I was going back through a chapter of the book, Teaching Beauty: A Vision for Music and Art in Christian Education, where several friends have contributed chapters. In the chapter by Ken Myers, he recounts how rehearsing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach provided him with an introduction to the entire musical tradition of the West. Here’s the quote from Ken Myers:
In 1967, the main musical preoccupation in my life was J. S. Bach’s motet Jesu, Meine Freude. I was a sophomore in high school and had been encouraged to try out for the Bach Choir, which practiced for about six months, once or twice a week, mastering a single work for performance at a single concert. In learning that music, something was conveyed to me that I had never experienced in the hymns and choruses at church, or in the music I listened to on the radio.
It was not an easy conversion. Learning to like Palestrina and Mozart, Fauré and Vaughan Williams, Beethoven and Prokofiev, was something of a stigma for a high school student, who was socially obliged to respond enthusiastically to Wilson Pickett or Jimi Hendrix or the Rolling Stones. But 1967 was undoubtedly the most formative year of my cultural life, since that intense and rich introduction to Bach was for me an introduction to the entire musical tradition of the West.1
If you have heard Ken Myers speak or listened to his Mars Hill Audio Journal, you will know all too well just how Bach’s music has shaped who Ken Myers is as a cultural apologist and critic. Our students here are getting to follow a variation on the same kind of introduction that Ken Myers undertook. My Geneva Academy 8th–12th grade musicianship classes have begun working on Bach’s cantata (BWV 80) on Luther’s “Ein Feste Burg is unser Gott,” where we get the most common music version of “A Mighty Fortress is our God.”
The above video clip was recorded from my iPhone just before lunch this Friday. It was my junior/senior musicianship class, and we were rehearsing through the Bach in preparation for our upcoming concert on October 29 here in West Monroe, Louisiana. Some of the 8th/9th graders had a study hall, and when they joined us towards the end of our time to get in a bit of bonus combined rehearsal time. You see, these singers are not a proper choir. They meet in a musicianship class format. Occasionally, we take a short-term singing project like this cantata, Rutter’s Gloria, or the Bach Magnificat. I want them to experience the performance and serving aspects of singing, even though we prioritize reading and writing and growing in the grammar of music in the school day curriculum. Notice they are singing this complex choral polyphony without piano accompaniment or assistance. I’m so delighted with what they have been able to do in just the first week and a half of working on this Bach Cantata BWV 80.
Irrigating Deserts
C. S. Lewis’s well-known admonition in Abolition of Man about not “chopping down jungles” but “irrigating deserts” is a fitting way to describe what is happening here. These students have “caught” the love of Bach. I wouldn’t have been able to lecture their way into it. Music Appreciation or Fine Arts units on Bach’s music would not do the same. Instead, I have found there is no better instructor than the singing of Bach’s music. The rehearsal process and the music learning have already produced much fruit.
These students have put in the time of music literacy training from the perspective of the Kodály music pedagogy. As a result, they possess a high ability to sing through complex music and hopefully be stewards of that great music when others cannot perform it. The musical oasis here in northeast Louisiana has been an interesting experiment in how an average-looking small private Christian school can recover music literacy. But beyond that, with literacy, that generation can taste some refreshing musical waters like that of Bach, Handel, Palestrina, and many similar composers like Ken Myers referenced in his quote above. Indeed, my students, like Ken Myers, have been able to taste and see some marvelous musical morsels for themselves.
Be Encouraged
These students are no better than any other. What we are doing here can be done and is being done in different corners of our country. I try my best not to tell them I’m trying to mature their loves and musical tastes, but that’s precisely my goal. It continues to yield much fruit, and I pray it continues to do so here and in other places across the country. I leave you with another clip from them singing later in the same rehearsal and experimenting with different standing positions in the room.
Teaching Beauty: A Vision for Music and Art in Christian Education. United States: Square Halo Books, 2016, 13–14.
Bach's Desert Irrigation