The Recovering Choir Director

“The Christian Art of Music” by Frederick Stocken

It always amazes me how such disparate musical styles as baroque music, classical music and romantic music (in fact all music from Josquin to Bruckner) have far more that unite them than separated them. In this period of some five hundred years, in a period in which music retained faith in its musical laws, the supremacy of the so called musical triad, (otherwise known as the common chord) remain inviolate, the key system was expanded though never changed, and the hierarchy of chordal relationships within keys remained constant. In terms of basic musical structures, form and chordal procedure a Josquin Motet works in a surprisingly similar way as in a Bruckner Symphony. True—and astonishing.

But what happened when music entered the twentieth century? Those laws, based I stress again essentially on faith rather than proven science, were rejected. Is it mere coincidence that in the very year, 1907, that Schoenberg began ripping the intestines out of music in his first atonal compositions, Pope St. Pius X was issuing his encyclical Pascendi Gregis, against Modernism? To the casual historical observer the activities of an atonal composer and a Pope shoring up the theological purity of the Catholic Faith would seem entirely separate. But bearing in mind everything I have said so far about the connection between music and Catholicism, it is only too easy to see that there may be a link, a spiritual causal relationship between the decline in Catholic, and indeed all Christian, belief in the west, and the collapse of music. If I had given the first part of this talk a hundred years ago it would have been easy to dismiss my claims that the laws of music were based perhaps more on faith than on empiricism, but the fact is that these musical laws have been dismissed by most serious twentieth century composers—they are not apparently the common sense laws of music, just as the Ten Commandments have turned out not to be common sense morality either.