis acutely observed regarding the use of ex tempore prayer in church services that critical and devotional modes of thought are mutually incompatible; if one must focus on analyzing a prayer for theological soundness or sincerity, attention cannot be given to actual worship instead. The same principle, I believe, applies to church music. To me, the new works on the disc I reviewed suggest that their composers either do not know or willfully ignore these crucial distinctions. In making frequent use of jarring harmonic dissonances, irregular rhythmic figures, unusual intervallic leaps, and so on, they follow certain currently fashionable rules for academic musical composition. And at an abstract conceptual level, they doubtless have arguments for why these devices are symbolically expressive of the religious texts they have set.
But what is completely lost sight of is how the results will affect their hearers. The intellectual attention and energy needed to comprehend and process discordant music that is filled with unexpected twists and turns make true devotion impossible, precisely because instead of serving as an aid conducive to prayer, the music draws attention away from prayer to itself instead. (Even more disturbing is the palpable sense that some modern composers treat audience members as the equivalents of laboratory rats, to be run through experimental auditory mazes to test and measure their reactions.) In order to fulfill its intended and proper purpose, liturgical music must necessarily be more conservative and restricted in character than concert music. While it should not be superficially "pretty" or trivial, it should be profoundly beautiful, clearly manifesting the traditional aesthetic principles of order, clarity, and harmony in an unobtrusive manner conducive to and supportive of prayer and religious contemplation.
This raises a deeper, more fundamental question: Does true church music, rightly written for devotional purposes, have an inherent character distinct from music written for other purposes? I am inclined to think so, but equally inclined to think that delineating such a difference in terms of specific criteria and rules would be an exercise in futility. While composition of music requires rational cognition, its roots and effects are intuitional and affective, and will bear the stamp of either the sacred or the profane. Very much akin to Justice Potter Stewart's famous observation regarding pornography, although I cannot exactly define it, I know what it is when I hear it.
The Doctrine of Affektenlehre
While its specific details can be subject to debate, the eighteenth-century doctrine of the Affektenlehre (championed by C. P. E. Bach, among others) is, I believe, correct in its basic principles. According to this theory, various combinations of the elements of music—melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, and so on—used to create pieces of music have objectively ascertainable effects on the passions (affects) of most listeners. As skilled craftsmen, composers are aware of these effects on hearers of music and how to bring them about. Consequently, composers as creative artists have a fundamental moral obligation to fashion works that exercise positive, healthy moral influences on their hearers. More recently, Paul Hindemith, in his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1949–1950—published in book form as A Composer's World: Horizons and Limitations—also staunchly advocated this
position.
As Hindemith's own highly complex music proves, this theory is by no means a mandate for simplistic reduction to the glitzy prettiness of unremitting consonance, or the banalities of modern "pop," rock, and New Age genres. Beauty can encompass depictions of struggle, anguish, horror, and tragedy (otherwise no art could portray the Crucifixion). But such a moral, indeed theological, outlook does assert that music is not merely "ear candy"—abstract patterns of sound that indifferently titillate our hearing—but rather a realm of affective (as opposed to cognitive) languages, generating sonic discourses that have irreducible moral content. Furthermore, musical statements that are of sound moral character are not indifferently appropriate for all contexts; a Johann Strauss waltz is a wonderful creation, but it simply is not suitable for either public worship services or private devotions.
James A. Altena is the associate editor of Fanfare magazine, a comprehensive bimonthly periodical for reviews of classical music recordings. He is a member of All Saints Episcopal Church in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
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