 |
|
    |
 |
||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If this final assumption of mine is true, then the music of modern Christianity has more than a problem; it has a major dilemma! The music available to us as modern Christians is either cloned from the art of a former Christian culture, or it's borrowed lock, stock, and barrel from the surrounding secular culture, which is driven by ideals and assumptions that can hardly be considered Christian. Judging from the present state of its music (and other arts as well), Christianity in the modern world is to a large degree impotent, sterile; it has lost its zeal and vitality, its inner conviction, its confidence, its consistency. Such a claim may be exaggerated, I'll grant—but a candid assessment of our present situation will confirm, I believe, that it is not entirely baseless. It is not the threat of a "take-over" by popular music that we as church musicians should fear—that is, in my opinion, a red herring. The importation of popular music into the church is not a cause but a symptom. The secular culture of the modern world is not fundamentally the problem. If by waving a wand we could suddenly banish it from our modern churches, what creative intensity could today's churches muster to produce something viable in its stead? No past art form alone can adequately serve the modern church. Just like the church in every age, today's church requires art that is indigenous—native to Christianity—and modern—of our time—and we don't have it: that's the dilemma! How do we surmount this impasse? We can't go back—that leads ultimately to creativity stifled, to stagnation, to epigonism. Neither can we uncritically adopt the alien secular musical styles that surround us—that would brand us as sterile, exhausted, without prophetic power. How do we surmount this impasse? If I knew the answer to that, I'd be a prophet—and I'm not a prophet. I don't know. But I suspect that some part of the eventual answer is to begin again at a grass roots level to identify and empower the artists in our midst; to encourage a vital artistic expression within the churches we serve, an expression that is driven by a community's faith, and that intensifies that faith; to build a broad-based, creatively aware constituency, people who intuit what's at stake here. And that brings us full circle to the ideas I put forth earlier in this address; those are:
ENDNOTES 1. From Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), 313-14. 2. L. Kent Wolgamott, "What is Art," Lincoln Journal Star (August 3, 2002): K 2. Art painted by elephants is now bringing up to $500 a painting—check it out on the web: www.elephantart.com/catalog/ 3. Quoted after Haar, "The Fantasie et recerchari of Giuliano Tiburtino," Musical Quarterly 59 (1973): 223-38 4. Johann Mattheson, Grosse General-Bass-Schule (Hamburg, 1731), 34-35, as translated and condensed by George B. Stauffer, "J.S. Bach as Organ Pedagogue," in The Organist as Scholar, ed. Kerala J. Snyder (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1994), 37-38. 5. See Quentin Faulkner, "Die Registrierungen der Orgelwerke J.S. Bachs," Bach-Jahrbuch (1995): 29-30. 6. Music & Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint, 2nd ed. (Peabody, Mass.: Henderson, 1998), 26. Quentin Faulkner is Larson Professor of Organ and Music Theory/History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where in addition to teaching organ he has developed a series of courses in church music. He is the author of Wiser than Despair, a book on the history of ideas in church music (1996). During the winter semester 1998-9 he was Fulbright Guest Professor at the Evangelische Hochschule für Kirchenmusik, Halle/Saale, Germany. He and his wife, Mary Murrell Faulkner, serve together as musicians for St. Mark's-on-the-Campus Episcopal Church in Lincoln. |
||||||
 |
||||||
|
Academics | Admissions | Alumni | Works | Listen | Look | Contact | Index | Home | Yale University
|