Unholy Church Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 421, 18 July 1947, Page 16

Unholy Church Music

HURCHGOERS would have good reason to be startled and offended if ministers took to reading erotic poetry from the pulpit. Just as jarring to the sensitive, trained ear of Professor Richard T. Gore is much of the music now played and sung in Protestant churches. "Go where you will," he advises in Christian Century, "to the vil- | lage church or the great metropolitan cathedral . .. . most of the music used /in our worship services is little better than blasphemy." A long-time church organist and head of the conservatory of music at the Col- | lege of Wooster (Ohio), Professor Gore | divides the church music he scorns into | two broad classes. One kind is "soft purrs from the organ, a gentle humming from the choir, hymns sung slowly and glueily /and.... a maudlin ditty played sotto | voce on out-of-tune chimes," the whole | being calculated to "lull the listener into | a dream state." The other kind is erotic _music calculated to excite the listener into a state of unholiness. Bad music, thinks the professor, has infiltrated the Protestant service from start to finish: "The organists play pieces either transcribed literally from secular sources or written in imitation of them. . .. The congregational hymns in widest use recall the rhythms of the beer garden and the dance pavilion. . . Most of the choir anthems and canticles are the grandchildren of French opera, piano pieces and military marches."

Examples of the lulling school: Tchaikovski’s None But the Lonely Heart, Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, and "scores of feeble organ pieces called Dreams, Harmonies du Soir, Berceuse, or Forest Vespers." As for, sexiness, Gounod is perhaps the worst offender: "Voluptuousness .. . . was in Gounod’s nature; he could not escape it. In opera it is fine; in the church it has no place. Listen to The Redemption .... or to the Seven Last Words of Gounod’s spiritual disciple, Dubois! The suave melodies are the same, the suggestive rhythms are the same, the osculatory orchestration is the same. Only the words are different. You can’t make sacred music out of operatic by using sacred words. .. ." Why is such music tolerated in churches? Professor Gore thinks that it is only because "music is a foreign language; one person in a hundred knows its grammer and syntax, not one in a thousand knows its aesthetics." Good church music, the professor believes, besides being written by the best com‘posers, must either: (1) be set in musical style that does not sound at. all like secular music (i.e., the unaccom-, panied Gregorian chants-still sung in many a Catholic and Anglican church); or (2) have its secular elements "assimilated and purged of their worldly connotations" (i.e., the cantatas, Passions, and organ works of Bach). As soon as churchgoing ears become educated enough to recognise irreligious . (continued on next page)

De (continued from previous page) music when they hear it, "pieces like the popular setting of The Lord’s Prayer, ‘a ballad as voluptuous as anything in Faust, will cease’ to be best-sellers; organists will cease to play as voluntaries pieces that would do very well -as background for Hollywood erotica." Professor Gore’s plea: "O sing unto the Lord a new, song!"