The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship

MUSIC, WORSHIP, AND HARMONY

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter – to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water. (Thoughts for Our Times, p. 34)

Music is an act of worship with Bach. His artistic activity and his personality are both based on his piety. If he is to be understood from any standpoint at all, it is from this. For him, art was religion, and so had no concern with the world or with worldly success. It was an end in itself. Bach includes religion in the definition of art in general. All great art, even secular, is in itself religious in his eyes; for him the tones do not perish, but ascend to God like praise too deep for utterance. (J.S. Bach. p. 167.)

Beethoven and Wagner poetize in music, Bach paints. And Bach is a dramatist, but just in the sense that the painter is. He does not paint successive events but seizes upon the pregnant moment that contains the whole event for him and depicts this in music. (Reverence for Life, p. 93)

When I hear a baby’s cry of pain change into a normal cry of hunger, to my ears that is the most beautiful music – and there are those who say I have good ears for music. (The Schweitzer Album, p. 71)

The morality we have lived by was fragmentary only. We must abandon it in favor of the complete, all-embracing love expressed in “reverence for all life.” That fragmentary moral of concern for human life alone was like a single tone floating in the air, incomplete because the base tone to produce the harmony was missing. Reverence for life gives us the full chord, the harmony. (Thoughts for Our Times, pp. 10-11)

By practicing reverence for life we are in a spiritual relationship with the universe; we are in harmony with it. (Thoughts for Our Times, p. 11)