Renewing Our Inheritance
From early in the Church's history, Holy Week and Easter have inspired many profound artistic works, and for good reason. The events honored during this all-too-brief season invite creative commemoration, especially in music. They were and are the fulfillment of the redemptive love of God, of his eternal purposes being realized in history, and no art form expresses the mysterious relationship between time and eternity and between the personal and the cosmic better than music.
Those living through this history were propelled into a range of intense human emotion and spiritual alertness; their response has been conveyed (however approximately) to subsequent generations through poetry, visual representation, and musical forms. Music may have an edge on those other modes of communication: as philosopher Susanne Langer argued in Problems of Art, music sounds as feelings feel.
The significance of this sequence of experiences cannot be received without the engagement of sanctified imaginations and the welcome assistance of gifted servants capable of conveying to our minds and bodies the drama implicit in this victorious divine incursion. During the sacred meal shared with the disciples on the night in which he was betrayed, Christ gave a command to remember, a command followed by the singing—from memory—of one of the songs of Zion. Even in the midst of his suffering, our Lord quoted from the hymns of his ancestors. He recalled their history and articulated his membership in it by remembering their songs.
The Animating Power of Memory
The Greeks rightly understood that memory is the mother of the Muses. A living connection to the past enables an imaginative response to one's experience in the present. In The Religious Sense, Luigi Giussani warned that being cut off from the past makes experience in the present dry and hollow. "The substantial attraction for living comes from the past," he argued:
What a breath of fresh air to read a page of Homer or to repeat verses of Virgil by memory or to remember the plot of a tragedy by Sophocles! The substantial attraction of the present comes from the richness with which it is imbued with its past inheritance.
Without the vital connection to the past—a vitality sustained by the imagination—living becomes mere reacting.
Yves Congar offered similar claims in his book The Meaning of Tradition: "If we remembered nothing it would be impossible to advance." And thus, "Tradition is not merely memory; it is actual presence and experience. It is not purely conservative, but, in a certain way, creative."
The days of Holy Week and Easter are a time in which the animating power of memory may have its most heightened capacities. Fittingly, the musical repertoire available for use in liturgical and private devotional settings is extensive. Especially for the days leading up to Resurrection Sunday, we have many Passion oratorios and settings of the Stabat Mater, as well as many interpretations of the penitential Psalms. There are also musical treatments of countless poems reflecting on the horror and beauty of the Cross.
It is lamentable that such a treasure trove of abundantly rich expressions of faith is largely unknown to many Christians today. This ignorance is due in large measure to the acceptance and often enthusiastic endorsement by church leaders of the cultural habits of the surrounding society. The fact that the musical practices of most Christians are indistinguishable from those of their pagan neighbors is just one reason why I am fond of observing (perhaps too fond) that there never was a culture war—and we lost.
Gifts from the Professionals
If local churches have effectively abandoned a commitment to the living tradition of the Church's music, professional musicians around the world have providentially stepped in to assist Christians who long to be fed by a repertoire of sacred music capable of the depth of impression demanded by this season's events. A recent recording of Bach's St. John Passion by the Bach Collegium Japan is a great gift for those so hungry. The year 2020 marked the thirtieth anniversary of this ensemble, and they began a European concert tour before Covid-related lockdowns began. But by the time they reached Cologne in March, they were told that giving a concert was forbidden. So after live-streaming a performance of the St. John Passion, they hastily made arrangements to record the work.
From the swirling opening bars of this work, Bach captures a greater sense of urgency than is audible in the St. Matthew Passion. The existential challenge of completing a recording before being thrown out of the hall by local police may have heightened the intensity of the performance here. Writing in Gramophone, Jonathan Freeman-Attwood judged that "here we have a reading that feels as if, deep in the psyche of the performers, they know this is all happening close to the wire." But credit must also be given to conductor Masaaki Suzuki, a committed believer who has discovered much in thirty years of conducting Bach's cantatas about how this composer captured in musical form the inner drama of spiritual struggle.
Another recent recording is a further occasion for gratitude this Holy Week and beyond. The performers are the ensemble Vox Luminis, whose website declares that their objective is "to gain access to the Light through the Voice." Many of the recordings they have released over the past fifteen years feature music of the German Baroque era, some by very well known composers, some by sadly neglected figures in music (and Church) history. This recent album, Ach Jesus stirbt ("Alas, Jesus is dying"), includes fifteen short works by Andreas Hammerschmidt (1611 or 1612 to 1675).
Virtually unknown today, Hammerschmidt, during his long tenure as a faithful church organist in the Johanniskirche in what is now Zittau in Saxony, produced over 400 choral compositions for use in the Lutheran liturgy. Like his better-known contemporary Heinrich Schütz, he successfully cross-fertilized the style of traditional Lutheran choral compositions with expressive techniques imported from Italy.
Ach Jesus stirbt presents settings of texts that move us from Good Friday to the Ascension and the promise of Pentecost, from sorrowful penitence to triumphant celebration. The album may signal a revival of interest in a forgotten servant of the Church's life. It can certainly help us remember Hammerschmidt and, more significantly, renew our memory of the events of sacred history that he memorialized in his music.
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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more on music from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
Bach's Cantata BWV 106, Gottes Zeit ist die allerbesteZeit (God's time is the very best time) by Ken Myers
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C. S. Lewis on Civilization & the Natural Order by Timothy L. Hall
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on Our Sacred Duty to Teach the Devil to Death by Marcus Johnson
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