If we are fortunate enough, we find or are found by special people who help us along on our journey. I wish to acknowledge my very special people...
* * *
When in prep school in Bronxville NY, I wanted desperately to study the organ, but the powers that be refused me. So, after doing my research, I rode the train into Manhattan, took the subway uptown, walked into the Church of the Heavenly Rest, and said to Charles Dodsley Walker "teach me".
And for almost four years, every other week, we had a lesson filled wih challenge, imagination, and lots of creative music making. None of this "do what I say because I said it" bumf. Listen, challenge, think, explore, listen.
Thank you, Charles. I'm still listening...
* * *
After I graduated from Westminster Choir Collge, and had worked for one or two organ builders, I found myself unemployed. A friend said I should call this fellow who went around voicing organs. And so I made contact with Allan Van Zoeren, which led to five years of going around and voicing organs and learning. Allan was a true master of the American/Dutch neo-classic style. His organs were clean and clear, precisely balanced, and never screamed.
I asked him early on how I could learn about tonal matters. He replied: "When you hear a stop that you like, go find out why you like it. Look at the pipes, measure them. Listen to them. They will tell you. And if you hear a stop that you truly dislike, go find out why..."
Thank you, Allan. I am still finding out why...
* * *
I had heard about him when I younger, and his name was Walter then. Switched On Bach was his entree to fame. Then I heard that he was really she: "Walter" had been a way to "make it" in what then was a man's world. The image stuck with me and I secretly admired her. I actually wrote to her once, and she actually responded.
When I decided to reveal my true self, I thought of her audacity and it helped to sustain me.
Thank you, Wendy Carlos, for your inspiration and courage. I still draw on your example every day...
* * *
Without these special people I would not be what I am today.
I hope I can do for someone what each of you have done for me.
Olivia
Monday, July 19, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
The Beaches are awry with no sound of music
It was recently published in Charleston's newpaper that the neighboring municipality of Sullivan's Island has enacted an ordinance to ban all sorts of noise . . . including singing? Yes, Virginia, no Singing in the Rain. Or in the Sun. Or in your home or office.
Knock Knock
"Yes, Officer?"
"I'm sorry to have to do this, Reverend, but I have to give you a ticket for all the noise you permitted to occur in your church last night. Let's see: loud singing, ringing of small bells, other loud and disturbing noises in the parking lot. And those loud bells in the tower at midnight. . . "
"But Officer. It was Christmas Eve Midnight Mass."
"Sorry, Reverend. See you in Court."
Knock Knock
"Yes, Officer?"
"I'm sorry to have to do this, Reverend, but I have to give you a ticket for all the noise you permitted to occur in your church last night. Let's see: loud singing, ringing of small bells, other loud and disturbing noises in the parking lot. And those loud bells in the tower at midnight. . . "
"But Officer. It was Christmas Eve Midnight Mass."
"Sorry, Reverend. See you in Court."
The report in the Post and Courier says:
"Sullivans Island Town Council approved an ordinance last week that added singing, whistling, hooting and hollering on public streets to a list of possible disturbing noises.
"Sullivans Island code already prohibits crying, calling, shouting, whistling, rattling, using a bell, gong, clapper, horn or hammer, drum or making about any other loud noise imaginable."
And the public comments have already started . . .
"I guess getting vocal during sex is outlawed also? "
"LOL!! Hey- when you jump into the ocean, you BETTER NOT MAKE A SPLASH! Don't allow the water to ripple and please don't ever talk out loud during the remaining open hours. We don't want to wake up the town council while they sleep in session."
And what will happen if the Spoleto Festival decides to have an event onthe Island? Will they take Westminster Choir away in handcuffs? And what about singing teachers? Will they be run out of town on a Grand Staff feathered with hemidemisemiquavers?
The mind boggles. What ever became of common courtesy, much less common sense? As usual, the irresponsible and unthinking few cause trouble for the rest of us.
". . . I'll know that I'm on the street where you live!"
"Hey, Bubba, you can't sing that there here . . . You have the right to remain silent . . . "
Just my thoughts...
Olivia
The Charleston Lawyer's Chorus, which usually contributes an excerpt from the rock opera "Runaround? Sue!" has decided to stand mute...
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Transition - One Year down and a Lifetime to go . . .
My dear readers:
It has been a little more than a year since I stood up in front of my Westminster Choir College classmates at our 40th reunion, and stated: "Well, there have been a few changes..."
Little did I realise at that time that the changes were only beginning...
First of all, for those of you who are new to these ramblings, transition is not a matter of what clothing one wears, or how one walks and talks, or even of what's been added or subtracted...
It is more a change in one's thinking, for women and men are not just from different planets, they are from different universes. It is a change in how one best reflects one's soul.
One woman who went through mid-life transition and lived to tell her tale likened it to a tornado. One day, without warning (even if you have been thinking about it for years), you wake up with sirens screaming in your head. This is The Day. You are ready for it.
Or so you think...
And then your whole world collapses as the Transition Twister tears apart your life, everything you have held dear for 30, 40, 50 years, and deposits it in itsy-bitsy little pieces in your front yard. Your friends desert you. Your enemies spread evil stories about you. You may lose your job, and you certainly lose may of your civil Rights. If you are especially unfortunate, you lose your family.
But wait! While you are surveying the aftermath, you notice that something is changed. Something is different in a big way. The air is now still, but breathtakingly fresh. It is clean and crystalline, as God intended it to be. What has happened?
For once in your life, in a way not granted to many people, you are at a point where you can start over totally free of other people's notions. You can remake yourself as you would have yourself be, not as someone else demands. It is an awesome prospect, with even more awesome responsibilities; for as of this day, you are become the only one responsible. You can't blame your kid brother, or Aunt Sally, or mean old Cousin Saunders. You can't say anymore "But that's what my parents taught me."
That day is your re-birth day and the first day of your new life, and you have to make the best of it because once you take that fateful step out the front door, you cannot ever go back.
I have had many bad experiences within this year, but the good experiences outweigh them. Let me tell you about just a few of them. Naturally, no names are divulged, as that won't do anyone any good
-----------------------------------------
- There is the church I have served for more than 30 years. When I told the Music Director, he said "I don't know about this. How on earth am I going to explain to my 85 year old Life Deacon that our organbuilder is now she instead of he?" Whatever he told the man must have worked, as I am still on board there.
- There is the church I served for 20 years. When told of my transition by the Music Director, the Rector, I am told, said: "It's time we had a new organ technician. Do it immediately." End of story.
- There is the man with whom I had been personal friends for more than 10 years who, when I told him, said "Well, you can't come here any longer. What will the neighbors think if I start entertaining a woman in the afternoons while my wife is at work?"
- There is the church where the Senior Minister advised me that a woman on the office staff complained about my using the Ladies Room. She wanted me to use the Men's Room "where I belonged..." Sez me: "And what if her husband and I happen to exit the Men's Room at about the same time?" She hasn't complained again...
- Then there is the client who, after receiving my Transition Letter, invited me into his office and fired me on the spot. And then he laughed and said that by my announcement of transgender status I am no longer eligible for protection against discrimination under Federal Statutes and he is going to take the opportunity to get rid of me.
And yes, he can legally do that. Illegal aliens have more legal protections against discrimination than I do. {psssst...support an inclusive ENDA}
- And there is the minister who used to be my client who won't even reply to my request to become a friend on Facebook.
I have learned now that the key phrase coming from a man, especially over the phone, is "I'll have to think about this..." And you KNOW that the second after he puts the phone down all thought of the matter had passed into oblivion, never to be raised up again.
- There is the ladyfriend who, after being told over an afternoon glass of Chardonnay, gave me a big hug, and said "This calls for champagne..."
- And then there is the Organist with whom I had worked for more than 10 years who now looks straight through me when I explain a technical problem and each time says "I will have to get a second opinion." As if I had suddenly become less than competent... And I am not even a blond...
- And furthermore, there is the man I have known for a while whose eyes keep straying downward to my chest while we are talking, He never used to do that before... Oh, and, by the way, the answer is "Yes."
- And there was the female TSA agent at the airport who looked at my boarding pass, then at my driver's license (with its photo of me with my very long hair and its big, annoying "M"), then at the boarding pass and again at the license...handed them back to me, said thank you, MA'AM and gave me a big thumbs-up.
-----------------------------------------
Each day has been a challenge. Each day has been an opportunity to discover the great richness of diversity in and on God's Earth. Each day has offered unimaginable blessings along with seemingly insurmountable challenges.
They say that when you transition, you find out who your true friends really are. I have many fine friends, and thank God each day for them. I hope that when the time comes, I can support them as freely and as well as they have supported me.
Where do I go from here?
Well, writing more in my blog for one. Composing more music for two. And taking more time to be with my friends.
There is one special lady who always has a tag line at the bottom of her emails, my favorite of which is:
"If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it"
I look forward to whatever God brings me to in this next year, knowing that I will be cared for by God and my friends.
Blessings...
Olivia
It has been a little more than a year since I stood up in front of my Westminster Choir College classmates at our 40th reunion, and stated: "Well, there have been a few changes..."
Little did I realise at that time that the changes were only beginning...
First of all, for those of you who are new to these ramblings, transition is not a matter of what clothing one wears, or how one walks and talks, or even of what's been added or subtracted...
It is more a change in one's thinking, for women and men are not just from different planets, they are from different universes. It is a change in how one best reflects one's soul.
One woman who went through mid-life transition and lived to tell her tale likened it to a tornado. One day, without warning (even if you have been thinking about it for years), you wake up with sirens screaming in your head. This is The Day. You are ready for it.
Or so you think...
And then your whole world collapses as the Transition Twister tears apart your life, everything you have held dear for 30, 40, 50 years, and deposits it in itsy-bitsy little pieces in your front yard. Your friends desert you. Your enemies spread evil stories about you. You may lose your job, and you certainly lose may of your civil Rights. If you are especially unfortunate, you lose your family.
But wait! While you are surveying the aftermath, you notice that something is changed. Something is different in a big way. The air is now still, but breathtakingly fresh. It is clean and crystalline, as God intended it to be. What has happened?
For once in your life, in a way not granted to many people, you are at a point where you can start over totally free of other people's notions. You can remake yourself as you would have yourself be, not as someone else demands. It is an awesome prospect, with even more awesome responsibilities; for as of this day, you are become the only one responsible. You can't blame your kid brother, or Aunt Sally, or mean old Cousin Saunders. You can't say anymore "But that's what my parents taught me."
That day is your re-birth day and the first day of your new life, and you have to make the best of it because once you take that fateful step out the front door, you cannot ever go back.
I have had many bad experiences within this year, but the good experiences outweigh them. Let me tell you about just a few of them. Naturally, no names are divulged, as that won't do anyone any good
-----------------------------------------
- There is the church I have served for more than 30 years. When I told the Music Director, he said "I don't know about this. How on earth am I going to explain to my 85 year old Life Deacon that our organbuilder is now she instead of he?" Whatever he told the man must have worked, as I am still on board there.
- There is the church I served for 20 years. When told of my transition by the Music Director, the Rector, I am told, said: "It's time we had a new organ technician. Do it immediately." End of story.
- There is the man with whom I had been personal friends for more than 10 years who, when I told him, said "Well, you can't come here any longer. What will the neighbors think if I start entertaining a woman in the afternoons while my wife is at work?"
- There is the church where the Senior Minister advised me that a woman on the office staff complained about my using the Ladies Room. She wanted me to use the Men's Room "where I belonged..." Sez me: "And what if her husband and I happen to exit the Men's Room at about the same time?" She hasn't complained again...
- Then there is the client who, after receiving my Transition Letter, invited me into his office and fired me on the spot. And then he laughed and said that by my announcement of transgender status I am no longer eligible for protection against discrimination under Federal Statutes and he is going to take the opportunity to get rid of me.
And yes, he can legally do that. Illegal aliens have more legal protections against discrimination than I do. {psssst...support an inclusive ENDA}
- And there is the minister who used to be my client who won't even reply to my request to become a friend on Facebook.
I have learned now that the key phrase coming from a man, especially over the phone, is "I'll have to think about this..." And you KNOW that the second after he puts the phone down all thought of the matter had passed into oblivion, never to be raised up again.
- There is the ladyfriend who, after being told over an afternoon glass of Chardonnay, gave me a big hug, and said "This calls for champagne..."
- And then there is the Organist with whom I had worked for more than 10 years who now looks straight through me when I explain a technical problem and each time says "I will have to get a second opinion." As if I had suddenly become less than competent... And I am not even a blond...
- And furthermore, there is the man I have known for a while whose eyes keep straying downward to my chest while we are talking, He never used to do that before... Oh, and, by the way, the answer is "Yes."
- And there was the female TSA agent at the airport who looked at my boarding pass, then at my driver's license (with its photo of me with my very long hair and its big, annoying "M"), then at the boarding pass and again at the license...handed them back to me, said thank you, MA'AM and gave me a big thumbs-up.
-----------------------------------------
Each day has been a challenge. Each day has been an opportunity to discover the great richness of diversity in and on God's Earth. Each day has offered unimaginable blessings along with seemingly insurmountable challenges.
They say that when you transition, you find out who your true friends really are. I have many fine friends, and thank God each day for them. I hope that when the time comes, I can support them as freely and as well as they have supported me.
Where do I go from here?
Well, writing more in my blog for one. Composing more music for two. And taking more time to be with my friends.
There is one special lady who always has a tag line at the bottom of her emails, my favorite of which is:
"If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it"
I look forward to whatever God brings me to in this next year, knowing that I will be cared for by God and my friends.
Blessings...
Olivia
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
AND THE BEAT GOES ON ...
I had an experience yesterday which brought me up face to face not only with my mortality, but with my immortality. And yours, too...
The days' work having been finished, I was lurking through the virtual halls of the Facebook site. The Omnipotent FB Server had recommended that I friend a person, so I clicked on his photo to browse his profile. The words "Ephesus SDA Church" jumped out at me. I had installed an organ in the very same church. And we are talking ancient history here, folks. This was wayback in about 1975. Why, that makes me almost as old as god. Not as wise, though...
So I quickly recounted this connexion and hit Send. Within minutes, comes a return email from one Lawrence S. granting me the beneficience of Friend status (Hail! Omnipotent Server), and telling me how he as a 12 year old boy stood on the curb watching a crew unload his church's new pipe organ console.
Then it hit me. Hey, wait a minute. I am sitting at my desk with an email originating in year 2010 from a man in California recounting his exprience of watching ME unload an organ console on the streets of Harlem in the 1970s...well, who would'a thought...
Aside from a few prescient authors, who of us could have foretold, of a hot summer's day in 1975, that something called a computer would have become such a pervasive force in our individual lives less than 50 years hence, thereby assuring each of us our ubiquitous 15 minutes of fame whilst simultaneously confirming the fragility of those moments....
Has the Internet affected your life today? More than you know. More than any of us knows or could have imagined just a short 40 or so years ago...and in another galaxy far, far away...
Olivia
The days' work having been finished, I was lurking through the virtual halls of the Facebook site. The Omnipotent FB Server had recommended that I friend a person, so I clicked on his photo to browse his profile. The words "Ephesus SDA Church" jumped out at me. I had installed an organ in the very same church. And we are talking ancient history here, folks. This was wayback in about 1975. Why, that makes me almost as old as god. Not as wise, though...
So I quickly recounted this connexion and hit Send. Within minutes, comes a return email from one Lawrence S. granting me the beneficience of Friend status (Hail! Omnipotent Server), and telling me how he as a 12 year old boy stood on the curb watching a crew unload his church's new pipe organ console.
Then it hit me. Hey, wait a minute. I am sitting at my desk with an email originating in year 2010 from a man in California recounting his exprience of watching ME unload an organ console on the streets of Harlem in the 1970s...well, who would'a thought...
Aside from a few prescient authors, who of us could have foretold, of a hot summer's day in 1975, that something called a computer would have become such a pervasive force in our individual lives less than 50 years hence, thereby assuring each of us our ubiquitous 15 minutes of fame whilst simultaneously confirming the fragility of those moments....
Has the Internet affected your life today? More than you know. More than any of us knows or could have imagined just a short 40 or so years ago...and in another galaxy far, far away...
Olivia
Sunday, April 4, 2010
LOST LOVES
Alec Wyton once described the two professional certificates awarded by the American Guild of Organists as being the AAGO (Also a good organist) and the FAGO (Formerly a good organist)...
I never got that far. I was just a BPO (Basic Parish Organist)....
Likewise with flying little airplanes. If you are instrument rated you get to fly IFR (Instrument Flight Rules), and if not, you fly VFR (Visual Flight Rules)...
Again, I went back to the basics and flew SOP (Seat of Pants)...
I loved doing both things. Thy each had their moments...
There is little else like leading a large congregation in a familliar hymn, frantically grabbing for any stop or coupler that ain't already on and wishing for the miraculous appearance of a Chamade Trompette while the people are singing for all they are worth and threatening to sonically obliterate you...
There is not quite anything like sitting at the end of the runway, running the throttle up to its limit while you are standing on the brakes and the airplane is quivering like a wet spaniel. Then you pop the brakes, pull back on the yoke, and suddenly you are on your back going almost straight up at only 4 or 5 knots above your rated stall speed...
What a rush! Both give one a great FOP (Feeling of Power)...
I haven't played for a congregation nor flown an aircraft (unless you count riding in the back on Delta) in close to ten years. Mercifully, I don't remember the last time I did either, which is perhaps just as well...
In both cases, I had no choice because of my physical condition, but perhaps God was telling me it was time to move on before I crashed a perfectly good airplane or got fired for playing the hymns too fast...
I did learn something from both experiences: The trick to aging gracefully is to move on to other pursuits while they will still remark "So soon?"
Easter Blessings to y'all...
Olivia
I never got that far. I was just a BPO (Basic Parish Organist)....
Likewise with flying little airplanes. If you are instrument rated you get to fly IFR (Instrument Flight Rules), and if not, you fly VFR (Visual Flight Rules)...
Again, I went back to the basics and flew SOP (Seat of Pants)...
I loved doing both things. Thy each had their moments...
There is little else like leading a large congregation in a familliar hymn, frantically grabbing for any stop or coupler that ain't already on and wishing for the miraculous appearance of a Chamade Trompette while the people are singing for all they are worth and threatening to sonically obliterate you...
There is not quite anything like sitting at the end of the runway, running the throttle up to its limit while you are standing on the brakes and the airplane is quivering like a wet spaniel. Then you pop the brakes, pull back on the yoke, and suddenly you are on your back going almost straight up at only 4 or 5 knots above your rated stall speed...
What a rush! Both give one a great FOP (Feeling of Power)...
I haven't played for a congregation nor flown an aircraft (unless you count riding in the back on Delta) in close to ten years. Mercifully, I don't remember the last time I did either, which is perhaps just as well...
In both cases, I had no choice because of my physical condition, but perhaps God was telling me it was time to move on before I crashed a perfectly good airplane or got fired for playing the hymns too fast...
I did learn something from both experiences: The trick to aging gracefully is to move on to other pursuits while they will still remark "So soon?"
Easter Blessings to y'all...
Olivia
Saturday, January 16, 2010
A PLACE OF MAGIC . . .
"I am a graduate of Westminster Choir College in Princeton NJ."
I say that to people who ask me where I went to college with fierce pride, the sense of which is founded in a special community of people who have gone before and come after. The long red line... each of whom has heard the sound.
The first time I trod upon the bricks of the Quad, I heard it. It is that sussurrus of music which pervades the campus. It comes from the practise rooms, the classrooms, and the Playhouse. It comes from the Chapel in the wee hours of the morning. Little did I know then, that it would color my life almost continuously for four very short years. Little did I know that the memory of it would always be in the corner of my mind, coloring my entire life even to this day.
Westminster is not just a place; it is a state of mind. It is song and more song. You cant sing in a choir with other people every day for four years withut a special bond forming. That bond is exemplified in the tradition of singing the Peter Lutkin "Benediction" at the conclusion of Choir College events and concerts.
It has been said that when Greek meets Greek, they open a restaurant. Well, whenever WCC alum meets WCC alum, they sing the Lutkin. Or as the late Lee Hastings Bristol remarked, "The Lutkin is the closest thing the Choir College will ever have to a 'fight song'..."
It is arguably not the greatest piece of music in the world, and to others it may even seem a bit mawkish; but to a Choir College person it is very special. You learn it as a Freshman at the first meeting of the Chapel Choir. You sing it at every possible occasion during your time at the College. You teach it to the choirs of your student church. And finally, in the great fane of the Princeton University Chapel, after your friends have asked "Whom shall we send?" and you have answered "Here am I, Lord, send me", it is sung lovingly to you - a final Benediction until you meet again.
From time to time over the forty-plus years since that day in the "U Chapel" when the Lutkin was sung to me and the members of my graduating class, I have myself felt drawn to that magical few acres of ground we call the Choir College. When I heed that call, without fail I come away refreshed and hopeful, renewed in spirit. Yet I know that the time is coming - not too soon, I hope - when I will not be able to make that pilgrimage except in my mind.
The late General Douglas McArthur spoke of such a time to the assembled students of West Point, his beloved Alma Mater, and with a few emendations I quote:
"The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished - tone and tints. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint anthems, of far voices united in song.
"In my dreams I hear again the crash of the Missa Solemnis, the rattle of Carmina Burana, the strange, mournful mutter of the Brahms Requiem. But in the evening of my memory I come back to Princeton. Always there echoes and re-echoes: 'The Lord bless you and keep you...'
"Someday I will sing that final Benediction with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the bar, my last conscious thoughts will be of the Choir, and the Choir, and the Choir.
I say that to people who ask me where I went to college with fierce pride, the sense of which is founded in a special community of people who have gone before and come after. The long red line... each of whom has heard the sound.
The first time I trod upon the bricks of the Quad, I heard it. It is that sussurrus of music which pervades the campus. It comes from the practise rooms, the classrooms, and the Playhouse. It comes from the Chapel in the wee hours of the morning. Little did I know then, that it would color my life almost continuously for four very short years. Little did I know that the memory of it would always be in the corner of my mind, coloring my entire life even to this day.
Westminster is not just a place; it is a state of mind. It is song and more song. You cant sing in a choir with other people every day for four years withut a special bond forming. That bond is exemplified in the tradition of singing the Peter Lutkin "Benediction" at the conclusion of Choir College events and concerts.
It has been said that when Greek meets Greek, they open a restaurant. Well, whenever WCC alum meets WCC alum, they sing the Lutkin. Or as the late Lee Hastings Bristol remarked, "The Lutkin is the closest thing the Choir College will ever have to a 'fight song'..."
It is arguably not the greatest piece of music in the world, and to others it may even seem a bit mawkish; but to a Choir College person it is very special. You learn it as a Freshman at the first meeting of the Chapel Choir. You sing it at every possible occasion during your time at the College. You teach it to the choirs of your student church. And finally, in the great fane of the Princeton University Chapel, after your friends have asked "Whom shall we send?" and you have answered "Here am I, Lord, send me", it is sung lovingly to you - a final Benediction until you meet again.
From time to time over the forty-plus years since that day in the "U Chapel" when the Lutkin was sung to me and the members of my graduating class, I have myself felt drawn to that magical few acres of ground we call the Choir College. When I heed that call, without fail I come away refreshed and hopeful, renewed in spirit. Yet I know that the time is coming - not too soon, I hope - when I will not be able to make that pilgrimage except in my mind.
The late General Douglas McArthur spoke of such a time to the assembled students of West Point, his beloved Alma Mater, and with a few emendations I quote:
"The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished - tone and tints. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint anthems, of far voices united in song.
"In my dreams I hear again the crash of the Missa Solemnis, the rattle of Carmina Burana, the strange, mournful mutter of the Brahms Requiem. But in the evening of my memory I come back to Princeton. Always there echoes and re-echoes: 'The Lord bless you and keep you...'
"Someday I will sing that final Benediction with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the bar, my last conscious thoughts will be of the Choir, and the Choir, and the Choir.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
THE GLOBAL IMPORTANCE OF BACH TODAY
This address was brought to my attention today, and I believe it cannot be reprinted too many times...
So please welcome one of my favorite journalists, Uwe Siemon-Netto.
**********
The Global Importance of Bach Today
(Opening presentation by Uwe Siemon-Netto at the "Bach in Today's Parish" conference, Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, IN, November 2, 2009)
A few caveats are in order before I speak to you about the global significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I am not a musicologist, nor a musician; you'll hear from these eminent scholars and artists later. I am just a journalist, and as a journalist, I'll start with hometown news first -- before going global.
I was born in Leipzig, virtually in the shadow of the Thomaskirche. When I was four, my parents began taking me to the motet or cantata services in the Thomaskirche every Friday or Saturday. This might sound alien to present-day parents, Lutherans included, who do not introduce their kids to music saying that they were "too busy" for that and preferred to spend some "quality time" with their children, like munching hamburgers together.
I spent most of World War II in Leipzig. This is why a blend of two kinds of acoustical impressions has been resonating in my head ever since my childhood - the sound of bombs and sound of Bach.
Often the two dovetailed. Often an air raid followed a cantata service or an organ recital. Or an air raid interrupted a house concert in our home. It was during one of these weekly concerts that I was first introduced to the Art of the Fugue, to which I shall return several times this morning.
The first time I heard the Art of the Fugue, it was played by a string quartet in the music room of our downtown apartment, which was destroyed on Dec. 4, 1943. Two of the musicians were members of the Gewandhaus orchestra, and two were amateurs. In the middle of the performance the sirens howled, and we all rushed to the basement.
There is something else I must tell you about these extraordinary events. They suspended on a very private level the artificial division between Jew and non-New imposed on us by the Nazis. Often Jewish relatives or friends came out of hiding a night to perform Bach or Beethoven, Pachelbel or Pastorius with us before joining us in the air raid shelters or disappearing into the night.
From that the very moment I heard the Art of the Fugue at home, the opening bars of its Contrapunctus One returned to my inner ear virtually every day - while being bombed, while fleeing from Soviet-occupied Leipzig after the War, while sitting exams at school, while feeling lovesick or covering the Vietnam War as a reporter, while suffering from a writer's blocks.
Oh, I sang Lutheran hymns in my head too, and I still do, none more often than "Abide with me." But most of all I am fixated by these fugues! They order my mind and my soul.
In my prayers fugues join the hymns my grandmother sang into my ears during the air raids. And this has been so for nearly seventy years now.
But that's enough about me for the moment. Let's stay in Leipzig for a while longer, though, in Leipzig, cradle of the peaceful revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall exactly 20 years ago. Did you know that this monumental event in history has a strong Bach connection?
The protest movement that ultimately snowballed into the bloodless revolution of 1989 started with young Christians, and even though it developed into a mass movement involving more non-Christians than Christians, it was the Church that provided the umbrella for its growth.
Here is a significant bit of information you will rarely find in your media:
This protest movement had its roots in the popular anger over a barbaric act committed by the regime of East Germany's Communist leader Walter Ulbricht. Ulbricht was a former bordello bouncer.
On his orders, the Communists blew up Leipzig's graceful late-Gothic university church. It stood on Karl-Marx-Platz, formerly - and now again -- called Augustusplatz. Ulbricht, also a native Leipziger, had big plans for transforming this largest square in Germany into the biggest proletarian parade ground in Europe. In Ulbricht, a church had no business standing at such secular venue.
The university church, symbol of Leipzig's academic life, as murdered on May 30, 1968. Three weeks later, the Third International Bach competition took place in Leipzig. During its opening session in the Congress Hall of the Zoo, Aall the Communist bigwigs sat in the front rows, next to prominent personalities of the international Bach community.
Suddenly, invisible hands unrolled a yellow poster from the ceiling of this concert hall causing a gasp. The poster showed the outline of the murdered church, the year of its death --1968 - and the words, "Wir fordern Wiederaufbau" ("We demand Reconstruction").
This spectacular incident drew the attention of the world's musical elite to a Communist outrage. The authors of this demonstration were four young physicists, all Christians. One was eventually betrayed by a West German leftist to East Germany's secret police and sent to prison.
It was this stunning episode that ultimately spawned the resistance movement whose success in November of 1989 Germans are commemorating in these weeks.
I must still beg you to remain with me in Leipzig for a little longer for it is, after all, the capital of the global Bach community, the number one pilgrimage site for Bach lovers from all continents. Of the 850 students at Leipzig's Hochschule f=FCr Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Germany's oldest state conservatory, almost one quarter hails from Asia. Asians fill the pews of the Thomaskirche during its motet and cantata services.
Japanese in particular have been flocking to Leipzig even in Communist days. One of them was musicologist Keisuke Maruyama. He became a Christian by studying the impact of the weekday pericopes in the 18th-century Lutheran lectionary cycle on Bach's cantatas.
After he had finished his research he told my friend Rev. Johannes Richter, then the superintendent (regional bishop) of the half of Leipzig's Lutheran parishes: "It is not enough the read Christian texts. I want to be a Christian myself. Please baptize me."
When Richter told me this during one of my rare reporting stints to Leipzig, atheism was the state religion of East Germany. On the same occasion I interviewed the members of the Thomanerchor, whose director Bach had been from 1723 until his death in 1750.
Since the Reformation, the Thomanerchor has been a municipal institution, and so it was in Communist days. But under Communism, for the first time in the choir's history, no chaplain was allowed to provide pastoral care to these boys in their boarding school. For the previous 800 years, their predecessors received their instruction in the Christian faith in their dorms; now even table prayers were forbidden. To be catechized they had to go to a nearby church.
But when I asked several of these children whether they were believers they replied: "O yes, almost all of us are. You cannot really sing Bach without faith."
These two examples show that in an era of darkest atheism Bach worked as a missionary - to a scholar from far-away Asia, and to kids raised in a godless environment, and even a ranking Communist functionary.
I remember interviewing the director of the Leipzig Bach Institute of that period. He was a member of the Communist hierarchy. He told me that he could only be an atheist only as long as he did not have to listen to Bach. "It is strange, though, how quickly this changes when I hear Bach's music."
This now really does take me to the global significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I have made the fascinating discovery that whenever I write about Bach for the Atlantic Times, my regular client, these articles automatically appear in its sister paper, the Asia-Pacific Times.
Why should this be so? Because the editors of both publications know that Bach is one of the hottest topics in the Far East. You write about Bach in Germany or in France or in the United States, and Asians gobble it up - so much so that features like these sell advertising space more easily than many other topics.
My wife and I spend our summers in the Dordogne in southwestern France, where towns and villages are gradually restoring their Romanesque parish churches; there are about one thousand of them in the Dordogne alone. These sanctuaries are usually empty, largely for lack of priests. But this changes during the summer thanks to a concert series organized by Ton Koopman, the great Dutch organist and Bach performer, who owns a home there.
Then busloads of music lovers pour into the Dordogne from all over the world, Dutch, Belgians, Germans, Scandinavians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese. A French count sleeps in a car parked immediately in front of ancient churches where the musicians store their ancient instruments. He protects those instruments literally with his own body against thieves and vandals.
French peasants devoid of musical education suddenly appear in their churches they and their ancestors had ignored for at least two centuries. Their children, until recently ignorant of any form of classical music now join choirs whipped into shape by Koopman, the star, and hitherto unknown instructors.
Wealthy Frenchmen like my friend Francis Vigne, a retired engineer, buy orphaned organs from the Netherlands and Germany and install them in these rural sanctuaries that had never held any instrument since they were built a millennium ago. Now slowly the locals, intrigued by their alien sounds, pop into these churches they had never seen from the inside. And more and more often do I hear them sigh: "All we need now is a pastor."
It is my impression, which I cannot substantiate with statistics, and for which I must beg you to trust my experienced journalist's nose, that all this is a manifestation of what many French call la grande soif pour Dieux or, more sophisticatedly, la soif pour la transcendence.
I claim that the music of Bach and his contemporaries lures the thirsty to a place where they will be refreshed -- to ancient edifices where they sit tightly packed on narrow benches, often without backrests, and listen to Koopman's Baroque ensemble, more and more and more every year - so much so that many copycats are now imitating Koopman's initiative.
When I see and hear all this I cannot help thinking with enormous sadness and anger of one big Lutheran church near St. Louis, which proudly proclaims: "Here you will never hear the music of Johann Sebastian Bach."
Well, let me tell you this: In southwestern France people might not fill the pews every Sunday but they have also not replaced the altars with sets of drums; they swing along not with praise bands but with Bach, Telemann and Pachelbel, Sch=FCtz, Schein and Scheidt. And I have noticed that when the concert season is well over, some of the churches, once so empty, remain packed.
Yes, I do believe that Bach is busily at work as an evangelist, to paraphrase Nathan Soderblom, the former archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden. I also share a similar view expressed by the late Arthur Peacocke, one of the most significant figures in the burgeoning dialogue between Faith and Science.
Peacocke, an Anglican canon and a noted biochemist, sounded much like Martin Luther who once described music as a tool of the Holy Spirit. He specifically made a point to which I am inclined to subscribe to heartily:
The Holy Spirit Himself dictated The Art of the Fugue into Bach's plume.
When I wrote this on my blog site I got into deep waters with Lutheran coreligionists who believe themselves to be more orthodox than I.
What infuriated them was not only my reference to the Holy Spirit's authorship of the Art of the Fugue, but even more so a story of mine describing how Glenn Gould's rendering of the Goldberg Variations, another very abstract work by Bach, had triggered the interest of Masashi Masuda from Hokkaido in northern Japan in Christianity.
Masuda told me on the telephone one day that he wanted to discover the source of this wonderful composition - and was guided to the Christian faith, thus supporting Arthur Peacocke's theory.
Masashi Masuda became a member of the Society of Jesus, and ultimately a professor of systematic theology at Sophia University, a Jesuit-owned school in Tokyo.
You cannot believe the furious electronic missives aimed at me across the internet in response to this report. "Sir, did you not know that the Holy Spirit only works through the Word?" one angry reader chided. I replied, "I thought we had learned in Systematics III that the Holy Spirit blew as he wished.
I apologized saying that I was unaware that the Third Person in the Trinity was under any obligation to study the Book of Concord before blowing? So now we know: The Holy Spirit has no right to use an abstract composition by Johann Sebastian Bach as a shoe ladle for the Word of God.
Another email correspondent seemed ready to burn me at the stake, if only this could be done in cyberspace, for implying in my Masashi Masuda story that the Holy Spirit might have guided this former non-believer to a denominationally incorrect target. "See? Now Siemon-Netto even asserts that Bach has driven this man to the Antichrist."
Rare in a journalist's life are such wonderful occasions when divine irony refutes absurdity with swift fury. On the very day I received this email a friend from Portland, Oregon, sent me this beautiful bit of news: She had a grandson, who used to be a godless lout. Then one day his father gave him a Glenn Could recording of Bach's Italian Concerto, another work without words.
A few months later, this young man surprised his father by playing the Italian Concerto on the father's piano, from memory. Until that point Dad had had no idea that this teenager even knew how to handle a piano.
Next, the boy informed his grandmother that he would now like to learn how to play the organ.
So from that day on he accompanied her every Sunday to her Lutheran church, and now he can play the organ and has become a Christian. I just copied this bit of her email to my angry interlocutor, self-righteously adding three of the first Latin words I had ever learned: "Quod erat demonstrandum."
As Prof. Robin Leaver told me this morning, Johann Olearius, the 17th-century German mathematician and librarian called the Holy Spirit "der grosse Kapellmeister" (literally, the great orchestra donductor). Again: Quod erat demonstrandum.
This leads me to a fascinating question others are probably more competent to answer than I:
How come that the most destructive and tasteless forms of music and the very best have an almost equal ability to transcend ethnic, cultural and geographic barriers while others don't.
How come you see people twitch to the same inane beat whether you are in Iceland or Okinawa, in Berlin or Bali? If Arthur Peacocke is right that the Holy Spirit disseminates Bach, what do you call the spirit that promulgates rap and Hip Hop but not, for example Schubert's lieder, on a global scale?
We might have to consult psychologists here, perhaps even physicians. After attending a genuine - not touristy - Voodoo seance in Haiti back in 1964 my wife told me that this experience had literally put a spell on her, mesmerized her, changed her physically at least as it was happening.
One physician said that this intense drumbeat actually changes your breathing or your heartbeat. I don't know about that. I was there too, and it did nothing for me. But like my wife, and evidently like huge audiences in Tokyo, I feel profoundly changed when listening to the Art of the Fugue or the final chorus of Bach's St. John's Passion.
There might well be some kind of spirit involved in Rap and Voodoo, in addition perhaps even to temporary biological and physiological transformations. Others might be more competent to opine on this.
But what about the Spirit who made sure that the Japanese with their entirely different musical background grasp the significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whereas most of us Westerners might find the traditional tunes of Japan charming, exotic, an alien delight, but not really overwhelming.
About ten years ago, I put this question in Tokyo to a couple of musicologists, whose names, I am ashamed to say, I have misplaced in my messy archives. They came up with the following theory that might in part explain the current Bach Boom in Japan and other parts of Asia for several decades now.
When Francis Xavier and other Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries landed in southern Japan in the mid-16th century, they brought with them Western-style church music, especially Gregorian chant, and the organ. In fact they built pipe organs from bamboo, and before the sixteenth century was out, some Japanese princes were so accomplished on the Queen of the Instruments that in the 1560s three of them toured European courts playing before kings and princes and before the Pope.
Christianity was eradicated in Japan in the early 17th century. Christians were crucified, burned at the stake, and scorched to death while hanging upside-down over cesspools.
But my Japanese interlocutors told me that while the Christian faith was wiped out, elements of Western music infiltrated Japanese folk song. This influence evidently remained strong enough to help Bach's music sweep Japan four centuries later.
I like this theory. I am sure Arthur Peacocke would have loved it. It comforted me in my perplexity throughout the last four years in St. Louis when I listened to Robert Bergt's spectacular Bach at the Sem performances, and found the huge Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus filled with white heads.
Most of these heads belonged to members of outside communities. I was grateful to see them there. But where were the seminarians in whose theological tradition the music of Johann Sebastian Bach played such a towering role? Where, for that matter, were most of the faculty members?
These concerts were recorded and then repeated over KFUO-FM, this marvelous gift by faithful German-American Lutherans to the larger St. Louis community, a jewel of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod whose reputation is otherwise not really one of winsomeness.
Now this KFUO is being sold for an apple and an egg. The church body whose founder had linked music and the Holy Spirit so closely glibly jettisons one the Comforter's most splendid tools. Ladies and gentlemen, by all means grill me electronically for this outburst: This unfathomable act reminds me hauntingly of Walter Ulbricht's massacre of
our University Church in our mutual hometown of Leipzig in 1968.
I have been invited to talk to you about the Global Significance of the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach. You cannot do this without contemplating the Third Person of the Trinity, and I cannot help noticing that He is being mocked in our own family of faith.
Of course you can try to keep the Holy Spirit and his toys out of reality and replace them with kitsch. But be warned. The Holy Spirit will still blow as he wills, perhaps not on Founder's Way in St. Louis, but -- Japan and Korea, in once abandoned Romanesque churches in southwestern France, in the head of a formerly godless lout in Oregon -- and in my head, which keeps finding order and comfort thanks to Bach's incomplete masterpiece, the Art of the Fugue.
Uwe Siemon-Netto Ph.D., D.Litt.
Director
Center for Lutheran Theology & Public Life
Concordia University,
Old Administration Building, 312 A
1530 Concordia West
Irvine, CA 92612-3203
So please welcome one of my favorite journalists, Uwe Siemon-Netto.
**********
The Global Importance of Bach Today
(Opening presentation by Uwe Siemon-Netto at the "Bach in Today's Parish" conference, Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, IN, November 2, 2009)
A few caveats are in order before I speak to you about the global significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I am not a musicologist, nor a musician; you'll hear from these eminent scholars and artists later. I am just a journalist, and as a journalist, I'll start with hometown news first -- before going global.
I was born in Leipzig, virtually in the shadow of the Thomaskirche. When I was four, my parents began taking me to the motet or cantata services in the Thomaskirche every Friday or Saturday. This might sound alien to present-day parents, Lutherans included, who do not introduce their kids to music saying that they were "too busy" for that and preferred to spend some "quality time" with their children, like munching hamburgers together.
I spent most of World War II in Leipzig. This is why a blend of two kinds of acoustical impressions has been resonating in my head ever since my childhood - the sound of bombs and sound of Bach.
Often the two dovetailed. Often an air raid followed a cantata service or an organ recital. Or an air raid interrupted a house concert in our home. It was during one of these weekly concerts that I was first introduced to the Art of the Fugue, to which I shall return several times this morning.
The first time I heard the Art of the Fugue, it was played by a string quartet in the music room of our downtown apartment, which was destroyed on Dec. 4, 1943. Two of the musicians were members of the Gewandhaus orchestra, and two were amateurs. In the middle of the performance the sirens howled, and we all rushed to the basement.
There is something else I must tell you about these extraordinary events. They suspended on a very private level the artificial division between Jew and non-New imposed on us by the Nazis. Often Jewish relatives or friends came out of hiding a night to perform Bach or Beethoven, Pachelbel or Pastorius with us before joining us in the air raid shelters or disappearing into the night.
From that the very moment I heard the Art of the Fugue at home, the opening bars of its Contrapunctus One returned to my inner ear virtually every day - while being bombed, while fleeing from Soviet-occupied Leipzig after the War, while sitting exams at school, while feeling lovesick or covering the Vietnam War as a reporter, while suffering from a writer's blocks.
Oh, I sang Lutheran hymns in my head too, and I still do, none more often than "Abide with me." But most of all I am fixated by these fugues! They order my mind and my soul.
In my prayers fugues join the hymns my grandmother sang into my ears during the air raids. And this has been so for nearly seventy years now.
But that's enough about me for the moment. Let's stay in Leipzig for a while longer, though, in Leipzig, cradle of the peaceful revolution that brought down the Berlin Wall exactly 20 years ago. Did you know that this monumental event in history has a strong Bach connection?
The protest movement that ultimately snowballed into the bloodless revolution of 1989 started with young Christians, and even though it developed into a mass movement involving more non-Christians than Christians, it was the Church that provided the umbrella for its growth.
Here is a significant bit of information you will rarely find in your media:
This protest movement had its roots in the popular anger over a barbaric act committed by the regime of East Germany's Communist leader Walter Ulbricht. Ulbricht was a former bordello bouncer.
On his orders, the Communists blew up Leipzig's graceful late-Gothic university church. It stood on Karl-Marx-Platz, formerly - and now again -- called Augustusplatz. Ulbricht, also a native Leipziger, had big plans for transforming this largest square in Germany into the biggest proletarian parade ground in Europe. In Ulbricht, a church had no business standing at such secular venue.
The university church, symbol of Leipzig's academic life, as murdered on May 30, 1968. Three weeks later, the Third International Bach competition took place in Leipzig. During its opening session in the Congress Hall of the Zoo, Aall the Communist bigwigs sat in the front rows, next to prominent personalities of the international Bach community.
Suddenly, invisible hands unrolled a yellow poster from the ceiling of this concert hall causing a gasp. The poster showed the outline of the murdered church, the year of its death --1968 - and the words, "Wir fordern Wiederaufbau" ("We demand Reconstruction").
This spectacular incident drew the attention of the world's musical elite to a Communist outrage. The authors of this demonstration were four young physicists, all Christians. One was eventually betrayed by a West German leftist to East Germany's secret police and sent to prison.
It was this stunning episode that ultimately spawned the resistance movement whose success in November of 1989 Germans are commemorating in these weeks.
I must still beg you to remain with me in Leipzig for a little longer for it is, after all, the capital of the global Bach community, the number one pilgrimage site for Bach lovers from all continents. Of the 850 students at Leipzig's Hochschule f=FCr Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Germany's oldest state conservatory, almost one quarter hails from Asia. Asians fill the pews of the Thomaskirche during its motet and cantata services.
Japanese in particular have been flocking to Leipzig even in Communist days. One of them was musicologist Keisuke Maruyama. He became a Christian by studying the impact of the weekday pericopes in the 18th-century Lutheran lectionary cycle on Bach's cantatas.
After he had finished his research he told my friend Rev. Johannes Richter, then the superintendent (regional bishop) of the half of Leipzig's Lutheran parishes: "It is not enough the read Christian texts. I want to be a Christian myself. Please baptize me."
When Richter told me this during one of my rare reporting stints to Leipzig, atheism was the state religion of East Germany. On the same occasion I interviewed the members of the Thomanerchor, whose director Bach had been from 1723 until his death in 1750.
Since the Reformation, the Thomanerchor has been a municipal institution, and so it was in Communist days. But under Communism, for the first time in the choir's history, no chaplain was allowed to provide pastoral care to these boys in their boarding school. For the previous 800 years, their predecessors received their instruction in the Christian faith in their dorms; now even table prayers were forbidden. To be catechized they had to go to a nearby church.
But when I asked several of these children whether they were believers they replied: "O yes, almost all of us are. You cannot really sing Bach without faith."
These two examples show that in an era of darkest atheism Bach worked as a missionary - to a scholar from far-away Asia, and to kids raised in a godless environment, and even a ranking Communist functionary.
I remember interviewing the director of the Leipzig Bach Institute of that period. He was a member of the Communist hierarchy. He told me that he could only be an atheist only as long as he did not have to listen to Bach. "It is strange, though, how quickly this changes when I hear Bach's music."
This now really does take me to the global significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I have made the fascinating discovery that whenever I write about Bach for the Atlantic Times, my regular client, these articles automatically appear in its sister paper, the Asia-Pacific Times.
Why should this be so? Because the editors of both publications know that Bach is one of the hottest topics in the Far East. You write about Bach in Germany or in France or in the United States, and Asians gobble it up - so much so that features like these sell advertising space more easily than many other topics.
My wife and I spend our summers in the Dordogne in southwestern France, where towns and villages are gradually restoring their Romanesque parish churches; there are about one thousand of them in the Dordogne alone. These sanctuaries are usually empty, largely for lack of priests. But this changes during the summer thanks to a concert series organized by Ton Koopman, the great Dutch organist and Bach performer, who owns a home there.
Then busloads of music lovers pour into the Dordogne from all over the world, Dutch, Belgians, Germans, Scandinavians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese. A French count sleeps in a car parked immediately in front of ancient churches where the musicians store their ancient instruments. He protects those instruments literally with his own body against thieves and vandals.
French peasants devoid of musical education suddenly appear in their churches they and their ancestors had ignored for at least two centuries. Their children, until recently ignorant of any form of classical music now join choirs whipped into shape by Koopman, the star, and hitherto unknown instructors.
Wealthy Frenchmen like my friend Francis Vigne, a retired engineer, buy orphaned organs from the Netherlands and Germany and install them in these rural sanctuaries that had never held any instrument since they were built a millennium ago. Now slowly the locals, intrigued by their alien sounds, pop into these churches they had never seen from the inside. And more and more often do I hear them sigh: "All we need now is a pastor."
It is my impression, which I cannot substantiate with statistics, and for which I must beg you to trust my experienced journalist's nose, that all this is a manifestation of what many French call la grande soif pour Dieux or, more sophisticatedly, la soif pour la transcendence.
I claim that the music of Bach and his contemporaries lures the thirsty to a place where they will be refreshed -- to ancient edifices where they sit tightly packed on narrow benches, often without backrests, and listen to Koopman's Baroque ensemble, more and more and more every year - so much so that many copycats are now imitating Koopman's initiative.
When I see and hear all this I cannot help thinking with enormous sadness and anger of one big Lutheran church near St. Louis, which proudly proclaims: "Here you will never hear the music of Johann Sebastian Bach."
Well, let me tell you this: In southwestern France people might not fill the pews every Sunday but they have also not replaced the altars with sets of drums; they swing along not with praise bands but with Bach, Telemann and Pachelbel, Sch=FCtz, Schein and Scheidt. And I have noticed that when the concert season is well over, some of the churches, once so empty, remain packed.
Yes, I do believe that Bach is busily at work as an evangelist, to paraphrase Nathan Soderblom, the former archbishop of Uppsala in Sweden. I also share a similar view expressed by the late Arthur Peacocke, one of the most significant figures in the burgeoning dialogue between Faith and Science.
Peacocke, an Anglican canon and a noted biochemist, sounded much like Martin Luther who once described music as a tool of the Holy Spirit. He specifically made a point to which I am inclined to subscribe to heartily:
The Holy Spirit Himself dictated The Art of the Fugue into Bach's plume.
When I wrote this on my blog site I got into deep waters with Lutheran coreligionists who believe themselves to be more orthodox than I.
What infuriated them was not only my reference to the Holy Spirit's authorship of the Art of the Fugue, but even more so a story of mine describing how Glenn Gould's rendering of the Goldberg Variations, another very abstract work by Bach, had triggered the interest of Masashi Masuda from Hokkaido in northern Japan in Christianity.
Masuda told me on the telephone one day that he wanted to discover the source of this wonderful composition - and was guided to the Christian faith, thus supporting Arthur Peacocke's theory.
Masashi Masuda became a member of the Society of Jesus, and ultimately a professor of systematic theology at Sophia University, a Jesuit-owned school in Tokyo.
You cannot believe the furious electronic missives aimed at me across the internet in response to this report. "Sir, did you not know that the Holy Spirit only works through the Word?" one angry reader chided. I replied, "I thought we had learned in Systematics III that the Holy Spirit blew as he wished.
I apologized saying that I was unaware that the Third Person in the Trinity was under any obligation to study the Book of Concord before blowing? So now we know: The Holy Spirit has no right to use an abstract composition by Johann Sebastian Bach as a shoe ladle for the Word of God.
Another email correspondent seemed ready to burn me at the stake, if only this could be done in cyberspace, for implying in my Masashi Masuda story that the Holy Spirit might have guided this former non-believer to a denominationally incorrect target. "See? Now Siemon-Netto even asserts that Bach has driven this man to the Antichrist."
Rare in a journalist's life are such wonderful occasions when divine irony refutes absurdity with swift fury. On the very day I received this email a friend from Portland, Oregon, sent me this beautiful bit of news: She had a grandson, who used to be a godless lout. Then one day his father gave him a Glenn Could recording of Bach's Italian Concerto, another work without words.
A few months later, this young man surprised his father by playing the Italian Concerto on the father's piano, from memory. Until that point Dad had had no idea that this teenager even knew how to handle a piano.
Next, the boy informed his grandmother that he would now like to learn how to play the organ.
So from that day on he accompanied her every Sunday to her Lutheran church, and now he can play the organ and has become a Christian. I just copied this bit of her email to my angry interlocutor, self-righteously adding three of the first Latin words I had ever learned: "Quod erat demonstrandum."
As Prof. Robin Leaver told me this morning, Johann Olearius, the 17th-century German mathematician and librarian called the Holy Spirit "der grosse Kapellmeister" (literally, the great orchestra donductor). Again: Quod erat demonstrandum.
This leads me to a fascinating question others are probably more competent to answer than I:
How come that the most destructive and tasteless forms of music and the very best have an almost equal ability to transcend ethnic, cultural and geographic barriers while others don't.
How come you see people twitch to the same inane beat whether you are in Iceland or Okinawa, in Berlin or Bali? If Arthur Peacocke is right that the Holy Spirit disseminates Bach, what do you call the spirit that promulgates rap and Hip Hop but not, for example Schubert's lieder, on a global scale?
We might have to consult psychologists here, perhaps even physicians. After attending a genuine - not touristy - Voodoo seance in Haiti back in 1964 my wife told me that this experience had literally put a spell on her, mesmerized her, changed her physically at least as it was happening.
One physician said that this intense drumbeat actually changes your breathing or your heartbeat. I don't know about that. I was there too, and it did nothing for me. But like my wife, and evidently like huge audiences in Tokyo, I feel profoundly changed when listening to the Art of the Fugue or the final chorus of Bach's St. John's Passion.
There might well be some kind of spirit involved in Rap and Voodoo, in addition perhaps even to temporary biological and physiological transformations. Others might be more competent to opine on this.
But what about the Spirit who made sure that the Japanese with their entirely different musical background grasp the significance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whereas most of us Westerners might find the traditional tunes of Japan charming, exotic, an alien delight, but not really overwhelming.
About ten years ago, I put this question in Tokyo to a couple of musicologists, whose names, I am ashamed to say, I have misplaced in my messy archives. They came up with the following theory that might in part explain the current Bach Boom in Japan and other parts of Asia for several decades now.
When Francis Xavier and other Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries landed in southern Japan in the mid-16th century, they brought with them Western-style church music, especially Gregorian chant, and the organ. In fact they built pipe organs from bamboo, and before the sixteenth century was out, some Japanese princes were so accomplished on the Queen of the Instruments that in the 1560s three of them toured European courts playing before kings and princes and before the Pope.
Christianity was eradicated in Japan in the early 17th century. Christians were crucified, burned at the stake, and scorched to death while hanging upside-down over cesspools.
But my Japanese interlocutors told me that while the Christian faith was wiped out, elements of Western music infiltrated Japanese folk song. This influence evidently remained strong enough to help Bach's music sweep Japan four centuries later.
I like this theory. I am sure Arthur Peacocke would have loved it. It comforted me in my perplexity throughout the last four years in St. Louis when I listened to Robert Bergt's spectacular Bach at the Sem performances, and found the huge Chapel of St. Timothy and St. Titus filled with white heads.
Most of these heads belonged to members of outside communities. I was grateful to see them there. But where were the seminarians in whose theological tradition the music of Johann Sebastian Bach played such a towering role? Where, for that matter, were most of the faculty members?
These concerts were recorded and then repeated over KFUO-FM, this marvelous gift by faithful German-American Lutherans to the larger St. Louis community, a jewel of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod whose reputation is otherwise not really one of winsomeness.
Now this KFUO is being sold for an apple and an egg. The church body whose founder had linked music and the Holy Spirit so closely glibly jettisons one the Comforter's most splendid tools. Ladies and gentlemen, by all means grill me electronically for this outburst: This unfathomable act reminds me hauntingly of Walter Ulbricht's massacre of
our University Church in our mutual hometown of Leipzig in 1968.
I have been invited to talk to you about the Global Significance of the Music of Johann Sebastian Bach. You cannot do this without contemplating the Third Person of the Trinity, and I cannot help noticing that He is being mocked in our own family of faith.
Of course you can try to keep the Holy Spirit and his toys out of reality and replace them with kitsch. But be warned. The Holy Spirit will still blow as he wills, perhaps not on Founder's Way in St. Louis, but -- Japan and Korea, in once abandoned Romanesque churches in southwestern France, in the head of a formerly godless lout in Oregon -- and in my head, which keeps finding order and comfort thanks to Bach's incomplete masterpiece, the Art of the Fugue.
Uwe Siemon-Netto Ph.D., D.Litt.
Director
Center for Lutheran Theology & Public Life
Concordia University,
Old Administration Building, 312 A
1530 Concordia West
Irvine, CA 92612-3203
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