On Dissonance in Sacred Music

On Dissonance in Sacred Music

by a friend!

As those who have attended the Alpha Course may remember from one of the talks, it is worth noting that while many of us wear Crosses as jewelry, and adorn our church sanctuaries with fanciful gilded Crosses (Truro is no exception), we sometimes too easily forget that the Cross was an instrument of unspeakable violence and torture. One would think it bizarre to wear a miniature gallows around her neck as jewelry, or to mount a large electric chair at the front of our church, yet that is what we do when we likewise display the cross.

Sometimes it takes a major work of art like Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ or Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (pictured) to remind us of this truth. Yet these artworks also remind us that while the Cross was a place of horrific ugliness, it was at the same time a place of immeasurable beauty. We look at the screen or the canvas and see ghastly wickedness, yet we know as Christians that such unfathomable agony was at the same time the vessel of infinite Love. 

As with the visual arts, so with music; in Bach’s monumental settings of the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, the choruses depicting the crowd shouting “crucify him!” are frenetic, angry, disjunct, and dissonant; indeed, how could they be otherwise?

During this Lenten season, we  have occasionally offered choral music that likewise challenges the ear, and some of you have expressed concern; we want you to know that we hear you. Yet to eschew great art that reminds us of the ugliness of sin and the suffering of the Cross is to rob Easter of its meaning. We would glean little from The Passion of the Christ if we watched only the last few moments as our Lord is risen; or if we closed our ears to the Bach passions and listened only to cheerful Easter music. Likewise, we hope you will embrace the challenge of some of our music this Lent (and on other occasions as appropriate), and that the joy and beauty of our Easter music will all the more powerfully remind us of the victory of Love over even death itself.