O'Brien-Music and the Christian Tradition (original) (raw)
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Music in Early Christianity and Its Cultural-Historical Context
The suitability of certain styles of music for liturgical use and for everyday appreciation by Christians is a highly contested subject. Issues regarding performance and skill level, audience participation and response, harmonic style, instrumentation, and lyrical content of the music used in worship, as well as the appropriate extent of engagement, inclusion, or appropriation of other contemporary and non-liturgical music styles, are frequently and sometimes ardently debated both between and within denominations. When we examine the historical evidence, we discover that this debate, and the diversity of musical opinions and expressions that underlie it, dates back to the earliest development of the Christian gathering.
Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity , 2022
This encyclopedia article gives an overview of "music" in early Christianity. This topic is associated with a few difficulties, namely diversity of definitions, blurred boundaries between singing and speaking, terminology, and last, but not least, the scarce findings on music in the sources from the first three centuries CE. After an introduction and a description of the beginnings (findings on music in the New Testament texts, Jewish and pagan musical traditions of this time) chapters on music in Christian Worship, musical instruments in early Christian literature and musical theory follow. The article concludes with a historiography.
Chapter Three: Ancient Church Music, c.1800
Sacred Harmonies: Music and Religion in Berlin, 1760-1840, 2021
modernity." 12 Conversely, discussions on church music invariably aired grievances about a "deluge of songs" in the print market polluting it, and the poor state of musical instruction that sustained it. 13 As E.T.A Hoffmann argued in his article on "Old and New Church Music," published "works for the church have been in short supply" because of an "unparalleled frivolity" in the training of church musicians. 14 Before teachers and statesmen ultimately disciplined music through new political institutions of knowledge, church music became a focal point for a new generation reckoning with the media disruptions of their immediate past. For Wackenroder and his generation, the initial solution for music critics seeking to shore up epistemic anxieties wrought by Enlightenment media was to look further back-to ancient church music. Early nineteenth-century proposals for church music to be recast from ancient models were not, as music historians commonly suppose, evidence of a decrepit, secularized Protestantism in need of purification-not least because, as I will show, such calls perpetuated eighteenth-century arguments under new terms. 15 Nor did such proposals necessarily indicate the (rather abstract) rise of Winkelmannian "historicism," as James Garratt has suggested. 16 Rather, I suggest that historicist interventions in church music around 1800 expressed an early reckoning with Enlightenment mediation: more specifically, they registered print media's effects on music and religion in the context of German Protestantism. This chapter, then, reassesses the Romantic "problem" of modern church music from the perspective of a newly disruptive Enlightenment media; it addresses why alte Kirchenmusik, or rather a small, carefully curated selection of it, became the first recourse for stabilizing a disruptive eighteenth-century musical mediascape. In turn, the discourse, practices, and materials of ancient church music in German religious life were the basis of music's and religion's new institutional identity as fields of scientific knowledge in Berlin. The newly fabricated legacy of ancient church music-its specific historical narrative and enduring liturgical value-hinged on the Lutheran chorale. Musicians and critics, I argue, derived their liturgical applications of alte Kirchenmusik from those of the Lutheran chorale. In the early nineteenth century, music not strictly in the genre of the chorale, but which now counted as part of the chorale's historical lineage, was newly interpreted as being "chorale-like," and so was associated with the same religious-aesthetic experiences (communal
During the ecclesiastical year 1689-90 the Lutheran superintendent in Leipzig, Johann Benedict Carpzov, and his cantor, the composer Johann Schelle, embarked on a collaboration of unusual scale. In the previous year, Carpzov had preached a cycle of sermons based on well-known hymns from the Lutheran tradition. In 1689-90 Carpzov gave a short summary of the earlier hymn sermons, while Schelle composed for each Sunday a cantata based on the very same hymn. The result is a unique collaboration between preacher and musician, pulpit and choir loft. Only a few of Schelle’s compositions have survived; however, the extant cantatas together with the printed sermons by Carpzov allow us to reconstruct the patterns of collaboration. They also demonstrate how music and sermons had to follow different genre conventions, which sometimes led to intriguing differences in the way preacher and composer interpreted the hymns. This historical case study leads to more general questions: What are the unique capabilities of language (in the sermon) versus sound (in the chorale settings)? How do sermon and music complement one another?
Music and language as fundamental categories of the liturgy
The body prefers to imitate rather than to invent. Our memory is a set of bodily procedures for making an image of a reality. We don't remember 'things', but how to make them. And as our body prefers the easy way, we make them exactly the same way as we did before, which results in a copy of the previous image or gesture. 1 The musical forms of melody, meter and rhythm are easily repeatable procedures of construction. They help us remember words. The 'homeric question', for example, is about the hexameter as main organizing principle in the epic traditions of Homer: the epic poets did not remember the whole epos literally, but knew how to reconstruct them with the help of the hexameter. 2 If we look at other oral traditions it is easy to see how musical procedures work as ordering and unifying principles, which allows people not only to remember but also to recite their tradition as in one voice.
Controversies in Church Music from the Early Church to the Reformation
This essay will examine some of the areas of controversy in the history of the pre-Reformation church, and argue that, contrary to Col 3:16 in which Paul intimates that music is God’s gift to all Christians and is to be used as a medium for teaching, edifying and praising, the Church constrained and misused that gift and increasingly dictated the parameters of its use such that the ordinary Christian was silenced in worship.
De Utilitate Cantorum: Unitive Aspects of Singing in Early Christian Thought
Anglican Theological Review, 2018
In this article, I draw from a number of church fathers who almost unanimously affirm the socially and cosmically unifying power of singing the Psalms. Often tacitly but unmistakably, they draw upon singing as a type of the person of Christ, a participative union of the divine with the human. However, investigation of singing’s “illegitimate” pagan and Jewish heritage illustrates the reason for singings ambivalence in the Christian mind. I conclude, however, that singing, employing the human body and its sensory faculties sanctified by Christ, constituted a far more valuable heuristic, pedagogic, and doxological tool in the early Christian centuries than we commonly appreciate today.