08-20-21

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHING
August 20, 2021
Guest Writer: Dr. Joel Plaag
“I wasn’t a great Sunday School student!” the clinician espoused, evoking laughter and nods from the other choral directors in the room. I sat transfixed – this was one of the great choral directors of the USA, and he just said that he hadn’t studied scripture.

“I learned it from singing the same works, over and over. I learned it by practicing the right vowels, the correct breaths, and later, when my teachers would remind us to quit singing the notes, I allowed myself to feel the words.”

Twenty years later, I remember that day, seeing this man at that World Symposium on Choral Music. I remember the way he sounded, the way the room looked, the smell of the carpet, sitting next to my college choral director, and, most importantly, how this speaker whom I had never laid eyes on seemed to pluck a phrase right out of my head.

I learned scripture through music.

As a freshman in high school, I got to delve into the colorful world of Johannes Brahms’ A German Requiem. Up until that point, it was one of the most difficult pieces I had ever learned – or attempted to. Of course, part of the “tough” was that it was in German, and the other part of the “tough” were the many, many notes, divided into long phrases that were a little too high for my recently changed baritone voice. There was still something “sort of” interesting about it. Until the first time I heard it with an orchestra.

I don’t even remember the recording that someone gave me on a cassette tape. That deep, dark introduction won me over. The string basses pulsed slowly, followed by a melody in the ‘cellos, and at long last, the soaring melody – in the violas.

Now, if you’re not used to an orchestra, the violas are not the high parts of the strings – that’s the violins. But in the opening movement, the violins are silent and still. The darker, larger violas pull the melody across their strings with that pulsing trudge from the basses underneath. Finally, the choir comes in:

Selig sind die da lied tragen – Blessed are they who mourn.

Simple words, taken from Matthew 5:5. Like a master chef, Brahms sprinkles in a variety of texts, all in German: Psalm 126, 1 Peter, Psalm 39, and many others, to create the desired effects. Even now, studying the piece for many years, I learn new things either about the composition or about the verses and realize just how masterful Brahms really was at knowing his biblical texts. Those verses, though, for me were not just evocations of sadness or depth, but reminders of choral camps, friends long since forgotten, great and not-so-great performances, apartments, you name it.

In intimate ways, these scriptures, brought to life through music, provide comfort by connection to happy times – and happy performances – in the past. Is that what Brahms intended? I have no idea, but I know this: when I first encounter a sacred choral work that I know, it’s like getting a visit from an old friend. Of course, I remember that verse in the Beatitudes in the Brahms Requiem! Of course, I remember the crowning point of the Requiem, which is Psalm 84 stuck right in the center: How lovely are thy dwellings, O Lord of Hosts.

Even now, as I write this, I think of other texts set to music. Ask me to recite Psalm 8, and I’m lost, but ask me to recite the text to Dan Forrest’s Adonai Adoneinu (O Lord My God), and I can spit it out with no problem as though I recited Psalm 8 every day, or Psalm 133, or the opening of Genesis (thank you Aaron Copland’s In the Beginning).

When I pray, often either excerpts of verses or liturgy make their way in, partially because their words are much more elegant than I could ever recite. Why not steal them? They mean something important, both for their beauty and for their personal connection.

Take for instance one of my favorite lines from liturgy: “…that we should in all times and in all places offer thanks and praise to you…” All places? All times? Even under the hood of a car or in the attic? Even with this phrase, I hear the chant and am transported to the awe and wonderment of preparing for communion.

My faith journey maybe should have started with regular scripture study, but it didn’t. It started with musical study. In that way, I can “heal the broken hearted, preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind.”

For those that were in church a few weeks back, yes, this comes straight from the choir’s anthem, The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me, by Edward Elgar, and is taken from Isaiah 61 and repeated in Luke 4:18. Thanks to a certain choir member for having that discussion with me, and to Mr. Elgar for writing such wonderful music to remember another bible text.

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