ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 77.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> NICK: Building upon Joshua's question, what does Luther's German mass teach us about using music in worship? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: Your question gives us a chance to summarize what we said about music earlier in the example of his revising the mass to suit the German people. First of all that he would not discard old music when it could serve, for example, that three-fold Kyrie. Those were old melodies. Now, you could produce new ones. And in the Lutheran Hymnal and in Divine Service I, and as the Lutheran Hymnal music moves into the Lutheran Service Book, the next one, there's a 1528, if I remember the date right, *Braunsweig tune for the Kyrie that's just three short phrases that has been used for a century among us. That kind of music, you know, is old by now, but it still serves. So that's one thing we can learn. To invent new ones. So he wasn't afraid to paraphrase scripture for "Isaiah, mighty seer," where there had been text created by the church to suit that spot in the service, Holy, Holy, Holy, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, a different way to express it. So in Lutheran Worship people had creativity acting on the "This is the feast" "Thank the Lord and sing his praise" paraphrases of scripture that would serve that part of the service. No other denomination in the world had those kind of texts. So he kind of set a direction for the use of music that allows you to be creative, not locked to a form when the material would perform the right function. And then this fit between preferences of the German people in a language with that kind of sounds, not in the sense of just using what's popular, but what actually fits the function of that part of the service, say, the reading of scripture so you have a melodic design that asks a question, that makes a statement, that has a sense of ending at a semi-colon and so forth to express this so people listen to the text. It's not about the music. If you've ever heard those Lutheran designs for chanting used, and we've done it here. I have a graduate student now who is able to do this very beautifully. He'll take a whole chapter of John and sing it. We never listened to the readings as well as when it is sung like that. That's what Luther had in mind. So his notion was let the music, which is artistic and powerful in itself, simply be a tool of what's happening with the text. And let that be the main judge of it, not am I on the cutting edge. Am I doing what's most artistic in my expression. Am I doing what tickles my ear, but what serves the text and the work of the Holy spirit.