Title: The New Worship: Straight Talk on Music and the Church
Author: Barry Liesch
Publisher: Baker Books, 2007
For a book which promises "straight talk on music and the Church", Barry Liesch still leaves us with a few questions. In Chapter 10 (p.199) he says:
"... most of us (even musicians) do not have the expertise to talk about music style precisely. We are better equipped to talk about the words."
This kind of honest assessment makes Liesch (for all of our theological differences) hard to dislike as an author. If only he did not contradict his own logic:
"we should begin with the thought that no melody, scale, chord, rhythm, instrument, or timbre should be theoretically off-limits to the Christian composer." (Chapter 12, p.182)
Read moreTitle: Celestial Music? Some Masterpieces of European Religious Music
Author: Wilfrid Mellers
It is difficult to read a man groping in the dark, as Wilfrid Mellers does in Celestial Music. He rests far too heavily on music for his comfort and support:
Music is often said to be the closest of the arts to religion since what we call its ‘language’ cannot be intellectually articulate; indeed, its very lack of articulacy may put us in touch with the numinous, and therefore presumably with the divine, or at least with the forces we call ‘spiritual’. Although I am not myself a ‘believer’, I seem to be partial to religious music, I suspect because it asks, though it cannot answer, those eternally Unanswered Questions.
Prologue: What is religious music? p.xi
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