“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is just, whatever is lovely, whatever is spoken well of, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy — meditate on these things” (Philippians 4:8).

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED why there are no great symphonies being written anymore and why popular music is nothing more than a money-making fest full of satanic imagery and debauchery? Music composition in the classical scene seems to have degraded just as in so many other areas of life. The downgrade. The global satanically-induced ‘Disintegration’ of everything — even of the visible church. Music is just one more area where this debacle of cataclysm is proliferating. It is all part of Apostasy.

Although music is the most abstract of the arts, it is also the most intensely communicative — being able to cut through to the very heart of a person. Because it is something powerful struggling for expression in a fallen world, music can be both heavenly and demonic, inspirational and debasing. In this brief study, I want to show that although Western church music, and the classical music which succeeded it, reflected in some way the glory of God and the expressiveness of humans made originally in His image, an unprecedented shift occurred around more than a century ago which undermined the fundamentally theocentric character of all music.

In some Christian circles, there is a frequent denunciation of the corrupting influence of that corpus of sound known as ‘Rock’ music. This is hardly surprising, in view of its dark pedigree and its association with rebellious expression — “sex and drugs and rock and roll” — and the extent to which it has been imported as pseudo-worship and entertainment into Christian liturgy and worship. Though not all Rock music is corrupted. At the furthest reach, Death Metal and Satanic Metal epitomise the very worst aspects of Rock, and much of many other styles of Rock is stale and devoid of beauty, poetry and conscience, But Prog Rock, Country, and other branches of electric music can be interesting and edifying, mainly depending on the lyrics and the performance/presentation. Individual singer-songwriters can use a folk-rock or contemporary folk style which can border on what one could loosely call rock, depending on the instrumentation, and still have a worthy message for the world, or simply artistic excellence.

I remember telling one of the best-known pastors in the UK evangelical scene, some thirty years ago, after I had been preaching in his church, that I had been listening the previous night to a symphony by Franz Schubert. He immediately said in a very solemn manner, as if I had breached one of the Ten Commandments: “He was an unbelieving man and a great sinner. You shouldn’t listen to his music. I know what I’m talking about as my father was an amateur conductor”. This kind of superstition and narrowmindedness is rife in the world of Christianism. The wonderful thing about great music is that it is created despite the background of the flawed individual who created it. In fact, when I listen to the stupendous output of a man like Schubert (nine symphonies and fifteen string quartets — not to mention his gargantuan String Quintet in C major), who was only known to a small circle of friends in Vienna and died at age 31, I am transported to a deep and special place in my heart. Great art transcends the character and trappings of its human creator. (And that’s a good thing, because I am flawed too, so maybe you shouldn’t be reading this article! 😊).

The Religious Background to Classical Music

Western classical music has also not been without its influence in church music: Many tunes which have been used as an accompaniment to psalms, hymns and spiritual songs have been borrowed from what now forms the classical music repertoire. [e.g., fragments of Palestrina, Byrd, Tallis, Haydn, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Schubert, Vaughan Williams, etc.] Some of these tunes were themselves once used as a part of liturgical church worship. However, Western classical music has not come under a critical Christian microscope to the same extent as Rock music. There are two reasons for this: firstly, it has never appeared to directly threaten the Church; secondly, whereas Rock music has been corrupt from its very roots and inception, classical music has always contained much that is noble, lovely and praiseworthy on which to meditate (cf. Philippians 4:8).

Music, throughout the history of the world, has always been intimately connected with all forms of religious ritual and ceremony. As a valid vehicle of human expression, music provides a natural communication point between a religious community and its object of worship — however misguided that ‘worship’ may be. Five thousand years ago, the people of Sumero-Mesapotamia were performing temple rituals to the accompaniment of hymns and instruments. The fertility cultus and sexual rites of China c.2000 BC involved choirs of boys and girls singing alternately and together to symbolise Yin and Yang dualism. The ritual magic musical ‘ragas’ of India performed in c.1500 BC have survived unchanged to this day. The Psalms of the Old Testament, written between c.1000-c.400 BC, gave religious expression to the worship of Jehovah which is still practised today among both Jews and Christians. Music, as an artistic expression, provides a fitting vehicle for human worship, be it true or false worship. And so it has been throughout the millennia of human history.

The music of the churches consisted originally of plainsong or chant. This was initially monophonic — in a single line of melody, as in the well-known ‘Gregorian chant’ — and did not essentially develop beyond that in the Eastern Churches. But as early as the 9th century, the Roman Catholic churches began to develop polyphonic music — in which several differing voice-parts are simultaneously combined. This development marks a real watershed in the history of music, for it laid the foundation for the entire development of Western classical music. It is a most interesting fact that almost all that we today call ‘classical music’ has its roots in music which was written as part of the churches’ Divine worship.

Admittedly, church music went through some barren patches in which secular music played an increasingly important role (notably, the 13th. and 14th. centuries). But from c.1400 a new era began in which masses and motets flowered in an unparalleled manner. Some of those involved in this renaissance were the trend-setting English composer John Dunstaple (d.1453, whose hyper-polyphonic motet, ‘Veni Sanctus Spiritus’ — ‘Come Holy Spirit’ — is one of the most exquisite pieces ever written), Guillaume Dufay (c.1400-1474), Josquin des Prês (c.1445-1521) and, later, Palestrina (1525-1594). Whatever one may think about the Mass from a theological standpoint, it has produced some of the most beautiful music ever to come from the human pen, most notably the Mass in B Minor by J.S. Bach. [A great version is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FLbiDrn8IE ]. The fact has to be squarely faced that there will have been some genuine Christians in the churches of this era, and much music came out of those churches which provided an expression for worship and edified the spiritual life of the people, while, at the same time, glorifying God.

Music of the Cosmos

The undergirding feature of all church music had been primarily one of cosmos rather than chaos — of consonance rather than dissonance — of concord rather than discord. There was a real ‘centre’ to this music — a stability and harmony which was designed to be pleasing to the ear. The original meaning of the Greek word kosmos was order or harmony. As an example of this, in Matthew 12:44, the Greek text shows the Lord Jesus using this word kosmos to refer to a house as being ‘empty, swept and in good order’ (‘garnished’, KJV). Similarly, and from the same Greek root word, in 1 Timothy 3:2, one of the qualities of an elder in the Church is kosmos, ‘orderliness’ (‘of good behaviour’, KJV). Later it came to signify the world or universe as an ordered system — hence our word ‘cosmos’. The universe is an ordered system because it has been created and is being upheld by God. As human beings were originally created in the image of God, anything which they create should reflect this orderliness, this harmony and beauty (unless one is specifically teaching about how darkness operates or is composing something which is representative of darkness, chaos, so as to provide a contrast to cosmos.

And here we come to the core theme of our study. Because of this undergirding idea of kosmos, one can say that church music was theocentric in both its form and its expression. It was standing on solid ground: the cantus firmus in any contrapuntal structure is the musical equivalent to the terra firma of nature. This vocal polyphonic music of the churches based on the principle of kosmos eventually found its expression in instrumental polyphonic music — from string viols with lute accompaniment in the 15th and 16th centuries, through the baroque orchestra of the 17th century, to the full classical-romantic orchestra of the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus the theocentric solidity and consonance of monophonic and polyphonic church music was carried over into the classical music repertoire, as its very foundation.

To my knowledge only four composers in Western classical music have deliberately dedicated their music to the glory of God — often inscribing this on their scores. [1) Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745), one of the most neglected and brilliant composers of the baroque period who was greatly admired by Georg Phillipe Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach; 2) J.S. Bach himself (1685-1750); 3) Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), who always fell to his knees in prayer before composing at the piano; and 4) Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), the devotional Austrian composer of nine gloriously expansive symphonies.] But is there not also a sense in which all genuine music glorifies God because of all that it contains which is beautiful, ordered and reflecting of His glory. Consider also that every single contrapuntal complexity in a piece of music (a fugue being the most extreme example) reflects the elaborate counterpoint of the cosmos, as God upholds the myriad functions of the universe in any single moment of time and in every consecutive moment too. Wherever there is order, He is there.

Surely, it also follows that for music to be a valid representation of the mind of God and His creative work, there should be a resolution of tension and conflict. This accurately reflects the entire run of history: for tension and conflict exist in the cosmos in the first place because of the Fall. For the present, the whole of creation groans and labours with birth pangs together, and the entire universe is longing for the final resolution (Romans 8:19-23). But God has guaranteed the outcome in “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21; Romans 8:21), the inauguration of the new heavens and the new earth (2 Pet.3:10-13). All music should ultimately reflect this, even if there is tension along the way. That this is so can easily be demonstrated. Take the well-known nursery rhyme, “Three Blind Mice”. For it to conclude musically with the line of notes, “Did ever you see such a thing in your life”, would be absurd and incomplete. The light of nature tells us that those four descending notes of the final cadence which bring it back to the ‘tonic’ must be added. Not to do so would be perverse.

Thus, in the early church ‘modes’, even before tonality or key had been developed, there would always be what was called “the final” — the natural-sounding note at which the music could come to a halt (similar to that final ‘tonic’ note in “Three Blind Mice”). It is most interesting that in the 4th and 5th centuries, because the Psalms chanted in church did not end on this “final”, in order to obviate the inconclusive effect, antiphons which did terminate on the “final” were added both before and after a Psalm. It is natural for music to be orderly and thus be ‘cosmic’ and godly.

It is for this reason that the extremely systematised musical development known as “sonata form” in music came into being in the early eighteenth century. In many ways, this imitates the poetic form of the ‘sonnet’ which has two parallel subject themes, stated in the first two quatrains (four-line verses), followed by a development quatrain and then a coda in the form of a rhyming couplet. In the sonata type of movement in music, there is an exposition of two musical subjects (the first more masculine and the second more feminine), followed by a development section, a tension-preceded recapitulation (a summation by way of return to the exposition, though transfigured in some way) and finally a coda. As an expression of the harmony which lay at the heart of the baroque and classical eras, the sonata form — in spite of it being apparently tied to a particular matrix — was exploited to maximum effect in an astonishing variety of ingenious ways by many composers. It represents a supreme manifestation of order in music — and the individuality of the composer had to be subsumed in this order. Generally, a sonata-form symphony will finish in a higher key than its opening key, indicating some kind of ‘character development’ in the overall work.

The fundamental purpose of music, then, is to create something which is pleasing to the ear — a thing of beauty and inspiration. This does not mean that there will never be any tension in music; on the contrary, tension and even dissonance can be introduced into a piece of music as a deliberate contrast, yet without in the least destroying its underlying beauty. Unfortunately, as Franz Liszt (1811-1886) rightly said: “Musical history is full to overflowing with unresolved dissonances”.

There are a very few pieces of classical music which do end in devastating chaos but which are nevertheless masterpieces with some kind of teaching and, I believe, a prophetic function. They do need a commentary because of the effect which they can have. The two most prominent would be Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony in A minor [you can view a great performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IQRVslLb7s ], and Ralph Vaughan Williams 4th Symphony in F minor [great performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woLYBpiV4fQ ]. The interesting thing is that in both cases the composer could not explain how those works came out of them. They just came out that way and it was like, “What I have written, I have written”. Mahler was devastated by what he had composed. He and his wife cried hard about it together when they tried to play a two-part piano reduction, and Mahler was found sobbing inconsolably after the first performance. Vaughan Williams said after the first performance of his 4th, “I don’t know if I like it, but I meant it”. In the case of both symphonies, they were being written in the run-up to a major war (Mahler, WW1, Vaughan Williams, WW2) as tensions in Europe escalated. One doesn’t listen to those symphonies because they are beautiful and uplifting, though there is much beauty in them despite the overall material. One listens because they are compositional masterpieces and have something educational to impart. [I have written more extensively about these two works, and others of a similar nature, in another article, entitled “Holy Fools: Prophetic Elements in Music”, which you can find here: https://diakrisis-project.com/2019/08/25/holy-fools-prophetic-elements-in-music/ ].

A great work of musical art will not necessarily always have a wholly ‘happy’ ending. Benjamin Britten’s powerful and haunting Violin Concerto, written as World War II was beginning, has a most enigmatic coda with the soloist trilling gently between the major and minor thirds. One is left unsure in which mode the piece concluded. It is poignant and reflective of the composer’s state of mind when it was written in 1938-1939 (’nuff said). Many other works have been composed out of a situation of appalling tragedy, and the music reflects the genuine expression of the composer’s heartache. For example, the tortured Tchaikovsky’s profound ‘Pathetique’ 6th Symphony, or Franz Schmidt’s intensely moving Symphony No.4, written after the death of his beloved daughter in childbirth. These constitute exceptions to the principle that there should generally be a resolution of tension and conflict. For they have been deliberately constructed to convey an empathetic experience of pathos. Other compositions which did not provide a final resolution in the closing bars, yet which still held to the fundamental principle of musical order, were Brahms’ and Sibelius’ fourth symphonies. One could also cite here the Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich which, although coming to an apparent resolution in the coda of the final movement, was really a hollow sound of victory behind which lay the composer’s heartache over the despotic devastation wreaked on the U.S.S.R by Stalin. [Modern performances tend to reflect this posthumous understanding of Shostakovich’s music by making the coda sound over-ponderous and forced. In fact, the discerning Polish conductor Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who knew Shostakovich personally, did this as early as 1956 in his famous Mercury recording with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra].

So we are not here taking issue with the natural expression of human emotion in music. Music written under the inspiration of a moving event will naturally reflect that situation. The creative urge can often provide a catharsis in times of trauma. A bereaved composer will write a tragic piece; a composer in love will write a romantic epic; a composer abandoned by his love will reflect that bleakness. These are all genuine snapshots of real life. They do not represent a breakdown of order, but merely the outpouring of a heavy heart. Such music still has a ‘centre’, a sense of integrity, and continues to reflect God’s cosmic order.

However, this fundamental integrity, which had prevailed in Western church and classical music for almost 1500 years, began to disintegrate towards the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, a change altogether unprecedented in global music history was about to make its mark in the world of music: I speak of the movement from ‘tonal’ to ‘atonal’ music. Until a century ago, all music had been ‘tonal’, marked by loyalty to a tonic ‘home note’ in the piece (as in the last note of “Three Blind Mice”!). As one musicologist puts it:

“One of the most striking phenomena of music is the fact that, throughout its evolution — in non-Western cultures, in Gregorian chant, and in harmonised music — practically every single piece gives preference to one tone (the tonic), making this the tonal centre to which all other tones are related”.[Willi Apel (ed.), Harvard Dictionary of Music (Heinemann, 1970), p.855].

This universal musical feature is known as “tonality” — which is really the musicologists expression for the necessary cosmos of music discussed above. That we are speaking of the same phenomenon is borne out in the definition of tonality as “a particular expression of the general principle of relaxation of tension — tension being a particular state that implies its ‘resolution’, i.e., a return to relaxation, a stable state”. [Ibid., p.62] The actual break-up of tonality in Western music began with Adolf Hitler’s hero, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) — notably in his opera “Tristan and Isolde” — and Claude Debussy (1862-1918), who was the Grand-Master of the occult Rosicrucian lodges in France. However, their work by no means completed the job, for they still retained the essential elements of tonality in their music. The real descent into the chaos of atonality began after the turn of the century in the decadent cultural capital of Europe, Vienna.

Music from Another Planet

Orchestral music had gone about as far as it could possibly go with Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) in Vienna, who set out to encapsulate “the whole of life” in his massive symphonies. Mahler himself was not actually dedicated to the idea of atonality (as were many of his admirers), but the fear of his looming death from heart disease suffused every piece he composed after the Eighth Symphony with a chromatic melancholy which stretched his sound-world to breaking point. When the Adagio from his Tenth Symphony screamed out an awesome ten-note chord — probably the most overwhelmingly frightening moment in the entire history of music (though Schubert had done something a little similar in the Andante of his 9th Symphony some eighty-four years earlier) — the chaotic chasm of atonality opened up, ready to swallow up the one who would take the leap.

The mantle fell to his pupil of the ‘Second Viennese School’, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). His first real attempt at atonal composition (2nd String Quartet, slow movement), demonstrated the alien nature of this new departure when the voice of a soprano entered on the words “I feel the air of another planet”. Schoenberg seems to have been aware that he was entering forbidden territory, for he later wrote of this moment: “Personally I had the feeling as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water….. It burned not only my skin, it burned also internally”. [Paul Griffiths, ‘A Concise History of Modern Music’ (Thames & Hudson, 1978), p.26]

The implications of this disintegration of tonality in music are enormous. It was not simply a question of concluding “Three Blind Mice” on the words “Did ever you see such a thing in your life”. It was actually removing the cosmos from musical expression: it was the musical equivalent of political anarchism and religious pantheism. For this change in music was not occurring in a cultural vacuum. Blavatskian theosophy, Marxist-socialism, Freudian psychodynamics and Darwinian evolutionism were all making their mark on European life at around the same time.

The so-called “Enlightenment” had prepared the way for this at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, when the discipline of Classicism was being overtaken by the Romantic Movement, which indulged the cult of the personality and composed music out of human sentiment rather than as an ideal of pure music. This breakdown in music represented a breakdown in culture, which has continued to this day, and which will culminate in the chaos at the end of this evil age. Now you know why there is no truly great classical music being written anymore.

The very last of the old style symphonic composers was the Soviet Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). He began to go down the pathway of atonality in the 1930’s but, ironically, Stalin repudiated him, decrying this development as “chaos not music” and as “bourgeois formalism” which would never be understood by the peasants of the proletariat. Thereafter, he lampooned the dictator’s demands for ‘music-with-a-happy-ending’ by composing grotesque and bombastic circus music for a number of his symphonic finales. Since his death there has been no composer of international stature to continue the tonal heritage which received its death-blow three quarters of a century earlier. Much of what pretends to be “classical” music which is now being written is awkward, boring and self-consciously experimental — satisfying only the intellectual appetite of an effete musical elite. Those who attend a concert to appreciate the kosmos in music are increasingly likely to become the victims of this chaotic ‘New Music’ which is conspiratorially sandwiched between the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms in the vain attempt to cloak it in respectability.

The children of the world — wiser in their own generation than the children of light — have always dominated the field of music. This is not surprising. Along with technology and pastoral husbandry, music had its original post-Fall roots in the line of Cain rather than in the godly line of Seth (Genesis 4:16-21). However, one can say with all confidence that music is a gift from God, although developed in the world of culture through His common grace. The fact that fallen men (who will always be inventors of evil things, Romans 1:30) pervade it with sin and pervert it in the service of self will never eclipse the enigma of its essential beauty when it comes through as such. Music which has a heart, a centre and a sense of cosmos, is music which reflects the mind of God and His creation.

While the unbelieving world — although seemingly unable to glorify God in any of its inventions (save by accident) — revels in its undeniably formidable artistic creativity with gifts they have made as unwitting mouthpieces of their Creator, the Christian man and woman can share in its bounties and take additional comfort in the simplicity which is in Christ, letting His word indwell them richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in their hearts to the Lord.

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2025
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]

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