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Musical virtuosity in church services. Is it showing off? Giving God your best? Christians often come to opposite conclusions.
Today’s podcast episode is the first in a series about virtuosity. We’re kicking off the series by talking with Dr. Joshua Kalin Busman, an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina—Pembroke. He researches “music in religious communities, liturgical theology, mass-media, and identity politics in American popular music,” with a particular focus on Evangelical worship music.
Joshua Busman studies white Evangelical megachurches where virtuosity gets seen as showing off and taking attention away from God. In fact, Josh says that in these churches, “the role of the church musicians is essentially to become invisible.”
But as the same time, worship music isn’t an amateurish style of music (unlike, say, punk), so even though musicians aren’t supposed to draw attention to their skills, they do have to be skilled to play it.
Martin Luther’s contemporary, the theologian Andreas Karlstadt, wrote about this tension that we still feel over 500 years later. Josh describes Karlstadt’s “conundrum” like this:
“In order to honor God properly with worship we would want to have a performance that is of the highest possible quality. In fact we can’t imagine a context in which we would need a higher quality performance than a performance in which the primary audience is God. However, in order to execute such a performance, our attention would have to be so fully devoted to executing the performance properly that we would end up canceling out our ability to focus on worshipping, because we would be so fully immersed in trying to execute the performance properly. So there’s this double bind that is sort of seeded into the beginning of thinking about Protestant worship, in which focus on technical proficiency or skill is placed in contract to focus on proper worship.”
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Resources We Mentioned
- Music and the Church podcast episode on musical views in the Early Church
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