What Language Shall I Borrow?
Steve Jobs, the man who revolutionized the way we listen to music, was asked by his 2011 biographer what was on his iPod. In his answer, Jobs related a musical experience that had nothing to do with an mp3 player. Jobs had desperately wanted virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma to play for his wedding. Though scheduling conflicts would not allow it, they soon developed a friendship. One day Ma visited Jobs’ home to play the J. S. Bach piece he had intended for the wedding. As he played Jobs “teared up.” After Ma finished, Jobs told him, “You playing is the best argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don’t really believe a human alone can do this” [1]. This was no mean feat, for Jobs was a Zen Buddhist.
What was it in Ma’s performance that spoke to Jobs? What was it that transcended his disbelief? Certainly, music speaks about God’s beauty. But specifically, I believe Jobs was moved by Bach. Though some of his favorite music selections included Bob Dylan and John Lennon, it was Bach’s music that argued for the existence of a transcendent God. What was it about Bach that was so effecting?
Bach the Man
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was born into a large family of musicians in eastern Germany. Though his paternal family was staunchly Lutheran, his maternal side was Anabaptist. Thus, while Bach was raised in a Lutheran home, his early experiences of the faith were flavored by radical Reformationalism. However, Bach was orphaned by disease at the age of ten.
For the next five years Bach resided with an older brother who was a church organist in Ohrdruf, Germany. During his time there, Bach continued the schooling he had begun in his hometown. His coursework covered Bible history, the Lutheran Catechism, psalms, Latin, Greek, arithmetic, and rhetoric [2]. All of these subjects would come to figure significantly in his composing [3].
Bach left Ohrdruf in 1700 at the age of fifteen. For the next 23 years he composed and performed music in several small German towns, eventually settling in Leipzig. After passing a prerequisite theological examination, Bach was placed over the musical services of all the churches in Leipzig and the direction of all music courses offered at St. Thomas School. Because he worked for the town bureaucracy, Leipzig held many difficulties for Bach. His career there would be a long and turgid one.
Though his work in Leipzig was often volatile, his home life was warm and bustling—“like a beehive, and just as full of life” as his son Emanuel put it [4]. Bach married two wonderful women; and fathered eighteen children, ten of which survived to adulthood [5]. Despite his domestic successes, at the time of his death in 1750 Bach was considered behind the times musically, remembered by only a few.
If It Ain’t Baroque Don’t Fix It—Bach the Musician
If Bach was viewed by his contemporaries as being “behind the times,” it was only because his thought and music was so “decidedly pre-Enlightenment” [6]. Along with reorienting the relationship between faith and reason, the Enlightenment spawned new musical styles that Calvin Stapert describes as “spurning the complexities of Bach’s art in favor of a simplicity that the Enlightenment took to be ‘natural’” [7].
This desire to sound “natural” was the result of the Enlightenment view of music as nothing more than a “gratification of the sense of hearing” [8]. Music was only a fanciful diversion meant for enjoyment—or to “play with our sensations,” as Immanuel Kant put it [9].
Bach did not subscribe to any such minimalistic view of music. He was behind the times—a composer who believed that music should communicate truth in all its complexity. Bach was born during the Baroque period (1580-1730), but died well into the Classical Period (1730-1820) of artistic music. This is an important dividing line. Pre-Enlightenment (pre-Classical) music was considered closely tied to rhetoric. As far back as the Greeks and Romans, music was treated as a persuasive language. It was not believed to communicate as precisely as words, but it was believed to convey broader concepts and ideals in a visceral way that words often could not.
This musical thought was at its peak during the Baroque period. In fact, during the Baroque period theorists “overtly described music as a branch of rhetoric,” and they often borrowed “terminology directly from the rhetoricians” [10]. No one composer embodies this rhetorical association more than J. S. Bach. But what was it that he wanted to say?
What Language Shall I Borrow to Thank Thee Dearest Friend?—Theological Music [11]
At his death, Bach’s library contained a large number of Lutheran theological works. Though his education did not extend to a university, he was well-read, and could carry on in-depth theological discussions with even learned scholars.
But Bach’s theology also infused his compositions. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his cantatas. During the late-16th and early-17th centuries, the Lutheran church service would have music for voices and instruments after the reading of the Gospel lesson for the day. Their texts were usually derived from the sermon and were meant to complement the message.
Cantatas have several parts: (1) instrumental solos drew the congregation into meditation; (2) short vocal pieces for soloists or choirs expressively related the message with the corresponding emotions of the text; and (3) familiar hymns or perhaps new words set to familiar tunes were sung by the congregation. They served a similar purpose to a well-formed music service in a modern Free Will Baptist church service.
Besides cantatas, Bach also wrote several oratorios, which are large pieces that tell a biblical story in song. Perhaps his most famous oratorio is his St. Matthew’s Passion, which was composed for performing during the Passion Week. In dramatic musical fashion, it retells Matthew’s account of Jesus’ last few days, culminating in His crucifixion. Though a concert version of passion oratorios emerged during the 18th century, Bach still wrote his for liturgical use in the local church. This meant that he stuck to the Gospel narrative (Mt. 26-27) without cutting portions or paraphrasing, since the purpose was to highlight the Passion sermon that would be preached between the two halves of the oratorio.
But not all of Bach’s music is directly liturgical. He wrote many pieces for organ, harpsichord, violin, cello, and orchestra. Teaching music for much of his career also caused him to write pieces that were meant to train the musician’s physical technique, but also be beautiful (Two-Part Inventions and Three-Part Inventions among others). Though these pieces have no liturgical texts or uses, they still communicated Bach’s understanding of the world.
Bach was overtly Christian even in his instrumental works. They don’t convey specific doctrines like his cantatas or oratorios, but they do convey the spirit of those same doctrines. For example, the firm belief in order and infinite beauty in the complexity of creation can be heard in his Brandenburg Concertos. The believer’s quiet reverie while meditating on God’s closeness through the death of Christ is present in the prelude to his Cello Suite No. 1.
In these works Christian doctrines are not explicitly present, but their attending sensibilities are. Paul Elie states, “Bach is as Christian an artist as they come and yet wins acceptance on his own terms from people who would otherwise would have nothing to do with Christianity” [12]. Though many reductionist authors will try to deny Christianity’s influence on the authors, poets, painters, and musicians of the past, Elie says he has never encountered one for Bach [13]. He goes on to say:
Even the most hardened Marxist will still allow that something is going on in Bach that’s not materialist. . . . Again and again people you might expect to reduce Bach don’t. They’re willing to say, “This is an argument for things that I am otherwise not persuaded by” [14].
Conclusion
This brings us back to Steve Jobs: Jobs, a convinced Buddhist was so moved by hearing Bach played by a virtuoso cellist that it brought tears to his eyes. It was an argument for things by which he was otherwise not persuaded. The spirit of Bach’s deep faith in a transcendent and almighty God spoke through time and across space to a lost soul nearly 350 years after he had died. It did not bring Jobs to faith in Jesus Christ, but it did bear witness to him (cf. Jn. 16:7-8). It seems to me this should be my ultimate goal as a Christian musician.
The music I perform in my home and church should reflect the intricacy and beauty of reality, as opposed to conforming to a modern worldview which views music as only a whimsical diversion. The former can engender tears of reflective considered belief as opposed to tickling my fancy into a sensational response. Finally, would my music speak of my dearest Friend? Indeed, Bach is a paragon of what our music could be.
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[1] Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 425.
[2] Eva Mary and Sydney Grew, Bach (New York: Collier Books, 1947), 23, 25.
[3] Karl Geiringer, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Culmination of an Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 7. See also, Calvin Stapert, My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 9.
[4] Carl Philip Emanuel Bach quoted in Geiringer, 37.
[5] Bach was left a widower at age 35 with 4 children. He then remarried to a woman 16 years his junior who bore his remaining 14 children.
[6] Stapert, 47.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., 40.
[9] Music in the Western World, 297 found in Stapert, 47.
[10] Stapert, 12.
[11] J. S. Bach has only one hymn arrangement in the Free Will Baptist, Rejoice hymnal—“O Sacred Head Now Wounded.” The third verse reads, “What language shall I borrow, to thank Thee dearest friend?”
[12] Paul Elie interviewed by Ken Meyers, “On the Technologies that Reinvented Bach,” Mars Hill Audio Journal 120, Published 2/10/2014 accessed at https://marshillaudio.org/catalog/volume-120.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
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