Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship

“The Government Loves Me, This I Know”: The Social Gospel in Virgil Thomson’s Score to The River
Joanna Smolko, Independent Scholar

Virgil Thomson’s orchestral film score to Pare Lorentz’s The River (1938) employs American songs and hymns to underscore the flow of the Mississippi River. The music of the hymns and their associated texts as paired with the imagery in the film create a theological subtext of creation, fall, and restoration--the final stage accomplished through human efforts. In the film’s opening, fragmentary melodies accompany footage of tributaries that come together to form the Mississippi River in its pristine glory, accompanied by the pastoral hymn “Resignation” (“My Shepherd Will Supply My Needs”). The film climaxes with footage of the river’s flood of 1937 resulting from the misuse of the water and surrounding land, underscored by a fugal layering of apocalyptic hymns, including “Mississippi” (“When Gabriel’s Awful Trump Shall Sound”). The film continues by outlining--and imploring support for--governmental and social efforts to repair the damage, overlaying poignant footage of poverty-stricken families with hymns such as “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” In its conclusion, the film returns to peaceful images of the Mississippi River, accompanied again by “Resignation.” Thomson’s use of hymns in this score demonstrates the waning but present power of the Social Gospel movement in the 1930s, a movement that emphasized social responsibility over specific church doctrines. Like other artwork of the period, such as the photography commissioned in New Deal initiatives, the use of religious artifacts in the film support secular restoration efforts on several levels. They humanize the victims of abject poverty, appeal to the sentiments of the audience, and ease the transition into the greater role the government played in providing aid, a role that previously had been filled by religious communities in the United States until they were overwhelmed by the widespread poverty and destruction created through increased industrialization.

Theological Contexts for the Magnificat in Bach’s Leipzig
Mark Peters, Trinity Christian College

Since at least the Rule of St. Benedict in the sixth century, the Magnificat--the song of Mary recorded in Luke 1--has been a prominent text in Christian liturgy and music. Sung every evening at Vespers, the canticle has been set by composers from the Medieval period to the present. Martin Luther, in his revisions of the liturgy for the evangelical church, retained the Magnificat as a central element in the Vespers service. And although he translated it into German (as “Meine Seele erhebt den Herren”), Luther retained the canticle tone to which the text was commonly sung and also encouraged the singing of the Magnificat in Latin. Two centuries later, in the orthodox Lutheran city of Leipzig where J. S. Bach was cantor, the Magnificat continued to be sung in either Latin or German for Sunday and feast day Vespers. By composing Magnificat settings in both Latin (BWV 243) and German (BWV 10), Bach contributed to a long and vibrant musical tradition.

This paper explores theological sources which inform our understanding of the Magnificat in eighteenth-century Germany, particularly in Bach’s Leipzig. The study begins with Luther himself, whose commentary on the Magnificat and 32 sermons for the Feast of Visitation demonstrate both his regard for the canticle and his continued interactions with it throughout his life. It further examines commentaries and sermons by seventeenth-century theologians whose writings were not only influential in Lutheran orthodoxy, but were also included in Bach’s own library: Abraham Calov, Johann Olearius, and August Pfeiffer. These writings reveal the ways in which the Magnificat was understood, as well as the importance the canticle held theologically, liturgically, and musically. The paper concludes with a consideration of how these sources contribute to our understanding of Bach’s Magnificat settings and of the Magnificat tradition in which he composed.

Zoltán Kodály’s Genevan Psalm 50: The Composer as Prophet in the Midst of National Crisis
Timothy H. Steele, Calvin College

As in the days of the Turkish conquest..., the peasant in many places hitched his wife and children to the plow; most of the food had been consumed or destroyed by the Nazi and Soviet troops; economic life had fallen to a primitive barter level; organized society had completely collapsed; safety of life and property was ruled by blind chance; the last strands of administration were snapped by maneuvering armies; justice was no more dispensed, and what remained resembled lynch law.

In a “birds-eye view” of post WW-II Hungary, Gyula Gombos describes the ruin of a modern state, its institutions in shambles, its population decimated through war, disease, and famine, its sense of identity crushed. For Gombos, the events of 1945-1949 assume a tragic shape. Writing as a historian of the Reformed Church of Hungary, he writes of the swift and steady recovery of Hungarian society and democracy after the war under the seemingly benevolent yet watchful eyes of the occupying Soviet army. With the purges of 1948 and the imposition of a new constitution in May of 1949, however, the Stalinist regime of Mátyás Rákosi inaugurated a period of several years of totalitarian dictatorship, with devastating consequences for the church and Hungarian society in general.

In 1948, although he had been officially retired since 1942, Zoltán Kodály’s stature as a composer, musicologist, pedagogue, and living symbol of Hungarian music and culture was at its height. Among his several compositions of that year, the Genevan Psalm 50 was probably intended for the 200-year old collegium musicum at the Reformed College in Debrecen, the historic center of Calvinism in Hungary. Known as Kantus, the student choral ensemble founded in the 18th century by Gyorgi Marothi had survived all the vicissitudes of Hungarian history to become one of the premiere ensembles of the 20th-century choral revival led by Kodály and Lajos Bardos. Kodály used the Genevan psalm tune as a cantus firmus and adapted an early 17th-century Hungarian translation of the metrical psalm text as a symbolic gesture of respect for the young singers who embodied the Reformed church’s religious and cultural identity.

But Kodály’s psalm motet certainly does not convey the quiet mood of religious consolation one might expect for such an occasion. On the contrary, the psalm speaks of God the judge, rebuking hypocrites and adulterers in Old Testament fury. One can hardly imagine a less sentimental or uplifting text with which to honor a prominent Hungarian musical institution. Was it merely the case, as Percy M. Young suggested, that the Genevan psalms provided Kodály with a link to “that part of Hungarian literature that derived inspiration from the asperities of Calvinism”? In fact, Kodály was uncannily prescient in his choice of text, and in the motet he seems to take on the mantle of a prophet calling the nation to repent, restore justice and offer sacrifices of thanksgiving in the midst of what came to be known as “the year of changes.” This paper will offer a reading of the motet that situates it in the moment of relative calm between two great periods of crisis, a moment that sheds light on Kodály’s appreciation for and creative refashioning of elements of traditional Hungarian Christianity. In this respect, Kodály’s setting of Genevan Psalm 50, together with his other psalm motets, were models for several generations of his pupils, culminating in the publication of a large collection of Hungarian psalm motets in 1979.