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Gifts of music

by David F. Recher

The following article is a "Coffee Talk" that was given by David Recher at Spirit Rhythms, an evening of music, fellowship and reflection. Spirit Rhythms events are a monthly ministry of St. John's Lutheran Church, Three Rivers, Michigan.

Spirit Rhythms is a way to share and to celebrate the gift of music. What a joy it is to be sharing it with you, and to have these wonderful people sharing their musical gifts with us.

I have a deep and abiding love for music, and I consider that to be a gift in itself. I've also been given a voice to sing with and ears that allow me to stay on pitch most of the time. Those, I've learned, are the sum of my ability to make music. All my life, though, I've received a wealth of musical gifts from those with a gift for creating them.

Three times in my life, I had the thrill of hearing the original Don Cossack chorus led by Sergei Jaroff. Jaroff was a strutting "banty" rooster of a man who stood a little over five feet with his Cossack boots on. At symphony hall in Boston, I watched him stalk across the stage at intermission time and tug on the stage door. It stuck; that eight-foot door wouldn't yield to that five-foot giant. As he struggled a second and a third time to open it, the men in the chorus began to chuckle. The chuckle rose to a roar. Finally, a huge man in the bass section, about seven feet in his boots, strolled over and yanked open the door. There they stood, one looking up and the other down. We in the audience loved it. We loved their music far more.

I've heard Charlie Barnett's band, Guy Lombardo's and Glenn Miller's, heard the Chicago Symphony led by Sir Thomas Beecham, stamped my feet to the sound of Charlie Acuff's fiddle and a host of Appalachian and bluegrass artists at Norris, Tennessee. I have enjoyed a wealth of musical blessings.

My tastes in music might not be yours, but I've been able to taste, and enjoy, a large variety over the years. I can't name the source, but someone once said, "I like what I know and I know what I like." In that way, I can identify with another man who loved music, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the same Sam Clemens we know as Mark Twain. No one has ever given us the measure of Sam's musical talent, but I do know he would often play the piano as family and friends joined in songfests at the Twains' home in Hartford. His youngest daughter, Clara, married a brilliant concert pianist of the time, Ossip Gabrilovich. The music he made and Sam heard must have been a source of comfort and relief from the tragedy and grief of Sam's later years.

But, he knew what he liked, and he could express, with his wonderful gift for language and humor, his feelings about the rest. One night, after an opera he had attended, someone asked him what he thought of the performance. Sam replied, "I haven't heard anything like that since the orphanage burned down." On another occasion, he remarked, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."

We all know what we like. Some folks are blessed with more likes than others. I say blessed, because music is a gift that can enrich our lives. Lutherans, those thoughtful people who are thrilled to share this musical evening with you, have known this and have celebrated with music since our beginnings some 480 years ago. We've been known as "the singing church."

Martin Luther, after whom Lutherans are called, was no plaster saint, frozen forever in a state of piety. He enjoyed life. He could also be stubborn and opinionated, but not about music. Lutheran music developed and flourished within the secular musical culture of the time. Luther, somewhat of a musician himself, borrowed from a broad range of sources, including the beer hall. One of our best-loved hymns, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," is set to the tune of a tavern drinking song.

A slightly more musical fellow of whom you may have heard, one we also like to claim as one of our own, is Johann Sebastian Bach. It's been 273 years since he died, but his music is still influencing the music of our own culture, even rock music. Bach felt much the same as Luther did about music. Although much of his composition was devoted to sacred music, he evidently didn't see any difference in principle between sacred and secular music. Many of his sacred pieces were adapted from secular pieces.

Bach always kept the goal of perfection up front, so maybe for him, and maybe for us, it's the quality of the music that counts. I don't mean quality in terms of technical perfection. The quality of music to my mind, "uncluttered" as it is by a musical education, lies in its ability to hit people where the heart is, to move them, to affect mood and emotion.

Could it be that we, who live in a far less religious culture than Bach did, are coming back to that same idea, that there isn't any difference between secular and sacred music? At any rate, we are now living the beginnings of a new renaissance in music used in the Christian Church, a new freedom in the use of musical expression. We're using music from the culture that speaks to the culture.

Both Bach and Luther leave us another legacy in addition to their musical gifts and their attitude toward music. It lies in their willingness to see all music as a gift from God, and as a gift to God. At the beginning of his sacred works Bach inscribed the letters J.J. These stood for the Latin words, "Jesu, juva," or "Jesus, help." At the end of the scores he wrote the letters, S.D.G. for "Sola Deo Gloria:" "To God alone the glory." I understand that similar inscriptions appear even on some secular pieces.

In seeing music as gift, Bach and Luther were acknowledging the giver. In short, their view of music was a gift in itself, a gift of their faith. And that is a gift that keeps on giving, an unending legacy.