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Deus Ex Musica is an ecumenical project that promotes the used of a scared music as a resource for learning, spiritual growth, and discipleship.
Filtering by Category: Faith and Music
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…
Read MoreIn 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).
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreAs 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.
Read MoreWhen 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.
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreToday, I’m going to use my setting of O Magnum Mysterium as a springboard to make some observations about the issues I consider important in my work as a composer of sacred music and to offer some commentary on my own approach and techniques in setting a sacred text, using illustrations from this piece.
Read MoreWhen I graduated from Seminary, one of the first things that I strove to do was to acquire books. I wanted to have the insight and wisdom of great theologians, thinkers, and scholars to guide me around matters theological, ethical, and spiritual. This was, and still is especially the case with commentaries on the scripture. As a pastor, I am expected, on a weekly basis, to lead a community to wrestle with, consider, and delve into a Biblical text, and this is no small task. In one Bible verse are a multitude of meanings, layers of context and sub-context, social influences, rhetorical word plays, and traditions of hearing and receiving the text. With one Bible verse are centuries of tradition engaging with the text, centuries of scholarship that has considered the social, the historical, the literary, and the spiritual nuances that are overtly seen or are to be found more subtly within the text…
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