Unholy Music

Churchgoers 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 this week's Christian Century, "to the village church or the great metropolitan cathedral . . . most of the music used in our worship services is little better than blasphemy."

A longtime church organist and head of the conservatory of music at the College 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: Tchaikovsky'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 grammar and syntax, not one in a thousand knows its esthetics." Good church music, the professor believes, besides being written by the best composers, must either: 1) be set in a musical style that does not sound at all like secular music (i.e., the unaccompanied 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 recognize irreligious 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 bestsellers; organists will cease to play as voluntaries pieces that would do very well as background for Hollywood erotica." Purist Gore's plea: "0 sing unto the Lord a new song!"

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