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A NEW SONG BEGUN:
LUTHER AND MUSIC
We in the twenty-first century speak of the Protestant Reformers in somewhat hushed tones—those fabled heroes who carved out a safe path for future generations to follow. Certainly, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, Martin Bucer, and John Knox were heroes of the faith. But only one of them was able to establish a healthy relationship with the arts that has lasted for five hundred years, and that is Luther. Although he was a theologian, he did not put forward what would amount to a systematic theology of music. Instead, he developed a paradigm for musical practice through letters and commentary, through informal communication with colleagues, and through a brilliant strategy for musical formation in the new Lutheran church.
Luther’s thoughts on music for Christian worship were varied and sometimes fluid, but his ability to winsomely articulate those developing thoughts helped to nurture the young Lutheran movement. He wrote on music and its effects in several of his published works, including the preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae Iucundae, where he penned what may be the closest he came to a system of theology of music: Here it must suffice to discuss the benefit of this great art. But even that transcends the greatest eloquence of the most eloquent, because of the infinite variety of its forms and benefits. We can mention only one point (which experience confirms), namely, that next to the word of God, music deserves the highest praise.
In studying Martin Luther the musician and Reformer, we can read his own words, and we can gain further insight from scholars who have studied music’s profound influence on his life. As we explore Luther’s thoughts on music, we will look into the significance of Luther’s musical training in his role as Reformer. Living when he did, Luther inherited medieval ideas about music theory; we will examine how these ideas show up in his writings. We will also look at the common accusation that Luther advocated the use of “bar tunes” in Christian worship, and we will conclude by considering the influence of Luther’s ideas on later generations.
The heritage of Lutheranism in its first 150 years is one of a growing church music held in esteem by musicians of the era. Among those influenced by Luther were Louis Senfl, Johann Walter, and Georg Rhau, who composed, performed, or published into the next generation. Local German composers and Kappellmeisters approached with delighted seriousness the job of providing the newly established church with music for its congregational singing. Instrumental music grew, flourished, and expanded to include organ chorales and choral settings (with instruments) of the great texts of the church: Magnificat, German Mass, passion, and cantata. The German tradition was becoming the busiest in Europe, and it spawned new musicians through choir schools whose training provided competent singers and organists for the next generation.
The German musical tradition reached its pinnacle in the eighteenth century in Johann Sebastian Bach. The great composer hailed from Eisenach in Thuringia, near where Luther started his career. As Luther faced trials after posting his Ninety-Five Theses, Bach suffered criticism of the music he created.
He stood his ground despite loss of income and prestige, demonstrating a Luther-like refusal to compromise beauty and truth for expediency.
Luther’s rather straightforward thoughts about music continued through Bach and beyond—into the next three hundred years. By the late twentieth century, composer/writer Carl Schalk confirmed Luther’s view of church music as “proclamation and ministry.”
Luther’s Musical Training
Luther’s greatest contribution is arguably his rediscovery of the glorious gospel of salvation by faith alone in Christ alone. So much did Luther exult in this truth that he proclaimed it throughout his ministry, including in doctrinally rich chorales of praise. Through music, the Reformer led thousands of followers 3 Given the role of music toward a deeper understanding of God and His Word. in his career as a theologian and Reformer, it is good for us to ask how Luther developed his musical sensibilities.
Little is known about Luther’s exposure to music at home. During his student years, he studied music in the Ratsschule at Mansfeld, where he learned music theory, sang Psalms as a choir boy, served in Catholic processions, and 4 He became an learned the changing responses of the liturgical year. accomplished singer and lutenist, and he even transcribed “polyphonic vocal compositions for the lute.”
At the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt, Luther was the most musically accomplished of the monks. He was among the few who took time to write in notation what he improvised, leaving tangible proof of his skills, and he chanted for the appointed daily services or “offices.” His love of music was not limited to spiritual songs, and he became a devotee of certain popular (i.e., familiar to the common people) songs improvised by the Meistersingers(like troubadors). He also appreciated art songs by renowned Renaissance composers, among them Josquin des Prez and Ludwig Senfl.
These varied experiences begat in Luther a hearty appreciation of music that informed his work in the early years of the German Reformation. As he labored to establish a new, biblical form of worship in Reformation churches, Luther composed, collected, or commissioned songs that married congregational usefulness with his own sense of their doctrinal suitability. As a performer and composer, Luther encouraged music at every level.
Luther’s Musical Ideals
As Europe emerged from the medieval period, its culture was ripe for change. Musicians and artists in the sixteenth century began to create a new synthesis of the humanities and arts. Sixteenth-century Europeans grew more sophisticated in their preferences for poetry, painting, and music that celebrated man and his ideas.
Despite these changes, Martin Luther remained a medieval man when it came to music. While his contemporaries were questioning music’s place in the classical quadrivium—the classical curriculum that also included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy—Luther was not so quick to do so. This curriculum had enjoyed wide acceptance: “arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—four sciences that were studied alongside the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Together, the quadrivial and trivial arts formed the corpus of learning in 6 Luther was a staunch advocate for the arts faculty of the medieval university.” what has been called the “Great Tradition.”
Though Luther could argue his love of Jesus (and music) with any humanist, his musical ideals were moored in the previous 1,100 years of tradition, going back to Augustine and Boethius. The Great Tradition of medieval theologians and philosophers provided Luther with a framework out of which to define but also to practice music. Luther no doubt had to study Boethius, especially book one of his five-part treatise De Institutione Musica. And, like any good student, he absorbed the sixth-century Roman philosopher’s musical views.
Boethius distinguished between three kinds of music: “The first is music of the spheres [mundana]; the second is music of the body [humana]; and the third [is] that which is made by certain instruments [instrumentalis], for example, the 7 The “music of the kithara or the aulos and others which assist with songs.” spheres” is a kind of unheard music that expresses celestial harmony; the “music of the body” is a harmony that unites body and soul; and music by instruments is that which we typically think of as music.
Luther’s debt to this tradition can be seen in his distinction between “natural” and “artificial” music. However, he slightly adjusted his fidelity to Boethius, according to Jeremy Begbie. He refused to elevate the theoretical above the practical and emphasized the goodness of the created realm (and the creative acts that men do in the midst of it):
His main interest is not in music as a vehicle through which we rise to mathematical comprehension (although he may have believed this). The stress is on music as full and glorious, a good gift, with little sense that its physical, material, and sensual nature is a potential hindrance to union with God. Moreover, Luther does not treat practical music making as secondary and inferior to the theoretical discipline of music; hence… his massive investment in music as practiced.
For Luther, music was a primary force for all things emotional. He saw music as serving the purposes of the church to “turn the hearts” of all within earshot of the true gospel:
Experience testifies that, after the Word of God, music alone deserves to be celebrated as mistress and queen of the emotions of the human heart (of animals nothing is to be said at present). And by these emotions men are controlled and often swept away as by their lords. A greater praise of music than this we cannot conceive. For if you want to revive the sad, startle the jovial, encourage the despairing, humble the conceited, pacify the raving, mollify the hate-filled—and who is able to enumerate all the lords of the human heart, I mean the emotions of the heart and the urges which incite a man to all virtues and vices?—what can you find that is more efficacious than music?
The enthusiasm Luther felt for music was not without sobriety. In fact, he 10 with a ends his introduction to Georg Rhau’s collection of contrapuntal motets sense of caution:
Take special care to shun perverted minds who prostitute this lovely gift of nature and of art with their erotic rantings; and be quite assured that none but the devil goads them on to defy their very nature which would and should praise God its Maker with this gift, so that these bastards purloin the gift of God and use it to worship the foe of God, the enemy of nature and of this lovely art.
Augustine had warned about the pernicious influence of erotic, sensuous music. Luther had read Augustine, but unlike the great bishop of Hippo, he was no enemy of music’s powers. In fact, it was the power of music to effect joy that gave Luther reason to praise it. Luther further saw the power present in musical performance as a catalyst for the growth of the church. In keeping with his general liberality toward culture as a gift of God, Luther included music within his paradigm to awaken all believers:
I firmly believe, nor am I ashamed to assert, that next to theology no art is equal to music; for it is the only one, except theology, which is able to give a quiet and happy mind. This is manifestly proved by the fact that the devil, the author of depressing care and distressing disturbances, almost flees from the sound of music as he does from the word of theology. This is the reason why the prophets practiced music more than any art and did not put their theology into geometry, into arithmetic, or into astronomy, but into music, intimately uniting theology and music, telling the truth in psalms and songs.
Unlike his younger contemporary John Calvin, Luther was not driven primarily to protect parishioners from music’s potential power. Calvin famously retained a profound suspicion for music:
But when they [believers] frequent their sacred assemblies, musical instruments in celebrating the praises of God would be no more suitable than the burning of incense, the lighting up of lamps, and the restoration of the other shadows of the law. The Papists, therefore, have foolishly borrowed this, as well as many other things, from the Jews… but we should always take care that no corruption creep in which might both defile the pure worship of God and involve men in superstition.
Luther maintained that in creation, music and the arts are manifestations of God’s image in man. In fact, he evaluated those who lacked proper appreciation for music: “I am not satisfied with him who despises music, as all fanatics do; for music is an endowment and a gift of God, not a gift of men. It also drives away the devil and makes people cheerful; one forgets all anger, unchasteness, pride, and other vices. I place music next to theology and give it the highest praise.”
In his speaking and writing, then, Luther carved out a fresh musical paradigm. Though he inherited the medieval understanding of music, he did not adopt it uncritically. Instead, he built upon the medieval paradigm, resulting in a fresh and novel approach. Indeed, music was Luther’s apparent inspiration, his resource, as he resisted, fled from, and eventually overcame the civil and ecclesiastical authorities who opposed his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and beyond.
Luther’s Tunes
Luther asserted that by praising God in music, humans were enabled to “to taste with wonder (but not to comprehend fully) the absolute and perfect wisdom of 16 Worship in the earliest Lutheran God in his wonderful work of Music.” parishes included rudimentary instruction in the gospel, in sound doctrine, and in the practice of godly singing. Largely due to a growing unrest among the populace, Luther’s ideas were welcomed with open arms. The newly allowed congregational practice of singing rustic chorales was a boon to the early Reformation. In keeping with the spirit of the age, community singing was a breath of fresh air to the poor, often downtrodden, working-class folk who resented church officials’ keeping company with the sometimes oppressive nobility. But were there sinister, clandestine sources for these chorales? Did Martin Luther endorse “bar tunes” for use in Christian worship?
Luther was careful with his sources, but he rarely denied the value of a good tune. His chorales were derived from community songs, Gregorian chants, and Meistersinger melodies performed at courts and community fairs. In one of his chorale books, Geistliche Gesangbuch(Spiritual songbook), published in 1524, Luther included artful part songs written in sophisticated counterpoint. Later on, his friend and composer Johann Walter wrote complex motets for worship. By mid-century, it was clear that the new Lutheran chorale tradition, at first known for simple melodies and strong rhythmic patterns, had inspired a measure of quality and artfulness. This further distanced the Reformers in Germany from the church in Rome.
Luther himself was a composer, and it is well known he wrote texts and tunes for a number of German chorales, including “Wir glauben all an einenGott” (We all believe in one God), “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” (A mighty fortress is our God), and the Sanctus from the German Mass. In keeping with Meistersinger tradition, Luther set his own texts to music and played them for 17 It was his careful fusing of lyrical beauty with good theology, gathered crowds. then, that gave his hymns a particular effect. By 1545, this version of “Ein’ festeBurg” was published, still with its isorhythms (repeating patterns) from the Meistersinger tradition.
Since the musical form of this and many other chorales was known as “bar tunes” or held to a “bar form,” some have accused Luther of appropriating musical forms from taverns. The implication is that it would be inappropriate to import such licentious tunes into the sanctuary (others, more approvingly, use such a practice to justify the use of popular forms of music in church today).
However, such tunes are called “bar tunes” not because of their origin, but because of their structure. The term refers to a musical notation, the bar, 18 Over the last five indicating that the melody of the first line is to be repeated. hundred years, this form has been in use commonly, and has no connection to consuming ale in a tavern.
Although these hymns were perhaps rhythmically more driving, Lutheran musicians eventually began to refine the rustic simplicity inherent to the German chorales. Only a generation or two later, organists and choral composers such as Heinrich Schütz and Samuel Scheidt set about creating ornamented and elaborate versions of the once-simple chorales. By the middle of the seventeenth century, early Baroque chorale cantatas and passions, with their elaborate choral settings, bypassed the simple chorale tune tradition and soon became weekly fare at the larger urban churches.
Luther loved to gather his family and sing songs, play the lute, and enjoy music for its own sake. His newly formed churches in central Germany were now in need of a repertoire of sung praise in the German language. Two publications of 1524 met the need. The first was the Achtliderbuch(Eight-song book), originally titled Etlich Cristlich lider Lobgesang… in der Kirchen zusingen(Some Christian songs to sing in the church). The other was Enchiridionoder eyn Handbűchlein(An enchiridion or a little handbook); it contained twenty-five poems to sixteen melodies, in two volumes. These books contained only melodies for unison singing.
Chief among some of the newer forms employed in Lutheran churches in the seventeenth century are the chorale cantata and the chorale-based passion. In both cases, as composers became familiar enough with the newly applied tradition of chorale tunes, they were able to base entire multimovement works on one or more chorales. An example would be Passion according to St. Luke by Heinrich Schütz. During a period of study in Venice, the young composer learned Italian vocal style. He returned to Germany to write remarkably dramatic settings of the texts from the week before Easter.
As the now-century-old Lutheran movement progressed, more chorales, including elaborate motets based on them, along with vocal part songs that could only have been sung by a trained choir, were performed in many urban churches. There was money to support concert performances, such as Buxtehude’s Abendmusiken(Evening music) series at Marienkirchen in Lübeck, furthering the developing musical life of central and northern Germany.
Luther’s Influence
It had been Luther’s practice to establish schools for children of the new Lutheran faith, to ground them in grammar and the rhetorical arts, including music. Over the years, this method of inculcating the ecclesiastical solidarity of Lutherans nationally was more than effective. Indeed, there was a virtual explosion in singing, composing, and commissioning music and in concert performances. The chorale-based cantatas with their Italian forms opened a well of rich musical activity in Germany. They and the passion settings, based on accounts in John and Luke, paved the long road to the eventual masterpieces of the next generation.
By the late 1600s, a young Saxon organist began as a chorister and eventually set about creating even larger and more elaborate vocal and instrumental music for the Saxon cities where he served. His name was Johann Sebastian Bach.
Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707) in Lübeck to the north, Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706) in the south, and Georg Böhm (1661–1733) in Thuringia (where Bach spent his early years) wrote organ chorale settings that were often used to introduce the Sunday tunes to the congregations they served. These masters of organ and choral composition heavily influenced the young Eisenach-born organist. Their advocacy of the maturing chorale tradition— chorale preludes, fantasias, and fugues—resulted in the direct transmission of tunes that had been sung by sixteenth-century Lutherans, to the sophisticated choirs and organist/cantors of Lübeck, Lüneberg, and Hamburg. And in an era of largely improvised hymn and chorale introductions, these organists took the time to write their works out for future players and churches. These works are now not only still used in liturgies throughout the Western church, but they also have become the best training ground for young organists learning the delicate intricacies of pedal and hand coordination.
Bach, who by 1723 had assumed the post of cantor in the university city of Lübeck, was well versed in these traditions, with one important caveat. Bach, who was noted for his ability to soak up the various traditions around him, was not satisfied to limit his study to the chorale and cantata forms of his mentors. He also copied scores by French composers such as Nicolas De Grigny and the Italian composers Corelli and Vivaldi, and he imbibed other styles and forms including dance suites, secular operatic works, and more.
All these influences began to show themselves in Bach’s compositions for organ, harpsichord, choir, orchestra, and solo voice. The result was a truly Lutheran musician, a man after Luther’s own heart, who agreed with his two centuries-removed mentor that next to theology, music, in all its magnificent forms, is the greatest art. We may estimate the depth of Bach’s admiration for the Erfurt theologian from his library, which, at his death, contained more than eighty volumes of Luther’s collected writings.
We also know there was a genuine affection in Bach for the chorale texts and tunes that the mighty Luther penned as he (and the people’s rebellion) gradually pushed back against the Roman Catholic Church authorities. Bach’s Luther was the progenitor, the rebel with a cause, the catalyst for all that was lasting in theology and music. One might expect this great liturgical tradition to continue into the next generation. Tragically, that was rarely the case.
After the towering Bach, very little can be said of his successors. Music scholars generally agree that the second half of the eighteenth century experienced a decline in its liturgical practice and in the overall output of church composers. As the center of compositional and performing activity moved farther away from the church and toward the concert hall and opera house, compositional output in the churches diminished. In Lutheranism, a parallel movement away from orthodoxy and toward an emotion-based pietism focused the church inward. Worship and its music became enmeshed in a sentimentalism based in human experience and moved away from the objective gospel of the Bible and the Reformers.
While the buildings and grand traditions were usually maintained in Germany’s larger urban churches, rural churches often experienced a definite decline in their music. Training schools for choirs, once the center of education for Lutheran children who were headed toward vocations in the church, were closed in some cities.
Even Bach suffered a period of underappreciation. Though he was remembered mainly for his legendary organ playing, he composed more than three hundred cantatas, passions, and concerti that were tucked away in storage in Leipzig and the other cities where he worked. Eventually, most of Bach’s music was gathered and safely deposited in manuscript libraries, where students and scholars have studied it. Though Bach was extremely influential, disinterest in his church music continued, despite the best efforts of Bach scholars.
Then, young Felix Mendelssohn dusted off Bach’s St Matthew Passion for its return to public consumption in a Leipzig performance in the 1820s. Bach was back, eighty years after he dictated some of his final notes to his assistant.
Thankfully, today there is a resurgence of interest in fine church music, both historical and current. One of the centers for a Lutheran musical revival, the Japan Bach Collegium, has recorded under its director, Masaaki Suzuki, almost the entire corpus of Bach’s works for chorus and orchestra. As European and American university and conservatory students rediscover some of the greatest music of the period from Luther to Bach, it is being replayed. Music from that period (and more recent music as well) is hailed for its beauty. Remarkably, some of Bach’s scores are still being uncovered.
Luther’s Musical Legacy
Luther’s warm enthusiasm for music in all its powerful forms is best found in his own words, which still resonate from concert hall to church nave to classroom:
I, Doctor Martin Luther, wish all lovers of the unshackled art of music grace and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ! I truly desire that all Christians would love and regard as worthy the lovely gift of music, which is a precious, worthy, and costly treasure given to mankind by God. The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them…. In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits…. Our dear fathers and prophets did not desire without reason that music be always used in the churches. Hence, we have so many songs and psalms. This precious gift has been given to man alone that he might thereby remind himself that God has created man for the express purpose of praising and extolling God. However, when man’s natural musical ability is whetted and polished to the extent that it becomes an art, then do we note with great surprise the great and perfect wisdom of God in music, which is, after all, His product and His gift; we marvel when we hear music in which one voice sings a simple melody, while three, four, or five other voices play and trip lustily around the voice that sings its simple melody and adorn this simple melody wonderfully with artistic musical effects, thus reminding us of a heavenly dance, where all meet in a spirit of friendliness, caress and embrace. A person who gives this some thought and yet does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.
Luther’s legacy is best measured in the categories where he expressed himself. First, he was a scholar who believed in the value of the written word, 22 Through his vast writings, including letters, sermons, and his thirty-six hymns. he blazed trails for other Reformers who would follow him.
Second , he was able to articulate his position in underscoring music’s power and unquestioned influence on the human heart while remaining convinced that its power could be abused and should be curbed when necessary.
Third , his musical tastes ranged from the vocal polyphony of art music composers such as Josquin des Prez to tunes such as “O Welt, ich muss dichlassen” (O world, I now must leave thee), which he borrowed and transformed from Heinrich Isaac’s beautiful “Innsbruck, I Now Must Leave Thee.”
Fourth, Luther’s understanding of musical style proved useful in a growing Lutheran church where vestiges of old Roman rites remained, but in which singing chorales such as “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott” was a unifying element. His chorales combined vital biblical theology and freshly derived music.
Fifth, Luther embraced all the arts, including painting, stained glass, organ, architecture, and poetry. He affirmed their value even as others in the quickly moving Reformation were condemning them: “Nor am I at all of the opinion that all the arts are to be overthrown and cast aside by the Gospel, as some super spiritual people protest; but I would gladly see all the arts, especially music, in the service of Him who has given and created them.”
In all the crosscurrents of the modern worship discussion, few have this enlarged view of the arts. Indeed, lack of appreciation for the arts, even with a clear declaration of the gospel, is a truncated approach to evangelism. One of the hallmarks of Luther’s spiritual and aesthetic maturity was that the adiaphora benefit the proclamation of the gospel, when properly managed and sensitively encouraged throughout the church’s life. Perhaps, then, if Luther were allowed a glimpse into the modern evangelical church, he would scratch his head at much that he saw.
The five-hundred-year legacy of Luther’s life and work, from a musical perspective, is considerable. God used Luther to enrich the true church of Jesus Christ with music. Since the first days of the Reformation heroes, he alone among his contemporaries held out this hope: that in using choirs, bells, stringed and brass instruments, and richly derived polyphony, not all was rejected as the property of the Roman Catholic Church. Though these things were connected in many people’s minds to the pope and his minions, the things themselves were in fact just things, and could be used again, in another age, with a different spirit, for the greater glory of God who created all things.
Luther innovated in the use of music in the education of children as they learned catechism, pastors as they learned theology, and a fledgling church as it experienced congregational singing anew. Luther never let the devil turn him away from supporting and advocating the truths of the Bible, and he used music to cheer his soul in the process. Luther, in his ecstatic support of God’s gift of music, used it as a weapon against “all anger, unchasteness, pride, and other vices.” As a student of the Word of God and an amateur musician himself, he wrote, “Reason sees the world as extremely ungodly, and therefore it murmurs. The spirit sees nothing but God’s benefits in the world and therefore begins to sing.”
All the volumes of words written to describe Luther’s impact on the West for the last five hundred years pale in comparison to Luther’s own sense of gratitude to God for the precious gift of music. We can be likewise thankful that God allowed this German monk the years he worked, in order that the world might be a more truthful, good, and beautiful place.
Notes
Notes
1. “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae Iucundae” (1538), in LW, 53:323.
2. Carl F. Schalk, Luther on Music: Paradigms of Praise(St. Louis: Concordia, 1988), 51.
3. Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007), 104.
4. Schalk, Luther on Music, 13.
5. Ibid., 20.
6. Andreas Loewe, “Musica est optimum”: Martin Luther’s Theory of Music(dissertation, Melbourne College of Divinity, Australia 2013), 6, http://ml.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/12/19/ml.gct133.
7. Translated from the original Latin found online: Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/start.html.
8. Begbie, Resounding Truth, 100. Emphasis original.
9. WA, 50:371f; What Luther Says, 2:982–83.
10. Jeremy S. Begbie, Music, Modernity, and God(London: Oxford University Press, 2013), 30.
11. LW, 53:324.
12. Letters of 1528–1530, WABr, 5:639; What Luther Says, 2:983; cf. LW, 49:428.
13. John Calvin, Commentary on Psalms, 5:320.
14. WATR, 6:7034; What Luther Says, 2:980.
15. Luther was of the opinion that “music enabled people to endure the very Anfechtungen that led him to challenge the late-medieval doctrine of justification in the first place is theologically significant. Like the scholastic supernatural habit of grace, music also was a free gift [Gabe, donum] created by God. Like the habit of grace, music was in itself grace-filled [gnadenreich]. Like the habit of grace, music had a profound effect on the human soul, encouraging and enabling other habits of goodness and grace. In this way, while it was not in itself an agent of justification, music contributed to the formation of a character or habitus that closely resembled the late-scholastic supernatural habit of grace [gratia creata]. As Luther made clear in his Marginalia to Peter Lombard’s Sentences(1509– 12), rejecting the scholastic distinction between created and uncreated grace as artificial, “that habit is the Holy Spirit.” Loewe, “Musica est optimum.”
16. WA, 50:372, 12–13.
17. Schalk, Luther on Music, 26.
18. Bar form, in music, the structural pattern aab as used by the medieval German Minnesingers and Meistersingers, who were poet-composers of secular monophonic songs (i.e., those having a single line of melody). The modern term bar form derives from a medieval verse form, the bar, consisting of three stanzas, each having the form aab. The musical term thus refers to the melody of a single stanza, the a sections (called Stollen) having the same melody, and the b section (Abgesang) having a different melody. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Bar form,” accessed 1-5-15, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/52460/Bar-form.
19. Willi Apel, ed., Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 158.
20. Peter Washington, Bach, Everyman’s Library—EMI Classics Music Companions(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 30.
21. “Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae Iucundae,” in LW, 53:323. Quoted in John Barber, “Luther and Calvin on Music and Worship,”Reformed Perspectives Magazine 8, no. 26 (2006): 1–16.
22. Barber, “Luther and Calvin,” 1.
23. Ibid., 4.
24. Ibid., 6.
25. Quoted in Begbie, Resounding Truth, 100.