A Conversation with Benedict Sheehan and Harrison Russin
(The following conversation is a continuation of the OCA’s series on vocations. Previous installments have included “Vocation as Church-wide endeavor” and “A Call for Monastic Vocations”.)
In his 2018 encyclical Of What Life Do We Speak?, His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon articulates the stark reality facing Orthodox church musicians in America today: church music, though it is “often the first thing which deeply strikes people when they walk into an Orthodox church,” is “a tool that has become sadly blunted in many of our present-day parishes.” (p23) There is indeed a great amount to celebrate in our present-day musical situation. We ought to celebrate the professional-level quality of ensembles focused on Orthodox liturgical repertoire — ensembles like Cappella Romana, the PaTRAM Institute, and the Saint Tikhon Choir. We ought to endorse, sing, and support the work of professional composers working in the Orthodox tradition. We ought to purchase and use the publications coming out of Saint Tikhon’s Monastery, Saint Vladimir’s Seminary, Musica Russica, and the OCA Department of Liturgical Music and Translations.
Yet at the same time, those involved in the weekly liturgical worship at their parish know that the musical situation is bad in many places, and getting worse. Research for Father Peter Simko’s M.Div. thesis at Saint Tikhon’s Seminary indicates that of 268 parish bodies he surveyed, only 18 had any sort of payment for choir directors or members, and about one-third of parishes have changed musical leadership in the past five years, primarily due to moving, retirement, or death, and less than one-third of parishes had any sort of youth musical education component. This situation is far removed from the days of my (Harrison’s) father’s generation, when he grew up with a “Professor” who directed the services (including two liturgies every Sunday), taught Russian school (and Russian dances!), and was provided a house at the parish. Both of us, Benedict at Saint Tikhon’s and Harrison at Saint Vladimir’s, regularly receive emails from parishes across the country seeking qualified music directors. Many of these parishes are willing to offer stipends, but only extremely rarely, if ever, are they prepared to offer full salaries and benefits for directors. Even when the support is there, moreover, it is unclear where qualified candidates for us to recommend for such positions will come from.
We offer here a call for the renewal of the vocation of the Orthodox church musician. This starts with a call for all the faithful to engage in the musical life of their parishes, both as musicians themselves and as supporters of music in the church. At every augmented litany we specially pray for “those who sing,” remembering this office as an important one in the church. Indeed, the placement of the choir at the front of liturgical processions is a remnant of the ancient consideration of singers as minor orders of the clergy, and this aspect of being set aside for specific liturgical service is no less important today than it was in centuries past.
Our offering is presented here in the form of a conversation because, while we both have unique perspectives given our vantage point as music directors of two major OCA institutions, neither of us as yet has definitive answers. Our hope is that through our dialogue we might arrive at some new solutions to the problems facing us, and furthermore might invite others in the church to join in the discussion going forward.
Benedict: Harrison, let me begin by posing a question to you that I ask seminarians at the beginning of each academic year: why do we sing in church? Why music specifically, and not simply preaching or reading or some form of congregational speech?
Harrison: One text I always come back to is from Evagrios’ Praktikos, his hundred chapters on prayer. With Evagrios we have to be careful, because several of his teachings were condemned by the church. But the bulk of his teachings on prayer were imported and endorsed by the Orthodox fathers of the early centuries and are found in the Philokalia. Number 69 of the Praktikos says: “It is a great thing to pray without distraction. A greater thing still to sing psalms without distraction.” I like to focus on that word, “sing,” because so much of our liturgical and spiritual tradition comes from this early desert practice of singing the psalms.
This word, “sing psalms,” is all over the desert tradition, and some newer translations even insist on that verb “sing.” Because the desert monks were not just reciting the psalter; they were actually singing it with melodies, and probably simple melodies. We know that they had the psalter memorized (see Serapion 1 for a very vivid example of this!), and we know that they sang the entire psalter every day. Saint Benedict says in his Rule, chapter 18, concerning the psalter, that “we lukewarm monks read in one week what our forefathers promptly fulfilled in one day!”
Psalmody is our entrance into the scriptural story. In Robert Alter’s translation of the Psalms, he chooses the word “murmur” instead of “meditate” because the word in Hebrew supposes a kind of continuous mumbling (see Psalm 1:2). The point is that knowing the Psalter gives us the vocabulary to understand scripture, and to put our own selves as hearers of that scriptural story. (See also the famous second canon of the Second Council of Nicaea, which requires all bishops to know the psalter by heart, “so that from it he may admonish and instruct all the clergy who are subject to him.”)
Fortunately, there’s no such thing as a “read psalm.” It’s an oxymoron in Greek! The very verb psallein presupposes that you are singing them. And the psalms are the foundation of our liturgical services. (Unfortunately, I will add as a side note that they are usually the first thing cut when we seek to abbreviate for parish usage.)
Most of us can probably sing from memory a song we loved as teenagers. Do we have any similar familiarity with the psalter?
So this is where I always start: singing the psalms is always our entry into the liturgical, spiritual, and ascetical life of the church. The very act of singing demands tasks that are the perfect training ground for spiritual warfare. In order to sing well, we have to let go. We have to listen to others, we have to be obedient to the director and to the sound of the choir. We can’t sing too loudly or too softly. The fundamentals of most singing techniques are about relaxing and singing without tension, breathing with solid but free breath. I think these are all reasons why singing the psalter is part of the foundation of the Orthodox experience.
Benedict, I know you have meditated (or mumbled) on these questions for many years, so I’d love to hear your response.
Benedict: I think you’re absolutely right. The ascesis — the spiritual practice — of psalmody is an extremely important factor here. Singing is both a high-level cognitive skill and a complex motor skill, and as such involves our whole selves in a very deep way. The idea of channeling those immense human capacities into an act of prayer is definitely integral to explaining the importance of music in the church.
For me, it’s also important to bring up two other concepts. First is the concept of beauty. Music, at a very basic level, is meant to beautify the worship of God. Other arts serve this purpose as well — I’ll get to that in a moment — but music plays an irreplaceable role in the beauty of divine services. We believe in a God who is fundamentally beautiful, and the worship of Him must reflect that beauty on every level of the liturgical experience. I am not speaking here merely of beauty as a subjective quality based on aesthetic taste, though that’s important as well, but beauty in an ontological sense; beauty as goodness, beauty as truth, beauty as the underlying purpose of existence. In this sense, we can see that the beauty of the Liturgy is a manifestation of reality, of existence as such, not just a kind of ornamentation superimposed upon an inherently neutral reality. I think this is why Christianity as well as many other of the ancient religious traditions have tended to use artistic expressions — and music in particular — in their worship.
I’m reminded here of the story of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with an alabaster flask of costly myrrh:
And when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, “Why this waste? For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.” But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me. (Mt. 26:8-10)
To me, this story is the ultimate justification for sacred art. From a certain perspective, all the time and money and energy invested into church art is indeed a waste. We spend all that money on iconography, vestments, beautiful churches, furnishings, lighting, music, and for what? For a fleeting experience of glory? Or worse, for institutional or personal aggrandizement? Those resources might easily have been spent on the poor, or on some other form of practical social service. Understanding beauty, however, as something more fundamental, as something inherently connected to the meaning of existence, we can see that the work of creating or revealing beauty is really the work of the spiritual life, the work of expressing our love for Christ. Jesus’ answer to the disciples, “the poor you always have with you,” while it may at first seem a little hard-hearted, points to a really essential truth. I read this as saying that there will always be practical problems — there will always be struggles and needs, people to feed, grass to mow, taxes to pay — but if we don’t know why we exist in the first place, either as churches or as individuals, then nothing ultimately makes any sense. To put it simply, if we feel we can’t spend money on church art because we really have to fix the church roof, we need to ask “why do we even have a church in the first place?” To create and reveal true beauty in this world, I think, is the answer. And this, more than anything, gives us all a reason to live.
To address music in particular, I first want to admit that music is, in a sense, the hardest thing to justify spending time and money on. I think this is partly because it is the least tangible of all the arts. As soon as you sing a note it disappears; as soon as you sing a service you have to sing another one. Paying for music in the church is a literally ceaseless investment with no real tangible return. What you’re really paying for when you support music is time. And this brings me to my second concept.
Music is an art of transfiguring time. Rhythm, pitch, phrasing, form, all of these things unfold over time and permeate and shape our experience of it. We all come into church with our own individual experiences of time. Maybe we’re tired, or bored, or waiting for something; or maybe we’re afraid, or excited, or sad, or hungry. All of this creates in each of us an isolated experience of time. When the music starts, though, suddenly we’re unified, suddenly we all enter into a common experience of the unfolding of time, suddenly we all feel and hear and think in unison. Studies have shown that during powerful musical experiences, even the heart rates of singers and listeners align and fall into rhythm with the music. I think this is amazing, and I think it has a lot to do with why music is so integral to the liturgical experience. We certainly know in the negative how uncomfortable it can be when the music in church falters for some reason — we’re suddenly thrown into a state of confusion and sympathetic anxiety, dropped abruptly back into our own isolated psychological experience of time. When the music does its job, though, it’s like nothing else. Time disappears, or rather, is radically transfigured, and we are all changed as a result. This is the other reason why I think music is so immensely important for worship.
Harrison: Beauty and time are the foundation of how our actions in church communicate meaning. The earliest examples of Christian “iconography” are relatively simple attempts to beautify the worship space. These were rarely “functional” improvements; instead, they are etchings of the cross on little barriers, paintings squeezed into spaces that were otherwise empty. We now take the ubiquity of iconography for granted, but it grew out of very simple beginnings as an attempt to add meaning to a space, visually. Music does the same, in terms of time and aurality.
We now understand that music is a prerequisite for liturgical worship. Yet the situation “on the ground,” in parishes from week to week, often sounds far from beautiful. You mentioned the necessity of putting financial and personal resources into music and arts, but how does that practically work out for a parish? What can we do to cultivate the vocation of the church musician as English-speaking Orthodox in America?
Benedict: As I see it, there are two ends from which to approach this question. On the one end, we have the problem of identifying and/or producing qualified candidates for leadership positions in church music. Let’s call this “the Personnel problem.” On the other end, we have the problem of actually providing such people with jobs that pay a fair wage. We’ll call this “the Pay problem.” The two problems are integrally connected, and ultimately you can’t solve one without solving the other, but we have to start somewhere.
If we start with the Personnel problem, what we’re effectively asking is how do we inspire people to be musicians? What is it that makes someone want to devote the enormous of amount of time and energy that it takes to become a truly skilled church musician? Any kind of musical training is deeply involved and immensely time-consuming, and the discrete skills and knowledge associated with Orthodox liturgical music are a yet further specialization of that training. Why would someone undertake that?
Nietzsche famously said somewhere that “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” The good news, then, is that if someone is truly inspired to pursue a vocation in church music, he or she will likely be willing to face significant obstacles and assume significant risk in order to achieve that goal. I do frequently meet people that fit this description, but most of them are quite young. It’s very rare that I meet anyone my age or older who is seriously considering pursuing church music as a vocation, unless they’re already doing it. I think, then that the key to the Personnel problem is to focus on inspiring music vocations in young people, especially teenagers and young adults. This does not mean we should necessarily create youth music programs — those can be very positive, but only if exceedingly well-constructed and well-run, and most churches don’t have the capacity to achieve that — but it means rather that we need to start giving young people adult musical responsibilities. Integrate youth into your church choir and give them leadership roles, perhaps even before they’re totally ready for them. Take them seriously. Do not make them a showpiece — this infantilizes them — but treat them exactly like adults. I strongly believe that young people who have a clear sense of ownership of church music will find themselves deeply inspired and will commit seriously, even into adulthood. And I suspect that some will go on to choose music as their vocation. This solution will take patience on the part of parishes, but I contend that it is the only meaningful and lasting solution to the Personnel problem.
To address the pay problem, let me first say that I know there are parishes that are struggling financially. Every time I say to people that we need to allocate money for church music, someone inevitably says, “but we can’t even pay our priests!” I know, money is tight in many places. I want to argue, though, that the problem isn’t really money — its value. Let’s step back a moment and realize that we live in the richest country in the world at the richest period in world history. There is truly a lot of money out there if we really want to find it — donations, grants, endowments, crowd-funding, capital investment, you name it. Our problem is that we often don’t really care enough to find it. It’s not clear to many of us what the value of good church music actually is. The oft-repeated maxim of fundraising is “money follows vision.” So if we want to solve the Pay problem, we have to simultaneously solve the Vision problem.
So here’s my two-part recommendation: First, start small. If your church can’t afford to pay a professional choir director a full-time salary with benefits, then hire a professional musician to come to your parish periodically to lead an all-day choir rehearsal and direct weekend services. Working on this model you can also set discrete extended goals rather than focusing on every service in the church year. Hire a conductor to help organize your church choir and other interested folks in your area to sing a concert and have a set number of rehearsals together in order to prepare. This will pay dividends in your regular services without breaking the bank. Your choir will get better, and everyone will leave the experience inspired rather than exhausted. And more importantly, everyone will start developing a new vision for what church music can be. Remember, money follows vision.
Second, build on strength. Too many church choirs operate on a quantity-over-quality model. Very few choirs hold auditions, and too many parish priests are afraid of the hurt feelings that can sometimes result from people being told they can’t sing in the choir. So we have choirs full of people that are dedicated followers (at best) but only a very few leaders. In such a circumstance the leaders in the choir very rarely have an actually satisfying experience singing, and all too often they get burnt out and end up leaving the choir. We have to stop operating like this. It’s entirely self-defeating. My solution to this problem has long been to make the regular church choir, as much as possible, a small select group of competent singers — only as many as we actually have, even if it’s just a few people — and then, as we are able, to gradually create satellite training programs to cultivate new members. This model ensures that the actual liturgical experience is reliably good and, just as importantly, it sets a standard for everyone else to shoot for. Over time people actually improve and the choir grows, both in skill and in personnel. (Our choir is almost too big now!) But we have to keep in mind that no one will ever get better if they never see what “better” means. It also — and here’s the key — lets the parish get used to good singing in church. This is extremely important. By creating an expectation of musical quality in your parish you necessarily create an unconscious, and thus deeply-rooted, sense that music is inherently valuable. In my experience, people will happily pay to maintain that value.
Harrison: I appreciate your precise diagnosis of the two problems. As you note, both of these problems have deeper roots and are complex, but they also both have attainable solutions. Of course, these solutions are generational, and may require great shifts in our thinking about how parishes operate on multiple levels. The Statute of the OCA gives a definition of a parishioner’s expectations and responsibilities:
A Parishioner has a reasonable expectation for pastoral care in accordance with the Orthodox tradition. He or she enjoys full benefits of participation in Parish life. He or she has the duty to sustain, strengthen and witness to the Orthodox Faith; to live according to the teaching of the Church; to participate in the religious services; to partake of the Holy Sacraments; to fulfill acts of Christian mercy; to support and help the Church.
This is, in fact, a very demanding list. For several overlapping reasons, I think many of us fall into the habit of thinking of Church as another “activity.” Monday is bridge club, Tuesday is soccer practice, Wednesday is vespers. Church becomes another aspect of our personal identity, but its value remains relative to us, not to Jesus Christ and his gospel. This way of thinking is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of a consumerist culture, because even those who diagnose the problem have difficulty escaping from it. How do we live our lives as Christians in the world? How do we avoid making church another activity merely fortifying our definitions and delusions of self? No parish community — from a 100 year-old cathedral to a brand-new mission, from “convert” to “cradle” — can easily escape this secular way of thinking about church.
Benedict, I think the suggestions you give start to pave a way to break out of secular thinking. We don’t sing in church because we are part of the choir and have been for decades. We sing in church in order to submit our own talents to the service of God. Coming back to my first point, singing is an act of ascesis, and the beauty it creates retains this empty dimension — the dimension of Christ crucified.
On the practical note, I will further add that learning music is very akin to learning a language. This language supports all that we do liturgically. Readers, servers, priests, and hierarchs all rely on a sense of timing developed by going to liturgical services continually. In my experience, those liturgical servants with the best-developed sense of timing also have a capacity for musical language, whether that capacity is learned or innate.
I am not claiming that “tone-deaf” men cannot become deacons, or that priests be required to take voice lessons. But for those who lack musical sensitivity, I have found that the path to becoming a fluent server requires a great amount of dedication to learn “musical” principles of timing, resonance, and tone. After all, we expect our priests to offer a homily every week, regardless of their “innate” homiletical, exegetical, and theological capacities. These capabilities take years of training to develop. The same principle holds for music and liturgical service — we expect our clergy to sing at every service, regardless of their innate talents.
It is, perhaps, an apparent truth that some individuals today have more “innate” musical talent than others. But I do not think that fact erects a barrier to those who consider themselves non-musical. If the language analogy holds, even individuals who are not good at learning languages will start to develop proficiency in a foreign language when forced to speak and hear it on a daily basis. This is, for example, one reason that participation in choir is a requirement for seminarians at Saint Vladimir’s — to use the voice and ears daily as a training tool in this language of music.
My guess is that every parish community has people who are naturally gifted in music, and those who struggle. Even those who are naturally gifted may require some training in order to quantify and hone their gifts; Michael Jackson and Luciano Pavarotti, for example, famously couldn’t read music, although they are two of the most famous musicians of the twentieth century. So I would additionally think of money spent on learning music well as money spent on “learning the language” of liturgy. This does not necessarily mean hiring an Orthodox church musician to come teach, though that is a wonderful place to start; other wonderful places to start include the classes offered online from the OCA. Benedict, I note that you said hire a “professional musician,” not necessarily an Orthodox professional musician.
Benedict: Yes, you’re absolutely right. I don’t necessarily mean an Orthodox professional musician. (Those are not always easy to find!) A great deal of what church choirs need right now is simply musical training, as you say. If we have to choose between “Orthodox” and “musician,” I argue that churches are fairly well-equipped to provide the “Orthodox” part — the “learning of the language of liturgy” as you beautifully put it — but are generally not well-equipped to provide serious musical training. If we have to choose, then, I think we should prioritize the “musician” part if the goal is to make our choirs function better.
Harrison: Given that, I would further suggest all those involved in music ministry to seek out lessons in vocal technique and ear training. These are musical skills that are not specifically “Orthodox” which will improve the musical ability of any choir. Maybe someone in your parish already is proficient in these areas; maybe you have to seek out a professional, or even engage a teacher for online one-on-one lessons. The possibilities today are manifold, and the cost for online tutorials is significantly more affordable now than at any previous time.
The calling for church musicians is a calling for an integrated approach into the liturgical worship of our church. We do have a duty to make our services as beautiful as we can, though, as you, Benedict, pointed out above, it is a Christian vision of beauty centered around the cross of Christ.
We hope we have demonstrated that the calling to music ministry is a calling to Christian living. Singing is not simply “an aspect” of liturgical worship — it is the very essence of liturgy, and, as we learn from the desert monastic tradition, it provides unequaled entry into the spiritual life.
Music also beautifies our services, and by so doing beautifies all of us and the world around us. Dedicating our time, resources, and talent to music is a dedication to doing “a beautiful thing” for Christ. We are, in a very real sense, pouring upon the very head of our Lord the most precious and pure gifts we have to give as human beings.
His Beatitude Metropolitan Tikhon listed “encouraging the sacred arts of iconography and music” as the first of his “enduring goals” for the First Pillar of his “Four Pillars for the fulfillment of the Apostolic Work of the Church.” Unlike other sacred arts, however, music needs constant care and investment in order to come alive. Iconography can be paid for and finished, but the work of musicians in the church is never finished. In this regard, iconography, architecture, furnishings, vestments, all these wonderful arts ultimately serve to show us what the values of a parish were at some point in the past; only music truly reveals what the values of a parish are today.
It is our urgent hope that Orthodox Christians in America respond to the call to support the vocation of musicians. Our sacred music is an immense treasure — a treasure admired the world over — but it is not an inexhaustible one. Our music is only as strong as the people who sing it every day. Without musicians to sing, educators to teach, directors to lead, and people to understand and value it, this treasure may eventually become little more than a memory of past glory, a museum of ancient artifacts that no one knows how, or cares, to use anymore. May it not be so! We believe that we have an opportunity right now to reinvest in the vocation of music — we must not let that opportunity pass us by.
— Harrison Russin & Benedict Sheehan
October 4, 2021
Benedict Sheehan is a composer, conductor, arranger, writer about, and teacher of music. He is the Director of Music at Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and Monastery. He has earned degrees from Bard College Conservatory of Music, Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and Westminster Choir College.
Dr. Harrison Russin is the Assistant Professor of Liturgical Music at Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. He has earned degrees from Swarthmore College, Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and Duke University.