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If this book has attracted you with its title and you have fumbled through its pages, you may have felt cheated. This title is somewhat essayistic, very popular, too broad and most of all it is not directly linked with its genre. On the contrary, the book it heads is a piece of research, i.e. material that is unpopular and that comes from a completely unpopular field – musicology, and at that it is directed at the most boring part of a research work, the study of methods. Indeed, my ultimate goal here is to propose a system of methods for studying church music, a system of methods appropriate for that music. But do not be too quick as to adjudge that the title is not appropriate.
This is so because in order to cover the long road leading to the system of methods the book had to reply to so many questions. The first one among them was: What is church music, or which music is church music? What is the difference between it and the music that the logic of opposing concepts calls “non-church” music? What is its relationship with secular music? And with “music as such”? Is it that music, which is performed during the services of worship, i.e. liturgical music, and is it enough for a music to be performed during these services so as to be considered church music? And when we hear it in the secular space of the concert hall, does it turn into secular music? And if it has been created by a composer – a figure of the culture of the Modern Ages, – is it just as churchly as the examples taken from the medieval musical traditions of the European East and West? And finally, what are the criteria we use so as to recognize it?
Similar questions run through the entire history of music and time and again this history reduces them to one question: the question as to what music is appropriate for performance in church. Already Blessed Augustine sets the tone for the worries around that question, when he vacillates between “the danger stemming from the pleasure caused by the song and the proof for benefit that proceeds from singing”, when he wants to keep “the delight of the ear” under control of reason. His anxiety comes from the fact that the sounds bearing this delight “seek to enter a worthy place in my heart together with the meaning through which they live, while I succeed, at the cost of great effort, to keep them at a place appropriate for them. Sometimes it seems to me that I pay more attention to them than they deserve, when I feel how our souls flare up in the fire of piety in a more florid and more fervent way if the holy words are sung in the proper manner, than if they are not sung like that” (Confessions).
The replies differing from each other come with different speed and in different ways. They seek help from the link of music with the holy words or from the idea about the religious musical ethos, they feel suspicious that what comes from the senses can express fully the spiritual meaning of music, or they rely too much in this respect on what comes from the senses. And when they become fixed to what looks most secure in music – its means of expression, its peculiarities, when it begins to look that it can give the criteria as what is churchly in music (if only it is adapted in the proper way to what is churchly), only then one can begin to understand that this adaptation requires that it be directed to something that is different from the very peculiarities of the sound and its structures in terms of figures, formulae, chants and compositions, that it be directed to something else. And there follows another round of seeking and another division between, on the one hand, the firm mainstay of the sound form, which has preserved in itself the church-musical meaning, a sound form that has been given once and for all and preserved by canon, validated by the secrets of the compositional principles of music, and, on the other hand, the optimistic urge to describe this meaning with the help of somehow another meaning that the sound seems to express – the religious musical feeling, thought, and concept.
The book had to go through the conflict between the one and another, through their potentialities and when it exhausted these potentialities, it began seeking new prospects. The book found these prospects in the tradition of Christian biblical exegesis. Relying on its original idea, it understood that just as Sacred Scripture is revered as “the inspired word of God” so church music becomes accessible to us when we accept it as divinely inspired, holy, coming from eternity. The book discovered that its church quality, the thing that makes it differ from any other music, cannot be seen if we fix our gaze on “things terrestrial” – the appropriate peculiarities for the appropriate devout idea. The eyes must be raised upward, where one begins to notice the traces from the torn link between “terrestrial” and “celestial” music. The ears must hear music as “the fundamental principle of divine creation”. For the difference of church music from any other music is a difference due to a mode of existence and as such we can perceive it when “the fire of piety” flares up in our own souls, when we ourselves take along the way of joining in full the life of the Church, when going along this way together with music, we ourselves become appropriate for it, i.e. when we “lift up our hearts”.

Translated by: Alexander Gospodinov
Authors: Êðèñòèíà ßïîâà
ISBN: 978-954-8594-04-2
Year: 2007
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