Calvin R. Stapert, A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

What sort of meanings can music have or convey? Are there inherent, even fixed meanings in the grammar or structure of a musical composition, the ordering of sounds apart from anything extra-musical? Does music acquire meanings (for those who hear or make it) through the extra-musical associations of its functioning in a given culture? Text, time and place, timbre, velocity, volume, virtuoso performer: can such things determine an understanding of what music means or what music can do?

Music, as a non-discursive language, is an ordering of sounds that can bring forth as many responses as there are hearers. There are some things in its structure that lend themselves to certain human activities, and thus it is easy for us to associate specific genres of music with particular activities. It’s easier for an army to march to a steady beat, for a baby to calm down to a sotto voce lullaby, for a dancer to whirl ecstatically to an increasingly breathless percussive intensity (one in which the rhythmic component dominates the melody). It’s also often easier to enter into a meditative state of inward reflection with music of irregular but lengthy phrases, or for a group of untrained singers to sing together in step-wise motion rather than large leaps. In each case, music enhances a human activity at the same time as it reinforces the association of certain types of ordering of sound (certain musics) with that particular activity.

Calvin Stapert seeks to tell the story of what the church fathers thought about music and the ways in which music could either detract or enhance the church’s faith. He asks us to listen back to the thoughts of the church fathers, to listen behind some Enlightenment-based contemporary understandings of liturgical music that count anything that is pleasurable to listen to as being an appropriate vehicle for the worship of God. Stapert looks to the church fathers, yet what they spoke of time and time again was not the music per se but the associations that clung to the genres of music. Ritual music, whether it was the music of Temple and synagogue, or the music of pagan state or cultic gatherings, pre-dated the church and the song which arose in the resurrection community. As Stapert presents so well in his early chapter on “The Song of the Church in the New Testament,” there was singing… but what did it sound like? Stapert does not help us understand that as a new community there must have been some continuity with the ordering of sounds they were accustomed to, even as they sought to forge a separate identity.

In the sexually charged culture of the descending Roman empire, where both titillating entertainment and pagan ritual had intrinsic and identifiable musical components, where music was commonly associated with words and/or dance, and where an Aristotelian understanding of music’s effects on the passions (i.e. emotions or states and/or qualities of the “soul”) was an implicit understanding, could the fledgling Christian community sing the New Song with old notes? Because we have neither musical manuscripts nor recordings from the early Christian era, Stapert calls us to what he believes to be the primary sources—the writings of the church fathers, both Latin and Greek. He presents Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Ambrose, Chrysostom and Augustine, who agreed in their condemnation of music associated with theater and pagan rite yet presented a spectrum of beliefs as to how close Athens really needed to be to Jerusalem. However, with regard to understanding the public worship or devotional home life, such sources are secondary, that is, they are reflection. They are neither event nor source that can help us re-create a liturgical experience, and thus their usefulness is necessarily limited by the boundaries of the theories of music and music’s effects as they were understood in their day.

Stapert calls us to consider these reflections, albeit often allegorical reflections upon music by the church fathers, in hopes that the early twenty-first century church might look critically at its Enlightenment understandings of music and how such understandings effect the sound that arises from the faithful today. Whether the issue is outright idolatry or commonplace immorality, can music affect belief and action? His book serves as yet another reminder that the music we hear and sing when we gather for worship (in our homes or in a basilica) is a ritual way that we gain knowledge about the Divine, and that the associations of musical sound are not automatically lost in a new locale. Unfortunately, Stapert’s penchant for quoting text alone, as if text alone can reveal to us what a hymn sounded like, misses the connections to the wider conversation of liturgical and ritual studies and undercuts what he implicitly is trying to do, that is, move the current church’s music away from the popular auditory and visual spectacle that many believe will attract new “members.” Stapert’s argument would have been much stronger had he spent less time in quoting hymn texts. Text and tune together provide the mutual reading that is at the heart of the liturgical event, and it is from that embodied and auditorily inflected mutual reading that the potential meanings of a biblical or hymnic text are opened up for the gathered assembly. In the early twenty-first century, there are far too many who make a reverse argument based on text alone, as if an over-amplified hard rock setting, or a glitzy Broadway reprieve with would be capable of conveying the same meanings of a Psalm text as a Gelineau setting would do.

According to Stapert, the church fathers “left us… their musical imagery as our guide,” and from such imagery, “we can make responsible choices” (p. 201). While he provides wonderful information about both the church fathers and the understandings of the power of music within churchly and pagan cultures, a reliance on musical imagery as a primary source for the decisions we face today is ultimately unsatisfying. As he has graciously invited us in to read his reflections upon the church fathers’ reflections, let us now take his material and place it in further conversation with the insights of ritual scholars so that those who seek to faithfully praise the triune God may be strengthened in their journey.

Amy Schifrin is the Pastor at St. Peter Lutheran Church in York, Pennsylvania.