the best church choir east of the mississippi
How does a downtown Presbyterian church in Buffalo, NY, get a forty-five-voice choir of professionals and volunteers under the direction of a young virtuoso? As one pop rock group might say, it’s a long and winding road. The journey from the Last Supper, which concluded with Jesus and the disciples singing a Passover hymn, to Sunday morning communion at Westminster Presbyterian Church, covers two millennia and the birth and evolution of a religion. From that tiny cell group of disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem, music has played a central role in the worship life of the church. The other arts would take longer to be accepted and have an impact–architecture that transformed the landscape of Europe and the New World and painting from Eastern Orthodox icons to Michelangelo’s Renaissance murals and sculpture came later; drama and dance had more tenuous, controversial paths to acceptance. But there has never been a time when music and verse have not figured prominently in Christian life and worship.
The story is complicated given the nature of religion, which, on the one hand, must adhere to the preservation of ancient texts and traditions but, on the other hand, must change and keep pace with evolving culture to avoid becoming dead ritual. Perhaps nowhere in the life and mission of the church is this tension experienced so acutely as in the role music plays in worship. Musical expression from antiquity to the present has evolved from chanting Psalms in the early church, to the emergence of polyphonic music in the 4th century, to the Protestant Reformation and use of hymns written for the liturgical year, to the preference today in one wing of the church for guitars and rock bands, while the other wing remains loyal to choral anthems and the pipe organ. Yet, in each era, one issue has polarized opinions of how and what kind of music should be employed in congregational worship.
This issue has its roots in an ancient controversy in which Westminster, founded in 1854, took sides. The debate, or more accurately, the fight, was rooted in an ancient doctrinal dispute regarding the individual’s role in the act of being “saved,” which fueled opposing views of piety and performance in worship leadership. Two parties in the Presbyterian denomination parted company, literally creating a schism, over whether singing anything but the Psalms without instrumentation was a degradation of worship. To sing hymns with organ accompaniment, the critics argued, drew attention away from God to the performer/choir/soloist and became entertainment, thus changing the congregation’s role as supplicant/petitioner to that of audience/recipient, consequently usurping and displacing God as the audience for worship. The parties were known as the Old School and New School, the latter being the party open to a more expansive role for music in worship.
The two schools disagreed over other worship issues, including preaching style and the order and parts of worship. The New School was the child of the Second Great Awakening (c. 1820s)–a massive revival movement that attracted tens of thousands of worshippers during the first half of the 19th century and swelled the pews of Presbyterian and Congregational churches in the mid-Atlantic and New England states. Exactly one hundred years before, the First Great Awakening drew battle lines between what were then called the Old Light and New Light parties, predecessors of the Old and New School camps that fought over essentially the same issues of doctrine and worship style. When discussing Presbyterian or “Reformed” worship and liturgy, it should be noted that the eminent liturgical scholar Howard Hageman maintains that there is no such thing as “Reformed worship” or the Reformed way of worship. Hageman’s case is that worship, in all of its diversity, is subject to the final authority of the Word of God, by which he means that worship is designed and prepared through the lens of the Bible and the fresh understanding of the text and the requirements of the text for worship. The point is that many worship styles may be considered “Reformed” and, as such, subject to change, given the ongoing interpretation of the text.
The New Light and New School parties aimed their worship services and multi-day outdoor revivals at the conversion of the uncommitted and recommitment of the converted to the Christian faith. Preaching, prayers, and music were designed to lead worshippers to a choice–to accept Jesus Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior. The Old School was highly critical of this approach because it rearranged the order of the liturgy and veered significantly away from worship and faith as a cognitive experience and transformed it into an emotional event. New School preachers threatened worshippers with vivid depictions of damnation, referring to them, for example, as Jonathan Edwards famously did, as “spiders dangling over the fiery pit of hell.” Old School critics maintained that the root of the problem was New School doctrine and worship that placed the decision for “salvation of the soul” completely and solely with the individual’s “decision” to step forward at a revival and be saved. Yet, God alone, the Old School held, was the judge and jury of those worthy of being saved or damned. In Protestant theology, there is no Purgatory as there is in the Roman Catholic Church–an in-between state of the soul, after death, in which believers whose souls are not ready to enter heaven can earn their way to salvation and eternal life. In Protestant “afterlife,” therefore, any who are not saved are consequently damned.
This controversy, known as the Calvinist/Arminian debate, goes back to the 5th century when it was known as the heresy of Pelagianism–a dispute between Pelagius and St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo–a long and winding road, indeed! The theological cases made by the Old School (taking the Calvinist view) and the New School (leaning toward the Arminian stance) for their positions preserving God as the final judge or allowing the individual to affect his or her salvation centered on what was called “total or partial depravity.” The totally depraved (i.e., sinful) person, could not affect or “choose” her salvation at all, given the permanently flawed nature of her soul. The partially depraved soul had a path to recognize and choose salvation. The theological points/counterpoints were a splitting of doctrinal hairs made with microscopic precision, cast in a doctrinal language few could understand, and consequently were lost on all but a small circle of theological scholars. Eventually, the sides would recognize that the acrimonious splitting up of the church was counter-productive to being the church, and the parties would reunite, as happened in 1870 when twenty-five separate Presbyterian denominations, arrayed over various nuances of the controversy, buried the axe and came together in Philadelphia in one Presbyterian denomination–until the old dispute reared its head in the modernist/fundamentalist debate in the early 20th century.
One practical result of this complicated theological controversy was that music in worship became a lightning rod for the theological tension over the individual’s role and freedom versus God’s sovereignty. Much to the benefit of the New School, the elevation of the individual’s role and place in the plan of salvation resonated with the growth of the young democracy when the political populism of Andrew Jackson swept from power the dominance and succession of New England elites who guided the nation from its founding. The role and freedom of the individual were in the “cultural air” and prevailed in religion and politics.
The more expansive use of music in worship with choirs, soloists, and pipe organs presenting hymns and anthems was seen by the conservative Old Light and Old School proponents to elevate the role and importance of the individual and diminish the role and importance of God. Yet in this sense, while they held to Calvin’s view of total depravity, they departed, as we shall see, from his open, expansive understanding of the liturgy. Those who supported the expansive use of music–the New Light and New School parties–believed they were offering their best to honor, glorify, and worship the Creator of life.
It is a controversy that will never finally be settled. I recall taking a cab to dinner in New York City with the presidents of two theological seminaries who debated whether worship leadership should be considered “performance.” One held that performance was entertainment; the other argued that all worship leadership was and should be performative if done with integrity and striving for excellence. What is really at issue in this age-old debate is the piety or reverence of the worship leaders. How does one evaluate piety? And is it even appropriate to attempt to do so since the experience and practice of religious faith is an intensely personal, interior experience incapable of being judged by an exterior observer?
Yet, while the question of total or partial depravity has receded, the place and nature of music in worship is still a hot topic–not so much in traditionally “high” or liturgical churches–Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and Lutheran–but more significantly in the “Mainline” Presbyterian churches in which liturgies tend to be more straightforward and less sensory (i.e., without visual and audial stimulation). Interestingly, however, the Presbyterian Church (USA) introduced a new worship book in 2018 that finally, after four hundred years, embraces Calvin’s recommendation for a holistic approach to worship that engages all the senses and relies less on worship as an intellectual experience and encourages the use of musical responses, body language by the worship leaders, and other visual stimulation in the liturgy. Hageman explains that Calvin’s innovative, open approach to the liturgy was overshadowed by the more one-dimensional liturgy and bias for the intellect of the Zurich Reformer Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli’s church and liturgy were up and running and normative when Calvin opened his church in Geneva five years later. Now that the new guide for worship has fully adopted Calvin’s open and expansive approach to liturgy, the Presbyterian Church is making room for worship that looks more “high church” or Catholic. Looking back over nearly five centuries of preference for a rational/intellectual worship experience devoid of visual color or stimulation and kept within a narrow band of music, the playful reference to Presbyterians as the “frozen chosen” rings somewhat true.
II
Garrett Martin became the Organist and Director of Music at Westminster in 2013. The Rev. Dr. Todd Leach was installed as senior minister in 2021. Both inherited an expansive worship and music program that started in 1949 under the direction of Hans Vigeland when Westminster created a large choir featuring an ensemble of soloists typical of many churches in the first half of the 20th century. Thomas Swan followed Hans Vigeland in 1975 and was succeeded by Richard Herr in 2002. Under these leaders, the choir grew in number and in its role in Sunday worship from the old model of a four-voice ensemble that offered an anthem and led the congregation in singing hymns to an assembly of a musically gifted group of professionals and volunteers who today offer annual masterworks, monthly vespers, and an All Saints “Requiem for the Homeless” that dedicates the offering to homeless shelters. The Festival of Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve continues a tradition that started at Westminster eighty-eight years ago. Over the past fifty years, the choir has produced several CDs and, during Garrett Martin’s leadership, makes biennial trips to England for residences in an Anglican cathedral to provide liturgical music for weekday and Sunday services.
In many ways, this blossoming of Westminster’s adult choir corresponds with the publication of the 2018 Presbyterian Book of Common Worship. It is the sixth Book of Common Worship since the church’s founding in the United States in 1789. The 2018 book serves, as the others have, as a guide for local churches to shape their own worship liturgies to fit their time, place, and heritage. As mentioned, the 2018 book moves closer than the others to embracing Calvin’s view of balancing the worship experience between the intellect and senses. Remarkable as it seems, the early 16th-century Zwinglian model of liturgy–heavily dependent on long sermons and Biblical readings–became the gold standard for the church’s worship life and had the effect, according to Hageman, of “burying” Calvin’s views on worship and liturgy for nearly half a millennia. The 2018 book encourages, at last, music to be woven through the service, “Psalms, canticles, anthems, alleluias, songs of praise or other musical responses may accompany [the liturgy].” The 2018 book even provides a glossary of body language with illustrations of drawings of stick figures for the worship leader to use during each part of the service, including the sacraments.
Calvin’s expansive view of worship is as fully embraced at Westminster as anywhere. In fact, more so given the church’s dedication to liturgical excellence. Yet, excellent worship does not depend as much on material resources as the commitment to make the worship experience fresh and creative. Calvin understood that the whole person needed to be engaged in worship, not just the rational/logical side of the brain. Toward that end, Westminster continues experimenting with visual and auditory depth in the liturgy. Of course, this approach does not appeal to everyone. Some who have visited the sanctuary on a Sunday morning have expressed feeling out of place with the physical space and service of worship. The sanctuary, in its formal “Victorian Gothic” design with stained glass windows, earth tone colors, ornate ceiling, chancel with needlepoint cushions, and the Tree of Life painted in gold in the dome overhead, is a fair representation of Gothic splendor. Add to the grand sanctuary a large, formal choir presenting the best-sacred music composed over several centuries with a landmark pipe organ and often string or woodwind instruments, and some visitors feel the worship experience is too elaborate. They prefer the simple design of a New England-style sanctuary or the quiet of a Quaker circle of discernment where a more straightforward service of worship may be found.
Such diversity of preference for worship style has the ring of the classic New School/Old School differences. A choir of Westminster’s distinction and accomplishment may not be spiritually edifying for all worshippers. Relative to the old piety/performance debate, Westminster’s status as a significant downtown congregation, almost a Mainline Protestant cathedral, if Protestants had cathedrals, is a fitting home in a Presbyterian church for the elevation of music in worship. Maintaining such a robust musical program requires adequate instrumentation. The church was fortunate to install an Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ in 1958 when Hans Vigeland shifted from a small ensemble of singers to a large choir. Seven years earlier, the church installed a small chapel organ by the same builder. Both instruments represent the work of what was then the best organ building firm in the United States during its high-water mark, building instruments that had the versatility to play a wide variety of literature for the instrument. The chapel and sanctuary organs have had consistent care and maintenance and, more recently, new pipes and consoles with the latest technology. An additional console was built in 2021 for the sanctuary organ on the sanctuary floor. (The other console is in the choir loft above and behind the last row of pews.) The purpose of the floor console is to be available to accompany the choir when it sings from the steps of the chancel. The floor console was also installed to enable the performance of works for organ and orchestra and makes the only such venue in Western New York with a pipe organ that can accommodate a full orchestra. The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra has expressed interest in performing at Westminster if and when it schedules works with pipe organ. Throughout the year, and at Christmas and Easter, instrumental ensembles accompany the choir. The church acquired a Steinway concert grand piano several years ago, and it is used to accompany the choir from the chancel steps and lead hymn singing when a piano is called for.
A music ministry of this depth and complexity requires a level of expertise and dedication to sustain and grow. Garrett Martin has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organ performance, performs organ recitals nationally, and is a consultant for several organ builders. He is a serious student of the history of the pipe organ and has made it a personal mission to play the great pipe organs of America from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. His musical expertise is virtually entirely devoted to sacred music–fitting for a master of an instrument designed specifically for the performance of church music. While he can play a mean cocktail piano, his greatest satisfaction comes from playing the organ for worship for choral music he selects and conducts through the seasons of the church year. He regards the role of music in worship as finding or creating what the Celts called “thin places” where the separation between heaven and earth, the sacred and secular, is nearly transparent. “Scripture tells us to worship in the beauty of holiness,” he says, “but I believe that there is holiness in beauty–that moment when a final chord is released and hangs in the air and no one can move because of the moment that was experienced together.” In support of this insight, he quotes composer Howard Hanson: “We salute music not as an abstract art but as a considerable human force. We call upon ourselves to use this force for the benefit of all humankind…that we may be fit servants of so great an art–music–a divine art this is part of [the eternal] itself.”
Reference to J.S. Bach, who dedicated his life to composing organ and choral music for the Sunday worship service, as the “Fifth Evangelist” after the four gospel writers, is precisely for this reason–music is endemic to the human experience more than any other art–and conveys more effectively than the other arts the experience of the human spirit, the soul. In fact, the other arts may be defined in terms of music. Certainly, spoken and written language is musical and varies in tone, pitch, and tempo from culture to culture. Music is dark and light and can express the colors of the rainbow; it can be as simple as a late Kandinsky or as complex as a Jackson Pollock drip painting. Music can evoke as spacious and encompassing architectural features as a basilica or as intimate and minimalist as a grotto. And music expresses experiences, thoughts, and feelings for which we have not yet found the words. Martin says, “I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I did not think music was part of me. Music is everywhere: in the air we breathe, in the sleep we sleep, and in the dreams we dream. I never think of music as a separate entity, but part of our very being.”
Martin says one of the primary attractions of being a church musician is that he is required to “do it all”–conduct, compose, improvise, play a service, inspire the singing of a congregation, play the repertoire. Yet, he quickly adds that the combined effort of all these skills is shaped and driven by the Biblical texts appointed for the service. The Scripture is the golden thread that runs through a service, he says–when everything comes together around the words of the prophet or a parable of Jesus. This view is classic Reformed theology codified in the writings of Calvin. The Bible is the church’s book; as such, it teaches and nurtures the people of God in the life of faith.
The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures–the Word of God–are foundational for what occurs in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning. The design of a worship service requires deep expertise and collaboration between musician and pastor. Both must be literate in music and theology, bringing specialization in their field to the conversation. The common ground is personal faith, dedication to the holistic ministry of the church in general (which the worship experience nurtures), and the primacy of the Scriptures for shaping and informing the life and ministry of a congregation. The relationship of the musician and pastor, and any others on the worship team, only works if there is trust in the gifts and motives of one another. If the warmth of friendship is added, all the better for the end result that the congregation experiences on Sunday morning.
Dr. Leach observes that “traditional” church music draws directly from the Bible and, in that regard, takes precedence over but does not exclude other kinds of music. He says the worship service’s goal is to lead the people from where they are to the divine, to bring people into an encounter with “the holy.” Like Martin, he believes that the “golden thread” of the service is the Biblical text woven through the service. He says the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit, is the weaver. Planning worship is an involved, lengthy process from start to finish. For Leach, the process begins in a week-long personal retreat on which he selects, for every Sunday for the year to come, Biblical texts, themes to preach, and recommended hymns to consider. He says his approach from his first cup of coffee when he sits down to select the Biblical readings is to trust that the Spirit is present and participating in the entire effort–from retreat to final conversations and selections of hymns and design of service with the musician. Leach says that music gets us out of ourselves; it meets us where we are but doesn’t leave us there; it delivers us to God. Words that resonate with Martin’s vision of the worship experience as creating a “thin place.”
Indeed, creating that special place of encounter with the holy is achieved not just by the humans involved in the process but by the Spirit of God. Yet, humans must be ever open to searching for a worship experience that is fresh and creative. Still, the balance, keeping the creative tension between preserving tradition and changing with the culture in every aspect of the worship service from beginning to end, is no small achievement. When it works, it is life-giving and transformational. Sometimes, it doesn’t work, or rather misses the mark the worship leaders were aiming for; yet invariably some in attendance will say that worship that day is exactly what they needed. Like a prayer rug with an intentional flaw to acknowledge that only God is perfect, the worship experience has many moving parts and, therefore, adequate opportunity for slips and mistakes. Tolerance either by the worship leaders and the worshippers varies for such flaws. At Westminster Presbyterian Church, the aim for excellence in all aspects of what takes place in the sanctuary is high but not unforgiving.
Maybe at a time like this, when public discourse has degenerated into what social critic Deborah Tannen called “the triumph of the yell,” offering uplifting choral and organ music, leading the people in hymns of praise and thanksgiving to the best of a church’s ability to glorify God, is precisely what Westminster should be doing. Calling attention to that thin place where heaven and earth touch or where the sacred and secular come together is what the church is called to do in every generation. Dr. Leach says he does his final preparation for the sermon of the coming Sunday with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. The great English poet George Herbert, an Anglican priest, wrote:
“Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one,
when they mingle and combine,
bring a strong regard and awe.”
First and foremost, it is the encounter with the Creator of Life that the service of worship seeks to provide. There are as many ways to achieve that goal as there are churches, indeed, as there are synagogues and mosques, yet not without considerable human investment and the Spirit of God who blessed Abraham and Sarah to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. Westminster Presbyterian Church does its best in its worship life to pay tribute and honor, with awe and wonder, to such a God, for the gift of life.
Thomas H. Yorty served Westminster Presbyterian Church as Senior Minister from 1998 to 2021.
photos by mark e. dellas