Resources

Andrew Mark Sauerwein,
Abstract of Seminar Project

The project I intended to complete as an outgrowth of the seminar has quickly developed in several different directions and taken forms I didn’t anticipate. Some of these are described below. Most involve my creative work as a composer, which is where much of my perspective originated to begin with. The seminar had a profound effect on my conception of the compositional process and gave me an invaluable opportunity to examine the range of discourse in which the project fits. I plan yet to complete the article (or articles, or book) described below, but a fair bit of work remains before the ideas are sufficiently fleshed out and tempered.

My initial plan was to write an article outlining a “renewed vision” of the nature of beauty. The argument is as follows: In place of the contemporary notion that judgments of beauty are personal and arbitrary, consider that beauty, like truth, resides in God, and scripture speaks of the subject when it mentions God’s glory and splendor. In the same way that we come to know truth, we also come to know beauty. God reveals truth and beauty to us, his children, in the context of our individual and communal relationship with him through Christ, through all of the agencies of revelation: Jesus himself (“the image of the invisible God”), the scriptures, the created order, and our right ministry and worship of God. Thus, we come to know beauty better as we grow and mature in the knowledge of God and in discernment, and we rely on God’s formative work to guide us into an understanding of beauty. We rely not only on our individual gifts and discernment (which together might be called “expertise”) but also on the tempering and sharpening effect of pursuing beauty in community, as part of the body of Christ. As a result, beauty is not a matter of arbitrary taste, but a mystery as deep and fleeting as truth–something we understand in limited but substantial ways as God reveals himself to us and we come to know him better. This transforms our approach to a variety of beauty-affirming choices, such as choosing music for worship. We become answerable to God and to one another for what we admire as beautiful (there IS an accounting for taste).

My continuing work to develop these ideas runs in several directions, including these:

Composition:
The prevailing paradigms composers inherit from academic study and commercial practice emphasize individual style and innovation, a mentality of “remote genius,” and a de facto belief in the inherent value and importance of the autonomous composer. The above line of thought deeply challenges these values.

Here is an example of how my approach has changed: I have abandoned the search for “my personal voice” in favor of an artistic style motivated by content and service. My work is not “about” me, my presumed creative prowess and capacity for innovative originality, but focuses on revealing ideas and attitudes (ways of thinking and feeling about things) through whatever musical means best fits a given situation of music-making. As a child of God and a unique member of Christ’s body, my “personal voice” is inescapable, since I and my talents are God’s workmanship: so I can safely die to myself, so to speak. Interestingly enough, my work has become more unusual as a result. The God we worship (the “content”, if you will) is at one and the same time “with us” and beyond our capacity to fully understand: this demands ways of musical expression which both connect with worshipers in familiar territory and reach beyond the easily sensible or conventional, in order to pursue (and “make room for”) an ever-larger knowing of God.

As a result, my recent church music is hard to perform, but has gained a reputation for being worth the effort. Recently I completed a choral piece for the Palm Sunday service at Trinity Reformed Church (Orange City, IA). The choir had several rehearsals and members used practice tapes at home to learn their parts, and still struggled to navigate the piece during worship. Despite that, members of the congregation said afterward that it was “very meaningful” and several choir members told me, “it’s a hard piece, but it’s really growing on me!” The challenges don’t come so much from technical difficulties in the music but from the fact that it is stylistically unusual, which makes it hard (initially, at least) for performers to anticipate their notes and understand how the expression “works.” Performers and listeners alike are called to spend a bit of effort to engage the ideas presented through the music—which is the point of any act of worship, that it directs worshipers to see “through” the act to the One being worshiped.

Teaching:
The same kinds of thinking which change how I approach composition also reshapes my approach to other disciplines within music. For instance, music theory is generally taught as a system of rules and conventions which musicians first learn to follow and then learn to break. I have recently been emphasizing a different way of thinking in my classes. Instead of a set of rules to transgress, music theory represents a collection of conventions and norms which constitute the grammar of a particular musical language, shared by musicians and listeners. The expressive power of music lies in using the conventions as a reference point, such that the tension between expected patterns and what actually happens in the music has poetic potency. This doesn’t explain musical meaning in its entirety, but it underlines the substantial connection between musical structure and expressive meaning. It opens the door to seeing music not simply as organized sound, but as something chosen and made by particular people at a particular time and place with expressive purpose in mind. This allows the technical realm of music theory to integrate with the theological perspective on beauty summarized above.

The renewed view of beauty is the central topic of a course I am teaching this fall (2004) at Northwestern College, entitled “Music, Identity, and Beauty.” This general-education course is one of several intended to introduce freshmen to the academic study of liberal arts from a Christian perspective. This provides an opportunity for the students and me to explore, develop, and refine ideas about beauty, the arts, and worship in substantive and practical ways.

“Scholarship:”
My renewed approach to the compositional process and music theory gave shape to an essay entitled “Mystery and the Language of Musical Simultaneity,” which I delivered at Baylor University’s Art & Soul conference in Spring 2003. The conference that year was subtitled “Mystery and Meaning in the Arts,” so the essay discussed theoretical aspects of my composition A Resurrection Series in order to show how choices of musical language could effectively express something mysterious and provoke listeners to engage that mystery and wonder.
In a similar vein, I am co-directing a conference entitled Forging Links: Composers and Community, the Composition of Worship, to take place on September 17-19, 2004, in Durham, North Carolina. The purpose of Forging Links is to explore and encourage new collaborative relationships between composers who are Christians and their local congregations, and to encourage churches and composers to think imaginatively about renewing and enriching their worship as well as their engagement with the “concert-music” world. My participation in the conference itself includes an opening address and the composition of a choral setting of Psalm 29 in collaboration with Dave Stuntz, music director at Blacknall Memorial Presbyterian Church (Durham, NC).

…and the original idea for an article? As time permits, I plan to continue writing, and see what develops. Beyond developing and tempering the aesthetic and theological ideas, one of my chief concerns is translating the renewed understanding of beauty into practically useful terms. Most of my writing, composing, and teaching is directed toward this end.

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