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Required for the position of organist at St. Nicholas Church in Berlin, 1773, recorded by Bach's pupil Johann Friedrich Agricola:
Only in the final example, in Agricola's instructions from 1773, was the candidate allowed to perform a work already composed, and even in that case the candidate was given the alternative of improvising a free fantasy. Until the twentieth century all composers of organ music were at first improvisers (including Mendelssohn and Liszt), and a major part of the literature for the instrument began its life as improvisations. Only when we compare our situation with theirs do we begin to understand what's at stake here. Great music—the organ works of the great composers—is indeed both a blessing and a curse! To the degree that it overshadows (or even stifles) improvisation—the creation of the new; indeed, the valuing of the new—it contributes to the impoverishment of the art of music as a whole, and specifically of the art of church music. Some of the art on the disk was produced by amateur or semi-professional artists. Amateur art in the church is in part the result of the rise of the egalitarian democratic ideal and the move toward empowering every individual, toward allowing all individuals to reach their creative potential. But amateur art in the church is also in part the result of a radically new cultural phenomenon, the separation of cult and government, of church and state. Has there ever been a traditional culture in which cult and government—church and state—have been or are separated? I can't think of one. The model on which all cultures previous to our modern culture have operated is as follows: the cult (the worship of God or the gods) is indispensable to the welfare, indeed to the very survival, of the people; the role of the ruling class, the government, is to collect wealth by various methods of taxation, and to dedicate part of that wealth to the adornment of the cult; it is the duty of the ruling and priestly classes to seek out and train talented artists to create works of art in the service of the cult, and to support the artists in that endeavor. Now and then one does encounter examples of religious art created by amateurs (e.g., some medieval English devotional poetry), but in developed traditional cultures, amateur art in public cultic observances is the exception rather than the rule. The model on which modern culture operates hardly needs to be described in detail. It's quite familiar to everyone living in the United States today: rigorously enforced separation of cult and government; cult (now actually many cults) supported by free-will offerings of adherents, etc. Neither of these models—the traditional or the modern—is inherently more friendly to art than the other, but the first has shown itself to be, on the whole, better funded and more congenial to professional artists; that is, friendlier to fine art. It seems to me that it has now become vastly more important for Christians in the modern world to encourage amateur or semi-professional artists, for two reasons: (1) we need what they create, and (2) we need a broad base of discerning, committed amateurs as a fertile matrix for the development and support of professionals. BUT! what do we do about the disasters, the failures, the trite, the second- and third-rate art that are an inevitable by-product of encouraging amateur art? Well, first we have to acknowledge that professional artists don't always create masterpieces either. And with that in mind, I can only recommend to you what we've been doing at St. Mark's: identify artists with talent, offer them guidance and support, and retire the ill-begotten as soon as is prudently and diplomatically possible—and above all, keep on encouraging more and better art to take its place. Granted, it's a messy business, but I think it's a risk we simply have to take. For me, a maxim (sometimes attributed to St. Augustine) comes to the rescue, reminding me that "we should not allow ourselves to be distracted by the imperfect as we strive for the perfect." Should everybody in the Church be an artist? Clearly not. Should every individual church be in the business of identifying, encouraging, and supporting the artists in its midst? I think so. It occurs to me at this point that I'm operating on a number of assumptions. Let me, in the interest of honesty and candor, make them clear to you now: 1. Christians, like all human beings, are subject to the creation mandate: since they're made in the image of God, they are, like God, creators. And, being made in God's image, they should exercise their creativity fully and continually. 2. The locus of human artistic creativity in the context of religion, viewed both historically and rationally, is principally in the service of the cult, i.e., of public worship—when imagination, impelled by intensity of love and devotion, takes wing. 3. Creative intensity is as good an indicator of intense religious conviction as any I know: we adorn what we love. We adorn by expending on what we love time, creative energy, effort, and resources. The truth of this statement is best understood when, viewed historically, we recognize and gauge the intensity of religious faith in past cultures largely by the creative uniqueness and intensity of their religious art: Mayan temples, Tibetan monasteries, Gothic cathedrals. Now, if we hold up the music of Christianity in the modern world to that standard we have a problem, because (in the words of Calvin Johansson) "if a knowledgeable observer were asked to name the institution in our society that clearly utilizes the highest musical creativity, we can be sure it would not be the contemporary church."6 4. The fourth and final assumption is this: religious creativity, at its most intense and vital, forges its own unique artistic stylistic norms, conditioned by its passionately held religious convictions. Those stylistic norms are always based in some way on the art of the past, but they always embody something new and original as well, in order to mirror a given religion's unique identity. Conjure up in your mind, for example, an image of the nave of a medieval Gothic cathedral. What's holding up its stone-vaulted ceiling? Columns. Are columns indigenously Christian? Of course not—the Gothic style inherited them from the earlier Romanesque, which in turn borrowed them from Greek and Roman architecture, which in turn...So Gothic architecture uses elements that are derived from the art of past cultures (we can trace that same process with the stone vaulting, and with the arches). The borrowing is not important, though. What the Gothic style does with what it borrows is important. We should ask: Does Gothic architecture incorporate those borrowed elements into something new and unique to its own culture (that is, to medieval Christianity)? Would you ever mistake a Gothic cathedral for a Greek or Roman temple? Would you ever mistake it for anything but a medieval Christian place of worship? Hardly! Most people the world over would immediately identify it as such. What makes a religious art form a truly indigenous expression of a particular religious faith, then, is not its individual elements, but the way those elements are put together, and the degree to which the resulting synthesis is truly a hallmark of a given religious identity. |
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