Amazing Grace 4: The Theology of Composition

Last week we explored how music can be designed—architected—either to lift—or to deceive—the spirit of its audience. We saw (or rather, we heard) how the same notes can open the heart toward grace or inflate the ego toward itself, depending on the motivations of the composer, the performer, and the listener.

This, then, led me to wonder: What does music do to the people who live inside it—the composers, whose entire lives are shaped by its vibrations? Does it humble them? Deepen them? Does it magnify whatever is already there?

To some of these composers, I discovered, sound was not entertainment—it was theology. Not a theory of God, but an encounter with God. Even non-believers, I suspect, sense an order, a truth, a presence, even if they are not prepared to call it God.

Let’s begin where the Western conversation about music and the soul first began: with the ancient Greeks. Here is a sample of the kind of music available to them—it’s a softly tuned interval on a lyre, probably very close to what Pythagoras would have listened to.

[Song of Seikilos]

In the ratios of those vibrating strings Pythagoras must have heard the same mathematics that governs the stars and planets. For him, the “right” proportion in sound was the “right” proportion in the universe and even in the soul. Spirit reverberates to the “right” composition of notes. Contemporaries and followers of Pythagoras reportedly used music to calm the passions, to restore balance between the inner and outer life. To them, harmony was moral in and of itself. To sing harmoniously was to live justly.

Plato inherited that conviction. He believed that music helped to shape the character of a community long before laws or sermons could take effect. Augustine, centuries later, baptized this idea, in a sense—not by bringing lyres into church, but by bringing the philosophy of harmony into Christian thought. He taught that ordered sound, harmonic sound, can mirror ordered love—provided we do not mistake the music for the God to whose presence it points.

In that lineage, from Pythagoras to Augustine, the composer is not merely an entertainer but a kind of priest—a guardian of proportion, a servant, we might say, of grace made audible, in the sense that the presence of God is grace.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Johann Sebastian Bach gave exquisite voice to this ancient vision. He was profoundly devout, and to him, composition was unequivocally no more nor less than a form of devotion. Counterpoint is a way of composing in which independent and interdependent melodies are woven into one fabric. Bach’s counterpoint is almost a kind of communion: many voices, one truth.

He often ended his manuscript pages with the initials S.D.G.—Soli Deo Gloria, “to the glory of God alone,” and that was not a flourish; it was a signature of intention. In Bach’s world, beauty was grace disciplined by law, the sensual was rendered sacred through symmetry. The early Church Fathers had feared the sensuality of music. Bach subtly redirected it, deflecting what might otherwise be sheer sensual delight into deep devotion. Here is the beginning of one of the finest demonstrations of counterpoint ever composed. Listen as four instruments, each playing the same notes, follow one another. As each joins in, the music grows almost exponentially more complex, yet amazingly, it never disintegrates into discordance.

[The Art of Fugue, Contrapunctus I]

Almost a century later, Ludwig van Beethoven brought a different vision into being. Deafness forced him inward, but he was not in total silence. “Music,” he wrote in a sketchbook for the Missa Solemnis, “is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.” He meant that music bridges two domains we often hold apart—the holy and the human. Even in deafness, the vibrations maintained his spirit and his connection with the world.

So in Beethoven, sound is neither sacred nor profane. It is the bridge between them, between the sensual and the spiritual. And you can hear that bridge in the opening Kyrie of the Missa Solemnis. Unlike the formal, restrained Kyries of Gregorian or Orthodox chant (the ones we heard in Talk 1), Beethoven’s is warmer, more urgent—a plea that rises from the body as much as from the soul. Here is a short excerpt:

[Missa Solemnis, Kyrie]

If you have time, go back to the Gregorian and Orthodox Kyries we sampled in the first talk in this series at donwweaver.org and listen for the difference between and among them and Beethoven. The Gregorian kyrie reaches upward through stillness; the Orthodox kyrie rises through intensity; and Beethoven’s kyrie rises through longing.

All three ask for mercy—but they ask in different dialects, as it were, of the same human need. With Bach, form becomes devotion. With Beethoven, inner struggle becomes devotion. But in both cases, the sound comes out as prayer—as a negotiation between heaven and earth, between what we hope for and what we know.

And then… along came Richard Wagner, who teetered on the brittle brink of beauty. If Bach gave us devotion through structure and Beethoven gave us devotion through struggle, Wagner attempted to give us devotion through sheer magnitude, or arrogance, or chutzpah.

He believed art could replace religion. His Gesamtkunstwerk (which means “total artwork”) combined the aural, visual and performative arts, and was designed to dissolve individuality into a single overwhelming experience. In the darkness of the theater, the unseen orchestra acted almost like an invisible priesthood, binding the audience into a shared emotional world that felt redemptive simply because it was so overwhelming. Wagner believed that myth and music together could forge a new German consciousness—a purified national identity held together not by creed but by aesthetic rapture.

And in the newly unified Germany of the late nineteenth century, his vision gained traction. The Bayreuth Festival, founded in 1876, became a cultural shrine to German identity, visited by emperors, ministers, and eventually dictators. Kaiser Wilhelm II used Bayreuth for imperial prestige. And decades later, Adolf Hitler—who idolized Wagner—turned that private cult into state ritual, with the help of Wagner’s own daughter-in-law, Winifred.

Wagner’s music was performed at Nazi ceremonies—not because it was “evil music,” but because beauty, when detached from humility, becomes extraordinarily easy to weaponize. It was the sensation of unity, not its substance, that made Wagner so useful to political power.

Here is a taste of that spellbinding sound—the majestic audacity, the sheer sonic chutzpah, of his Ride of the Valkyries:

[Ride of the Valkyries]

This is music engineered, architected, for sensual exaltation. And it reminds us why so many theologians have feared beauty’s power: because the human spirit longs to be lifted, and so is ever ready to mistake magnitude for meaning, to mistake grandeur for grace.

Wagner is the clearest example of what we’ve been exploring in these talks: the narcotic side of beauty—its ability to inflate the soul under the guise of transcendence. When beauty forgets its source, when it becomes an idol unto itself, the soul is drugged by its own exaltation.

Wagner shows how powerful—and indeed beautiful—music can be even when it is spiritually dangerous. The human heart longs to lose itself in sound. The question, always, is what we become once the music releases the senses—or the spirit. It’s not all down to the composer or the performer. The listener can choose to be complicit, or not.

After Wagner, history delivered its own corrections. Remember how we talked last week about society’s oscillating like a pendulum between grandeur and simplicity? The twentieth century shattered the nineteenth-century confidence that beauty would save us, that harmony guaranteed moral order, that art could redeem the world. Out of two world wars and disillusionment came a new musical humility—a search for grace within brokenness, rather than triumph over it.

This is where we turn next: to Olivier Messiaen, whose vision stands as Wagner’s counterpoint—humility instead of domination, wondrous astonishment instead of intolerant intoxication. Messiaen was a devout Catholic. He served as a medical orderly in the French army in WW2, and was captured and imprisoned by the Germans. It was in that prison camp, with the help of a German officer evidently not totally sold on Wagner, that he composed his masterpiece, the Quartet for the End of Time, in 1941 for three fellow inmates and a battered piano in a German camp. Instead of to grandeur, he turned to birdsong—to creatures free even when he was not—and wove their calls into a music of defiant hope.

He wrote that rhythm and color were “aspects of eternity.” Even in the dying monotone at the end of the piece, one hears a quiet refusal to sink into despair—one hears a kind of grace that whispers rather than shouts. Here is the ending of the 5th movement (of 8 movements), called Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (Praise to the Eternity of Jesus) from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time:

[Messiaen—Quartet for the End of Time]

If Wagner teaches us the peril of beauty, Messiaen teaches us its humility.

A few years later, John Cage took this to the ultimate—to a sort of cosmic background radiation. Influenced by Zen Buddhism, Cage came to believe that the world is never truly silent; that even when musicians cease to play (or perhaps even, like Beethoven, when they cease to hear), life continues to vibrate. His piece 4′33″ is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of intentional non-playing. The orchestra sits silent on stage. The piece invites the audience to discover that what we call “silence” is full of sound: breathing, shuffling, whispers, the hum of lights. Faint as maybe, but like the cosmic background radiation, it’s there if you know how to listen for it.

Cage, in his way, returned us to the cave we visited in Talk 1—the cave where sound and self first met in wondrous echo. He implied that grace may not be bestowed; it may simply be there—ambient, continuous, waiting to be noticed. It fits our definition of grace as the presence of God.

Now we move on to our own century and to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose music seems to distill the lessons of Bach, Beethoven, and Cage into a single, luminous simplicity. After years of experimentation and disillusionment, Pärt emerged with what he calls his tintinnabuli style—music pared down to bell-like clarity. “I have discovered,” he said, “that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.” That single note, for him, was a prayer.

Where Bach found grace in structure and Beethoven in struggle, Pärt finds it in stillness—in the resonance between a note and the silence that surrounds it. Here is an excerpt from Spiegel im Spiegel—“Mirror in the Mirror”:

[Spiegel im Spiegel]

Feel how it asks for nothing, forces nothing. It simply rings.

So what do all the voices we’ve heard from this morning—Pythagoras and Plato, Augustine and Bach, Beethoven and Wagner, Messiaen, Cage, and Pärt—tell us? They don’t tell us that music proves God, nor do they tell us that it disproves God. What they tell us is that music is a language in which both belief and doubt can be spoken, that it is a neutral medium in which we may imagine the Divine or merely feel the drift of our own souls.

Music is the theologian’s twin and the scientist’s partner—theologians search for meaning in order, scientists search for order in meaning. Both describe a world striving toward harmony with itself. To make music is to join that striving, consciously. To listen deeply is to sense the universal harmony acknowledge that creation is still unfolding and that we are participants in its score.

We’re nearing the end of our musical journey. The fifth movement comes next week. But meantime, what are your thoughts? Which (if any) of the composers I played today (and in previous sessions) feel most reverent to you, or reverberates with you spiritually?

Carolyn: I’m going to add one thing here before I ask another question. Jesus always asks questions—Don has taught us that—so that’s going to be my way. Is the lyre what David used when he soothed Saul, when Saul would call him to play a stringed instrument?

David: I know only that it’s a very ancient, U-shaped, harp-like string instrument. I would be very surprised if it wasn’t around in biblical times, or at least something very much like it.

Carolyn: We take a pill to soothe our pain, and David chose a musical instrument to soothe emotional or physical pain. What was going on back then was that music was the means of soothing.

When I think of how much our medical field does, I don’t know how many of us depend on music to keep us even when life feels very blustery—when we can’t agree with things and feel in turmoil. Music helps us put our hand in God’s hand by listening. But is there a “correct” music—a right music—or is it simply what we choose?

Because I know Beethoven was considered a rebel, musically, in his time, and people thought he wasn’t too soothing. But I know what his music does for me, and I think many of us choose music instead of a pill—when you’re in the car or wherever you are.

C-J: Trauma therapy uses the power of music. Surgeons use it in the operating room. Music has always done what you’re talking about, and I agree with you. Our brains are wired for that vibration.

When we’re able to embrace that calm, our bodies respond—blood pressure lowers, we think more clearly.

Carolyn: I also think about those raising children. I take my hat off to our church, because it has influence, and it can go either way. It was kind of proven in Beethoven’s time that music could be considered detrimental, depending on exposure.

But then you move forward, and you played Arvo Pärt. It’s just beautiful to me, the tranquility it brings to my soul. And yet music can also elevate with Wagner, though he’s not my favorite.

Donald: I want to focus on the word preference. Last night, we watched a presentation of Kevin Costner narrating the story of the birth of Jesus, and then went into different performances of O Holy Night—from Andrea Bocelli to the Three Tenors to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They are much more contemporary expressions of music.

What I’m wondering is where the word preference comes in. We’re very quick to use language like “inappropriate,” or “wrong,” or “not correct,” and that’s certainly shaped by how I think about what I just saw or heard. But should we instead be thinking in terms of preferences rather than right and wrong?

You talked about the ego being fed by music, which suggests there’s danger there. I don’t know. I just think we need to be thoughtful about the idea of preference. In modern times, preference has taken on a whole new meaning—you go into settings and change preferences. They’re not right or wrong, or they wouldn’t be available.

So is there really a right and wrong in regard to what we hear and what brings glory to God?

C-J: I think preferences are essential, just as when these new composers came along and were given categories—this belongs over here, that belongs over there. But the truth is, we need to compare and contrast. We need to be open to diversity. We need to recognize the darkness within us in order for the light to dispel it.

In therapy, you can often tell what someone is feeling—anger, fear—by what they choose. Their music says, “This is who I am.” When they’re introduced to music they can meditate on, visualize with, and move through to the other side, they’ll say, “I do feel better. I just don’t know where to find music like that, or how I’m supposed to listen to it.”

So I love diversity. I think we’re a richer culture when we allow it without a value judgment of “inappropriate.”

Reinhard: Music is very soothing. Centuries ago, formal music performances were accessible only to the upper class. The masses didn’t see those performances, though of course they enjoyed music in other ways.

Even today, with classical music, it’s still mostly a certain segment of the population—often higher-income people—who attend symphony orchestra performances. But beyond just enjoyment, some music is also used to praise God. In fact, much of what we now hear as sacred music was composed during those earlier times.

David: I enjoy the music of the gamelan—the Indonesian instrument—which is also very beautiful. Did music in Indonesia have a religious connotation even before Islam and Christianity arrived there?

Reinhard: In the area I come from, the gamelan is not that popular. But in certain areas—especially among Hindus, like in Bali—it does have a religious background. They perform it in rituals and so on.

There are many other instruments as well. The gamelan is often used to accompany dance performances, such as Balinese dance. But again, in my area (a Christian area), it’s not that popular.

Carolyn: When I was in Malaysia, we went to several university concerts, and the music was so beautiful. It was the kind that just lets you loosen and feel free. Your shoulders relax.

The young people at the university did the dancing, with costuming, and their bodies were so in tune with the music and how it flowed. I couldn’t help feeling that they were praising God in some way. I don’t know enough to say more than that, but I really appreciated it.

Donald: Words matter. So I want to take us back again to the idea of preference. Right after what Reinhard talked about—sophisticated people, the symphony, and so on—we quickly move to the idea of the untrained ear.

We can very easily suggest that certain music, or certain preferences, are not acceptable—that if you had a trained ear, you would recognize that as inappropriate music.

C-J: That music feels like bringing nature into a different format. I could imagine raindrops falling off roofs. I think that’s what you prefaced this whole talk with—the idea of natural vibration, new instruments, and even the silence, the space between one vibration and the next.

I love that concept. I heard something like that when I was very young from a musician who came from a home of very sophisticated, complex music. She made reference to popular music—people like Michael Jackson—and said that true musicians, those with innate creativity who tap into that deeper vibration, are able to create things that can’t be duplicated. That reminds me of the composers we’ve listened to today and in earlier sessions.

Reinhard: Maybe culture has something to do with it. Speaking from the background I came from, we have an instrument that’s more popular in my area: the kolintang. A group of us played the kolintang some years ago at Oakwood SDA Church. We used to accompany some of the singers.

In my country, it’s much more popular than gamelan. Gamelan is played by itself—you don’t usually sing with it. Kolintang, on the other hand, often accompanies singing. That’s probably why it became more popular.

Again, culture created these instruments and the kinds of songs that go with them. Singing and instruments together—it’s all part of the culture.

Carolyn: I was once enamored with John Cage because he introduced me to so many things that just made my jaw drop. He was an expert at the prepared piano (a conventional acoustic piano whose sound is deliberately altered by placing objects directly on or between its strings, transforming it into a kind of one-person percussion orchestra). He would actually go into the piano and prepare it—playing from the strings, almost like the harp inside the piano, rather than from the keys.

Some of that is certainly theatrical, but it also goes right to the heart of something: we all like at least a little sense that we know what we’re listening to. I think that goes way back, even before Beethoven and into Beethoven’s time.

As you move into the Romantic composers and then beyond, you see how much they loved Gypsy melodies and folk music. Folk music is the music of the people. I don’t know what makes music “perfect,” but I read a book this week about how the diatonic scale came to be. It talked about someone hearing vibrations and drawing the scale out of that experience.

I’m not good at math, but music feels very precise to me, almost like math. People who can feel the difference—the distance—of dissonance are sensing something real. I feel strongly that there is room for many different kinds of music.

Donald: Preference matters. Why can I march to marching music but not dance to dancing music? Why does each evoke something different? It’s connected to our relationship with God, and I’m not settled on it yet.

But we do need preferences. We can go right back to Saul: instead of a pill, he used the lyre, and someone played it to give him peace, joy, and connection with God.

David: I was curious about Reinhard’s mention of the kolintang.

Carolyn: I was wondering if Reinhard could tell us about the angklung too.

Reinhard: The kolintang is made from the wood of the kolintang tree—hence the name. As far as the history goes, I know it came from my area, where I grew up.

In 1979, I brought a set here that was played by six players. It’s laid out in front, similar to a marimba. Some sets are even larger. In my area, they sometimes make ten boxes with wooden notes, played by ten people.

It can be played as purely instrumental music, or it can accompany vocals—either secular or religious. It’s played in churches. When I brought it here, we performed mostly in churches in California—the university church, Mexican churches, and many Indonesian churches.

I didn’t really study music formally. I just happened to play the melody. When I tried to teach other Indonesians, many of them couldn’t play the melody easily. It’s a wooden instrument, cut into sections, and I think the melody spans four or five octaves—maybe about five octaves total—with accompaniment parts for soprano and bass.

Carolyn: I think it’s very much like the angklung, and they’re beautiful together. I’ve heard them in our own church here in Florida. A group plays them, and sometimes they join a larger ensemble. The sound is beautiful. There’s something about the wood, that marimba-like vibration, that I really love.

Donald: Maybe, before we move away from music, we might build on what Reinhard has shared—and Kiran could add to this as well. Most of us here come from a Western culture, and it might be really valuable for Reinhard and Kiran to share music from their cultures—music that introduces us to something we’re quite unfamiliar with.

It’s one thing to talk about listening to music. It’s another to talk about singing, where we become the instrument. And it’s another thing altogether to talk about actually playing an instrument. That’s a whole different dimension we haven’t really explored. I think it would be fascinating if those two gentlemen would be willing to put something together—maybe in a week or so?

Reinhard: I think I have some new suggestions. That would be good. I might get some music together. Because when you play this music—tenor, soprano, bass, and melody—you can’t really look at music books in front of you. You have to memorize it, especially the melody.

Don: Maybe David could coordinate that—a concept around culture and music?

David: I’d be glad to do that. I’ll talk with Kiran and Reinhard about what we can put together.

Carolyn: In the Avon Park church near me, there’s a group of women from the Philippines—anywhere from ten to twenty of them. They sing hymns and accompany themselves on the ukulele. They started very small, and they’ve been praising the Lord in a way that’s very different from what we usually hear at church.

They’re just enjoying the fellowship of praising God through music. They chose the ukulele—some of them learned it just to be part of this group. To me, that shows that we can all sing and play an instrument.

Donald: I do think there are a couple of aspects of music we’ve touched on that would be fascinating to continue exploring before we move away from the topic.

I’m also struck by how David can, on the fly, find what’s needed. Not that many years ago, we didn’t have access to this volume of music. Now, with something like Apple Music, you ask, “What would you like to listen to?” and there it is.

We’re saturated with music—from every culture and genre. It’s easy to push a button, but it must be quite remarkable to be part of a symphony—to perform the music rather than just listen to it. That sense of community must be extraordinary.

Carolyn: When we think of the night Jesus was born, and the sky was filled with angels singing praise together—it’s just extraordinary. To be part of a choir, an orchestra, or any group praising God is phenomenal.

David: Next week, having listened to the testimony of musicians this week, we will step beyond the human altogether. For if vibration is sound and sound is the language of grace, what is the sound—what are the vibrations—of Being? What is the music of existence itself?

We will turn from the composers who heard the world (the composers we heard today) to a world that composes itself—from grace to gravity, from music to the capital W Word that vibrated in the beginning and still hums beneath all creation.

[Gong]