Sound Theology by Colleen Butcher

The coming week’s lectionary focuses on two particular passages from Isaiah. For this week’s writing, I went looking for musical settings of those scripture passages. What I found was, as is often the case, the adjacent possible: the connected, but distinct, random thing that is much better than what you originally set out to find.

What I discovered was Randall Thompson. read more…

Bach’s liturgical compositions comprise the vast majority of his output, as the relentless pace of weekly worship required an equally relentless development of musical resources. Bach was a Lutheran—the state church was his employer and the beneficiary of his beautiful choral writing. Luther apparently called music the handmaiden of theology, but in Bach’s music, theology found its intellectual and creative equal. Bach’s liturgical music adds a kaleidoscope of nuance and illumination to Luther’s theology.

Luther was also a composer: his hymns and chorales were sung both in worship and in community settings. Choral singing in worship developed in the Lutheran liturgy, and parishes became responsible for teaching and promoting singing within the congregation. By the time Bach was writing for weekly worship, the liturgy and congregational singing were both at a very high level. read more…

We are now in the twenty-fifth week after Pentecost, the final month of Ordinary Time. The days are getting shorter, the evenings darker, and, frankly, I am weary. There are many reasons for my fatigue, but from a liturgical perspective (one of my favorite perspectives! J), the truth is that the season after Pentecost seems extraordinarily long and drawn out this year.

The big seasons have a sense of drama, along with the excitement of the liturgical activities, and the creativity that often accompanies them. Ordinary Time rarely receives this kind of attention, or intention, from pastors and worship planners. It is difficult to sustain the connections in a phase of the liturgical calendar that spans half of the year, and sometimes it feels like we’re simply going through the motions, rather than fueling people’s imaginations. The Ordinary Time lectionary invites us to dive into the narraphores (a mash-up of stories and metaphors) of Jesus’ life; tales full of mystery and questions and wonder. But often our focus is elsewhere. read more…

If you have been reading Sound Theology for a while, you may recall a post where I encouraged you to join a choir. Well, this fall I took my own advice, and joined the Concert Choir at the College where I work. One of the songs we are learning has a line that has been stuck in my head: “But music and singing will be my refuge. Music and singing will be my light …”

Yes! This has certainly been my experience. Music is a creative outlet, a source of joy, and a place of refreshment. I also know stories of others whose musical experiences have literally saved their lives. read more…

Monday is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, as one of my Facebook friends posted, “Because Canada always has to be first!”

The Canadian national anthem got a wonderful makeover by Canadian retailer Lululemon in 2015 that helps to illustrate the metaphor that we’ve been considering for the past few weeks: immersion in the surround-sound of Jesus.

The music in this video is made up of a medley of sounds. The hundreds of sounds that comprise the video are unrelated to each other, but each one (and the image associated with it), reflect a particular, and sometimes stereotyped, part of Canada. By themselves, these individual clips make no sense. They are too short to provide much information; they are disconnected and unrelated. If you don’t know the music—when you don’t recognize the melody—you have trouble figuring out how the puzzle fits together. Everything seems random. read more…