ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the history of music and theology in the Protestant Reformation, exploring the ways in which different Christian leaders in the 16th century allowed for the idea that music might be a means of ‘hearing revelation’ and so accessing God. Most theologians, the author argues, understood the profound power that music possessed to influence human experience: something that could move, inspire, subvert, and preach. Following the notion that there were several reformations in the Protestant Reformation, the author proposes several ‘revelations’, suiting diverse attitudes to the place of music in the faith, according to diverse needs. These include the more logocentric, moralistic, and platonic approach of Erasmus, who disapproved of much Church music in his time, to the more generous conceptions of musicians granted by Richard Pace and Thomas More. The contrasting perspectives of Luther (champion of polyphony, delighting in music as metaphysical vision), Zwingli (urging that music be a privatized affair), and Calvin (extolling monophonic psalmody but wary of idolatry) are considered, as well as the Catholic reforms that followed. Lastly the author traces a ‘via media’ between Puritan restraint and elaborate indulgence, as seen in the writer Richard Hooker and in the subsequent flourishing of English church music.
