A New Song from the Old World

Imagine a book on Renaissance art without any pictures. And I don’t mean without illustrations, I mean without any pictures. No frescos by Michelangelo, Madonnas by Raphael, springtime scenes by Botticelli, or even woodcuts by Dürer. We might have a few fragments of a bit of a panel by Ghirlandaio and a corner from a van Eyck altarpiece, but apart from that, nothing. But we would have writings, lots of them, by Ficino, Vasari, Alberti, Palladio, Luther, Calvin, thoughts on proportion, rhetoric, history, theology, and aesthetics. And from this literature alone we would have to understand what it was like to see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, kneel before the Isenheim Altarpiece, or think about Holbein’s portraits in Henry VIII’s court.

An impossible task. Yet that is exactly the job required of us when we try to understand the music of classical antiquity. While we have a rich and deeply varied literature about music, as well as extensive iconographical evidence of music making in Greece and Rome, our sources for music that we can transcribe with the slightest degree of confidence are exceedingly slim. There are bits of melodies and texts on papyrus (most found in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus) and a few damaged stone inscriptions from Delphi and the region of Ephesus; at most thirty examples, none complete and many as brief as a few notes. All of these are in Greek. We have nothing in Latin. And even with those few Greek sources, the all-important matters of tempo, dynamic, subtleties of tuning, timbre, and social occasion are usually impenetrably veiled when we try to understand them as pieces of music within the context of a culture stretching through seven hundred years and extending from Tunisia to Turkey. Apart from an outline of intervals and the Greek words (and an approximation of the rhythm based upon the text), when we perform them, we’re pretty much making the music up.

With the sources both so noisy and silent¯noisy in the sense that almost everybody who wrote in antiquity seems to have written something about music, and silent because we really have no idea what it was they were listening to (and listening to because performing music was usually beneath the dignity of the kinds of fellows who wrote about it)¯it’s understandable that the topic creates so much interest and generates so many different readings. How many views might modern scholars concoct of Michelangelo’s work if we possessed only Vasari’s descriptions and the pay ledgers of the Vatican? With the fecundity of the scholarly mind being what it is (as well as the breadth of the professorial ego), probably as many views as there are scholars.

Perhaps sensibly, Richard Taruskin, in his more than four-thousand-page Oxford History of Western Music , chooses to deal with this problem by skirting it. His story begins not with Greece but with the ninth-century Carolingian manuscripts that form the documentary beginning of our living musical culture.

The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship is bolder. In the tenth volume in its Liturgical Studies series, A New Song for an Old World, Musical Thought in the Early Church , Calvin Stapert discusses the relationship between the emerging church and the musical culture of the late-antique Mediterranean world. Believing that Christian ideas about music have been "truncated and twisted" by naturalistic thought since the Enlightenment, Stapert seeks to persuade contemporary evangelicals to embrace the patristic heritage of liturgical music based up the Psalms. This volume is Stapert’s brief for a reformation of evangelical worship.

Certainly Stapert’s volume is timely. It’s hardly news to Christians living in China and Pakistan that they live in a culture largely opposed to their fundamental beliefs, but for many Western Christians it’s a relatively new sensation. While the aggressive secularism and growing atheism of our culture certainly was not a characteristic of Roman antiquity, our contemporary emphasis upon "diversity," distaste for dogmatic pronouncements, and hedonism was. Romans sometimes condemned Christians as "haters of mankind." As that charge is again made today, it might benefit Western Christians to see how the Fathers urged believers to order their lives in the face of such a broad societal malediction. With music apparently an important part of the ancient world, what role did the ancient church believe music should play in private piety and public worship?

In chapters dealing with song in the New Testament, the relationship between the church and pagan society, and writings referencing music by Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augustine, Stapert surveys the sources. Although he makes it clear that he is not an expert in this material, Stapert is skillful in assembling and referencing the work of other writers (and he is generous in his quotations of both primary and secondary sources). His chapter on Augustine is particularly well done and his observation that music for Augustine was a form of rhetoric (and a thus a subcategory of the trivium instead of its own branch in the quadrivium) is insightful and illuminative.

Stapert concludes that "the early Christians can inspire and encourage us by their courageous and unwavering posture against the corrupt and very popular culture of their day. They can teach us that we need to draw a line, and they can encourage us to stand bravely behind that line." The line for Stapert means that the "whole Psalter with its full-orbed expression" should be the central element of Christian music, that the essential stance of the church should be countercultural, and that the Neoplatonic idea (by way of Boethius) of a musica mundana (or divine music of the spheres) should be the foundation of Christian aesthetics.

Lurking in the shadows of Stapert’s book is the contemporary evangelical praise service, with its "seeker friendly" popular aesthetic, scriptural amnesia, and manipulative stagecraft. His text is a useful indictment of the genus, at least from the viewpoint of the Church Fathers. And while I do not share his disdain of the Enlightenment (after all, I’m typing these words at the end of a Tennessee summer in an air conditioned studio with good plumbing), I applaud Stapert’s destination and share his enthusiasm for the liturgical use of the Psalter. But I must quibble about how he gets there. There are more than a few ruts and washouts on his road. Some are minor (such as his assertion that the Church had a fixed canon of Scripture by the year 200), but most stem from Stapert’s boldness where Taruskin is so circumspect.

The problems start right from the beginning. The book’s title not withstanding, we have no "musical thought" from the early Church. Musical thought is music . What we have from the early Church are words , thoughts about music and texts possibly to be sung. Of music we have nothing, unless you count the seven-line, fragmentary late-third-century trinitarian hymn from Oxyrhynchus, and that was unknown until the early twentieth century.

Stapert expansively claims that "the New Testament begins and ends with outbursts of song," citing the Magnificat, Benedictus, Gloria, and Nunc Dimittis with which Luke cradles his infancy narratives and the adoration of the four living creatures and the elders before the Lamb in Revelation 5. But Stapert is playing loose with the text. At least in Luke, the Greek verbs are clear. Mary, Zechariah, Simeon, and the angels say the text. Luke does not specifically write that they sing it. A reading of the text does not absolutely preclude the possibility that these were words that were vocalized while being sung, but that’s an expansion upon the text, not the text itself.

These may seem to be needlessly pedantic points, but they are not. The apostolic tradition is a tradition of words, not music. It’s the words that are important and not their method of delivery. In the few times where singing is specifically mentioned in the New Testament, I think it’s reasonable to think that if the music were important, some sort of musical instruction would have been preserved in the texts. This is particularly important when we consider the Greek "Doctrine of Ethos," which held that certain musical devices influenced character. In regards to that widespread belief, if it had carried any weight in the circles in which the New Testament documents were formed it would be reasonable to see it reflected in those documents ("and when they had sung a hymn in the Dorian mode, they went out to the Mount of Olives" or something like that). There isn’t even a hint of that kind of notion in the New Testament.

There isn’t even a hint because music, the business of high and low notes, half steps and whole steps (and how big the half steps are, because the size changes), loud and soft,¯is a mater of adiaphora , or indifference. That doesn’t mean that music is unimportant, it just means that it’s not particularly privileged and the specifics of what is or isn’t appropriate decided on an ad hoc basis.

Our difficulty in really grasping patristic thought on music is that it’s impossible to contextualize. There’s precious little "hic" to surround the "hoc." Our situation is not unlike that of historians of religion before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi documents. Before the unearthing of that material, Gnosticism could only be studied from the fragmentary polemic of its enemies; afterward a whole new branch of inquiry is born.

But scholars dealing with the Fathers and the Gnostics are now at least dealing with writers arguing with other writers; those of us interested in music of the period are stuck with a few writers writing about a great deal of music that we cannot hear and have to assume that they have understood. That’s not a very solid ground for confident scholarship.

Sometimes, when we don’t have solid ground for scholarship, we skate. And Stapert occasionally skates. When describing Ambrosian hymns, Stapert writes that it’s their "simple structure that contributes to making them easy to sing and memorize." The truth is that we don’t have a ghost of an idea what kind of tune they were sung to. We have some texts but no tunes. And just because a text is simple doesn’t mean that the tune it is sung to will be also (think of "The Star Spangled Banner").

So we’re back to my proposed unillustrated book on Renaissance painting. It would be tempting for the author to take Vasari’s descriptions of the Vatican frescos and flesh out some renderings of Raphael and Michelangelo. And that kind of temptation faces every musicologist who deals with the difficult period Stapert covers here (and indeed it is probably the most scholarly demanding period in the profession). Taruskin’s refusal to deal with the period is understandable but perhaps a bit cowardly. Stapert’s work is more courageous, if risky. It he stumbles, it’s at least on a valorous quest.

I have one final complaint. The Calvin editors of the series have decided to adopt the "CE" or "Common Era" style of dating. That a Christian publisher, publishing a book by a Christian writer for a Christian readership should choose to abandon the Christian calendar is odd in the extreme. It also unfortunately makes Stapert’s call for a countercultural stance a bit muted. So much for cultural accommodation.

Michael Linton is head of the Division of Music Theory and Composition at Middle Tennessee State University.