Music and Theology: Essays in Honor of Robin A. Leaver (review)

The first of Robin Leaver's many published writings on music is a short letter to the editor in the Musical Times of June 1964. Leaver was then, as he puts it in the letter, 'a theological student, soon to be launched into the ministry of the Church of England' (Musical Times, 105 (1964), 437). Decrying the rising popularity of trendy hymns, Leaver applauds the high standards demanded by the editors of the Cambridge Hymnal, which would appear three years later. Leaver dismisses the 'patronizing gimmicks which are presented to us as "Twentieth Century Hymns", [which] have nothing of that objective timelessness that can take man out of his present situation and point him to God'. Of course, Leaver was not condemning modern hymns wholesale, but merely those of cheap and easy affect that attempt to ingratiate rather than elevate. These songs want to draw people in, like an advertisement, rather than raise them up. Leaver then makes a reverential gesture towards the great corpus of Lutheran chorales, from which so much of his wide-ranging and influential scholarship would take its inspiration. This steadfastly conservative, aestheticist position would certainly prove no easier to defend as the centrifugal Sixties gathered force, nor indeed in the age of postmodern relativism. Leaver's letter is light of touch, but enlivened with higher purpose.

Regardless of where one comes down on such issues today—or indeed how Leaver's views may have evolved in the four decades since the Musical Times letter—one can already recognize the letter's crucial recognition of religious music's indispensable capacity to move the human spirit: this seemingly simple music holds the greatest power. And the best of such music makes great claims on even the most everyday of musicians, the congregational singer, who, as both a historical entity and a vital carrier of music culture into the future, figures directly or indirectly in so much of Leaver's essential scholarship. This scholar is indefatigable, as even a casual look at the bibliography of his writings confirms. Compiled by Sherry Vellucci, the list comes as the last chapter of this tribute volume and takes up more than forty pages. This productivity is astounding not only for its range and rigour, but also in the light of Leaver's commitments as a teacher and as an active leader in the professional life of several scholarly disciplines.

The volume begins with a four-page sermon delivered by William T. Flynn at Boston University in 2004; the inclusion of a sermon not only brings to mind Leaver's activities as a churchman and preacher, not to mention his short and persuasive book, Music as Preaching: Bach, Passions and Music in Worship (Oxford, 1982), but also his work on historical homiletics, particularly in Bach's orthodox Germany. Flynn's contribution glosses a letter of 1178 by Hildegard von Bingen that understands music as 'a primal and redemptive gift of God' (p. 3), a position that would seem to accord with Leaver's theological claims for Bach's music. Flynn argues that Hildegard's theology of music 'stems from the perspective of a performer' (p. 4), another viewpoint that must resonate with Leaver, who has helped train so many church musicians.

In its concentration on theological aspects of music, the book's final chapter, an essay by the theologian D. E. Saliers entitled 'Beauty and Terror: What Have We to Sing, What Has Worship to Pray?', provides a symmetrical close to the opening sermon. Saliers's thought-provoking and beautifully written piece examines the dialectic of aesthetic serenity and dark instability in two works seemingly very different from one another: Britten's War Requiem and Fauré's Requiem. Rather than following the easy path, which would find that 'Britten holds the terror and Fauré the beauty', Saliers argues that these elements are present in both pieces, though they are introduced through 'very different aesthetic...