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What Should a Congregation Sing?
A Few Thoughts on Hymnology
By William H. Scheide

EDITOR'S NOTE: This essay was originally prepared in connection with the Sesquicentennial celebrations of Princeton Theological Seminary. As the article indicates, the point of departure is Louis FitzGerald Benson, a graduate of Princeton Seminary in the class of 1887 and a collector of hymnbooks and writer in the field of hymnology. It was felt that this discussion should be published in THEOLOGY TODAY where its vigorous thesis, as well as its equally vigorous strictures on the kind of hymnody Benson represented, could be read and studied by the widest possible audience. It will be clear that the main point of the article is not Benson but the plight of contemporary church music, especially congregational singing.

WEBSTER'S Dictionary defines "hymnologist" as "a composer or compiler of hymns; one versed in hymnology." "Hymnology" in turn is defined as "the composition of hymns. The study or science of hymns, their history, classes, use, etc." The career of Louis FitzGerald Benson, D.D. (1855-1930) of the class of 1887 at Princeton Theological Seminary, corresponds closely to these definitions. He wrote hymn verses, he edited hymn collections, he lectured on and composed books dealing with "their history, classes, use, etc." Henry van Dyke, another Princeton Seminary graduate, characterized him as "the foremost hymnologist that America has produced."

Benson's right to such a position rests in part upon one very tangible foundation: his hymnological collection of some nine thousand

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volumes, now the property of Princeton Theological Seminary. Any person conversant with the contents of those books would be amply deserving of van Dyke's accolade. And Benson's own works are evidence enough that he studied the books he bought. "You have to be a grim collector . . . to . . . understand,"¹ he once wrote and on another occasion expressed himself as follows:

"It is only after twenty-five years of assiduous collecting that the present writer has ventured to bring his studies to so much of a conclusion as is here attained."²

The latter words were published in 1915 thus seeming to date the beginning of his "assiduous collecting" around 1890. This takes us back to the short period of his active ministry at the Presbyterian Church of the Redeemer, Germantown, Pa., in the years 1887-93. What originally sparked this interest I have not been able to discover. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1874 and from its Law School in 1877. After seven years as an attorney, he entered Princeton Seminary. In 1893 he retired from the German town Church and never served another pastorate. I incline to suspect that the death of his father may have occurred about this time which presumably left him an inheritance adequate for building his collection and pursuing his studies. The father, Gustavus S. Ben son, had been a successful business man and Trustee of Princeton Seminary. Thus situated, Louis F. Benson expanded his activities during the next thirty-seven years over the entire field of hymnology as above defined.

I

Consideration of a career such as Benson's provides an excellent opportunity to explore and discuss the state of Church music in America. For although Dr. Benson has been dead for over thirty years I find the current hymnological scene not strikingly different from that on which he exerted so important an influence. We may start by enquiring what was his definition of a hymn. He has left answers in at least two places:

(1)"Of all definitions of the Hymn that which claims least for it best defines it;-it is liturgical verse."³

¹ Louis F. Benson, The Hymnody of the Christian Church, New York, 1927 (hereafter cited as HCC), p. 114.
² Louis F. Benson, The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Worship, Philadelphia, 1915 (hereafter cited as EH), p. x.
³ EH, P. Viii.

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(2)"A Christian Hymn therefore is a form of words appropriate to be sung or chanted in public devotions."⁴

"Liturgical verse," "a form of words--these condensed definitions may be held in mind. When Benson sat down to compose hymns he considered his task finished when he had written "liturgical verse." Some of this verse was published in Hymns and Verses (1897) and Hymns: Original and Translated (1925). For, as he said:

"It is as devotional verse rather than as song that our hymns have entered into the spiritual experience of a myriad hymn lovers, to whom the church hymnal has meant most as the companion of silent hours, the source of remembered inspirations. It would be as futile to contend that Christian hymns have no office and no message until sung in the congregation as to say that the poetical and spiritual up lift of The Book of Psalms was confined to the comparatively few Jews who participated in the Temple worship."⁵

Thus he insisted that in the hymnals he edited, the words, except perhaps for the first stanza, be printed separate from the music for ease in reading.⁶ Similarly in his lectures and books on hymnology the emphasis is overwhelming upon the words and their authors. In The Hymnody of the Christian Church only the sixth and final lecture deals with "Hymn singing" and in "postponing until now any consideration of the hymn tune," he wrote, " we have simply followed the logic of the situation."⁷ And surely it is not too much to say that a similar "logic of the situation" prevails in most Churches to day where clergymen prescribe hymns for the organist solely on the basis of the words. The organist may hate every tune he has to play, but his concern for music and the clergyman's indifference to it are both considered to be irrelevant.

But however annoyed, even despairing, a musician may be at such a state of affairs he should not be too surprised. Candidates for the ministry, as it is presently conceived, must occupy themselves almost exclusively with the printed and spoken word. One is facetiously inclined to make a pun out of the opening of John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word

⁴ HCC, p. 25.
⁵ HCC, P. 228.
⁶ "Hymns that are not made personally familiar by devotional reading have not much spiritual influence," wrote Dr. Benson (HCC, p. 222), and he called the practice of printing several stanzas between the musical staves "admittedly illiterate…. demonstrably decadent," and "already . . . a menace" (HCC, p. 223).
⁷ HCC, P. 227.

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was God." Moreover a practicing pastor and preacher is expected not only to read written words and listen to spoken words but to utter many words every week about the central concerns of life. Thus he naturally tends to live by the word (with a small w, though I hope also with a capital W). His mind tends to become a conceptualizing mind, since concepts and words seem to have a mutual attraction, and he tends to conceive reality, including religious reality, in preëminently conceptual and verbal terms. He develops an inner sympathy for the mathematician who said to Artur Schnabel after the latter's playing of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata: "That is all very well, but what does it mean?"⁸ In fact I would be inclined to doubt if many such minds would take serious exception to the following quotation from Emil Brunner:

"The message of what God has done for our redemption certainly cannot be expressed as music, and what God wills to say to us in Jesus Christ cannot be painted. In this respect the human word is not simply one method among others, for human speech alone can indicate quite unambiguously God's thought, will, and work."⁹

A second reason for the subordinate place that music so often holds in the minds of the clergy is due to the accidents of history. If we ask: "What is the word of God?" and turn aside for the moment from the Johannine applications of the term, the answer would presumably be those writings canonized (an ancient ceremony without precise modern counterpart) by various early Jewish and Christian counts. Now a number of these writings, notably the Book of Psalms, have a great deal to say about musical instruments and performance. There seems little doubt that much of the Bible has been sung from the earliest period. I would even suggest the high probability that wordless music was also present in Old Testament times. If so, why didn't it survive and why wasn't it also canonized? The answer can only be: because of the lack of an adequate development of musical notation. It may even be that some of the original Jewish councils felt that they were canonizing the traditional music as well as the words but, as later translations disrupted the original Hebrew prosody and "nations that knew not thee ran unto thee," unwritten mu-

⁸ As I heard the story, Schnabel replied by playing the sonata again and adding when he had finished: "That is what it means."
⁹ Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative, translated by Olive Wyon, 1947, p. 502, quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, Fools for Christ, 1955, pp. 165 f.

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sical traditions were inevitably lost. Thus we Gentiles found our selves armed only with the canonized authority of the naked letter, divested of the power of the spirit previously provided by music. Accordingly our Gentile Christian music has been a kind of step child and has had to pray continually for admission to the house of God that it may join forces with those writings which have always enjoyed their uniquely sacred position safe within.

A third reason has to do more particularly with our own Anglo-Saxon culture. Different nations seem to have different intellectual and artistic talents consistent with their individual characters. The most widely known artistic minds of Italy would surely be sought (in spite of Dante) among the visual artists, among such figures as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. In Germany they would be found in music, and with such names as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to choose from we can say that Germany has been the real center of European music history since about 1700. When we consider Britain, the one Englishman who is freely accorded fame comparable to the above named Italians and Germans is the semi-mythical poet and playwright William Shakespeare. Thus, as British civilization reached its apogee it stood revealed, in the last analysis, as a lover of the word; its greatest genius lay in its manipulation of human speech. So we find here an additional reason for understanding why music labors under a special handicap in Anglo-Saxon countries.

II

Coincident with this literary hegemony in British culture went a weakening of the musical side. From the death of Henry Purcell in 1695 to the beginning of the present century there was no English speaking composer who commanded genuine international renown. One might claim that English music was crushed by the artistic weight of such immigrants as Handel and Johann Christian Bach, but the truth is probably more complex; we need not explore it here. Paul Henry Lang writes of George-III's England:

"The river of . . . [British] music, once flowing in abundance, then ebbing to a small stream at the time of Handel's arrival in Eng land, now barely covered the river bed. . . .

"The animated musical life in England . . . at the opening of the nineteenth [century], could not hide the attrition of the native

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creative forces . . . the decline of English music . . . was complete."¹⁰

In early Victorian England the composer most admired was probably the German, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. This outstanding musician is described by Lang as follows:

"[Mendelssohn's] intellect and intuition warned him that glowing passion and the tone of profound emotions were not in his make-up, therefore the emotional content in his works is carefully articulated and toned down. . . . the lack of conflicts and the cautiously held reins make this highly refined and cultivated music only classicistic. . . . In the hands of his lesser followers this art froze into sentimental academicism; what was brilliant craftsmanship and noble and truly artistic conception became mere formalism accentuated by sentimental pseudo-romanticism."¹¹

In this connection we may note Lang's remarks on the most important British musician of the mid-nineteenth century:

"William Sterndale-Bennett (1816-1875), admired by Mendelssohn and Schumann, could have become a great composer and a full fledged member of the Leipzig romantic clique of which he was a welcome guest. His early works-his best-were very promising, but he later succumbed to the infinite reticence of the Englishmen of the Victorian era, a reticence which constantly prevented them from fully giving themselves to anything. Bennett's style is an intellectual style, polished with great care and in its general tone even more cautious than Mendelssohn's. The inevitable consequence of such an attitude is sentimentalism, the symptom of suppressed and sterilized feelings."¹²

And here we enter the area where the most widely used hymn music in England and America was composed. Dr. Benson, in fact, is at pains to point out that a hymn composer such as John B. Dykes was "a disciple of Mendelssohn" and Joseph Barnby "a disciple of Gou nod." Thus we perceive that most of the tunes in our hymnals were produced by Englishmen and Americans whose native musical nourishment was at practically a starvation level; they were used by a society whose ears were all but tone deaf, where standards of musical taste were almost non-existent. Like withered grass, Anglo-American Church music was a plant that existed only to be cut down and thrown into the oven. Dr. Benson goes about it as follows:

¹⁰ Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization, New York, 1941, pp. 682, 929.
¹¹ Ibid., pp. 810 f.
¹² Ibid., p. 930.

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"Except in intent and through association there can hardly be such a thing as Christian music. Indeed if we are to divide life into compartments and set apart only one as dedicated to religion, it is questionable if there is such a thing as distinctively religious music. There is of course carnal and spiritual music. But in music that is pure in feeling and uplifting who can draw the line between secular and religious? Until it be clothed in words who can say whether the strains that incite us to activity incite us to the activities of brotherhood or the struggle for supremacy; whether the music that brings visions of peace points to Nirvana or to Heaven? Schumann's Nachtstücke No. 4 [sic] is secular, I suppose; but as embodied in our tune, 'canonbury,' it is a fit vehicle of religious expression. Sullivan's 'St. Gertrude' would serve as a march of the marines in Pinafore; if it is religious, it is the somewhat spectacular Christianity of Baring-Gould's 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' that transmutes it.

"It is then the thought and feeling of the hymn that imparts any thing like a specifically religious tone to the music to which it is set. It would seem to follow that any theory of hymnody that subordinates the hymn to the hymn tune is definitely unchristian: and that any tendency in our hymn books or choir lofts to treat the words of our hymns as a mere libretto of the music, however beautiful it be, should be dealt with very frankly."¹³

This point of view is in no sense sectarian. Dr. Benson would undoubtedly find himself in agreement with the sainted Pope Pius X who in his famous encyclical on Church music, De Motu Proprio, issued in 1903, declared:

"Although the music proper to the Church is purely vocal music, music with the accompaniment of the organ is also permitted."

And though Dr. Benson's imagination heard approvingly "the blast of Temple trumpets" and "the voice of harpers harping with their harps," 14 as a hymnologist such musical interest as he possessed was primarily centered upon the tunes that congregations might sing. In evaluating these tunes he suggested three criteria: charm, simplicity, and spirituality. By charm he meant the apprehension of beauty through the senses. Unfortunately he did not hedge this

¹³ HCC, pp. 228 f. I wonder whether Benson would consider "a march of the marines in Pinafore" to be "carnal" or "spiritual music." Might he possibly consider it at least a "flippant tune"? In his 1926 hymnbook Christian Song (where "St. Gertrude" and "Onward Christian Soldiers" appear duly married as No. 264), Benson remarked in his Preface: "Flip pant tunes . . . (have been) . . . religiously avoided." But his phrase concerning 'St. Gertrude': "If it is religious" might also be taken as expressing some residual doubt on this point. Is that an instance of "religious avoidance" of "flippant tunes"?
14 HCC, p. 236.

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about, or develop from it any standards of taste. As to simplicity, he wrote:

"The essential of simplicity can hardly be overstressed. a congregational tune . . . must be a clear melody that will carry it self without the inner parts."¹⁵

Finally, in regard to spirituality:

"The spirituality of the hymn is no doubt overstressed in describing it as 'an offering to God,' which on that account should be solemn and stately, with feeling duly repressed. The music is sufficiently spiritual if it encourages the deeper enterprise of offering ourselves to God. To that end an element of sentimentality is allow able: probably necessary so long as we are human beings rather than academic liturgiolists."¹⁶

Dr. Benson recurred to these thoughts in his Preface to the 1926 hymnal, Christian Song:

"Flippant tunes and dull ones and what is accounted correct liturgical music, he [i.e., himself as editor] has religiously avoided. . . . Each hymn is dealt with after its kind. If it is sentimental, as most good songs are, it is set to a melody that conveys the sentiment."

Again we may quote from his discussion of the Victorian hymn tunes of Dykes, Barnby, etc.:

"Their novelty lay largely in freshness of melody and delicacy of harmonization. . . . The new melodies were sentimental rather than strenuous, and often plaintive; supported in the inner parts by what may be called a sentimental use of close harmonies, in the manner of current part-song as over against the independently melodious counterpoint of the old Psalm tunes. They express . . . the spiritual sentiment of the individual. . . . Most of us probably believe in a religion of feeling and a hymnody that expresses it . . . these tunes . . . are beautiful music of their kind, but the kind is mainly part-song. They do not exhilarate our feelings, as some of the old Psalm tunes do. They do not greatly feed our Christian virility, but they bring a message distinctly spiritual. They fit into the spiritual interpretation of life, They have a curious gift of suggesting to the imagination that a yearning after holiness is the way to God's peace."¹⁷

it would be nothing short of ridiculous to deny the all-pervasive importance of the Victorian hymn tune in every hymnal since that

¹⁵ HCC, p. 230.
¹⁶ HCC, p. 230.
¹⁷ HCC, pp. 262 ff.

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time. Indeed the whole question of modern Church music centers on this point. Since Dr. Benson has probably contributed to the spread of these tunes more than any other graduate of Princeton Seminary, I have tried to assemble a number of his statements on the subject. But we can go even further. In the 1911 revision of the 1895 Hymnal, Dr. Benson, the editor, was joined by Alfred Reginald Allen as musical editor who also contributed eight original tunes.¹⁸ Dr. Allen died in 1918 and is represented in the 1926 hymnal, Christian Song, by only one tune, "Postlude" (No. 43) whose text is by Dr. Benson. It begins:

"O Holy One,
our prayers are done
and with Thy blessing may our worship cease."

Allen's setting of these words is quoted in Example 1 (printed with other musical examples at the end of this article). It may be offered as an embodiment of Benson's esthetic of Victorian hymns: "sentimental," "plaintive," "close harmonies in the inner parts" (note at bars three and four in the alto and tenor the four consecutive tritones, descending chromatically). It may be added that, aside from Allen, Benson seems to have had little association with musicians (if we may call Allen a musician). In one place Dr. Benson remarked:

"It used to be pleasant to talk over these matters with Horatio Parker. . . . He liked to say . . . that the hymn tune is quite the lowest form of music. . . ."¹⁹

a singularly devastating judgment from one of the most eminent American musicians at the turn of the century. But evidently this did not disturb the "pleasantness" of the occasion for Dr. Benson. The reason is no doubt to be sought in the subordinate position he accorded music in his hymnological hierarchy as shown above.²⁰

¹⁸ According to the Preface, "many tunes have been set in lower keys or modified in har mony, in the interests of congregational singing. In these matters the Committee has been fortunate in having the sympathetic coöperation of the Musical Editor."
¹⁹ HCC, pp. 230 f. Horatio William Parker, 1863-1919, appointed professor of Musical Theory at Yale University in 1894, composed several prize-winning cantatas, oratorios, and operas.
²⁰ Benson mentioned that one of Parker's "earlier tunes, 'Garden City,' that attained wide vogue, became an offense to him. . . . Dr. Parker told me he would recall his tune if he could" (HCC, p. 231). And a look at 'Garden City' arouses one's immediate sympathy for Parker. Such honesty is refreshing among hymn composers. It is surely no credit to Dr. Benson that against Parker's wishes he included the tune in his 1911 Hymnal where it was not even necessary, serving only as an alternate tune for No. 34.

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Let us now begin our discussion of Dr. Benson's ideas with some semantics. First, in regard to "simplicity,"²¹ we may ask: how can Benson reconcile his plea for "a clear melody that will carry itself without the inner parts" with his endorsement of the Victorian tunes supported in the inner parts... in the manner of current art song"? Dr. Allen's setting in Example I of Benson's words, no matter how "clear" its tune may be, cannot exist without those inner parts. Dr. Benson has here enunciated two contradictory hypotheses.

But perhaps the most important semantic problem is Benson's use of the words "sentiment," "sentimental," and "sentimentality" in his remarks on "spirituality," hymnal editing, and Victorian hymns. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "sentiment" as "a mental feeling . . . a tendency or view based on or colored with emotion." Webster's first definition of "sentimental" is "of the nature of sentiment. . . . pertaining to feeling." Webster defines "sentimental ity" as "quality or state of being sentimental." I presume all these definitions would be acceptable to Dr. Benson. But Webster does not stop there. "SENTIMENT," says Webster, "is commonly used in a good sense; SENTIMENTALITY often suggests exaggerated or affected sentiment;" and again: "SENTIMENTAL implies excess of sensibility, or (sometimes) an affectation of sentiment."

I remember a prayer offered in chapel by my favorite preparatory school master: "Lord, teach us to distinguish between sentiment and sentimentality." In Dr. Benson's writings I find the two words com mingled in most confusing fashion. If we accept the favorable definitions, we ignore what Webster assures us are the common and accepted definitions; while if we follow these, Dr. Benson's argument receives a serious if not indeed a mortal blow. The only quality he mentions that endows music with "spirituality" is "an element of sentimentality" which he regards as "probably necessary." What definition, therefore, shall we choose? The music of Example I gives a more convincing answer than is possible in words. A man who published his own verse under such a tune as "Postlude" can not expect his use of the word "sentimental" to be understood in a "good sense."

Thus a good deal of Dr. Benson's discussion supporting Victorian

²¹ One is reminded of William Blake's line: "How wide the Gulf and Unpassable! between Simplicity and Insipidity." (Opening of Milton, Book 2.)

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hymns-such as it was-collapses. We are left with the strange and per-verse spectacle of the Princeton Seminary alumnus most responsible for their propagation in this country having no defense for his acts. And there is something almost masochistic in Dr. Benson as when he quotes Matthew Arnold as follows:

"Bad music and bad poetry, to whatever good and useful purpose a man may often manage to turn them, are in themselves mischievous and deteriorating to him. Somewhere and somehow, and at some time or other, he has to pay a penalty and to suffer a loss for taking a delight in them."²²

The penalty and the loss here express themselves first of all in con fused thinking. A sentimentalist is a confused person. In one place Dr. Benson remarks:

"A dull or unwelcome tune will impart to the most spiritual words an atmosphere of insincerity that makes one's spirit shrink."²³

But his own spirit clearly did not shrink at the insincerity of "Postlude," a childish insincerity that any musician would have been glad to point out to him.

III

Dr. Benson apparently never asked any musician such as Horatio Parker-or even perhaps Alfred Reginald Allen-whether they thought there was such a thing as religious music and in what, if there were such, it consisted. But whether or not Dr. Benson was ever aware of it, musicians have thought about the problem. One example of such thought is the book Church Music, Illusion and Reality by Archibald T. Davison, Cambridge, 1952. Davison, a choral conductor and professor of music at Harvard University, at tempted to answer this very question in his second chapter, "Technical Differences Between Sacred and Secular Music." So, having listened to the ideas of a clergyman (and a hymnologist) let us now consider those of a musician. Six elements are singled out for discussion: rhythm, melody, sequence, modality, counterpoint, and chromaticism. It is instructive to apply Davison's ideas to the

²² HCC, p. 134. In Dr. Benson's remarks surrounding this quotation, I fail to disentangle any coherent rebuttal.
²³ HCC, p. 232.

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fragment from the tune "Postlude" given in Example 1. Taking rhythm first of all we notice the pattern

I doubt if Professor Davison would approve of this. He says:

"Rhythm . . . the element most likely to provoke a physical response, even though the urge to motion be repressed as it generally is in Church, is not the friend of pious contemplation. . . . If this be true, then the music must employ no devices of rhythm, such as dotting, which by its impelling restlessness would draw the ear away from . . . [the words]. The Church in earlier times recognized that fact. We have forgotten it."²⁴

As to Church melody Davison's ideal would "seem like the negation of musical personality, always self-effacing, making no claim on its own behalf but bending its will to every inflection of meaning and accent that reside in its partner the text."²⁵

Operatic melodies, on the contrary, have "sharply defined personalities"²⁶ but Davison declares that "the most serious defect in Church tunes is that they are undernourished aesthetically and too feeble to be enduring."²⁷ That is surely the case with "Postlude" but its pathetic attempt to echo the operatic style is seen by comparing it with Example 2, the "Motive of Love's Peace" from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Whether Dr. Allen had this passage in his conscious mind when composing "Postlude" is irrelevant.

Omitting the heading "sequence" we find Davison writing as follows about harmony:

"Harmony, partly because of the marked individuality of the soprano, but more especially because of the definiteness and rhythmic incisiveness which harmony possesses, may focus attention instantly on a single detail and is, therefore, essentially personal and dramatic. . . . Harmony has, without question, its value in the simpler types of Church music, but it needs to be regulated with care ."²⁸

The first bar of Example I with its three static lower voices is a per-

²⁴ Church Music, Illusion and Reality, by Archibald T. Davison, Cambridge, 1952, pp. 29, 31. Italics added.
²⁵ Ibid., pp. 31 f.
²⁶ Ibid., p. 31.
²⁷ Ibid., pp. 32 f.
28 Ibid., pp. 34 f.

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fect instance of what Davison is talking about. The attention is certainly focused on the "individuality of the soprano."

Davison devotes a colorful paragraph to chromaticism²⁹ which, in view of its importance in bars two through four of Example I and Benson's remarks on "a sentimental use of close harmonies," also deserves quotation:

"Chromaticism . . . corresponds somewhat to the addition of spice in the process of cooking, . . . There is a vast gulf between the subtle and aristocratic chromaticism of Wagner, for instance [as can be seen in Example 2], and the trite alterations resulting in what is known as barber-shop harmony [which are to be found in Example 1, second through fourth bars]. On the whole, excessive chromaticism tends to enervation. . . . It tends to weaken the fiber of strong music and to render vapid that which is already inconsequential. Nowadays, chromaticism infests Church music to such an extent that in more respects than one it suggests in its behavior the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It slithers insinuatingly over the page and in no time at all completely demoralizes the will of what might have been a reasonably self-respecting piece of music."³⁰

What Davison recommends here is "a chromaticism which is at all times restricted in amount and lacking in emotionalism."³¹

Seen thus through Davison's eyes our "Postlude" fragment crumbles to a piece of pseudo-religious, pseudo-operatic, pseudo-barber shop, pseudo-what-you-will music, too inconsequential for any serious consideration except that we are discussing a man who spread this kind of musical trivia throughout the American Church in more than one and a half million volumes. We are accordingly forced to assume that Benson's ideas represent a widespread, indeed the dominant feeling in the Church at large. If he is in any sense a confused sentimentalist as to the nature of religious feeling in music, he must thereby bear witness to a similar widespread and deep seated confusion if not, indeed, a fatal misapprehension-as to what constitutes genuine religious experience throughout American Christendom. The predominance of Victorian hymn tunes in our hymnals serves as the most eloquent witness available to the fundamental misconception of religion now prevailing in our Churches.

²⁹ Chromaticism is caused by chromatic neighboring notes or by two or more successive semitones in the same direction in any one voice. Accidentals occur but are chromatic only under these conditions.
³⁰ Ibid., pp. 35 f. Dykes's tune "Alford" seems like a fair instance of what Davison de scribes in his last sentence.
³¹ Ibid., P. 38.

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IV

To return to Professor Davison, what sort of music would he recommend to take the place of our poor "Postlude"? As nearly as I can judge from his book his main interest seems to veer more in the direction of a cappella choral anthems rather than congregational hymn singing. However, I am quite willing to employ his criteria upon Example 3, a setting by J. S. Bach³² of what Dr. Benson's 1911 Hymnal calls Passion Chorale. Its first stanza, as given there, runs as follows:

"O sacred Head, now wounded,
With grief and shame weighed down;
Now scornfully surrounded
With thorns, Thine only crown;
O sacred Head, what glory,
What bliss till now was Thine!
Yet, though despised and gory,
I joy to call thee mine."

In this music we find a rhythm of placid evenness. The feminine endings of the odd numbered lines even soften the cadential impacts of the musical periods. It is most certainly "a rhythm that avoids strong pulses."³³ Upon the melody, an old Lutheran chorale, Professor Davison bestows his highest pontifical blessing:

"The German chorale is the noblest example of Protestant congre gational song."³⁴

What is its secret? He characterizes it as "a melody whose physiog nomy is neither so characteristic nor so engaging as to make an appeal in its own behalf;"³⁵ that is, it exists to declaim the text, not for it self. Here is where a strong caveat has to be issued against accepting over glibly Dr. Benson's doctrine of "charm."

Perhaps the most salient feature of Passion Chorale that strikes the modern ear is its modality. The soprano is in the Phrygian mode which may be heard by playing the octave from E to E on the white keys of the piano. The harmonies created by the lower voices, while generally following the minor as developed in Bach's time, show the modal influence strongly in the last two bars. "It is a strange, un-

³² It is the fifth selection in Bach's Cantata 153: Schau, lieber Gott, wie meine Feind.
³³ Ibid., pp. 37 f.
³⁴ Ibid., p. 61.
³⁵ Ibid., p. 38,

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familiar, impersonal atmosphere that is evoked by" a mode such as the Phrygian, says Professor Davison, and he adds:

"Such music stands quite apart from typical secular expression, and its sacerdotal quality, its remoteness from the world, may be ascribed in no small degree to its modality."³⁶

This particular setting was chosen largely because of the simplicity of its counterpoint. All the voices move mostly in even quarter notes. This makes it easier for a singing congregation to follow. Yet even here the beneficial effects of the contrapuntal spirit are clearly present. Notice the alto in bar four with preceding upbeat and the tenor in the last four bars (plus upbeat). These simple yet expressive musical lines tend to diffuse the listener's attention over all the voices rather than to concentrate it on the soprano. As Davison puts it:

"The general effect of counterpoint may be said to be impersonal and undramatic . . . [it] is an ideal musical conveyance for the expression of the corporate attitudes of emotion such as awe, contemplation, or aspiration."³⁷

Notice how the chromaticism in the first two lines serves both to give shape to each of the three lower parts and to guide the harmony of the phrase as a whole to a satisfactory resolution. Thus it is used as a means of carrying out two serious and legitimate musical purposes. It has no relation to the chromaticism in Example 1.

In Dr. Benson's 1911 Hymnal, Johann Sebastian Bach was represented with one hymn (No. 220), another setting of the melody of Example 3 assembled from several instances of it in Bach's St. Matthew Passion.³⁸ But there the voice leading of lines six and eight had been mutilated and enfeebled, presumably by Dr. Allen "in the interests of congregational singing." However, it looks as though Bach did not gain admission of even that one tune to the Hymnal without a struggle. Perhaps Dr. Benson liked the text but there was

³⁶ Ibid., p. 37.
³⁷ Ibid., p. 34.
³⁸ This setting and Example 3 form an interesting contrast. Dr. Benson's Passion Chorale has a large number of chords in fundamental position and a considerable amount of eighth note motion, mostly in the inner voices. In other words its harmony is comparatively simple and clear while its counterpoint is unusually active for one of Dr. Benson's hymn tunes, In Example 3 the counterpoint is quieter but there are more inverted chords. Here the rest less harmonies seek for their resolution, there it is the eighth note motion in the counterpoint that impels the music forward.
Does the typical hymn setting, with most of its chords in fundamental position, minimum counterpoint and repeated bass notes, need such additional motive power? Discussion of this question will have to remain outside the scope of the present article.

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clearly a question in the editors' minds about the music. So to allay any fears of musical or rather hymnological unorthodoxy they included an alternate tune, "Gerhardt," composed by Joseph P. Holbrook, Doctor of Music, in 1862. It is included here as Example 4 and may serve as an instance of the contrasting approach of the old German Lutherans and the English Victorians to the same text. In deed there is "a great gulf fixed" between them.

How does "Gerhardt" measure up to Davison's standards for sacred music? Rhythmically it resolves into the pattern

repeated eight times. One has to hear a sequence of such length to believe that it could exist. Notice next how, with one exception, every odd numbered bar has repeated bass notes. As a result of this and the composer's lack of imagination, the harmony stagnates and musical life ceases in these bars except for the unvarying rhythmic sequence. The one exception is the sixth bar from the end where the harmonic changes must have caused the Doctor of Music above average cerebration. Perhaps he was so exhausted by this effort that he failed to notice the consecutive unisons between the soprano and alto linking the second and third bars from the end. For a Doctor of Music they are surely inexcusable.

Davison has some telling words on the responsibility of hymn composers. He writes:

"The composer has the advantage over clergy and laity in that his studies have presumably brought him into contact with a great many examples of superior Church writing which he may study analytically and which will serve him as models of style."³⁹

We have seen how Dr. Allen arranged Bach and that he may have known Wagner's work. Dr. Holbrook drew on Carl Maria von Weber's famous opera DerFreischütz for his tune "Jewett," No. 506 in Benson's 1911 Hymnal, Whether the works of Wagner and Weber constitute "superior Church writing" or not, the two men are at least first class musicians. Davison continues:

"Furthermore, it should be taken for granted that . . . [the composer] will conscientiously criticize his own work, avoiding in it the

³⁹ Ibid., pp. 60 f.

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easy popular cliche', [see Example 1, second bar] the tear-compelling harmonic progression, [see Example 1, third and fourth bars] the brass band effect, and the catchy devices of the operetta [see Example 4]. All this he would do were he writing music to be taken seriously, to be criticized as music. But this is Church music he is composing, and the modern Church dotes on poverty of invention and commonness of musical expression."⁴⁰

It is unnecessary to compare "Gerhardt" with every point raised by Davison. Obviously he would find little enough to induce religious contemplation. But we may pause to note the cheery, pink cheeked major mode contrasting with the dark, mysterious Phrygian of Example 3. Are both equally appropriate for passion music, or even for religion in general? I wonder. Davison reminds us that the medieval Church called the major mode "modus lascivus." I will not flatter "Gerhardt" with such an epithet; it is too hopelessly dull and ordinary. If performed fast, the eightfold rhythmic sequence would make it ridiculous; if performed slowly the harmonic stagnation in every other bar would reduce it to the most maudlin and empty sentimentality. It is indeed a composition beyond redemption. Yet it is a fair specimen of that Victorian hymnology which has captured and retained so large a place in all our hymn books.

Professor Davison's general remarks on the subject are valuable as a musician's sermonette upon Horatio Parker's text:⁴¹

"Musically unpromising as is a great deal of the Psalter, we could wish, nonetheless, that it had not so generally given way to the Victorian hymn, caught in the pale surge of that belated and attenuated musical romanticism which made its unexceptionable way over the England of Barnby, Dykes and Stainer; a feeble but an apt partner of religious literature frequently devoted to self-congratulation on an almost automatic salvation."⁴²

"Most hymns in current use are drawn from the tritest resources of musical language-bromidic clichés which are to music what typical newspaper English is to literature, the annihilation of everything that is aesthetically stimulating; . . . music for which there is even

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 61. Italics original.
⁴¹ Davison has some unkind remarks that could be applied to Dr. Benson's unconcern with Parker's criticism: to Benson that criticism would be "no more than a mosquito stab on the armor of entrenched smugness" whose "countenance was frozen in changeless self-satisfaction." (Ibid., pp. 80 f.)
⁴² Op. cit., p. 61. It seems to me quite possible to sing "O sacred Head, now wounded" to "Gerhardt" in a manner that would create this impression. It would be more difficult with Example 3. Passion Chorale opens the mind; "Gerhardt" closes it.

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no place among the sophistications of modern popular music, which would exclude it as the outworn backwash of the worst phases of nineteenth-century romanticism. Yet to God who gave us music, this, apparently, is the best that we can find to offer in return."⁴³

"The Church has deliberately laid up its musical treasures on earth, and investment in the trite, the pretty, the sensational, the sentimental, the exhibitionistic, the cheap, the immediately attractive, and the artistically insignificant has resulted inevitably in bankruptcy. . . . Our Churches are literally asylums for the harboring of the great army of the apostles of musical mediocrity. For them there are twenty or thirty third-rate musical formulas, and God whom they pretend to worship and who created the free imaginative capacity of man is told that that is all he need expect."⁴⁴

Few are the musicians who would bother to consider so inconsequential a subject as current American Church music. Few are the churchmen who have ears to hear, or a mind concerned to interpret the poverty of American Christendom's musical life. But here is Professor Davison, an American who manifestly loves both the Church and Church music. He has become very disturbed and has had the courage to publish his disturbed feelings to the world. It is a significant act, deserving both the warmest welcome and the deepest respect. Indeed, the idea of applying honest standards of taste to Church music and to Dr. Benson's hymnals is like introducing streams of living water into a desert. But let us now proceed to examine the question, "What may religious music be?" more fundamentally, more broadly, and more simply.

V

Professor Davison has been bringing standards of taste to Church music. But what is music itself? Music is the art which is concerned with the action of sounds in time. So we must ask a further basic question: how are these sounds made? At the present time the volume and quality of musical tone is controlled to an extremely intimate degree by finger and wrist pressure (if stringed or percus-

⁴³ Ibid., pp. 90 f.
⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 80 f. I suppose that if Dr. Benson were asked for a rebuttal he might employ against Professor Davison the words he used to describe Horatio Parker: "he had an idealist's contempt for the common level and for popularity" (HCC, p. 231). If so, may I express the hope that from his niche in heaven Dr. Benson is enjoying our singing radio commercials, our television soap operas, and all else that is reducing American society to a cultural common denominator. At least he may be interested to see how big business is learning from the Church for, in singing commercials, threadbare musical clichés are used not to praise God but to make money.

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sion instruments are being played) or by breath pressure (for singing or playing wind instruments). Thus the subjective feelings of the performer become projected with all possible sensitivity and fullness into his performance. This is the essence of what every modern performer instinctively tries to do; it is the essence of what every present day listener tries instinctively to hear. It involves the ebb and flow of human feeling as expressed in no other art so intimately or so minutely. The "personal" element in a singing voice, in the tone of a violinist, a pianist, or other musical performer is what we expect. This is musica humana in a sense and on a scale undreamed of by the Middle Ages who invented the term to describe vocal music only. It is music performed by humans for the benefit of humans and of this music is all our musical life made.

Well, almost all of it. If the reader of these words is a clergyman, the chances are that his Church still contains an instrument that corresponds essentially to none of these categories although it may well be suffering from their influence. I refer, of course, to the pipe organ, even today almost as firm a fixture of Church architecture as pulpit or altar. But why? How many preachers or Church musicians or boards of trustees, let alone disinterested theologians, have asked themselves why every Church building seems to require so expensive an instrument? Professor Davison himself never appears to have thought about it, probably because his main interest seems to be choral music. Of course the organ has been the "traditional" Church instrument but is that tradition legitimate? That is, was there ever a genuine connection between the organ and the Christian religion? Here we can only refer to organ tone, and in the tone emitted by classical organs (sometimes called by those who don't like them "baroque organs") something fundamentally different from the sounds described above is to be heard.

Any of those sounds may start pianissimo or sforzando at the performer's pleasure. Any organ pipe or reed has its own tonal attack, independent of the performer. A piano string ceases to vibrate, a singer or wind player runs out of breath, a string player must interrupt his tone to take another bow stroke. All these features are part of the appealing, human limitations of these instruments. But an organ with good bellows and dependable pumpers will produce an unvarying sound as long as the key is depressed. Nor, in the course of its duration, can the intensity or quality of the tone be affected in

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any way by the performer. It remains impersonal, beyond his reach or emotions. In its impersonal articulation and capacity for uniform and indefinite duration it inspires a sense of eternity. It speaks to man of things not of this world. Its thoughts are not the thoughts of violins, of oboes, of human voices, or of pianos. It is something apart, ultimately beyond the control of man, striving, as he is, to control all things, including musical articulation. Thus for him " who has cars to hear" the organ has truly served as a musical revelation of God and for this reason, more than any other, maintained its position as rex instrumentorum in Western Christendom for many centuries. It was the quality of eternity in the sound of an organ that brought devout listeners into the divine presence.

So when Dr. Benson questions "if there is such a thing as distinctively religious music" I answer: yes, there certainly is. Organ tone provides the one basic religious spirit in music. And the history of Christian Church music is, in the last analysis, the story of the extent to which the eternal spirit of the organ has been transmitted and infused into other musical media.

The organ arose as a major musical force in medieval times as polyphony began to be developed in northern Europe. It doubled the choir, filled in and amplified the tonal fabric. Choir and organ must have emitted a composite and generally fused type of sound. In this connection the following curious fact appears to be relevant. German organ pipes often exhibit what is called the "chiff" or spit ting noise produced at the beginning of their tone when the air current first enters. Italian organ pipes, on the contrary, were de signed to soften or eliminate this effect. Why was this? The most obvious explanation seems to be that it is related to the two languages; to the prevalence of strong groups of consonants in German as against liquid consonants and long vowels in Italian. This in turn can only indicate a subtle relation between choral sound and organ design in the two countries (probably even in their respective pronunciation of liturgical Latin). But since the organs that so responded to the sounds of the local languages had no swell boxes we may assume that the Church choirs on their side imitated the im personal sound of the organ. Certainly the music written for those choirs can best be performed on an even dynamic level-or with the alternation of choirs wholly analogous to a succession of stops on an organ.

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Thus I strongly suspect that ecclesiastical choral sound from, say, the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, often tended to approach the quality of organ tone. The extent of this no doubt varied widely from place to place and it would be foolish to make overly sweeping statements. I bring up the point simply as a caveat against assuming that choral sound is automatically to be opposed-or preferred-to organ sound.⁴⁵

Whoever would urge the primacy of choral as against organ tone as the standard for religious musical sound cannot evade the fact, first, that ancient choirs are dead and their singing unrecorded, while a few ancient organs have survived and their sounds can be heard. Second, that these organs can sound in only one way, a religious way (for the reasons given above), while a modern choir can sing in various ways, some of them very secular indeed. Thus it seems to me much more difficult to focus and express clearly the nature of choral sound than to describe organ sound. Choirs can of course approximate the impersonal sonority of an organ very closely. Probably a hymn such as "A Mighty Fortress is our God" should be sung this way. But a chorus may also use a sentimental, crooning type of de livery much favored by popular vocal ensembles. The latter seems clearly to have been descended from the nineteenth century roman tic choral revival. Its most famous orchestral idealization is probably the overture to Wagner's Lohengrin which the composer declared, with characteristic modesty, to represent the singing of angels. As a matter of fact this sensuous type of choral singing, this sensuous type of orchestral playing, even invaded the rex instrumentorum, the organ itself. This was the era when wind pressures were stepped up, swell boxes installed, and orchestral instruments imitated with the deliberate purpose of investing the organ with as much of the human centered sensuousness of the orchestra as possible.⁴⁶

Thus the organ's true nature was perverted and vitiated. How could it proclaim its eternal truths when it was expected to sob? To anyone who "has ears to hear" this was a profound expression of a sickness eating at the heart of nineteenth century religion. The one instrument which through the centuries had shown itself to be

⁴⁵ Even for simple congregational hymns organ sound is to be preferred to choral. Congregational singing is a collective phenomenon, notably impersonal and inexpressive. Nobody conducts it, there is no dominating musical conception other than the volume and tempo set by the organist. This feature may even be of some value in speculating how choirs used to sound centuries ago.
⁴⁶ A more recent example of organ and choral sound following similar paths.

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uniquely religious in its sound was being destroyed. Recently there has been some reaction against this tendency. Many new organs are being built which give back to the instrument something of its true sound. But this is primarily the expression of the twentieth century's historical instinct reacting against the nineteenth. In itself it has nothing to do with a revival of prophetic musical religion. Its creativity springs from historical, not religious sources.

This fatal blurring and obscuring of the real nature of organ sound in the nineteenth century, this identification of the one unmistakably religious note with secular and basically human sounds helps greatly to explain how Dr. Benson could write, "Except in intent and through association there can hardly be such a thing as Christian Music."⁴⁷ For indeed how could there be religious music if there was no longer any religious voice to perform it?

VI

Let us now see if we can pull some of these facts together in connected form. We start in medieval times with the predominance of the inexpressive organ, with the limited expressive powers of other artificial instruments, and a tradition of choral singing based on these instrumental sounds. All this was completely taken for granted and when composers wrote choral compositions they had this impersonal, inexpressive sound in mind, the sound that we regard as basically religious and which found its most characteristic utterance in the organ. Within this basic agreement no serious disturbance arose until the seventeenth century. Then the expressive powers of modern instruments, notably the violin, began to be developed, and the dramatic possibilities of the solo voice began to be exploited in the new operas, especially in Italy.

These secular forces did not at first endanger the religious foundation of Church music. The Catholic south, with the ancient choral sound still clearly in its ears, surrounded it with the new opulent orchestration and created the Church music that led to Haydn's and Mozart's masses and other liturgical works. These pieces can be distinguished from secular music about as much as a baroque or ro coco church can be distinguished from a corresponding palace; both show the same aristocratic spirit but are separate compositions. We may assume that what justified this Church music was the old basic

⁴⁷ HCC, p. 228.

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religious choral sound that the composer expected and the performers instinctively projected. But this was a dangerous course; eventually the expressive orchestral and operatic impulses became so strong that the chorus was swept away with them and the old sound forgotten. As soon as that happened Haydn and Mozart became exposed to the charge (by no means justified) that they possessed no true Church style. By the nineteenth century Catholic Church music was totally without anchor, buffeted by every wind and wave. Faith was gone and theatrical dramaturgy took its place, for example, in Verdi's Requiem.

The Protestant Germans measured the new operatic and instrumental sounds not against choral but against organ tone. Against this rock, Italian opera in eighteenth century Germany was shattered. But the new expressive instruments were nurtured and refined, as it were, by the organ itself, and the arias of Johann Sebastian Bach re veal the greatest artistic triumph of Protestantism, where the most secular forms and sonorities are transfigured by the spirit of the organ into religious works. The Lutherans made no distinction between sacred and secular compositions. Impregnated with organ sound, the most secular piece became sacred.⁴⁸ Example 5 is a German popular song of the early seventeenth century, over a hundred years before Bach. Its melody is the same as that of Example 3. The latter, in fact, is simply a later religious version of Example 5. The secular text is as follows:

"Confused are all my feelings;
A tender maid's the cause.
Bewilderment comes o'er me,
Pain at my heartstrings gnaws.
By day, by night, I rest not,
At all times much lament.
I sigh and weep forever,
With grief and sorrow spent."

Such musical borrowings by the Church from the world could be successful only while true feeling for the organ existed. When Bach wrote for orchestra he was thinking basically of the organ. Fifty years later when Mozart wrote for the organ he was thinking primarily of the orchestra. And with this step music history crossed

⁴⁸ It should be pointed out that, since secular instruments of the distant past possessed nothing like the expressive power of their modern counterparts, old secular music does not sound to our insensitive ears so very different from sacred.

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the Rubicon that led from the music of God to the music of man. As can be seen, this occurred just at the time when the crisis of the Enlightenment was at its peak and so faithfully reflected the spiritual history of Europe in general.

The later history of the organ is a true musical parallel to the destruction of Jerusalem:

"How the gold has grown dim, how the pure gold is changed!
The holy stones lie scattered at the head of every street…
Those who feasted on dainties perish in the streets;
those who were brought up in purple lie on ash heaps…
their skin has shriveled upon their bones,
it has become as dry as wood."⁴⁹

Organs and organists are the stepchildren of the modern musical world. Yet in their heritage lies buried the key to the lost musical faith of the past.

These crucial events of European music history swirled around England at a time when British music (the musical parent of Dr. Benson's hymnals) was declining to its weakest point. Having so little of its own to offer it gave off pale reflections of various foreign influences. For example, the remnant of the once great British choral tradition responded to the romantic interest in the so-called a cappella style. Thus it was predisposed to regard choral sound, with all its ambiguities, as the basis of musical religion, and to feel, with Catholicism, that secular pieces should never be converted to sacred as Example 3 had been fashioned from Example 5. Yet some odd coincidences occurred. For example, Will L. Thompson wrote the following words:

"Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling;
Calling for you and for me.
See, on the portals He's watching and waiting,
Watching for you and for me."⁵⁰

He set these words to Example 6. That tune is unmistakably simi-

⁴⁹ Lam. 4: 1, 5, 8b.
⁵⁰ This hymn was not used by Dr. Benson. One can only speculate as to the reason. Its third stanza runs:

"Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing for you and for me.
Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming,
Coming for you and for me."

One of the elements in Dr. Benson's fourfold test for hymns was "cheerfulness." Would this stanza have passed that test in his mind? I am not sure.

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lar to Example 7, an air from The Mikado by Sir Arthur Sullivan to the following words by W. S. Gilbert:

"On a tree by a river a little tom-tit
Sang willow, tit-willow, tit-willow."

If Examples 3 and 5 are paired against Examples 6 and 7, it will be seen that the first pair is essentially inexpressive organ music while the second represents the expressive string orchestra. And we must go on to assert that the first is religious and the second is secular. Better, to our twentieth century ears and soul, is the pseudo-secular sounding Example 5 than the pseudo-religious Example 6.

Thus we conclude that there is not only a religious style to music but also a musical sound that is itself basically religious. We conclude also that any person who brushed the peripheries of music as faintly as did Dr. Benson would neither be in a position to under stand this nor to pronounce such sweeping judgments upon music as he presumed to do. What musical contact he had at all was with the least imaginative part of British music at the time of its lowest ebb. But there is no mightier river in the history of Western music than the Church's forgotten musica sacra. Contemplating the richness and reality of its faith and its revelation of the living God one is indeed moved to cry with the prophet:

"Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters;
and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price."

And to Dr. Benson's successors he says:

"Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Hearken diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in fatness."

And to those insensitive to music he says:

"Incline your ear, and come to me; hear that your soul may live;
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David."⁵¹

⁵¹ Isa. 55: 1-3. The Presbyterian Directory for the Worship of God says (IV, 2): "It is . . . proper that we cultivate some knowledge of the rules of music, that we may praise God in a becoming manner." It would be relevant to know how much such "cultivation" occurs in theological seminaries. For who more than candidates for ordination should know how to "praise God in a becoming manner"?

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David, that patron saint of Hebrew music! In fact the entire chapter readily lends itself to this interpretation. I pray indeed that this be not taken for an example of "the devil quoting Scripture," or, worse, as unworthy of serious consideration.

VII

How may a rejuvenation of musical and spiritual culture be inaugurated, let alone accomplished? Three possible steps occur to me. The first and third are musical, the second is bureaucratic. First of all, there can be no future with such vacuous, pallid, sentimental, and pseudo-religious fare as Victorian hymn tunes and their numerous relatives. The house built on them was built on sand " and great has been the fall of it." We must first reacquaint our selves with some brand of true musical religion expressed in a congregational idiom. In the Protestant Church it is impossible to imagine any other nucleus for such a repertory than the classic Lutheran chorales. Dr. Benson, as might be imagined, was doubtful about this.

"There is . . . a temperamental difference between Germans and Americans that militates against the adoption of the chorales, especially in the slower and heavier form most familiar. . . . something in nervous make-up breeds an impatience in the vocal chords."⁵² But America is no longer so dominated by British influence as it was in Dr. Benson's day; our culture is more cosmopolitan. Moreover this particular piece of British inheritance has been worn out to an absolutely hopeless degree. The musical instincts of American Protestantism should experiment freely with the Lutheran chorales, shaping them to local needs with due perception for religious truth. No matter what is urged in opposition, something new is needed and in spite of Dr. Benson's strictures I see nowhere else to turn for the necessary rock on which to build a new house. It would indeed be surprising and most wonderful-if a new twentieth century Church music of pure gold were suddenly to spring out of the present vacuum. In default of such a miracle, however, it would seem reason able to start with the best in our heritage-instead of the worst which is what we now have-and build from there.

Second is the problem of the position of music in the Church. Since it enjoys no canonization such as has been bestowed upon the

⁵² HCC, p. 242.

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literature of the Bible it labors under a handicap, as pointed out early in this article. This handicap was illustrated by Professor Donald MacLeod of Princeton Seminary in a letter to Presbyterian Life, March 15, 1962. Wrote Professor MacLeod:

"In the United Presbyterian Church there is no such order as 'Minister of Music.' There are organists, choir directors, choirmasters,

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but none of these are entitled to a ministerial designation as we understand this office. The term 'minister' implies ordination. . . . True it is that there are Ministers of Education, of Counseling, of Visitation, but they have fulfilled the basic essentials for ordination."

As a musical layman I should like to enquire why the requirements for ordination embrace preachers, educators, counselors, and visitors but exclude musicians. How would a seminary graduate who had majored in the Old Testament enjoy a position in which he might be ordered by someone to whom the Bible was a closed book to read publicly from the opening chapters of First Chronicles or corresponding places in, say, the Book of Ezra? Yet that is exactly what the vast majority of Church musicians put up with all their professional lives.

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Week after week they are told what hymns to play by someone who has had no genuine musical training as part of his professional education, and who all too often has no interest or ear for music whatsoever. Ordination therefore apparently gives a person the right to decide about musical matters in which he admittedly has no competence and to order a trained musician around merely because that trained musician is not ordained.

Beyond any doubt this works great harm to the Church. No wonder Church music is the laughing stock of the musical world, no wonder the Church is justly mocked where it should be respected when its music is under the supervision of those who may be tone deaf. How can a non-musical clergyman perceive what is really offered to God in music every Sunday in nearly every Church in this land? I would not presume to call it blasphemy-only God who searches all hearts can judge that. But I can repeat the words of Professor Lang who calls it "sentimentalism, the symptom of suppressed and sterilized feelings." When the secular world looks to the Church for leadership and finds none, when the Church prefers complacency to controversy, let alone persecution on social questions, does the Church ever ask itself: "Why is this the case?" I would reply: the Victorian hymnbook as used even today is the most striking musical example I know of sentimental self-complacency. If the clergy as at present ordained do not understand this, they should share the responsibility with a ministry of music that does; they should respect its judgments and give no more orders on subjects on which they are supposed to be ignorant and for which they may actually have a dislike.

The quotation from Brunner in the first part of this article certainly bears witness to a deep disrespect by churchmen for music. Dr. Benson's writings are less forthright but there seems little doubt that, in the last analysis, he shared the same point of view. Indeed, the contradictory character and even the absurdity of his conclusions on musical matters can be explained in no other way. Moreover, one is amply justified in interpreting the vast circulation of his hymnals, as well as the inferior status of Church musicians described by Professor MacLeod, as representing widespread prevalence of the same point of view.

But Church music is deserving of respect both within and without the house of God. However, it will never be respected outside the

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Church until it wins respect within it. A constructive step in this direction would be accomplished if those trained in Church music and entrusted with the responsibility for its use in worship were accorded the same rights and privileges, including ordination, that other seminary graduates enjoy. Church music and Church musicians might begin to acquire a measure of self respect and a healthy new spirit might blow through the Church.

Finally, of course, a new Church music will have to be developed if Christianity itself remains in existence. There has been no really new Church music for generations. This, I would submit, is a very revealing indicator of the sterility in the Church's life as a whole over the last century. Nor will there be a new Church music until the vitality of the Church itself creates it. It cannot be made synthetically, it will spring up only when the spirit of God calls it forth. In the meantime let us nurture the spirit of prophecy, in whatever guise it may appear, even if, in God's good pleasure, it should chance to be in the wordless language of musical tones. So I close with the commandment, quoted in the New Testament probably more often than any other:

"He who has an ear, let him hear
what the Spirit says to the Churches."

It is my fervent prayer that this commandment be applied to Church music.