Amazing Grace 3: The Architecture of Sound 

Last week, we saw how music can either humble the soul or inflate it—how the same sound that reveals grace can just as easily counterfeit it. 

Across history, people have tried to protect themselves from that danger by shaping the music itself: deciding what should be sung, and how it should be sung. The result was what we might call a moral architecture of sound—ways of organizing tone and rhythm so that emotion, devotion, and understanding could reinforce one another rather than drift apart. 

Today we’re going to explore how those structures developed: from monophonic plainchant—the psalms sung on a single melodic line—to the complex polyphony of Renaissance and Baroque worship.

These musical forms were not only artistic choices; they were religious, or maybe even spiritual, strategies. They were ways of balancing feeling and form, heart and mind, immediacy and discipline.

We are also turning from the physiology of emotion to the cultural forms that give emotion shape. Those forms, especially in worship, tend to divide into two broad impulses. Following these impulses, every tradition of sacred sound has taken one of two approaches: one that seeks to provide immediate emotional connection, and one that seeks to elevate the spirit through ordered beauty.

Both arise from the same desire to give shape to awe, yet they represent opposite solutions to the problem of feeling. I will call them the populist and the classicist solutions.

The populist solution aims to shorten the distance between performer and participant, by speaking directly to the heart through popular melody and rhythm, and turns worship into shared song rather than a performance led from a pulpit. It emphasizes accessibility and immediacy—the sense that anyone can join. This is really part of the reformation revolution that Luther launched.

The older classicist solution reaches upward instead. It builds cathedrals of sound—lofty and spacious, but carefully ordered—in which the form is meant to lift the spirit beyond the individual and into a larger sense of the holy. It emphasizes discipline, contemplation, and proportion.

Both approaches have their attractions, both have hazards, and both tell us something about how we navigate the sacred. Let’s begin with the populist solution —the instinct to make worship immediate, heartfelt, and accessible. 

This approach shortens the distance between performer and participant. It tries to draw the whole congregation into the musical life of the service. It appears whenever the people’s voice becomes the heart of worship: Martin Luther’s chorales, the old revival hymns, the gospel chorus, the contemporary praise anthem. All share the same lineage. Their virtue lies in warmth and inclusion. Anyone can sing them—and by singing, belong.

You could hear this in Luther’s churches, where hymns were no longer reserved for trained choirs or priestly singers but were given back to the people. Last week we heard part of Luther’s A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. It is unmistakably populist—not in the political sense, but in the sense that it sings to and is sung by the whole congregation, not just the piety. It invites participation. It democratizes devotion.

But there is a risk, which is that when emotional expression becomes the expression of faith, any absence of feeling can be mistaken for absence of belief. So there is pressure to feel something— anything, and that can lead to trite sentimentality.

In the classicist approach, with its instinct to build worship upward, toward transcendence, we end up with cathedrals of sound: lofty, ordered, restrained, contemplative music, designed to teach that reverence is found not in immediacy but in spaciousness, proportion, and discipline.

We first encountered this in talk 1 in this series, when we heard Gregorian chant and Orthodox chant, but today we meet it again in the gorgeous polyphony of the Renaissance—music in which multiple independent lines weave together into a single living fabric.

Here is the Italian composer Palestrina:

[Palestrina—Alma Redemptoris Mater—Loving Mother of the Redeemer]  

And here is his English contemporary William Byrd. Notice how each voice has its own integrity yet yields to the whole.

[Byrd—Ave Verum Corpus—Hail, true Body] 

This is worship as architecture. It creates distance, and with distance, perspective. It cultivates quiet discipline—reverence that whispers rather than shouts.

Its danger, of course, is the opposite of the populist one. Where populism risks shallowness and trite sentimentality, classicist worship risks pride. Its very perfection can tempt us into thinking that beauty itself is holiness—that human craft is divine presence.

And so we have these two musical impulses: one warm and immediate and populist, the other cool and transcendent and elitist. Both arise from the same longing—to give structure to awe, or to wrap awe up in a package.

The classical and populist approaches tend to oscillate with time and culture. When society tires of pomp and ceremony, it invents a new simplicity. When it wearies of simplicity, it returns to grandeur. We swing between the hunger for honest feeling and the hunger for beautiful form. We see truth in both—in feeling, and in form.

But the real difference is probably not musical at all—it is psychological. The populist mind trusts the heart. It believes that if a feeling is sincere, then it must also be true. It equates authenticity (truth) with emotion (feeling).

The classicist mind trusts discipline. It believes that feeling becomes truthful only after it is refined —lifted out of sentimentality and clarified and refined through structure. This is the echo of the Buddhist Heart Sutra we encountered in talk 1, where form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

The populist hears “emptiness is form”—emotion expressed becomes truth.

The classicist hears “form is emptiness”—discipline purifies truth of ego.

Each approach risks something. Populism risks shallowness—feeling mistaken for depth. Classicism risks sterility—beauty mistaken for holiness. The mature listener, like the mature community, needs both: It needs immediacy and distance, and it needs empathy and proportion—heart and soul.

I think that grace, in its broadest sense, is the state in which feeling and form coincide.
Perhaps music at its best synthesizes the two approaches to achieve that equilibrium, where emotion is disciplined into clarity, and structure is animated by compassion.

Between the camp-meeting hymn and the cloistered chant lies a narrow path where beauty neither flatters nor forbids emotion but illuminates it. That path is hard to find because it requires vigilance against two equal deceptions.

The first deception is the populist one: the belief that sincerity alone redeems art. Just because a feeling is honest does not make the form, the expression, good. A heartfelt but clumsy song can be manipulative, vacuous, trite, and self-indulgent. Feeling real things does not guarantee expressing them well.

The second deception is the classicist one: the belief that artistry alone redeems the soul. Technical mastery or perfect beauty can be dazzling and yet morally empty. A flawed human being can write a flawless requiem. Beauty, by itself, does not sanctify.

Both deceptions arise from confusing means and ends. Feeling and form—emotion and technique—can be used as tools. But neither, by itself, guarantees truth. Art has integrity only when the artist’s expression of emotion through it is disciplined by his or her craft, and that craft must be animated by sincerity. It is the marriage of heart and form that makes music truthful.

The same question haunts every art and every ethics: Where does mastery end and vanity begin?

The Daoist answer (really, it’s a non-answer) is wu wei—not “non-action,” but “effortless accord.” It is the moment when action ceases to resist the current of things. The archer draws the bow without strain; the calligrapher’s brush moves as if guided by wind.

In music, wu wei reveals whether we are flowing with the Way or forcing our own will upon it. A single flute line, sustained without vibrato, can feel like wu wei: it breathes rather than insists. And note the silences.

[Solo Flute—Epigramas] 

Similar notes, played with vibrato and aggressive precision, can feel like domination.

[Solo Flute – Lyrinx] 

The difference is not pitch or rhythm but intention—an inner posture toward the sound. One opens space; the other fills it.

This distinction crosses cultures. A Bach fugue and a Zen shakuhachi flute solo can both embody wu wei when the performer vanishes into the music and the piece seems to play itself. But the same works collapse into performance when the performer steps forward to claim credit.

That is why I love Kathleen Ferrier’s recording of “What is life to me without thee?” so deeply—the one we heard last week. Ferrier recorded it knowing she was dying. In her final performance, in 1953, her cancer had spread to her bones. Her left femur partially disintegrated as she stood on stage. Other members of the cast moved quietly to support her; she finished the performance without letting the audience know there was anything wrong.

That is wu wei. That is grace without self: the music flowing through a life that had ceased to resist; and indeed, almost ceased to exist.

And so we arrive at the oldest criterion of authenticity: what remains afterward? When the final note fades—as with the church bells on a Sunday morning or the Islamic call to prayer—what kind of silence does it leave behind?

Is the silence spacious, generous, and calm? Or is it restless—hungry for the sensation to return?

If the silence feels clear and peaceful, then perhaps we can say that beauty has enlarged the spirit without inflating it. But if it leaves us craving more, eager to repeat the moment, then beauty may have crossed the line from grace to narcotic. It has not lifted the soul; it has swollen it.

Isn’t this the distinction between grace and idolatry? Or, to put it in psychological terms, between integration and dependency? Grace expands us toward others; idolatry curves us inward toward ourselves.

Either way, the test is behavioral: true elevation makes one more compassionate as the Abrahamic faiths tend say or more benevolent as the oriental faiths tend to say (Wouldn’t it be interesting to be offered a choice of compassion or benevolence? Which would you choose?) But I digress. False elevation makes you more certain that the mood you are in is right and true.

Music cannot answer for whichever way we choose to take it, but, like Scripture, it can lead us to the right questions—if we listen deeply.

I think this is what Søren Kierkegaard (our gloomy Dane, remember?) meant by “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” He did not mean innocence or moral perfection. He meant undivided intention—a will that does not secretly want something else.

To listen with such purity is to let sound move through us without grasping it or hoarding it or turning it into righteous self-congratulation. Music then ceases to be an argument; it becomes an atmosphere. What matters is not the size or weight of the experience but the direction it tilts the heart.

And for all its power to imitate transcendence, music is also our best teacher of humility.

Every phrase depends on what comes before and after. Every harmony dissolves into silence. And in that vanishing act lies its truth: sound teaches impermanence by example.

A note that refuses to end is not music; it is noise. Musically speaking, a note has meaning only because it ends—because it lives within a field of contrast: tension and release, sound and silence, turbulence and calm. If a note lasted forever, it would lose structure, proportion, and purpose. It would dissolve into undifferentiated insistence.

Ending is not failure; it is what allows meaning to exist.

But so far, we have treated music mostly as something that acts on us individually. What does it do among us? Because music is never fully solitary, even when heard alone.

We are always hearing someone else’s breath, someone else’s imagination, someone else’s courage encoded in sound. It puts us in relationship, even across centuries.

And when music is shared in real time—in worship, in ritual, in community—that relationship becomes overt. A congregation singing a hymn, a choir shaping a polyphonic mass, a circle of Sufi dervishes chanting the divine name—each enacts the same principle of coordination through attention.

We are united not by belief or language but by the act of attending together to the same rhythm, breath, and sound.

In such moments, the unison is not only sonic; it is ethical. Each voice yields a little autonomy for the sake of sustaining the larger whole. For a moment—sometimes only a breath—self-consciousness gives way to vibration. Participation becomes less an act of obedience and more a kind of wu wei: effortless alignment with the collective pulse.

And yet, communal music has always been politically and spiritually ambiguous. The same physiological synchrony that binds an angelic choir can also bind a murderous mob.

Wagner’s music created fraternity at Bayreuth in the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries, and later became a tool of domination in Nazi Germany. We’ll talk more about this next week; for now, let it suffice to note that  the mechanism was the same as we’ve just discussed: sound generated unity, unity then sought an object for itself, and the object then became ideology. The moral valence lay not in Wagner’s music but in what his music amplified.

Still, the musical ensemble remains one of our best metaphors for moral life. In any ensemble—choir, band, quartet—each part matters; none suffices alone. The discipline of listening, of waiting one’s turn, of tuning one’s instrument to those of others,… all of this rehearses the same habits that sustain ethical community: attentiveness, restraint, cooperation, responsiveness, and balance between ourselves and others. These are not moral messages; they are moral behavior, moral practices.

Sermons and laws may tell us how to live, but music lets us experience living that way, let’s us behave that way. Good music doesn’t preach virtue; it practices it. Harmony is cooperation made audible; dissonance is conflict made audible; resolution is reconciliation made audible.

And the silence that follows good music often carries this moral residue. It is a brief reminder—not that life is simple, but that coherence is possible. It might even be likened to the grace that passed through Kathleen Ferrier’s broken body, and still reaches and resonates with us seventy years later.

Music, then, is neither an argument for God nor for human artifice. It is a spiritually and morally significant diagnostic device. It reveals how easily the self can be inflated by sound, but also how delicately it can be tuned toward attention, restraint, reverence, and mutual responsiveness. These are the habits that sustain a decent society.

When the final cadence fades and the air settles, what remains is not doctrine but the possibility of resonating with one another again. The peril and the power of music are the same: it can deflate the ego and quiet the soul, or it can inflate the ego and rouse the self. The listener decides which path the music will take.

Enough from me for now. What do you think of the difference between popular and classical Christian worship music? What difference does it make anyway? Did the SDA purposefully choose the populist approach? Was it the right approach? Is there a right approach?

C-J: I think that to your question—and I’ve never been in an Adventist church—whatever strata or intention humanity has, you work with what you have. They didn’t have these instruments, these cathedrals, or large populations in confined spaces to do what you’ve described so beautifully. I think that’s true in our personal life, in our prayer life, and in the professions: we choose a code of expression that reflects who we are. With music, it’s encapsulated in a moment, whereas our life is a continuum.

Donald: The challenge—one of them, at least—is that when I think of the visual arts, music seems to be something more, something we feel entitled to speak about whether we’re musicians or not. People feel they can evaluate what is good or bad without any background in music, which is a little arrogant. Everybody has an opinion. Whether that opinion matters is a different question.

What you presented this morning is almost like a feather bed to everyone. You go in, it feels good, it makes sense, it wraps around you. But if someone else introduced the same topic, they might express ideas about music that would make us uncomfortable—and could be correct. That’s where the challenge lies: “No, you’re wrong if you don’t see it my way.” That is arrogant.

You can read a book or listen to a lecture and become better informed, but that doesn’t make my perspective any more right than the person next to me—especially if we’re singing in the same choir or playing in the same symphony. Carolyn knows all too well that Les spent many years working with music he’d share with me or with her, and we would look at each other and say, “What was that about?” I’m not sure we would even have called it music. We might have called it sound. Does that mean I don’t respect it enough to call it music?

When I leave for church today, we’ll hear hymns. Hymns are in between categories. Your words this morning were loftier than we usually apply to hymns, because hymns have played such a significant role in church music. Now we don’t call them hymns—we call them worship or praise music. Some praise music is in the current hymnal.

And I know from living in this community how many years it took to include or exclude what is in our Seventh-day Adventist hymnal. Musicians got together and decided: this is in, this is out. The hymnal was produced maybe ten or twenty years ago; the one before that had been around a long time. If something was left out, does that mean it was not meaningful or appropriate, or simply that there wasn’t space?

I appreciate so much what you said, and I’m soothed by how you said it. But I also know that most of us here—except for Rein—are going to feel good about it. Yet if you move down to our grandkids, it would be interesting to have them listen and respond.

David: I should say that one reason I was excited to give this talk, when Don asked me, is that I’ve long been bothered by the notion that music is a device to inflate the soul. I heard that decades ago, and it almost ruined music for me. For a long time, I couldn’t listen to Beethoven without thinking, “Oh, this is just playing with my mind,” and I stopped enjoying it.

So in these talks I’m really trying to talk myself into something. I’m trying to find an answer for myself. I hope I don’t come across as giving you an answer. I hope I’m not.

C-J: For me, it’s always a process, whatever the medium. However you receive it on a given day—that’s your moment in time as a receptor, a vessel, to do with it as you may. There’s a lot of music I’ve heard where I think, “That’s not music, it’s noise,” and other pieces I want to play again, pause, digest, and then play again. I don’t like anything put in a box, because as my spirit grows and changes—and as you said, you didn’t like that statement because of what it did to your head—that’s part of maturing. You move forward, you question. We’re supposed to question.

There’s no right or wrong when we stand before God with expectation, whether it’s through a hymn, a book, or watching children play. We should always have an expectation that God is being revealed in some form or fashion. And sometimes it may be in the noise around us, not necessarily in what we take inside.

Don: I’m struck by a couple of things. First, I don’t know if this is an oversimplification, but in many so-called primitive cultures, rhythm seems more important than the use of notes. In singing, there’s often more emphasis on the rhythm and the drum than on the quality of the notes. I don’t know if that’s truly accurate, but it’s an observation worth discussing. Is rhythm a part of music, or can rhythm be music itself? Rhythm seems to be one of the points of contention Donald keeps bringing up, so I’m wondering about its role in various cultures.

The other idea is that you put the classicist approach and the populist approach almost in opposition, as if we must choose one or the other. Donald has accused me of being the king of holding diverging opinions at the same time—“Why not both?” or “Why not neither?” But is it really a binary choice? Maybe that assumption is where we’ve gone off the rails. Perhaps the real question is how we include both.

C-J: I think you’re accurate about rhythm. Indigenous people live so close to the Earth that the beat comes from the heart, indicating life. Even the passage from day to night has a rhythm—a season, a time, an intuition about the rhythm. Melody comes in when we read the unspoken, like in a story: everything doesn’t have to be spelled out. Through our experiences, we interpret what we hear or are forced to consider another perspective, as in science. But the rhythm is critical because it directs; melody overlays and embellishes the potential already present.

Sharon: Living in a rhythm-based society, as I do, I think rhythm may run even deeper than culture. Rhythm might be genetic—and maybe culture, over time, becomes genetic. I see my little ones: they’re born with rhythm. Yes, the culture has rhythm too, but for them there is no music without rhythm.

What’s interesting is the impact of missionaries who brought Anglo music—predominantly what we sing in church. The indigenous songs lost all of their rhythm. We have de-rhythmized our spiritual expression of music in our context. In the Malawian Adventist milieu, I don’t see them allowing or tolerating their genetic leaning toward rhythm. Occasionally someone will sway, and the whole church looks at them as if to say, “What’s wrong with you? You’re not so holy anymore—at least not like the American missionary taught us.”

So it’s complex, and it’s deeply subjective. Music is central to our spiritual walk with God. It includes culture. It includes context. But I think it also touches something deeper—something in our souls that longs for certain elements in music. I don’t know how to explain it, but I see something deeper than culture that leads each of us to the music that speaks most powerfully to us as individuals.

C-J: We all hear music and sound in utero, but we are formed and shaped by culture and by the need for belonging. To strip someone of their ability to use the language of music—saying, “You can listen to this, but we’d prefer you not listen to that because it produces certain thoughts or behaviors”—that concerns me. Thinking precedes behavior, or behavior responds to what we’re exposed to.

You’ve been all over the world, and I don’t believe for a moment that it’s only what we practice; it’s what we’re taught and what we have access to that forms us. And I hear you, between the lines, saying you enjoy that rhythm, but culturally it may not be in your purview or job description to encourage it. I love differences. I love being able to express my rhythm with others, and it often looks very much like theirs. People have commented to me, “Connie, you seem so comfortable in this space.” And I say, “I am, because I allowed myself to be.”

David: You have to wonder whether, in African churches, if they played the kind of music I’m about to play, it wouldn’t fill the churches faster than they’re filling now. I’ll just play a little taste:

[Ladysmith Black Mambazo – King of Kings]

That’s extraordinary music. Surely churches would fill more quickly in Africa—or anywhere else!—if hymns like that were sung.

Sharon: In our context everything is a cappella, and we have very few keyboards. They thrive on harmonies. I actually think I might hear something like that on a Sabbath morning.

Carolyn: This is such a huge subject. I taught children music—not in a church program, but in a Christian environment, since most of the families were Christian. My goal was for them to appreciate everything. It’s hard for a fourth grader to say, “Yes, I love Mozart,” or even to know what they’re hearing. But I loved giving them simple rhythms to try, letting them play a few jazz chords, letting them hear different styles. You can do that with Christian songs too.

I’ve also done some church activities, like Vespers programs. I once tried to bring all the Adventist churches together for a joint evening program. One night we had a very young African group—Islanders, Africans, and others. I worked with them and grew to love them. For the closing number that night, they did the Hallelujah Chorus. They were a small group, many of them not strong music readers, but they did it beautifully. It brought tears to my eyes. I was overwhelmed by their intentions and the joy they put into it.

When I directed choirs for concerts, I always added a few pieces we’d call “black gospel.” I had more fun in those moments than almost anything—everyone loosened up, and we had such a good time. But you can also move into the classical side. My goal was always: let’s enjoy this just as much. We don’t have to sway or clap, but it’s a wonderful thing to use every genre.

I can’t express how much music means to me in praising God. I wanted every child I worked with to reach that place—not necessarily to become a great pianist or flutist, but to enjoy all these genres over time.

Kiran: I’m very interested in the genetic or epigenetic influence on music—how we’re wired. In Indian music it’s all about vibrations. Hindu temples are designed like antennas, resonating your frequency outward. There’s the idea that Earth has its own frequency—the Schumann frequency, around seven-something hertz. When our brains are in alpha or theta states, the frequency is similar.

Temples use granite pillars shaped according to sound-wave patterns. If you sprinkle sand on a cloth and run sound underneath, it forms shapes. The pillars are carved in those shapes. When you tap them, you hear specific notes. Temples often use chanting. The idea is that there’s an eternal frequency—Om—the first sound. When you chant it correctly, the vibration rises from your navel to your nasal passages. It aligns your body with the cosmic sound.

Chanting calms you—regulates blood pressure and hormones. There’s scientific evidence for some of that. Indian sacred music doesn’t rely heavily on drums; it uses bass notes and chanting. The idea is to align Earth’s frequency, the brain’s frequency, and the cosmic frequency.

When I came to the Adventist church, I was told God created music, Lucifer had beautiful tones—maybe eight or twelve, compared to our four—and that after he left heaven, he uses music to influence us toward rebellion. So music becomes tied to salvation. There’s also the 432 vs. 440 hertz idea: older tuning supposedly aligned with nature, but modern instruments use 440 because of electronic standardization. Some say that shift was intentional, even sinister.

So now I think: I can’t tune myself to some unknown cosmic force—it could be the devil. I have to be intentional about who I tune with. That’s how I learned to think about music. Ellen White has that famous quote: “Does the music elevate your soul to God? Does it bring you closer to God? If not, discard it.”

But that’s difficult. Sometimes secular music elevates you. I’ve had moments—walking in downtown Detroit, hearing a rapper I’d never listen to normally—and I was amazed at the talent. I thought, “This must be from God.” I felt a tiny spiritual experience.

So I think music is divine—there’s something in vibrations and sound waves. But I’m conflicted. After coming into Adventism, hearing that Satan has music and God has music—and you have to figure out which you align with—the Hindu cosmic-alignment ideas just fell away for me.

Carolyn: I would love to hear your music from India and to hear it through your ears. If I had my church available, I’d invite you to do a Vespers program. If you could perform some of this music—or knew people who could—I think we would all benefit. Just as Sharon brings her Malawian experience, you bring something from the inner soul of your culture. When you speak of the cosmic, I think of how the angels might have sung in heaven. We don’t have all the answers, but thank you for bringing that side to us. My understanding of Indian music is minimal, but what I’ve heard is beautiful, and I’d love to know more.

Kiran: One interesting thing is that most Christian music in India is Western, even when sung in our mother tongue. There was a radio preacher—a Brahmin priest who became Christian—who evangelized many Hindus. He had the same struggle: he couldn’t relate to God through Western music. He grew up with traditional Indian music, so he wrote songs that combined Sanskrit (the language of temple music) with Telugu. Sanskrit carries deeper layers of meaning than my mother tongue.

The first time I heard one of his songs, I cried. It spoke to me on a level nothing else had. I’d had transcendent moments listening to Western hymns, but nothing like that. And the raga David played earlier is North Indian; South Indian sacred music is more like Sanskrit chanting over bass tones. It’s different.

Donald: In the early Adventist church—well, not the earliest, but in the 1940s and 50s—music was extremely important. It defined what was considered appropriate. Think of the King’s Heralds, Del Delker, or The Sunnyside quartet. Some of you will know these names. That’s the music we exported in missionary work. It became the standard for what was considered Adventist.

For years I listened to a radio program called Night Sounds by Bill Pierce in Chicago. It was a kind of nightly Vespers: some thoughts, and then about half music. He has passed away, but the program continues as a podcast. I try listening now, but it’s challenging to appreciate it the way I once did because the music has changed—and I’ve changed. We evolve.

If Don Weaver introduced the King’s Heralds or Del Delker to his kids or grandkids, they wouldn’t appreciate them the way our generation did. But at camp meeting, if the speaker played that music, the Adventists would run toward the tent.

This is an interesting conversation. I’d like to think it’s about classical versus popular music, but it’s much broader. Far be it from me to say what’s right or wrong. About the things you mentioned, Kiran—the Adventist views of music—I never knew any of that. I think we’d all agree music can be vulgar, but where someone draws that line differs. That’s the challenge.

Kiran: In our youth groups, we had all these seminars. They brought in “experts” who studied music and warned us about everything—reversing Michael Jackson tapes that supposedly said “Satan, Satan, hail Satan,” the dangers of syncopation, rhythm, drums, and how they corrupt your mind. We were brainwashed. It’s still scary for me to pick music. Even if, intellectually, I think those teachings might be wrong, part of me is still afraid. I’m scarred by it.

Those seminars insisted that popular music—especially anything from Hollywood—was written by the devil and his angels to get you to break the Ten Commandments. You have no idea how much we were taught that in the Adventist Church, especially in Michigan. It was repeated again and again.

Carolyn: I have a grandson who does beach ministry with a friend. They’ve got dreadlocks and the whole look, and they do Christian rap. You’d never expect it to draw a crowd if you compared it to something like The Sunnyside quartet—but it draws people, especially in Miami. My grandson’s friend has become a real Christian rapper; he brings souls to Christ.

Kiran, I feel what you’re saying. My stomach gets tight because I like to please people, and music stirs up strong reactions. I would love to bring together music from every culture represented in our world church—one song from each community, each country. Even in the U.S. we have so much diversity. Imagine a Sabbath afternoon program where each group shares a song and a five-minute introduction explaining what it means. I’d love to know more about your Indian traditions; I know almost nothing. And as Sharon said, missionaries introduced Western music to many cultures—it’s wonderful that everyone can sing together, but people don’t want to lose their own music either. We have a lot to learn from one another.

Reinhard: Speaking of Western Christian music—when missionaries came to my country, music became a major part of worship. Most of the hymns, even from my former church, I later found also in the Seventh-day Adventist hymnal. Across denominations, the majority of hymns are shared. Looking back, I would say the hymns are the “gold standard” of worship music. Contemporary Christian music now often sounds very similar to secular music, except for the words. When I listen today, the old sacred hymns feel especially suited for worship.

In my country, Christians are only about 12% of nearly 300 million people, yet during Christmas you hear Christian music everywhere—on the radio and in public places. Secular music also has its own traditions, influenced by local culture and worship practices. But overall, I believe music is God’s gift to us. If our eyes appreciate beauty in nature, our ears appreciate beauty in sound. Music is part of our existence, part of our worship. As Christians, singing strengthens our faith and praises God.

David: Next week, we will turn from communities to the individuals who shape the sounds of music—the composers, conductors, and musicians who live inside the mystery of music. We’ll examine the question: If beauty can humble or deceive the spirit, what does it do to the people who spend their lives making it? We’ll listen to the musicians themselves—those who became, knowingly or not, the theologians of sound.

[Gong]