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MUSIC (RELIGIOUS)

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MUSIC (RELIGIOUS)

the accompanying words that w«* know the definite meaning.

Growing out of the fact that music is employed to heighten religious feeling, and also from the fact that music can awaken feeling and yet leave a wide range of choice as to the specific definition of the feeling, comes the fundamental necessity for making strong associations between the music used in religious services and all thoughts, sounds and sights accompanying it. This is important in order that the heightening and intensifying of feeling through these associations may be directed into religious channels. Aside from the fact that loud, vigorous and quick music excites us and that soft, gentle and slow music soothes us, we acquire in childhood associations with certain kinds of music that make these forms seem appropriate to the feelings they express, independently of any words that may be used with them. If the music employed in a religious service, besides awakening and stimulating feeling through beautiful sound-combinations, awakens at the same time echoes of previous deep religious feeling, the effect of the whole will be greatly heightened. The transfer of the musical feeling into religious emotion will thus be most effectively accomplished. On the other hand, if the music stimulates intense feeling but at the same time awakens associations with emotions quite at variance with those of the religious type, the transfer of the musical to the religious feeling will not take place.

While, in defining what the religious type of music is, no standard can be set up applicable to all, yet everyone can settle for himself a standard of judgment by the following test: Religious music should sound inappropriate on the street and the music of the street should sound inappropriate in a church, entirely apart from their pleasing or nonpleasing qualities. If a religious song expressive of love for the Savior can be sung in a concert-hall with no further change than that of writing the personal pronoun with a small letter instead of a capital, it is evident that such a song is not good church-music, either words or poetry; yet musically it may be beautiful. On the other hand, if a religious song heard even in the roar of a busy street awakens associations connected with worship, it evidently is good religious music.

We have seen the great importance of association to religious music. In order to secure the right association we must consider the second important condition, i. e., the limitation of religious music, so that the style employed shall not awaken secular associations. While genuine religious music thus sacrifices much of the sensuous effectiveness of secular music, this sacrifice is compensated for by the intensity of the religious feeling awakerjieck

Out of this condition arises the practical problem: Shall music be made attractive by the means employed by secular music; or shall the effectiveness of its religious use be brought about simply through the cumulative influences of past religious associations? Here a conflict arises between sensuous gratification and religious expression.

The history of religious worship is full of the conflict between these two opposing influences. At the Council of Trent the church authorities threatened to banish music from the church-service, because it was employing secular means. The same conflict is going on now. The recent edict of Pope Pius, commanding that the church-service shall employ only Gregorian tones or those forms of religious music dating back to Gregory ist, limited and archaic in their expression but for this reason having no secular connections is an attempt to use more effectively the associational power of music. At the same time it sacrifices its power of sensuous expression. In the Protestant churches the same conflict is going on. The choir-leader, the organist, the soloist are too often engaged only for the effectiveness of their work from a purely musical point of view, and the music employed is chosen for the emotion it stimulates, not for the quality of that emotion. Thus the influence upon composer, publisher, conductor, singer is to broaden the scope of religious music through the employment of all the means for stirring emotional feeling, that are known to secular art. Thus, while we have fine music which often thrills us, the transfer of this feeling into religious expression does not take place. Such music may attract to the service and serve as a sugar-coating to make a sermon endurable, but it is very doubtful whether such a use compensates for the sacrifice of the legitimate end that music should serve in worship. It introduces a subtle element of insincerity, which, for the very reason that its influence is to most of us unconscious, is all the more dangerous.

This disregard of the associational element is even more evident in the music of the Sunday-school, where, in order to make the service attractive to the children, the melodies of such songs as Robin Adair and Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes have been employed. Though they are used in connection with religious words and the child may have no other association, he is being educated in a disregard of the difference between religious and secular music, and thus there is destroyed the possibility of using the powerful influence of the particular association of religious music. The incongruity becomes greater when, later in life, he hears the same songs sung to their secular words. Thus the most potent factor in determining the nature of religious music, {. #., the congregation, is educated, frorrA