Lutheran philosophy and theology of music

Funeral Sermon for James Thiele, Church Musician for nearly 50 years at Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Adelaide. He was significant for the development of the Lutheran Hymnal in Australia, after the union of two different Lutheran traditions. I worked closely with James Thiele for nearly seven years, which was a great privilege. He taught me so much. He chose the text for the homily  which was John 1:1-14.

The objects of examination are musical settings of Psalm 51 in Germany ca. 1600-1750 viewed in the perspectives of reformational music aesthetics. The goal of this study is to represent the music historical development primarily, in which it analyses and connects the theological aesthetic flux and historical changes in the psalm compositions. The music aesthetic flux in Germany is evidently reflected in the development of concrete musical settings of Psalm 51 in Germany selected in this study. Beginning with Praetorius’ setting, which is a clear supporter for the priority of text comprehensibility, this study ends with a parody by Bach, which shows largely the dominance of music over the text. In between are various composers who have responded to the plurality of music aesthetic currents in their times. Their compositional practice attested in their settings of Psalm 51 are more or less responses to the diversity of reformational music aesthetics spread all over Germany. The composers did not see the confessional divergences to be restrictions for their compositional techniques. Rather, with broadmindedness they saw them as potentials for a unique personal integration of diverse music aesthetic concepts.

In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Lutherans were divided over a new style of church music as well as church music that was secular sounding.  This paper traces the spread and influence of the new style of church music from Italy through Germany, as well as the controversies surrounding it.  This style, known today as the Baroque style, divided Lutherans into two main camps.  What is interesting is that the Pietists generally opposed the new style in the church, while the orthodox generally accepted it.  Some prominent theologians from this 17th- and early 18th-century debate will be examined, such as Selneccer, Spener, Dannhauer,  Erdmann Neumeister, as well as important contributions by minor writers such as Theophilus Großgebauer, Gottfried Ephraim Scheibel and more.  The musicians of the time will also be considered, examining the perspectives of Praetorius, Schutz, Johann Kuhnau, Telemann, and more.  This historic divisions over the new Italian and secular styles of church music will be examined for application to today’s divisions and discussion over contemporary worship.

The Bavarian State Library in Munich preserves the Quinta vox partbook of a collection of German songs by the Passau composer Leonhard Paminger (1495–1567). This source is particularly important because it is one of only two autograph manuscripts of Paminger’s music. It is also important because Paminger’s huge published output contains very few vernacular songs. Although the loss of all but one of the partbooks of Paminger’s songs makes it impossible to reconstruct these pieces, this autograph manuscript nevertheless adds much to what we might otherwise be able to conclude about Paminger’s vernacular polyphony merely on the basis of his published work. Yet the book as it has come down to us is not simply an important repository of otherwise unknown music by a prolific (if little-known) sixteenth-century composer. Later alterations to the partbook by Leonhard Paminger’s son Sophonias reflect the latter’s desire to project an exaggerated image of his late father as a staunch defender of Lutheran orthodoxy. The book as it has come down to us thus bears traces of the purposes of Leonhard Paminger, its original author and scribe, and of Sophonias Paminger, its later editor.

Wurstisen's lute anthology contains arrangements of Sacred Songs and Psalms in its last part. This is a repertory of fifteen German Protestant chorales and two psalms after the Genevan Psalter. Тhe research on Wurstisen's arrangement are preceded by a brief introduction of Luther's and Calvin's branches of Protestantism and their thoughts on the role of music for the new forms of worship. Historiographical data is involved in order to clarify the origin of Wurstisen's chorales. The greatest amount of them belongs to Luther's own liturgical legacy or to theologians and hymn-writers of his close circle. The idea was expressed that Wurstisen collected his chorales from the most preferable and popular titles among the lutenists of the time. The second part of the article is a study on the process of intabulation. It is focused on melody treatment, harmonization of the chorale tunes and embellishments. Several approaches to the musical texture are determined. In addition, certain comparison between Wurstisen's intabulations and those in the rest of Basel's lute mansucripts and Hainhoffer lute book managed. As a result, it can now be summarized that most of Wurstisen's chorale versions don't correspond to other arrangements. There is only one known exception, which leads to the idea that some of his intabulations might have been copied from another source, while others are possibly his own arrangements.

Collection of Levoča is one of the most important musical collections in Slovakia. Attention is particularly drawn to collections with tablature notation, which contains repertoire of the 16th and 17th century. Compositions of great composers are to be found here, as well as compositions of authors whose names are not known today. Levoča tablature volume sign. 13994, includes name of David Thusius. It was needed to process his life in a complex manner. The basic source of information about David Thusius was Rober Eitner’s Quellen-Lexikon from the early 20th century. An interesting image of composers’s life was created thanks to RISM database (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales). The works of David Thusius seem to be popular in the 16th and 17th century. Three contemporary prints with his compositions are known. His compositions were spread mainly as a depreciations and came into a wide geographical area. His music has been preserved in the German cities of Wolfenbüttel, Blankenburg, Zittau, Coburg, Leipzig, Regensburg or Berlin (the print from Berlin is currently in Krakow). Outside the territory of today's Germany his music preserved in Gdańsk and Wroclaw. On the territory of today’s Slovakia there is a relatively high occurrence of Magnificats by David Thusius. They preserved in Bardejov, Levoča and Banská Bystrica. Music of David Thusius is in contemporary music collections beside such composers as Giovanni da Palestina, Orlando di Lasso, Hans Leo Hassler, Melchior Vulpius, Jacob Praetorius, Hieronymus Praetorius, Jacobus Handl-Gallus, Seth Calvisius and others. This very fact places Thusius among remarkable composers from the 16th and 17th centuries, despite the fact that little of his music has been preserved.

For a complete performance recording and video of this interpretation see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z6ensr5B0M

A performance edition of Johann Pachelbel's Chorale Fugue and Fantasia on "Ein feste Burg," following the interpretation of Jordan Alexander Key.

When 19th-century American Presbyterian pastor James Waddel Alexander wrote the lyrics of the hymn “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” he created what has become the most popular of numerous English translations of 17th-century German Lutheran pastor Paul Gerhardt’s hymn “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden.” That text was, in turn, a translation of part of an anonymous 13th-century cycle of passion poems, one dedicated to each of Christ’s wounds. From the medieval original through Gerhardt to Alexander, each subsequent translation has diminished its depictions of blood and rendered its narrator’s interaction with the crucified body of Christ less passionate, dictated by the theological needs and aesthetic sensibilities of the translator’s religious tradition. At the same time, both Gerhardt and Alexander included significant elements from the original that were anomalous in their own contexts. The inclusion of a medieval poem in the worship of 17th-century Lutherans and 19th-century Presbyterians may reveal an ecumenical bent on their part, albeit with clear limits. A comparison of the various versions of the hymn demonstrates the complex interrelationship between an original text and translations of it, some of which may properly be called versions of it and some of which may have become something altogether different.

The subject of “Luther and Music” never fails to make an appearance in any account of sixteenth-century music history. Invariably it is addressed from a blandly hagiographical perspective, reflecting dated notions of the liberation of the individual conscience and the increasing self-determination of the laity in early modern society. Excessive use of such ideas by earlier scholars too often played into an uncritical lionisation of Luther, the reformation and its musical consequences. For example, while the reformers’ ostensible valorisation of congregational monophony seems to represent a retrograde step in romantic narratives of the progress of western music history, this apparent eschewal of musical complexity is often depicted as a necessary precondition of later and greater developments, receiving redemption and apotheosis at the hands of J. S. Bach.
The present paper tries to escape from such narratives by attempting something a little different. It focuses on several pieces that reflect on Luther as a man, from the diametrically opposed perspectives of friends and enemies of the Lutheran reformation. The song "Ad Martinum Lutherum captivum lamentatio" reflects the mood of despair that surrounded the secret abduction of Luther in 1521. "Eyn erschreglicher Gesangk" attacks Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood, depicting it as a diabolical perversion. The "Epithalamia Martini Lutheri" parodies Luther’s marriage to Katharina von Bora in 1525. Caspar Othmayr’s "Heiliger Vater" and Leonhard Kettner's "Nu hört jr Christen newe meer" enshrine Luther’s reported last words in music. We shall examine these latter setting as a polemical response to Roman Catholic depictions of Luther’s last minutes as the moment when his diabolic nature was finally revealed.
All of these pieces are biased, and all present a partisan picture of a man whose open combat with the Roman Catholic church provoked extreme reactions, both positive and negative. However, it will be argued that taking account of the polemical context of these pieces provides a way out of the denominational bias that often distorts discussions of the music of the reformation. Consideration of the persistent imagery of saints and demons in the texts provides insight into the perceived cosmic consequences of Luther’s rebellion, on both sides. Consideration of the various musical genres of these pieces provokes further reflection on the various registers of reformation polemic. Finally, consideration of the printed form of the pieces—whether broadsheets, pamphlets or part of extensive collections of polyphony—also suggests conclusions about the intended audience for these pieces, and the circumstances of their performance.

It will be terrible to assume that, Luther just came ‘out of  the blue’ and carry the flag of the Reformation course which he effectively delivered. Though few have denied any kind of influence upon him by either the Religious ideas of his time or the Intellectual setting within which he was brought up. However, in this short paper I deem it fit to investigate both the religious and intellectual setting of Luther, to point out how he was indeed influenced by them, and how because of this influence he was able to reconstruct the task of a “true theologian” and what a “true theology” should be (or is).

This article from the Encyclopedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation (2017) explores the origins, composition and afterlife of Martin Luther‘s first song, “Ein neues Lied wir heben an”, a polemical account of the trial and execution of two Augustinians found guilty of spreading his ideas in the Low Countries.

More than any other time of year, Christmas reminds us of music’s power to unite the hearts and minds of a community towards Christ. But church music was not always accessible to the people.  The Lutheran reformation of church music and the mass made hymnody accessible to Christians in the church. From this reformation we have a rich tradition of Christmas hymns.

This is the Commemorative booklet I prepared for the 150 Jubilee of the first recorded Scandinavian Language Service in Queensland. The 1872 event was held in the Lutheran Chapel on Wickham Terrace, in Brisbane, Australia, on 26 June. The booklet contains the Divine Service (Liturgy), the hymns, readings (Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish); the Lord's Prayer (Icelandic, Norwegian, North Sami, Swedish, Finnish, Danish) for the consecration of the Lord's Supper; and (pages 27-30) a selection of significant dates from the Scandinavian Lutheran presence in Brisbane until 1940.  I also thank numerous people and institutions who have assisted in unravelling the Scandinavian Lutheran tradition in Queensland.

Prayers from the Pomeranian Agenda, translated from German by Paul C. Stratman. This translation is based on Die pommersche Kirchen-Ordnung und Agenda: nebst den Legibus praepositorum, statutis synodicis und der Vistitations-Ordnung von 1736. Evangelisch-Lutherische Landeskirche in Pommern, C. A. Koch, 1854, and is available on Google Books.

Religion and Human Being in the World of Sound. Contemporary Trajectories towards a Theological Aesthetics of Music Christian theology and philosophical reflection on music are historically two intertwined activities, most obviously so in medieval cosmological theories but also in the transformations of faith and linguistic rationalities that occurred in Reformation and Romantic thought. In contemporary postmodern landscapes theologians of wide varieties are venturing into new intellectual dialogues to explore the vital aesthetic dimension of religion and theology. Hence the last decades has seen a radical surge in theological attention to the aesthetics of music, a promising situation for those who seek intellectual tools to investigate relationships between music and religion, both in general terms and more specifically as regards the ministry of music in Christian communities. This article seeks to stimulate Scandinavian discussions about theological interpretations of music by w...

This little exploratory study for a congregation, written in 2004, has been slightly tweaked and enlarged in 2020. The original study had no footnotes! The motivation to do this came from i) the COVID pandemic which has imposed necessary restrictions on congregations assembling and therefore a  ‘collective silence’ when it comes to singing; and ii) the reference to the hymn On Eagle’s Wings, by President-elect of the United States of America, Joe Biden, on November 8, 2020.

In common with many Bach scholars, my ideal is to understand more about how Bach thought of music, what motivated his compositional choices and what he decided to teach the next generation. In Bach’s Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance (CUP, 2015) I describe Bach’s use of proportional parallelism. Searching to understand why Bach chose to spend so much time and energy introducing parallel layers of proportion into his compositions led me to a set of Lutheran beliefs about musical proportions and Harmony published in books that Bach could have read. See ‘A theology of musical proportions and Harmony in Bach’s time’, Appendix, Bach’s Numbers, 370–382.

With the increasing secularisation of Lutheran society in the 1700s one might expect that ancient beliefs about creational proportions in music would have died out during Bach’s lifetime, but the reality was more complex. In 1788 Forkel wrote wistfully, as if a golden age had passed, ‘when one believed that all expression and all beauty in art depended solely on the mathematical proportions of tones …but these times are now over, and what happened in excess then, maybe happens too little nowadays.’

Quoting Werckmeister, Walther, and Neuss and others, this paper will illustrate how widespread beliefs in God-given proportions and Harmony could affect the daily choices and compositional practice of Lutheran musicians, and discuss the choices Bach seems to have made in response. How these beliefs affected Bach’s sons and their compositional practice as the eighteenth century unfolded will also be discussed.
Paper presented at the American Bach Society's biennial meeting "J. S. Bach and the Confessional Landscape of His Time", 7–10 April 2016, at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.

The theological writings by Oskar Söhngen (1900–1983) are widely regarded as a pivotal contribution to a systematic Lutheran account of music. Notwithstanding such acknowledgements, Söhngen’s aesthetics is contested for its politics, historiography and adaption of the Lutheran heritage. This article investigates an issue that cuts right through these problems: Söhngen’s strategy to invoke Lutheran traits in support of a particular avant-garde trajectory of music. It provides a survey of central stylistic categories, and discusses how a turn back to Lutheran theology provides material for progressive musical developments. It becomes obvious how his writings widens the scope of theological aesthetics to an ‘autonomous’ aesthetics of created musical sound as divine self–revelation, and yet also instates decisively functional, kerygmatic and liturgical categories as central to music as a whole. The result is a bold but peculiar vision of specific transhistorical stylistic traits, in favour of a certain modernist trajectory of music.
Although impressive in its close encounter with precise aesthetic categories and arguably even more radical in the light of 21th century developments of church music, Söhngen’s starkly anti-liberal historiography induces an unwarranted cultural delimitation of the Lutheran heritage. His aesthetics is so also manifestly ensnared in a problematic dialectics with 20th century German political history.

"Man and religion in the world of sound - Contemporary trajectories towards a theological aesthetics of music". Outlines three main proposals for a theology of music; by Jeremy Begbie, Harald Schroeter-Wittke as well as the German anthology Das  Universum  im  Ohr. Variationen  zu  einer  theologischen  Musikästhetik. In Swedish with a brief English abstract.

The article shows the reformer Matin Luther as a misician and presents his theology of music. From an early age, Luther played the lute well and sang, later also the flute. When Luther studied in Eisenach, he had music lessons. Music was taught in a mathematical manner, but Luther acquired a good understanding of the theory of harmonics. He learned to distinguish between the differend musical genres. In the convent as monk he could refine his skills. Later Luther was able to transcribe and adapter folk melodies (contrafactum) and to harmonise them as well as to write melodies on psalms. Reformer himsels composen 36 hymns on Germen texts. As Luther reformed the liturgy, he accorded full importance to the sermon and to community singing. This singing was defined as an assertion of faith and sipiritual commentary on biblical texts. Music was at the heart of the Lutheran reformation. Luther’s theology of music is formed through the conviction that music is a particularly beautiful and unique offering of the divine creation. „Music is a gift from God and next to theology” – wrote Luther. Music also moves human hearts. To bring people joy and to praise the Lord is music’s true task and its service.

The proportions formed by the senario, or the first six numbers (1:1, 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, 5:6) were integral to a philosophy of a harmoniously ordered universe; a philosophy which dominated western thinking for over two millennia. Bach was brought up and educated in a society when this thinking was still dominant, albeit with a Lutheran emphasis. This paper will demonstrate from his writings, compositions and the books he read, how Bach was motivated by the perfect proportions of harmonie, giving specific examples of how they influenced his actions, his compositional choices and his performances. How this affects the way we listen to and use Bach’s music today, and what Bach would have thought about the way we use his music, will be covered in the later panel discussion.