For over 50 years, pop musicians in all genres have explored the meaning and significance of Jesus in their music. The result is a rich collection of songs that consider important spiritual questions like faith, doubt, and prayer in unique and often provocative ways. Delvyn Case and I both have a deep interest in the ways faith is expressed in and through pop music in all its many guises. In a recent series for HeartEdge we attempted to tap our differing interests and knowledge by choosing four songs for each festival we discussed. In this post I’d like to share the 4 songs we chose for Easter.
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The connection between composition and performance is part of what music is. In English the word ‘music’ can mean both the musical score and the sound product, but as states the Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff in his Works and World of Arts book[i], “to be composed” and “to be performed” are complimentary predicaments of the ontology of music. However, even if a same piece can receive different performances, cases as du Pré connection with Elgar’s Concerto make us thinking whether could be a final performance – the consummation of the expressive potential of a piece of music.
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For over 50 years, pop musicians in all genres have explored the meaning and significance of Jesus in their music. The result is a rich collection of songs that consider important spiritual questions like faith, doubt, and prayer in unique and often provocative ways.
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In 1967 Bob Dylan was living in Woodstock, a town in the Catskill Mountains, having recently bought a property in Byrdcliffe. It was there that he recuperated after his motorcycle crash. As the crash led to the cancellation of his 1967 tour, he was joined there by his backing band, then known as the Hawks…
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It is impossible to listen to Ralph Vaughan William’s gorgeous and transcendent piece, The Lark Ascending, without imagining a lark climbing, diving, turning, soaring as the violin’s flurry of notes floats above the orchestra below, the lush harmony a forest canopy of green dotted with geographical landforms. Peaceful and picturesque as it is, however, we should not dismiss the piece, or the poem by George Meredith which inspired it, as merely Romantic sentimentality, arousing feelings of nostalgia in listeners.
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‘Epiphany’ is a hymnlike lockdown song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift which is from her album Folklore released in July 2020. ‘Epiphany’ begins with Swift imagining the wartime experiences of her paternal grandfather who fought at the Battle of Guadalcanal in the Second World War…
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In legend, Saint Sylvester is the saint who converted emperor Constantine, and he is celebrated on the last day of the year by western churches (eastern churches celebrate him on the 2nd of January). Typical celebrations for this feast feature a Watchnight service or midnight mass. While I get the idea that this feast is quite celebratory, again, there is little music to be found to celebrate this by art music composers. However, I found this excellent Irish early music singer named Caitriona O’Leary who has a carol whose subject matter is Saint Sylvester (she also has one on the feast day of St Stephen, too).
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“On the first day of Christmas………” Yes - I know the words of the song (and so do you, having heard it every year since 1781). But it seems to me that most of us in these United States really don’t know what the twelve days of Christmas are, or indeed when they’re celebrated. I know that I and many of my friends assumed that they were the twelve days leading up to the 25th of December instead of Christmas Day being the first day of the twelve. Since many of the best of the carols (in many languages) focus on Advent, I decided to investigate the music that might tie in to the various ‘labeled’ days of the twelve days of Christmas, especially pieces written by art music composers. What is the music from the time between Christmas day and Epiphany? Most often these are associated with various feasts, most often celebrated in churches with established calendars and saints. Here is a very unofficial sampling with some history and some commentary.
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This December, the Church began praying what are known as the “O Antiphons” each evening during Vespers, or Evening Prayer. Outside of Vespers, the O Antiphons are more familiar in their adapted form as the verses for the quintessential Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”
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As believers and nonbelievers alike join in rousing and relentless caroling, they profess at least a basic understanding of the Christmas message. However, the popular litany of carols tends to be one-sided, resounding with Christmas cheer before reckoning with holy fear. Although rejoicing is an appropriate response to Christ’s birth, it is worth remembering the truth of the Psalms: that stillness and reverence beget knowledge (Psalm 111:10, 46:10). For this reason, “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” offers a much-needed text and tune which compel hearers to “be still and know” the One of whom they sing. Other carols may sing of silence, but they rarely evoke silence in response.
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This Christmas season marks our second advent in a post-COVID world. For many Canadian musicians, the road back to normalcy has been much slower than our American counterparts; we persevered through a second lockdown and our concert halls currently are only just being filled with live patrons at heavy capacity limits instead of virtual ones.
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Advent is a strange time for the Christian, who often finds herself caught between two calendars: on the secular calendar, the moment the last bite of Thanksgiving goes down, the Christmas season begins, and will stretch until the magic of Christmas morning, after which it is fairly immediately extinguished. But on the Church calendar, we are in a season of waiting, of expectant longing, right up to the fall on darkness on Christmas Eve, at which point we begin a season og rejoicing too intense to be confined to one morning, and so which stretches through the following twelve days. The soundtrack of this now and not yet double season, controlled as it is by secular concerns, is mostly skewed towards premature celebration. But some of its songs strike the right chord of expectation for the Christian. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is one of those.
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There are many reasons to internalize Scripture. Writing a jazz album is typically not on that list. However, when continually reminding oneself of the truth of God’s promises, it is possible, and even hoped, that the Word comes out in all that we do. I composed “Fear Not” in a season of my life where outside pressures and stresses threatened to overwhelm me. In the same manner that the song progresses by repeating a memorable theme, I overcame these challenges by returning again and again to God’s promises found in the Bible.
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Caroline Shaw is quickly rising in her status as a composer, especially since becoming the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music at the age of 30. Narrow Sea (Nonesuch Records, 2021), helps listeners long for another world that is free from darkness, strife, and suffering; in the liner notes, Shaw dedicates this piece to “all humans seeking safe refuge.”
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On Christmas Day of 2020, Disney & Pixar premiered “Soul,” a music-focused, Black-led, theologically rich film. The story follows Joe Gardner (played by Jamie Foxx and pianist Jon Batiste), a jazz pianist and music educator in New York on the hunt for his big musical break. But when the opportunity of a lifetime comes, his excitement literally kills him, setting his soul on a conveyor belt for the afterlife, “The Great Beyond.” Our protagonist refuses to accept his fate because he has yet to get his big break, so the movie then follows his relentless efforts to get back to earth and play his dream. Over the course of his search for earthly success, Joe learns about the real meaning of life.
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By Julian Reid
We need to give more comprehensive support for the arts and not take them for granted. And since I am a Christian artist, I am calling on the Church to help lead the way in supporting the arts in the political sphere. Ultimately I am calling for a new Department of the Cabinet: the Department of the Arts. For Christians, a theological case – rooted in Scripture and on our corporate practices of Christian worship – can be made for such a department, one that can be a source of vibrant life to the arts beyond the limits of Christian institutions.
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A unique feature of music is the way one sustained sound can sit underneath other harmonies layered on top of it. This concept is prevalent across genres: American jazz standards, Celtic bagpipe music, Bach’s Preludes and Fugues. In musical terms, this steady sound that sits underneath others is called a “pedal tone” (or “pedal point,” but we’ll stick to pedal tone in this article.) It might be such a common musical device because it has such symbolic value for the world that we live in. This way of sounds interacting illustrates how humans interact with each other, the rest of God’s creation, and God too. The pedal tone is an apt metaphor to describe what is going on today – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – in a country contending with its foundational racism. The pedal tone can remind us of God’s intentions for this gift of a world we inhabit.
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As musician and composer, playing Messiah is always one of the highlights of the Christmas season; I look forward to it every year. It is was in the middle of performing a 2018 production of Messiah that it occurred to me that for a work with such depth and popularity, there had never been a sequel, modern, or complementary work written to Messiah.
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When Christ Jesus came to us the first time, he attracted humanity to the manger by appealing to our senses of hearing and vision. The shepherds travelled to the stable to worship because they had heard the sound of the angels, whereas the sages made the trek from distant lands because they had seen and studied the Star of David. To put it in context of music, the divine revelation of the Incarnation involved the two ways that musicians typically play music – spontaneity (shepherds) and premeditation (the sages). On this view, the Christmas story invites musicians and music-lovers to reflect on the theological messages resident in these two modes of music creation.
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On November 13, a new album of my music entitled Mysteria Fidei was released worldwide (though physical copies are already available on Innova Recordings’ website). The project is the fruit of a six-year collaboration between me and Far Song, a husband-and-wife art song duo from South Carolina. Featuring three sacred chamber works, Mysteria Fidei explores the notion of “searching amidst life’s many difficulties—searching for understanding, searching for rescue, searching for hope, searching for fulfillment, searching for joy, searching for God.” Along the way, it deconstructs hymns spanning nearly two millennia and recontextualizes them within our polarized, fear-stricken, and increasingly isolated 21st-century milieu.
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