C.S. Lewis on Church Music
Musical Taste
There are two musical situations on which I
think we can be confident that a blessing rests. One is where a priest or an
organist, himself a man of trained and delicate taste, humbly and charitably
sacrifices his own (aesthetically right) desires and gives the people humbler
and coarser fare than he would wish, in a belief (even, as it may be, the
erroneous belief) that he can thus bring them to God. The other is where the
stupid and unmusical layman humbly and patiently, and above all silently,
listens to music which he cannot, or cannot fully, appreciate, in the belief
that it somehow glorifies God, and that if it does not edify him this must be
his own defect. Neither such a High Brow nor such a Low Brow can be far out of
the way. To both, Church Music will have been a means of grace; not the music
they have liked, but the music they have disliked. They have both offered,
sacrificed, their taste in the fullest sense. But where the opposite situation
arises, where the musician is filled with the pride of skill or the virus of
emulation and looks with contempt on the unappreciative congregation, or where
the unmusical, complacently entrenched in their own ignorance and conservatism,
look with the restless and resentful hostility of an inferiority complex on all
who would try to improve their taste – there, we may be sure, all that both
offer is unblessed and the spirit that moves them is not the Holy Ghost.
Musical Intention
It seems to me that we must define rather
carefully the way, or ways, in which music can glorify God. There is … a sense
in which all natural agents, even inanimate ones, glorify God continually by
revealing the powers He has given them. And in that sense we, as natural agents,
do the same. On that level our wicked actions, in so far as they exhibit our
skill and strength, may be said to glorify Good, as well as our good actions. An
excellently performed piece of music, as natural operation which reveals in a
very high degree the peculiar powers given to man, will thus always glorify God
whatever the intention of the performers may be. But that is a kind of
glorifying which we share with the ‘dragons and great deeps’, with the ‘frost
and snows’. What is looked for in us, as men, is another kind of glorifying,
which depends on intention. How easy or how hard it may be for a whole choir to
preserve that intention through all the discussions and decisions, all the
corrections and the disappointments, all the temptations to pride, rivalry and
ambition, which precede the performance of a great work, I (naturally) do not
know. But it is on the intention that all depends. When it succeeds, I think the
performers are the most enviable of men; privileged while mortals to honor God
like angels and, for a few golden moments, to see spirit and flesh, delight and
labour, skill and worship, the natural and the supernatural, all fused into that
unity they would have had before the Fall.
This was taken from an essay entitled "On
Church Music" by C. S. Lewis. It can be found in a current publication called
Christian Reflections published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.; ISBN:
0802808697.