What Do You Think You Are Doing? the Musician and Teacher "Beyond the Page"

Now an angel of the Lord said Philip, Go south the road-the desert road-that goes down from Jerusalem Gaza. So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means queen of the Ethiopians). This man had gone Jerusalem worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. The Spirit told Philip, Go that chariot and stay near it. Then Philip ran up the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. Do you understand what you are reading? Philip asked. How can I, he said, unless someone explains it me? So he invited Philip come up and sit with him. (Acts of the Apostles 8:26-31, NIV)he Hymn Society in the United States and Canada has embraced a mission - to encourage, promote and enliven congregational M singing - that positions it at the intersection of three broadly conceived disciplines: first, music and musicmaking; second, teaching and learning; third, theology and liturgy. It goes without saying, really, that anyone who wants not only make music, but also teach others make and thus experience music in community, and pursue these things within the framework of the Judeo-Christian scriptures - that anyone who wants do these things must learn think multi-dimensionally, balance competing allegiances, and interrogate tacit motivations. The task is thoroughly, even uncomfortably, interdisciplinary. As a teacher, one must be clearheaded about the nature of the materials: in this case, music, and the diverse ways it functions with words in gathered community. As a musician, one has exercise artistry and insight and must position oneself open paths into the musical experience for one's neighbors. Finally, as a practical theologian, the musician-teacher is enjoined drill down deep into the reality that the divine manifests itself in the human in ways distinctly independent of language. This is not an easy business; it is messy, fraught with pitfalls, and countercultural, as will become apparent a little later on.I want approach this business particularly through the phenomenon of music and by considering the implications of teaching musicianship. Hymnology courses often foreground the poetry of hymns - and rightly so, except when this encourages the assumption that music carries words instead of confronting or partnering with them toward a common end or that music as such has no semantics of its own and no function beyond what is often imprecisely and very unhelpfully called beauty. This pernicious notion that words are delivered on the back of abstract sonority, something like cargo delivered by a train, is easy grasp, but spectacularly wrong. Its headwaters spring from the social and economic concerns of Western industrial culture at large and from the dialogues of Enlightenment rationalism that have played out since the late-eighteenth century.Accordingly, we tend value music as an arrangement of pitches that exists for itself on a neutral plane, be understood without reference socio-political context, without reference the layers of potential meanings nourished by those contexts, without reference the concerns of cultural history, in short, with minimal or no reference music's fundamentally social character and its ultimate involvement, it follows, with social injustice. One need only think for a moment about what today is called music theory, which since the mid-nineteenth century has defined itself by a maniacal concern for pitch organization in composition and, by implication, for written-down music. For most modern people educated in the West, music theory means score analysis, whether of a Dufay motet or a Bach chorale or a Messiaen organ work. Music history, the other half of the modern musician's academic paradigm, arose in large part from the nationalist agendas of late nineteenth-century German idealism as one of the Geisteswissenschaften or human sciences, essentially as cultural history. …

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