The glorious beauty of those clunky German hymns
Our family joined the Lutheran church when I was ten years old. To be honest about it, at first I wasn't crazy about the hymnody. I was a typical American in my musical tastes, preferring the old Protestant standards and not remotely appreciating that my new denomination had the most glorious musical tradition in Christendom.
We live today in a world which even nominal Lutherans embrace and even prefer "contemporary" church music- most of it musically inferior to the Lutheran chorale, originating in Methobapticostal circles and theologically vapid if not outright heretical- largely on the basis of its alleged entertainment value and its supposed evangelistic potential. Of course, if we truly believe that God the Holy Spirit operates through the Word, we would not be nearly as obsessed with its packaging as a means of helping it along as many today are.
And the attitude that sees church music as entertainment is in itself a disaster. Is it really "evangelism" to teach inquirers that they and their emotions, rather than God, His Word, and His Sacraments, are the center of what the Divine Service is all about? While on one hand we go to church to receive what God has to give us- He doesn't need our praises, while we desperately need His Word and Sacraments- that is a very different matter than seeing ourselves as the "audience" for church music. We learn from what we sing, to be sure. Its primary function is as a medium for the Word, and in that sense we do, indeed, sing to ourselves. Moreover, there is a reason why we call it the "Divine Service:" in it God- incongruous as it seems- serves us by coming to us and bestowing upon us what we need. He, not we, is the primary Actor.
But on the other hand, if our worship we offer on Sunday morning has as its primary purpose our receipt of what God has to give us, that most certainly does not make us the "audience!" The party addressed by our worship- like its subject matter- is God, and not us! That's one reason why I've never been able to stomach applause for a piece of music in church. We are not there to be entertained, but to be fed. If there is anybody who might appropriately applaud, it's God.
That said, it took me a number of years to realize how many early Lutheran hymns- those "clunkers" we all grew up with in TLH, played much too slowly on a church organ- would probably go over very well with contemporary Americans on purely musical terms if people actually could hear the music, rather than the way we generally sing it. When some of these glorious hymns are played, contemporary American Lutherans listen for clunky, bizarre, musically awkward and outdated pieces played too slow on an instrument- the pipe organ- which in our culture is almost exclusively associated with church, and which fewer and fewer people even play. A tragedy beyond words, that; there is no music as glorious as that of the pipe organ. But that's a subject for another rant. One tragedy at a time: the one that I'm concerned with at the moment is our failure to appreciate the beauty of the very hymns in our tradition that we're perhaps least likely to think of as beautiful.
But what if contemporary Americans could hear the music on its own terms, instead of filtered through our own negative expectations? Years ago, it occurred to me, for example, that Luther's "To God the Holy Spirit Let Us Pray" is not really the clunky piece of medieval music many of us think of it as being. If somebody sang it a capella, and the people who heard it didn't know its origin, they would probably not only assume that it was "contemporary" but recognize how truly beautiful it really is. Unfortunately, somebody else realized the same thing; the only online version of the hymn I've been able to find jazzes it up to the point where the proverb about the gilding of lilies comes to mind. Trying to turn hymns by Luther and his contemporaries into modern "praise music" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to describe. Rather, it's a matter of uncovering the wholesome, unaffected simplicity which playing a song on a pipe organ sometimes can disguise.
I am an incurable traditionalist when it comes to worship. No one is as big a fan of the pipe organ as I am, and I would find its replacement on a regular basis by a guitar to be utterly unsupportable. Yet Luther, like David, played sacred music on a stringed instrument- the lute in Luther's case, the harp in David's- and if it serves the purpose of helping us to appreciate the glory precisely of our traditional Lutheran church music, well, why not, once in a while?
But enough musing. There's a young LCMS guy named Colin from Davenport here Iowa who has done some of our very earliest Lutheran hymns- some by Luther himself- on YouTube, either a capella or (shudder) accompanying himself on a guitar.
My parishioners know that I am not a fan of "contemporary" church music. They also know how suspicious I am of anything "seeker sensitive;" Christ is not a commodity to be marketed to skeptical clients, but a Savior to be proclaimed. And I am certainly not suggesting that this replace the traditional pipe organ as the way we celebrate the Divine Service.
But listen to Colin. I strongly suspect that "seeker" and orthodox traditionalist alike would be edified not only by the Word as set forth in these venerable and orthodox hymns, but awed by their wholly unexpected kind of simple beauty. These are certainly not "campfire songs," and they will not lead to a sudden outgrowth of human "trees" in the pews. But here we might just discover a dimension of our solidly traditional and very liturgical Lutheran musical heritage we may not have appreciated before.
And you would not believe which some of the hymns I'm talking about are...
Of his own faith journey, Colin says- quickly and concisely, I suspect, so that as befits a Lutheran he can get off the subject of himself and sing about Jesus: "My search for Jesus Christ has only begun. And it began where it ends: Baptism, and the Supper."
Enjoy.
We live today in a world which even nominal Lutherans embrace and even prefer "contemporary" church music- most of it musically inferior to the Lutheran chorale, originating in Methobapticostal circles and theologically vapid if not outright heretical- largely on the basis of its alleged entertainment value and its supposed evangelistic potential. Of course, if we truly believe that God the Holy Spirit operates through the Word, we would not be nearly as obsessed with its packaging as a means of helping it along as many today are.
And the attitude that sees church music as entertainment is in itself a disaster. Is it really "evangelism" to teach inquirers that they and their emotions, rather than God, His Word, and His Sacraments, are the center of what the Divine Service is all about? While on one hand we go to church to receive what God has to give us- He doesn't need our praises, while we desperately need His Word and Sacraments- that is a very different matter than seeing ourselves as the "audience" for church music. We learn from what we sing, to be sure. Its primary function is as a medium for the Word, and in that sense we do, indeed, sing to ourselves. Moreover, there is a reason why we call it the "Divine Service:" in it God- incongruous as it seems- serves us by coming to us and bestowing upon us what we need. He, not we, is the primary Actor.
But on the other hand, if our worship we offer on Sunday morning has as its primary purpose our receipt of what God has to give us, that most certainly does not make us the "audience!" The party addressed by our worship- like its subject matter- is God, and not us! That's one reason why I've never been able to stomach applause for a piece of music in church. We are not there to be entertained, but to be fed. If there is anybody who might appropriately applaud, it's God.
That said, it took me a number of years to realize how many early Lutheran hymns- those "clunkers" we all grew up with in TLH, played much too slowly on a church organ- would probably go over very well with contemporary Americans on purely musical terms if people actually could hear the music, rather than the way we generally sing it. When some of these glorious hymns are played, contemporary American Lutherans listen for clunky, bizarre, musically awkward and outdated pieces played too slow on an instrument- the pipe organ- which in our culture is almost exclusively associated with church, and which fewer and fewer people even play. A tragedy beyond words, that; there is no music as glorious as that of the pipe organ. But that's a subject for another rant. One tragedy at a time: the one that I'm concerned with at the moment is our failure to appreciate the beauty of the very hymns in our tradition that we're perhaps least likely to think of as beautiful.
But what if contemporary Americans could hear the music on its own terms, instead of filtered through our own negative expectations? Years ago, it occurred to me, for example, that Luther's "To God the Holy Spirit Let Us Pray" is not really the clunky piece of medieval music many of us think of it as being. If somebody sang it a capella, and the people who heard it didn't know its origin, they would probably not only assume that it was "contemporary" but recognize how truly beautiful it really is. Unfortunately, somebody else realized the same thing; the only online version of the hymn I've been able to find jazzes it up to the point where the proverb about the gilding of lilies comes to mind. Trying to turn hymns by Luther and his contemporaries into modern "praise music" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to describe. Rather, it's a matter of uncovering the wholesome, unaffected simplicity which playing a song on a pipe organ sometimes can disguise.
I am an incurable traditionalist when it comes to worship. No one is as big a fan of the pipe organ as I am, and I would find its replacement on a regular basis by a guitar to be utterly unsupportable. Yet Luther, like David, played sacred music on a stringed instrument- the lute in Luther's case, the harp in David's- and if it serves the purpose of helping us to appreciate the glory precisely of our traditional Lutheran church music, well, why not, once in a while?
But enough musing. There's a young LCMS guy named Colin from Davenport here Iowa who has done some of our very earliest Lutheran hymns- some by Luther himself- on YouTube, either a capella or (shudder) accompanying himself on a guitar.
My parishioners know that I am not a fan of "contemporary" church music. They also know how suspicious I am of anything "seeker sensitive;" Christ is not a commodity to be marketed to skeptical clients, but a Savior to be proclaimed. And I am certainly not suggesting that this replace the traditional pipe organ as the way we celebrate the Divine Service.
But listen to Colin. I strongly suspect that "seeker" and orthodox traditionalist alike would be edified not only by the Word as set forth in these venerable and orthodox hymns, but awed by their wholly unexpected kind of simple beauty. These are certainly not "campfire songs," and they will not lead to a sudden outgrowth of human "trees" in the pews. But here we might just discover a dimension of our solidly traditional and very liturgical Lutheran musical heritage we may not have appreciated before.
And you would not believe which some of the hymns I'm talking about are...
Of his own faith journey, Colin says- quickly and concisely, I suspect, so that as befits a Lutheran he can get off the subject of himself and sing about Jesus: "My search for Jesus Christ has only begun. And it began where it ends: Baptism, and the Supper."
Enjoy.
Comments