Psalm 95:1
Oh come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
Psalm 104:33
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
Psalm 105:2
Sing to him, sing praises to him; tell of all his wondrous works!
Psalm 144:9
I will sing a new song to you, O God; upon a ten-stringed harp I will play to you,
Psalm 149:34
Let them praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre!
Psalm 150:1-6
Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty heavens! Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his excellent greatness! Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
STORY
Janet Mead was born in Adelaide, capital of the state of South Australia, in 1938. At 17, she entered Sisters of Mercy convent. She was allowed to study piano at the Adelaide Conservatorium, which led her to form the Rock Band. The ensemble featured religious songs with a rock beat at what became known as her “Rock Masses,” in her words, “to make Mass more interesting and accessible.” For her regular “Rock Mass” in the St. Francis Xavier cathedral in Adelaide, she encouraged young Catholics to play guitar or drums and sing like Elvis Presley or Bill Haley.
She was making records for the school where she taught music, when she was discovered by Martin Erdman, a producer at Festival Records in Sydney. The producer saw her musical potential and came up with a modern arrangement for the Lord’s Prayer. It was actually meant to be the B-side version of Scottish musician Donovan’s track “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” but radio stations, by popular request from listeners, began playing the Lord’s Prayer. It became the one of the fastest-selling singles in the history of music.
Sister Janet’s recording of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which featured her pure solo vocal over a driving drumbeat, with her three-octave range and perfect pitch, became an instant hit in Australia, Canada, and the United States. The single sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. It shot up the charts in more than 30 countries and reached No. 4 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 at Easter 1974. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for best inspirational performance (nonclassical) but lost out to Elvis Presley in 1975 for his vocal of “Hoe Great Thou Art.”
Along with Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Sister Janet’s spiritual rendition of Jesus’ prayer, as recorded in Mathew’s gospel, was one of the very few popular songs with lyrics taken directly and unedited from the Bible. Sister Janet was the second nun to have a pop hit in the United States, after Jeanine Deckers of Belgium, the guitar-strumming “Singing Nun,” whose “Dominique” reached No. 1 in 1963.
More stunned than anyone else by the reception, Sister Janet declined to cash in with tours. She turned down a lucrative offer to play coast-to-coast in the United States, including Las Vegas. She mostly avoided media interviews. Regarding eschewing the limelight she shared, “It was unexpected, and I was unprepared. It was a complete shock when publicity came my way. Because I’d resolved to use all my powers to continue with the work I was doing rather than be side-tracked by the superficial kind of success that I was experiencing, it was very, very difficult. My school commitments were very heavy, I loved teaching, I was fully committed, so TV interviews and phone calls from all around the world, people would be ringing in the middle of the night from Canada or the U.S. And it was very hard for the sisters [Sisters of Mercy], too, although they were fantastic and very, very supportive.”
A humble nun who devoted herself to social justice, she donated her share of royalties for “The Lord’s Prayer” to charity, and continued to teach Catholic students at St. Aloysius College, a Catholic school in Adelaide that she had attended in childhood. Before her musical debut, she had long helped raise money for the disadvantaged, the homeless and Aborigines and worked on their behalf.
The success of the Lord’s Prayer single led to the album titled “With You I Am,” followed by another titled “A Rock Mass.” This time she included songs by other people she admired, including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Cat Stevens. As she told the Daily Telegraph, “Yes. I think they’re good songs, you know. ‘Things Will Be Better,’ ‘Turn Turn Turn,’ well that’s straight from the Old Testament. Things like ‘Sounds of Silence,’ there were all sorts of songs like that, protest songs, that showed life and growth going on.”
She went on to say, “I’m a firm believer in protest songs. I’m a firm believer also in protest. When things aren’t right, we’ve the right to sing about them, to speak about them.” She herself spoke out against welfare cuts for the working classes, supported stevedores during a waterfront dispute, and was vociferous in her antiwar sentiment, notably during the Vietnam conflict when up to 60,000 Australian troops fought shoulder to shoulder with Americans.
Regarding her music, Sister Janet said, “I believe that life is a unity and therefore not divided into compartments,” she wrote in the liner notes for her first album “With You I Am.” “That means that worship, music, recreation, work and all other ‘little boxes’ of our lives are really inseparable and this is why I believe that people should be given the opportunity to worship God with the language and music that is part of their ordinary life.”
DEVOTION
The Book of Psalms is a book of poetry in the Bible. While the poetic books of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon read as whole pieces, Psalms is a collection of 150 small units in one book, somewhat like today’s hymnals. Which brings up an interesting point: Psalms is the only book of the Bible that isn’t given chapters.
Unique among liturgies in their singular blend of majestic grandeur, lofty sentiments, and poignant simplicity, the Psalms embrace virtually every basic human emotion and mood, always in the context of faith. Their subject matter may be classified according to several basic poetic typologies, including hymns of praise and thanksgiving; elegies; pilgrim songs; meditations; paeans to God in history; celebrations of God’s glory and greatness in nature; and poems of moral-ethical instruction.
The Psalms pulsate with reflections of life: its tribulations, its moments of elation, the search for consolation in times of distress, the natural urge to offer gratitude, the quest for justice, the hunt for a path to contentment, the struggle to maintain faith in the face of diversity, the tendency toward doubt when practitioners of evil seem immune to defeat or justice, the spiritual struggles of transgressors to find their way, the hunger for virtuousness, and the pursuit of triumph over despair. Thus, despite their Judaic origin and solid Judeo-Christian association, the Psalms need not be restricted to any single people, religious group, or era. Their ageless attraction abides in their universal sentiment and their universally applicable teachings. In that sense, their resonance transcends both time and geographical space.
The Book of Psalms informs us that music does express our deepest human emotions and longing for God. Hymns, be they either traditional or contemporary, have the same influence and comfort as scriptural passages that we so often quote.
Though, on a personal note I would like to add: Traditional hymns that have expressed scriptural truth for centuries will continue to sustain us through life’s decades; contemporary hymns, popular this year, replaced next year, lack any lifelong spiritual support. Traditional hymns can give a worshipper “goosebumps,” contemporary hymns are no more than touch-felly music. Traditional hymns are hymns in the fullest sense of the word; contemporary music has the pretense of being hymns, though they are nothing more than songs.
Martin Luther (1483-1548), the father of the Protestant Reformation, was not only a theologian and a reformer, he was also a musician and a composer. In the reform of church liturgy, he gave community singing a renewed role. He composed about thirty chorales and a hymn book. He asked that singing be taught in schools.
Luther recalled that his mother loved singing to him as a child. This along with his father’s advice to replace drunkenness with singing and rejoicing indicate that Luther’s parents intended for their son to be a musician.
In 1491, at the age of seven, Luther entered Mansfield, a Latin Trivialschule school, named for its three-fold trivium curriculum: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The foremost goal of the education was promoting the use and understanding of the Latin language as found in the Mass and Daily Office. Not only did the Mansfield pupils memorize Latin liturgical texts such as the Creed, Lord’s Prayer, and Ave Maria, but they were also taught musical sight-singing.
At the age of fourteen, Luther went to Eisenach, where he would spend the most formative years of his education. Like other German schools, Eisenach allowed poor Luther to sing as a KurrendeKnabe, a schoolboy who sang in the streets for money and food. Luther wrote in one of his letters, “Do not despise the little boys who go singing through the streets, begging a little bread for the love of God; I also have done the same.”
When Luther studied in Eisenach, he had music lessons along with dance and singing. He learned to distinguish between the different musical genres. It was here, living a monastic life, where liturgy played an important role, he refined his skills. Luther was able to transcribe folk melodies and to harmonize them, as well as to write melodies on psalms in everyday words. For an illiterate society, folk tunes could easily be remembered when scriptural verses were ascribed to them.
While a student at Eisenach, a charitable woman named Dame Ursula Cotta, noticed Luther’s bright, pure soprano voice over the other pupils and invited him into her home. After conversing with him and taking pity of his difficult situation, she became his adoptive mother while at school. Cotta gave the boy his first instrument, a flute, which he quickly learned and availed himself of all the music he could. Luther reported singing motets and part-songs with an inner circle of students.
In 1501, at the age of eighteen, Luther went on to the University of Erfurt where his music accomplishments would progress even further. As a monk, Luther was immersed in the singing of Gregorian chant, the Psalter, and parts of the Mass. While there, his fellow students donned him with the following nicknames: “The Philosopher” and “The Musician.” It is recorded that when Luther left to enter the monastery, his friends lauded his musical accomplishments and affirmed that he was ein guter Musicus, meaning “a good musician.”
Then, in 1508, Luther was sent to the Augustinian priory in Wittenberg to pursue his doctor’s degree. His degree was conferred in October 1512, and a year later Luther began teaching at Wittenberg University. While the professor lectured on theology, he was also being influenced by Wittenberg’s new humanist musical ideas. At the start of the sixteenth century, the teaching of music at Wittenberg was moving away from the late medieval tradition of focusing primarily on music as a theoretical science, a subdivision of mathematics, towards an understanding of music as a practical art in which theory is expressed in practice. Musical practice was emphasized rather than musica theoretica. This shift in value gave a central place to performed music which in turn affected Luther’s philosophy of music in the church.
When Luther became a parish priest, to enhance the process of liturgical music, Luther used beer drinking songs, familiar to everyone, and transformed them, with new lyrics to known tunes, into theological confessions. This is why, the hymns written by Luther, have such a triumphant beat to them.
As Luther reformed the liturgy, he accorded full importance to the sermon and to community singing. The singing, called “Choral singing,” was defined as an assertion of faith and a spiritual commentary on biblical texts. It could be backed by an organ chamber or by an instrumental group. To implement the change, worshippers had to be acquainted with music practice. Schools or parishes became responsible for vocal training. For a populace unable to read, and for a community absent of hymnbooks, a cantor would recant the next hymn stanza to be sung, then the parishioners would sing along.
As the monk, priest, theologian once wrote, “Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.”