From Heavenly Harmony
The Depths of Solemn Grandeur
by Ken Myers
Many years ago, my undisguised disapproval of worship music that is inspired by contemporary pop music was (somewhat glibly) diagnosed by an acquaintance as an expression of a severely rationalist temperament. "You don't like these new praise songs because you don't want worship to be too emotional," explained my interlocutor. "Actually," I responded, "the problem with this music is that it isn't emotional enough. It typically lacks the aesthetic resources to express the depth of joy, sorrow, gratitude, and awe that worship demands." Well, those weren't exactly my words at the time, but it's what I was trying to convey. And my concern about the adequacy of musical language in worship has increased in the intervening years.
In The School of the Church: Worship and Christian Formation, Philip H. Pfatteicher writes that "worship is a demanding discipline that has to do with the most profound experiences a human being can undergo: the fear, love, and trust that commingle when mortals confront the Holy One of Israel." That discipline requires more than correct attitudes and intentions. It requires access to a form of expression capable of capturing (if incompletely) those deep convictions.
Earlier in his book, Pfatteicher quotes the English priest and poet R. S. Thomas, who lamented the lack of sensitivity to poetic expression increasingly common among allegedly well-educated people. The modern tone-deafness to poetry within a segment of the population once capable of receiving poetic meaning intelligently has made the work of poets increasingly difficult. "We are the prisoners of an age which is at best unimaginative," wrote Thomas in a 1966 essay in the Times Literary Supplement.
The task may well seem hopeless when the poet is confronted by this Augean stable: the gobbledygook of technologists and critics; the pompous, yet repellently servile idiom of business correspondence; the reach-me-down, utility style of most newspapers; the weird jargon concocted by civil servants; and worst of all, the hectic flush imparted to language by publicists and advertisers. The bogus floweriness of the latter and the barbarous, pretentious, or complacently drab tones of the others are enough to make poetry despair. Poetry's language should be a heightening of the common language, but when so much of that language is either vile or without flavor, the poet has no sound basis from which to work.
One can only wonder what Thomas would have made of the rise of the telegraphic style common in texting, not to mention the crude crutch of emoticons. When such habits of communication become the "common language," how might its "heightening" be achieved? And can an age suspicious of hierarchy (and hence of the very possibility of a fruitful heightening) leave room for poetry's fulfillment of the potentials of language?
Dumbed-Down Musical Ethos
More than a decade before Thomas's lament, philosopher Josef Pieper offered a similar warning with regard to common practices of music, describing the dangers of seeing "the entire realm of music as 'mere amusement.'" Pieper concurred with Plato and most of the Western tradition that habitual experience of disordered music results in disordered souls:
[T]hat intimate relationship between music, offered or received, and inner existential ethos all the more ominously degenerates the less a proper order is attempted. The situation commonly encountered shows that not even the awareness of the possibility of such an order is present, much less a concrete notion of such an order as the ideal.
Even in the early 1950s, Pieper was concerned with the effects of the "dumbing down" and deadening of musical expressiveness. Today, the notion that musical activity demands the recognition of certain proprieties is preposterous to most people; nothing in their experience suggests that music is anything more than self-expression.
A predominant amount of music produced and typically consumed today serves the interests of commerce, propaganda, and technologically driven concepts of progress. Those are not settings in which sorrow or remorse, joy or true hope, can find a home. They are not habitats that nurture contemplative reflection or attentive silence. Pieper saw some of the symptoms of this in the middle of the last century:
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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