Many Christians turn to both music and liturgy as primary sources of nourishment for spiritual growth. This is not surprising since expression through ritual actions and music making are both fundamental human needs. More often than not, the two are coupled together. This is particularly true in the tendency of liturgy to incorporate music into its structure. However, this coupling also occurs via the opposite route. One usually attends a concert for the purpose of hearing music, not to participate in a ritual of any kind. However, concerts tend to have their own sense of liturgy as Christopher Small demonstrates at great length in his book "Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening." A concert, like a liturgy, takes place in a space set apart from other human activity. There are certain gestures that have to happen if it is going to be a real concert. For example, the concertmaster must walk on the stage (a place set apart within the place set apart in the same way that a sanctuary is set apart from the nave of a church), and nod to the first oboist who then plays an A-natural so that all the musicians can play the same note in order to make sure they are properly in tune with each other. In some places, the National Anthem is then performed before the concert proper begins.

Both liturgy and music are primarily social events. A ritual is not a ritual if there are not two or (preferably) more people acting in concert. (The phrase used here is instructive.) A musical performance requires the concerted efforts of several people who, like participants in a ritual, are doing the same thing together. The audience is not as passive as some think. The act of listening (or refusing to listen) is an integral part of the "liturgy" of a concert. The rhythms created by the musicians are intended to be reproduced within all listeners, whether they move in time with the music as etiquette at rock concerts dictates, or sit perfectly still, as etiquette as symphony concerts dictates. In each case, the common action unites the group, at least for the duration of the liturgy or the concert. Although both can be done in a solitary mode, the social element is still present. One who reads an office out of a prayer book, is saying the same words and performing the same gestures that other members of that religious body are doing. A solitary listener with a Walkman is still interacting with the music in the same way as many other listeners, both solitary and corporate. Nowadays, solitary listeners write each other about their music listening in e-mail news groups.

We can't prove it, but it seems extremely likely that music and liturgy have been intertwined with each other since the dawn of creation, the earliest prayers sung or chanted and that the earliest music sung in worship. When their God delivered them from the Egyptians at the Red Sea, the immediate response was for Moses and Miriam and all the people to break out in song. (Ex. 15:1; 15:20) St. Paul attests to the importance of music for the earliest Christians when he encourages the Ephesians to "be filled with the Spirit, as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts." (Eph. 5: 18-19) Most of us who grow up in a Christian environment take in hymns and the liturgical music of our tradition with our mother's milk.

Music and liturgy are not synonyms, of course, but in the minds of some they can come pretty close to being that. In any case, liturgy is incomplete without music. As for music, is music incomplete without liturgy? Or, is music more complete outside of liturgy? These last two questions show us that music and liturgy are separable. We learn quite early that the hymns sung in church and the Top Forty songs played on AM radio are not the same, with very few exceptions. Later on, we might notice that a Brahms symphony is not likely to be played at a church service and that a choral concert is not likely to include a Stanford Magnificat, although it might include one of his motets. In church, it is possible to do a low mass or a spoken Evening Prayer. A child might overhear the grownups complaining about the music chosen by the choirmaster and then later, when old enough to be on a parish committee, become involved in a debate over what music the choir should be allowed to sing. These debates would never occur if music and worship were perceived synonyms in the sense that all music is worship. Even if all music should be demonstrated to have some spiritual value, it does not follow that all music should be used in worship. Moreover, if there were not a distinction, nobody would feel the tension expressed by St. Augustine of Hippo:

For sometimes I feel that I treat [music] with more honor than it deserves. I realize that when [hymns] are sung these sacred words stir my mind to greater religious fervor and kindle in me a more ardent flame of piety than they would if they were not sung....but I ought not to allow my mind to be paralyzed by the gratification of my senses, which often leads it astray....Sometimes, too, from over-anxiety to avoid this particular trap, I make the mistake of being too strict. (Augustine of Hippo: Confessions 10:33; tr. Pine-Coffin; Baltimore; Penguin; 1961)

This is a tension which has occasionally been resolved by separating music from liturgy altogether, or nearly so. The Puritans who banned most or all music from the liturgy did not ban music from their lives. Rather, they were nourished their lives by worship and music, but not at the same time. For example, while Oliver Cromwell drove the choristers and their music out of the churches during the Commonwealth, he always had a handful of star choristers in his entourage to sing the music banned from church during his recreational hours. On the other side, there is much music that could never have been created if it had been tied down to liturgical norms of any kind. Music is more "pure" when it is free to be itself.

There is no question that music plays second fiddle when it is an element in a liturgy just as music plays second fiddle in any context where it is used as a means to an end other than itself. Not only is this true with liturgy but it applies to music used to rouse patriotic fervor, pass the time while working, or stir up a revolution. Music written for a movie also takes this inferior position and can regain prominence only in a soundtrack album or when revamped into a symphonic work such as Vaughan Williams' celebrated Sinfonia Antarctica. Leonard Bernstein wrote about his disappointment when the climax of the love music he wrote to support a love scene in On the Waterfront was faded out to allow one of them to suggest going off to have a beer. ("Use it in a suite," the director suggested.) Even in Fantasia, a movie ostensibly focused on music, Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring are mangled to fit the movie's scenario and pacing. Just as a movie has its own structure and dynamic movement that will govern its use of music, so liturgy governs its use of music by its structure and pace. Movies and liturgy have ends of their own and the production of great music is not the end for either.

The end to which liturgy is directed is further each worshiper's relationship with God. That means that the liturgy should be structured in such a way that it is effective in directing one's attention to God and to what God has done for humanity. In the Eucharist, the words and action (and music, if any) should move towards the central focus of the consecration of the bread and wine. This act of consecration recalls the Last Supper, "the night in which [Jesus] was betrayed," for the purpose of leading the assembly into the central Mystery of the Church: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Just as music for a movie should support and add power to that movie's story and not distract the viewer from it, music at the Eucharist should support the main action of the liturgy and not distract from it.

There are two primary considerations about music when considered in relationship with liturgy. One is the thorny question of what music is sufficiently congruent to the occasion of worship. Should Mozart and Haydn be banned because they are too happy and lacking in solemnity, or should they be affirmed for expressing joy in the Lord? What about jazz? I have looked at this question a bit in my article Is Music Religious? and so I will not pursue it here. The other question is how music should fit into the structure of a liturgy. This is the question I will look at in this essay. I will concentrate mostly on Anglican worship because that is my tradition and the one I know best. I will work with a few broad liturgical norms that seem to be a consensus among liturgists today. Liturgical sensibilities have changed over the centuries and will likely change again. Current norms are available for us to work with, not something that should be set in stone.

Since the ordinary of the mass is often sung, its proportional relation to the rest of the liturgy is important. It makes sense to have a musical number at the beginning of the liturgy to get the ball rolling. A Kyrie or a Gloria will do just fine. Although the two together make a fine diptych, doing both has the disadvantage of stopping the flow of the liturgy before it gets off the ground. Moreover, doing only one or the other helps focus the liturgy as a particularly festive occasion or a celebration of "ordinary time." The recitation of the Creed is intended to put a cap on the Liturgy of the Word (the reading of scripture and sermon) and to prepare for the celebration of the Holy Mysteries. The Sanctus unites the hosts of Heaven with all worshipers on earth and gives an impetus to the consecration of the bread and wine that will follow immediately. An overly long musical setting of the Sanctus, especially one that includes an interminable operatic Benedictus, brings the dynamic flow of the liturgy to a grinding halt. More often than not, the Agnus Dei is either sung while communion is being distributed or afterwards as a prayerful meditation and do does not normally affect the pace or structure of the liturgy.

Evening Prayer in the Anglican rite is particularly well-designed for the integration of music with worship. After the assigned psalms are said or sung, there is an alternation of lengthy readings from scripture with canticles taken from scripture. It is important that elaborate settings of the canticles such as the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis should be a suitable length so as to allow amply time to reflect musically on these texts but not lose track of the office's structure. The rubrics allow for the singing of an anthem towards the end of the office after most of the prayers have been said or chanted. Here is an opportunity to present an ample work if the choir and its director are up to it as here, it will put a capstone on the office without interfering with its flow.

Perhaps the most important reforming principle of the liturgy during Reformation times was to make the content of the liturgy intelligible to the people. Casting the liturgy in the spoken language of the time and place was one obvious way to do this and all the reformed churches went this route. Although Rome did not give up the Latin liturgy at this time, the Vatican did pass decrees requiring that musical settings express the Latin words clearly. Liturgical reforms countered music's potential to obscure or even obliterate the text by enjoining use of music in such a way as to communicate the text as clearly as possible. The most radical way to make give prominence to the Word was to banish music from the liturgy altogether or allow only the simplest settings which would hardly be distinguishable from chanting. This is what happened in some Calvinistic churches. The Anglican tradition fostered a whole new style of composing where the florid, sometime riotous counterpoint of pre-Reformation composition was replaced by settings that normally assigned one note per syllable, used extensive solos, and arranged the counterpoint so that the words came through clearly. The Lutheran tradition developed dramatic productions that culminated in the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach with the effect of creating a double sermon at the heart of the worship service: one sermon in word only and one sermon where the word was set to music. In fact, some of Bach's two-part cantatas were intended to be split up with a spoken sermon coming between the two parts. Palestrina applied the Vatican decrees regarding music by revising his style so that the Latin text can be easily heard provided one knows the Latin at all. Palestrina's famous Missa Pape Marcelli is a good illustration of this achievement, even if legends to the effect that this setting saved polyphony from banishment are probably false.

Music is also greatly effect by the stress given today to participation by all worshipers. The liturgy is supposed to be an act of the people and not the performance of one person (i.e. the priest) or of an elite (e.g. a choir) Relegating most of the people attending a liturgy in a passive role tends to defeat the purpose of the liturgy. A liturgy is something one does, not something one watches. Since the Catholic liturgy that was inherited from the Middle Ages relegated everybody except the choir and sanctuary party to a passive role, contemporary liturgists are inclined to champion the cause of "the people" with great vigor. Even so, it does need to be remembered that listening is not really a passive exercise. Music lovers know that listening to a worthy piece of music is hard work and that performers depend on the energy generated by deep listening in order to give out their best. Likewise, listening to the Word of God at the liturgy is hard work as one is trying to bring the Word into one's heart and be energized by it in one's life. This consideration suggests that there is a place for a liturgy that features the treasures of our choral heritage and it reminds us that the art of listening is a lost art that also needs to be reclaimed. However, the active participation of each Christian in worship as the work of the people (worship as the work of God) and in the rest of life as the further work of God's people needs to be acted out. For that reason, liturgy that features congregational participation should be normative, even if liturgy geared more towards listening remains a significant alternative. It is also important to guard against envy in this matter. We should rejoice in the gifts that other people have and not resent it when those gifts are used in the assembly. There is a double standard here if people are willing to sit and listen to one person with specialized training speak for fifteen or twenty minutes (or longer!) but then are upset if a small group with special training sings a difficult piece of music that requires special training to perform.

The subordination of music to liturgy raises questions about how the quality of music is effected. Any time that music is used for an end other than itself, this question arises. For example, if music is required to convince people that they are living in a happy socialist paradise, then the tragic music of Shostakovich is not accepted by the political bosses. The evolution of dance music gives us a useful example of the variance in musical quality we get depending on how useful the music is for the purpose of dancing. As a rule, music that is really suited for dancing is not very interesting just to listen to. In order to be danced to, the beat must be clear and steady and the melodic line easily grasped. All of the composing techniques that make music interesting such as rhythmic variance and little surprises in the melody make it harder to dance to. When J.S. Bach came along and wrote suites out of the dances of his time, people sat down and listened to them. Much the same thing happened when rock music of the late sixties grew to such complexity that it no longer "had a good beat and was easy to dance to," as participants in American Bandstand noted in records they rated highly.

There are many examples that illustrate ways in which the requirement to make music fit the structure of a liturgy clips its wings. There are many settings of the Mass that are known as "hunting" masses. They got that name because they were written for bishops who demanded that Sunday mass be short enough to allow them to spend the rest of the day hunting. Bishop Colloredo, Mozart's boss in Salzburg, was of that type and that is why his Missae Brevae are--well--brevae. Compare a "hunting" mass by Lasso or Mozart with full-length masses that they wrote and the discrepancy in quality is obvious. However, mass settings such as these are quite useful for worship today when because they make a good proportional fit to the liturgy and also because many members of the congregation want to get out on the golf course before the day is done. Likewise, numerous mediocre settings of the Anglican Communion Service that dovetail with the liturgy are sufficiently effective in their liturgical context, even if they make weak concert pieces. One could say that the music is serviceable.

There are also, however, numerous gems that would never have been composed if it were not for the liturgical needs of brief settings of the ordinary. One can think of the dignified and haunting Mass in the Phrygian Mode by Charles Wood and the highly inventive Missa Brevis of Benjamin Britten. Igor Stravinsky, who relished the challenge of having to compose a ballet number so that it would run for a precise length of time, celebrated his conversion to Christianity by composing a mass with these liturgical demands firmly in mind and the result was one of his many masterpieces. Moreover, the limits normally put to a Magnificat setting for Evening Prayer that it be a four to eight minute work with a continuous flow of text and clarity of diction have inspired, if not great symphonies, many works of excellence which, again, the world of music would never have had. Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Weelkes crafted a whole new musical style to meet the liturgical needs of their time as did Charles Stanford and Herbert Howells in theirs. There are also many more composers who, if unsung in standard music histories, are sung in church. This rich repertory spanning many centuries surely not only justifies but should encourage the preservation of those ecclesiastical choral institutions that keep alive many musical treasures that would otherwise fall into oblivion.

Meeting the needs for full congregational participation can put quite a crimp in the quality of music sung in church. Much of the best music is difficult to perform. A normal congregation cannot sing Palestrina or Mozart. If they are going to have a mass by either composer, they will have to listen to a choir sing it. Plainsong is often commended for its spiritual depth but it is designed for groups that sing together quite frequently, preferably several times a day as in a monastic community. It is not easy to sing plainsong well in a congregation but repetition of the same chants by a group of faithful people for long periods of time can help considerably. The usual fare for congregational singing are hymns. Many hymns are deeply loved by in the Church and some of them are quite stirring and beautiful. Other hymns that are so loved are terrible. For some deeply committed Christians, singing some of these hymns constitutes one of the greatest trials of being a churchgoer. Many new hymns are being written today, ranging from powerful hymns such as "Here am I, Lord" to hymns that melt into the ubiquitous category of singable but bland "contemporary music," which nobody seems to like. I won't try to solve the mystery of how it is that some of the worst music and art in the world stirs the most religious devotion for some people. I am sure it has something to do with God’s little jokes that involve raising up the despised, the foolish and the weak to confound the honored, the wise and the strong. Artistically sophisticated people who look down on their brothers and sisters in Christ on account of their taste are not necessarily the best and holiest Christians.

The question is: must music be freed from liturgical use in order to achieve a high quality as music? Thinking of the music of Palestrina and Mozart, we are tempted to say: "Of course not!" But we need to think again. Much of the greatest liturgical music of the past conformed to sensibilities that are highly out of favor today. The masses of John Taverner are great music, but the long melismas that belabor a word like benedictus for huge stretches of time hardly makes the text intelligible to the worshiper who knows Latin. Moreover, to allow the whole congregation to proclaim the faith by reciting the Creed makes use of any choral setting of the Credo problematic. So, many of our greatest treasures in church music are no longer appropriate for frequent liturgical use, even if there were more church choirs capable of doing them.

So, although music has not been totally banned from worship in our neo-Puritanical liturgical culture, much of the best music has. And I am sure there are some liturgists who would like to drive out a lot more music that hangs on in special environments such as cathedrals and college chapels. In spite of the value of some liturgically sound music, we come to the odd conclusion that the best music is, in the main, not suitable for liturgical use at all. That is, for the music-loving Christian, the music that will do the most to nourish one's spirituality will not often be music included in worship. This isn't just a matter of not playing a Mahler symphony at the Offertory. The B Minor Mass of J.S. Bach, written for and dedicated to Soli Gloria Dei is unsurpassed in its power to reach to the very depths of a listener's soul. From start to finish, God's glory is palpable in every thread of the music. Being a setting of the Latin Mass, it could hardly have used it in its Lutheran composer's own church even if its length were not a problem.

With his massive two-hour choral work that is too great a whole to be part of an even greater whole, Bach anticipated a movement by almost a century that would push religious music out of church and put it into the concert hall. Handel, too, was pushing in this direction by writing oratorios were intended for the theater. His crossing of this boundary aroused protests that Israel in Egypt and Messiah were sacrilegious because the words of scripture were sung in a secular setting. The Requiems of Berlioz and Verdi and the Missa Solemnis by Beethoven are all the right length for a normal symphony concert and that is where on usually hears them. These works are just two examples of the mushrooming development of music into complex expressions of powerful emotions. Coming as it did at a time when traditional religion was undergoing serious questioning, music, along with the other fine arts, began to take over as a substitute religion for some people. Hence the uncanny and amusing analogies between concert halls and places of worship.

This secularization of music, even religious music, did not drain it of spiritual content. On the contrary, this separation did indeed free music for many deep explorations of the human spirit including humanity's quest for union with God. It is just that the separation of music for edification from worship that began with Cromwell has been fulfilled in the past century with the institution of the concert. It is instructive that, although polyphonic masses by Palestrina and Victoria are usable liturgically, they are more often and more fittingly done before recording engineers and in concert venues. It happens that, in their development of motifs throughout, these settings of the Mass have much the appeal of symphonic music that also features the same scope of development. Some may complain that this music is ripped out of its original context--and it is--but it does receive a niche that makes sense to classical music listeners, and allows one to drink in the spiritual wisdom embodied in the music without worrying about whether or not one is being distracted from the liturgical mysteries. Perhaps the best way to see the value of this separation by imaging the celebrant at the Eucharist standing at the altar for about twenty minutes while the glorious, but intense Sanctus from the B Minor Mass is sung before moving into the heart of the Eucharist. The bread and the wine on the altar would be overwhelmed by the sound. And yet, it is not music that has saved the world, but Jesus, who gives himself to us in and through the bread and the wine.