Music

I remember when I was growing up, I was listening to music. After listening to it for a minute, my mother asked why I was listening to such horrid music and commented that it was difficult to understand what they were saying. I replied that I wasn't concerned about the words. I liked the music, the beat. How naive of me, I know. I was unaware of how formed we are even by the things we think we aren't paying attention to. The words and the instrumentation of the music are meant to go together. This is especially true for the music used in the Church Service. 

Hymns, anthems, and service music are all meant to teach us deep and rich theology. Music is part of the worship that we offer to God. It is to be beautiful and the best we have, that which has been proven by time to be both Beautiful and True in its words and instrumentality. Music and singing are important because they both form us and it is our best we offer them back to God as our due worship of him. This has been the practice not only of the Church but even the Jewish practice, as many of the Psalms are set to music.  

A saying attributed to St. Augustine is, "He who sings once prays twice." While he may not have said these exact words, it is definitely in the spirit of other things he does say:  “he who sings praise, not only praises but also loves Him whom he is singing about/to/for.” Music does not take away from the words of the songs, but the music accompanies it and lifts the words in the form of a beautiful prayer. In this way, music is the handmaiden to the text.

When I first visited an Anglican Church, I was surprised at how much singing there was. The higher up the candle stick I went, the more people sang. And for many people, they assume the more chanting there is in a Mass the "higher church" you are. This is an unfortunate equivocation because music and chanting have been part of the Christian life from the beginning of the Church. Not only this, but it was the Reformers who had much to do with bringing congregational singing and chanting back. By the time of the European Reformations, there was a lack of participation by the laity often because the music and services were in Latin. The reformation principles of making the service in the vernacular of the people and doing away with private masses allowed the laity to participate more. 

In England, Cranmer himself had put together the Great Litany and published it with the musical notation by 1544. In the first Prayerbook of Edward VI in 1549, while it was not published with musical settings, the rubrics said that parts of the Communion Service should be sung. In 1549, the Act of Uniformity said that the Book of Common Prayer was the sole legal form of worship in England. Within a year of its publication, John Marbecke published the Book of Common Prayer Noted, so that the service would be sung. It should be noted, that Marbecke was not doing something new. He was pulling from what the Church has always done, even using the same melodies for many pieces and conforming them to the Reformation practice of making the service beautiful and accessible to the laity in the common language. 

Not only did the Reformers realize that this was an essential part of the worship of the Church, but it was also part of catechizing the laity. When Kelsey and I were still new to Anglicanism, we attended a parish that chanted the majority of the liturgy. We grew to love it. Not only was the music beautiful but it also stuck with us throughout the week. The Gloria, the Kyrie, the Agnus Dei, and even the proper prefaces would return to us throughout the week. The music allows for memorization--which helped the many illiterate people in England during the English Reformation.

Singing is wonderful and it adds so much to the beauty of the service. We cannot, however, separate the melodies from the text. The text and the musical settings go together, helping to form us to the truth proclaimed in the music and chanted words. Not only is this formative and catechetical, but it is the best we have and we offer it back to God. This has been the practice of the Church from the Early Church through the pre-reformation era and into post-reformation England. So, when we sing our prayers in Morning Prayer (Matins), Evening Prayer (Evensong), Nighttime prayer (Compline), or in the Mass, we can thank the history of the Christian Church, especially the Reformers. 

God's Peace,

Fr. Aaron