As Jim Vaskov played those notes, did you need Brad or Carolyn chanting to hear the words in your head? Probably not: the music from the organ reaches deep into our brains, and, for many of us, draws from countless previous masses we have attended to cause the opening phrases of the Great Thanksgiving to echo somewhere within us. Music serves this rudimentary purpose quite well: it helps embed the liturgy firmly into our minds.
Is this how it works? Words convey the real meaning, while music assists us to remember? That might seem to be the commonsense attitude. Words come first—to be really Protestant about it, the Word comes first—while music comes after. Music functions as an aid, or as entertainment: or perhaps something more nefarious than that. We hear in today’s first reading about Moses heading up Mount Sinai. When, in Schönberg’s Opera Moses and Aron, the prophet descends back down the mountain, he brings with him the truth of the spoken (not sung) Word. Meanwhile his singing brother Aaron has been busy seducing the Jewish tribe with music—music and a Golden Calf. Something has gone amiss in this opera. Music, false music like the false god of the Calf, exerts a priority over text, and the world suffers.
But I wonder: what if Schönberg’s Aron, not only his Moses, has a valid point after all? What if music does something more than viciously distract from the Word, ,more even than virtuously serve the Word? What if music brings something to worship that the Word cannot? I read once somewhere—though my quick Wikipedia-level research in preparation for today failed to confirm it—the speculation that parts of musical thought occur in the brain further down the brain stem than do any parts of the formation of spoken language. If this is true, than music constitutes a more basic, a more primitive, aspect of human experience than does plain speech. Specifically, it would seem to come, at least in part, from a part of the brain that precedes the formation of individuality, of the ego, of the self. And that strikes me as intuitively right. We may have our soloists (a modernist innovation, I’d speculate, probably no older than, say, 10,000 years), but music is fundamentally a communal activity. The conjoining of voices in the unison of Gregorian chant; the magical moment of harmony when emergent resonance produces a sound that exceeds the sum and character of the individual voices. As with a tribe of hunter-gatherers circled around a fire eons ago, music draws us . . . together. In music, we are a group, not a monad.
To be sure, language, too, can bring humans into communion. The Bible, more than practically any other book, has certainly formed a sense of identity among peoples, across the continents and across the centuries. But it’s amazing, really, to realize how quickly language evolves in unexpected directions; how, for instance, even the written declarations of the founding fathers of this nation probably don’t mean the same thing to us as they did to the gentlemen of the eighteenth century. Even their relatively proximate world is deeply strange to us—and if we don’t recognize it as strange, then we’re not looking close enough, and are instead projecting our ways of thinking on them. And two thousand years? What unites us with people of biblical times? Are we not constantly confronted, when listening to the readings each Sunday, about how inscrutable the concerns of those ancient inhabitants of the Near East are to us? Not just all that stuff about dietary habits and skin diseases and the inexplicable and cruel wrath of Jehovah; even basic concepts such as “love,” “neighbor,” and “faith,” and certainly “God” have undoubtedly drifted far in their modern meanings from their ancient intent. So, when reading the Bible, we encounter both the miracle of communion despite vast differences, but also the mystery of people and worlds that may be very difficult for us to comprehend. I think that music may help us bridge that gap. Again, raw speculation on my part, but I suspect that the deep-brain resonance of a song may often echo more successfully across distance and time than do the literal meaning of the Words. This is why we are still moved by Gregorian chants while we would almost certainly reject out-of-hand almost all of the content of first millennia preaching, if we even had access to it all. We cannot know all our Christian brethren, not really. As an entirety, they remain as mysterious to us as is the majesty of God. But music builds community, not only in this wonderful building today, but with all those unknown others. Music celebrates, and overcomes, and deepens, the mystery of our differences, and forges our unity.
This service today is dedicated to the role of music in our liturgy and in our community. Music is strong in this community. That statement verges on tautology, because music (if I’m right in what I’ve been arguing) is itself a form of community. Music is strong in this community, but we can make it stronger. You may be thinking, “Yes, music at Messiah is important to me”; and you may be asking yourself, “What can I do?” Well . . .
First, you might consider joining the choir. Yes, you: not those other people, over there. I may be up here in the choir stalls, but I have my spies out there in the pews, and I know we’ve got some folks in this parish who are just waiting to find their song. It’s a great group of folks that gather here every Thursday evening for rehearsal; we tend to have a blast. Not quite as debauched a time as Schönberg would lead you to believe that Aaron’s people of music enjoyed, but a good time nonetheless. You don’t need to worry about ability: our range of skills up here is great, and when you sing with the choir over time, you do get better—or, at least, I hope I have. We find true joy working together to craft a sound that we lift each week to the glory of God. I recall distinctly, when I first began singing in a church choir, which was at St. Michael’s and All Angels down in Corona del Mar; I remember an occasion when the men alone were rehearsing an anthem. Tim Getz, the wonderful music director and organist there at the time, listened to us once through, and said something like: “I can hear each of your voices alone, and they’re all more or less right, but I don’t hear them as an ensemble. Sing it again, but this time, listen to the voices to your right and to your left; don’t focus on your own. I want to hear a single sound.” We tried again, and what followed felt like a miracle. We each abandoned our individuality and blended into a collectivity. That sort of experience, which is both musical and philosophical, even theological, happens every week with the choir here at Messiah—well, actually, if truth be told, not exactly every week; we do have our off days. In short: at its best, the choir realizes, in microcosm, what the church in macrocosm itself can become, across vast distances and through long spans of time: a means to join into a community greater than the self.
Second, you can take advantage of the marvelous Concerts by Candlelight series that Jim Gilliam puts together each year. Our next concert comes up just next Sunday, a week from today, and features the California Quartet, intriguingly, playing along with projected film. Recently, Jim joined a consortium of chamber music venues in southern California, which gives us access to a superb list of performing groups that will be appearing in the months and years to come as part of the Candlelight series. Beyond being events that members of this parish can themselves enjoy, the concerts and the champagne receptions that follow provide excellent occasions to invite friends and acquaintances to visit Messiah. Once they see the building and they meet the people, such visitors stand a much greater chance to return on a Sunday morning. Growth of our parish family needs to be ongoing concern that all of us share, and these concerts are a fine means to introduce visitors to our active faith community and our community projects. If you do attend, we can always use volunteers to bring finger food, and to assist with the set-up and clean-up.
Finally, I would ask you to consider making a separate contribution, beyond your usual pledge to Messiah, to the Friends of Music. There may be some confusion on this point; certainly, I myself did not quite understand how music finances works here at Messiah until very recently. The Friends of Music budget is quite small, and only a relatively small portion of it goes to pay for the concerts and other incidental expenses, such as sheet music. The majority of the funds go toward paying our two staff singers, David Sheridan and David Stoneman. Some parishes pay staff singers out of the regular parish budget; here at Messiah we do not. Now, you all know what fine soloists David and David are, from the many times each has sung during communion (both are such unrepentant modernists in that regard!). Less obvious, perhaps, is the remarkable job they do leading the men’s sections week after week. I know that I panic any time Sheridan gets stuck in the snow, and I realize that I’m actually going to need to find my own way through the tenor part for that week. So the Davids don’t simply contribute their own voices; they keep all of the lower voices in line through their indispensable leadership. They are both real professionals, even though we pay them much below professional scale; they—along with the many professional quality musicians in our women’s sections, who are such a blessing—are giving their time and expertise as a gift to us every week; and our choir would be inconceivably worse without their contribution.
Music in this community; music is this community. However best you are able to join in, God welcomes you to follow the melody, to sense the rhythms, to be a voice in God’s earthly harmonies.
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