Sacred Sound: Experiencing Music in World Religions

2: CHRISTIANITY AND MUSIC

61 2 CHRISTIANITY AND MUSIC Gerald Hobbs With gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to God.1 F rom the origins of the Christian religion, music has been integral to the common life of its believers. Any description of Christian musical practice , however, must take into account the wide range of the Christian experience, which ranges across twenty centuries and among dramatically diverse cultures throughout the world. It must seek to do justice to the formal beliefs and practices of a faith and to the place of music in its rites of public worship. It must also acknowledge that there is a certain common tradition, but also that liturgical celebrations vary widely among the different families into which the Christian church is divided. At the same time, significant attention must be paid to a parallel tradition, the vast corpus of songs or hymns written in some instances as paraliturgical texts, but in others as personal meditation, or as unofficial and lay expressions of the faith.2 For the past two centuries, most, though not all, Christian denominations have sponsored an official selection of these in hymnals used in public worship, books that are periodically re-edited to reflect changing cultural norms as well as shifting religious emphases. These officially sanctioned collections are, moreover, outnumbered by unofficial publications, whose use ranges from less formal church gatherings to meetings in private homes. Recordings of “pop” hymns are also given regular airplay on commercial radio, particularly in the United States. It would therefore be a serious deformation of the subject not to represent both these official and unofficial dimensions. Basic teachings and primary sources The Christian religion was, for many centuries, the formally established faith of Europe. Its myths and liturgy have, at least until the modern era, profoundly shaped the core of the Western musical tradition as a whole. Many of the greatest composers practiced their art primarily as church musicians, writing as well as performing for public worship. Yet, from the first centuries, the Christian faith also had significant communities of adherents in regions of Asia and Africa, while, since the sixteenth century, moving steadily from its European and North American strongholds into all corners of the globe. It is probably inevitable that a Western historian writing for a Western audience will place principal emphasis upon the historical mainstream, but to ignore the practice of millions of adherents in every corner of the globe, or to speak of only one cultural tradition—even that of the (until recently) predominant Western European civilization— would be to repeat the self-centredness of nineteenth-century North Atlantic imperialism. North Americans are only now beginning to discover these traditions, but still must endeavour, at least, to name them as an increasingly significant dimension of the Christian story. Christianity is a religion whose beginnings lay in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean littoral. Historians and biblical scholars continue to debate the factual reliability of the traditions associated with Jesus of Nazareth, for whom the faith was named. What is indisputable, however, is that he was a Jew living in a border province of the Roman Empire early in the first century of the Common Era. This simple statement expresses Christianity’s dual origins, and those of its music. While almost nothing is said within these traditions on the subject of Jesus and music, we are told that he and his disciples “sang the hymn” at the end of their celebration of Passover, at what became known as the Last Supper.3 As this example suggests, Christian music can best be understood as a direct heir of the Psalms of ancient Israel. By the time of Jesus, the Psalms figured in several dynamic centres of Jewish life and faith. They were sung in the liturgy of the Jerusalem Temple (until it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 ce), in the local synagogues where Jews both in Palestine and throughout the diaspora met for weekly study and prayer, in rituals of the home like the annual Pesah, or Passover, celebration, and they were studied by scholars for whom their purported author, the king David, was one of Israel’s greatest prophets. Detailed consideration of the Psalms is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a few observations will help to show their contribution to 62
Christianity and Music the development of Christian music. The earliest Christians were Jews, although in time...