To sing is to sing about something, or so it seems.
In the clip below Steve Martin tells us something that should come as no surprise. To put it into my own words: Religious people have a lot of beautiful music, but atheists have nothing to sing about. Really, is it any wonder why people who believe in the infinite and incomprehensible, the uncreated and eternal noncontingent One, beyond being as we can even begin to imagine, especially when touched by faith in the revelation of love and goodness, have expressed it many thousands of times across the centuries? Is it any wonder that this music spans everything from the most magnificent masterworks to the simplest of children’s songs?
It was in the Church that ancient Greek modes evolved into the modern keys, that monophony evolved into chords, and that notation became a written language. Were I to take issue with anything in the humorous clip below, it might be that “Atheists just sing the blues,” or that “Atheists have Rock ‘n’ Roll.” I do not mean that they can’t sing those songs, or enjoy them, just as they can play Cantatas by Bach and sing hymns. But the Blues and Rock ‘n’ Roll also have their origins in the music of Faith.
Oh, yes they do. It was Gospel Music of the African Americans, as they survived the cruelty of slavery and the malicious injustice of Jim Crow, who created the great Spirituals, and who added the tritone to the pentatonic scale, thus creating the Blues Scale. Without that cultural innovation we would have no Jazz, no Blues, and no Rock ‘n’ Roll. Some people associate such sounds with bars, with venues of sin and carnal revelry. But the truth is that those sounds can also express the depth of feeling in the human heart, feeling that has been expressed in the music of prayer, the music both of mourning and of joy. That it can be carried into “dens of iniquity” should be no more surprising than the use of classic tonality in military music that celebrates war and destruction. It only tells me that we can never escape music because we can never escape God. The drunk man pours out his heart to the bar tender because deep within him is a psalmist pouring out his troubled heart to God. He simply does not know the better way until the day his eyes are opened. “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there (Psalm 139:8).”
Without Gregorian Chants and other Church music we would not have the musical “alphabet,” written notation, that gave us the first form of recording the sounds of rhythm and melody. One could now communicate across continents and across generations, sending unabridged musical thoughts as easily as sending poems and stories. Music could grow in complexity throughout the known world because of the richness of a new form of communication. People could sing in the same intervals from one country to another. This in turn led to the development of the triad, minor and major.
Without Bach, and his masterpieces mostly for Church, we would have no tempered tuning, and would be unable so freely to move from key to key, as we do today in every genre of music that has developed since his lifetime. Without the complex chords that were new and perhaps shocking in his pieces, we would have no modern harmony. The truth is that every possible arrangement of notes into intervals and chords is abundantly woven into his Church music, and the music of other Baroque composers.
The only harmonic difference between their time and our time, after the establishment of tempered tuning when it became the norm, is the expansion of progressions, that is, freer movement between chords that simply did not sound pleasing to the ear of their generation, and the generations that followed. The progression of One to Two-Major-7 with a diminished fifth, followed by Two-Minor-7 (the same root), before a Five-7 to One resolution was popularly accepted in Billy Strayhorn’s Take the A Train. But even though that harmonic progression would probably not have been met with success in eighteenth century, or even nineteenth century, Europe, the chords themselves were nothing new. Every chord that can be heard had been heard since the Baroque era: But not every sequence of chords.
For another example, in modern popular music a very familiar cadence is Five to Four to One. In the Baroque era, in the Classical era, and even through the late Romantic era, one could write the informal cadence of Four to One (“Amen”) as sung at the end of hymns, and most often in performance music, the formal cadence of Five-7 to One. But to move from Five to Four ever at all just wasn’t done. Apparently, it did not please the ears of those generations. But today it sounds perfectly normal to our ears, so we hear it in “Speaking words of wisdom, Let it be” At this point I must protest and correct an oft-repeated false assertion: Let it Be does not follow the harmonic progression of Pachelbel’s Canon, as is often alleged. There is no suspended chord that resolves in his canon, and certainly no Five to Four to One cadence. And, of course, let’s face it: That song is The Beatles having done Gospel Music. I mean, yes, Mary in the song is Paul McCartney’s mother speaking to him from heaven in a dream: But he knew full well that he was also creating an unmistakable literary allusion to the first chapter of Luke, to the Annunciation. So, it feels only right, even having gone to Five, that we nonetheless have the “Amen” of Four to One. And, probably most of Pete Townshend’s songs would have to be thrown out if people today could not appreciate Five to Four to One. And without Gospel Music having influenced the Blues, Jazz, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, we would not have that three-chord cadence. All of our musical roots are in worship, prayer, hymns, psalms, choral masterworks, chants, and spirituals.
And we could move on interculturally and consider the Hindu Classical Music that has developed in the East, listening to how it continues to develop with Anoushka Shankar’s works. If the birds can teach us anything, or even cayotes who, after playing “lone wolf” all day gather for choir practice at about Two O’clock in the morning to howl (as I often heard when I lived in the Pheonix Valley town of Fountain Hills), it is that we sing because God is present, always present everywhere; in churches and in bars, in cathedrals and in living rooms, on mountain tops and in the shower. In other words, without religious music, we would have not much at all to sing. For to sing is to sing about God, even if we do not realize it as intuitively as do the birds.