Who is music for?

As a devotee of classical music, I always think there is something to be learned from J.S. Bach. Consider the question: “Who is music for?” Bach’s answer to this question has defied and perplexed every generation that followed.

At the time of Bach’s death in 1750, the Enlightenment was in full swing. Amid that first flowering of liberty, equality and fraternity, music was thought an application of humanity’s “own native genius … that would revive his spirits and enliven his taste”. Who was music for? The audience’s pleasure.

Track forward to the Romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and enter stage left the lone genius, misunderstood and heroically persevering in a world that can’t keep up. Beethoven has been canonised as the archetype of this in music: writing works thought difficult and opaque in their day, but within a generation of his untimely death, effectively deified. Who was music for? The discerning few who recognised true genius.

Most Western societies since have swung between one of these two extremes. Whether the modernism of the mid-20th century – see Milton Babbitt’s infamous 1958 essay, “Who cares if you listen?”, which argued that the pinnacle of human musical expression is written by “specialists” for specialists – or the neoliberalism of more recent decades, where music is for those willing to pay for it, turning the music industry into a race to the lowest common denominator.

Into this strides J.S. Bach as a breath of fresh air, a man who signed off every work with S.D.G. (Soli Deo Gloria), who consumed as much Bible and theology as his vast musical output. Who is music for? Quite simply, “The glory of God”, says Bach.

We do well to remember this in our churches, guarding us against the extremes of the musical generations that followed Bach. If music is all for the pleasure of our audience, we risk singing that is bland and functional, claiming to cater to all and in fact catering for no-one, or worse saying only what “itching ears want to hear” (2 Tim. 4:3). If it is only for the discerning few, then we put musician-shaped idols in the place of God and introduce man-made divisions into a people God Himself has made one.

But if it is for the glory of God, then we pursue that which delights Him: the lifting up of His name in the passionate and excellent giving of our time and talents, and the good of “the church of God, which he bought with his own blood” (Acts 20:28). We would do well to let Bach’s voice be heard today.