Norwegians Singing
Music, religion, and empathy
The St. Olaf Choir and its founding conductor, F. Melius Christiansen
In my “Music and Identity in the Americas” course, we spent time last week thinking about the role of music in religious practices, with a specific focus on how these contexts shape personal perceptions of identity and belonging. It is tricky territory for me, a musician and music scholar whose identity was shaped profoundly by a religious tradition he fully rejected as an adult. The hymns of the Lutheran Book of Worship tear at my heart, triggering long “resolved” trauma in that weird, comfortable way that sensory memory can do.
My first foray into higher education, though, showed me a different kind of religious community, using much of the same music. For me, the damage had been done at that point, so even with the smiles and literal hand-holding that accompany the musical culture of Luther College and its particular immigrant tradition, singing in those choirs still hurt, even while their undeniable beauty moved me. It did not hurt all of my friends and classmates in the same way. It comforted many of them and produced a truly enviable community. My experience was deeply emotional, both soothing and torturing. It never included community (I found that elsewhere).
The Scandinavian-American Lutheran choral tradition is distinct. Some of the intricacies and differences between its unique ethos and that of other choral music can be difficult to describe. They have to be experienced. Any singer taught in that tradition learns the primacy of blending, not sticking out, but contributing to a mass sound. Some choirs hold hands, both as a physical means of demonstrating community, but also as a way to communicate with a singer’s neighbor. Sometimes, choirs organize singers in mini-choirs, individuals of different voice parts standing next to each other, rather than in larger sections. This configuration is not exclusive to the Scandinavian-American tradition, but it is pronounced in it. This contributes to both a sense of community and individual responsibility. A singer can’t simply try to match pitch with the person next to them. They have to sing in harmony, in both the literal and figurative senses.
I dropped out of Luther College for a number of reasons, but I was there long enough to absorb and love that musical tradition, a tradition that, at that time, I simply could not remove from the church, which had caused enormous harm in my life and the lives of many people I loved. That love of a thing that didn’t love me back is why I often find myself listening to choral music—not just any choral music, but specifically Scandinavian-American choral music. It is one of the musical canons that routinely soothes me. I think I need the contradiction.
I now find myself teaching about music and culture at Augsburg University, an institution whose history connects it directly to that very tradition. This means I had to talk about F. Melius Christiansen, founder of the St. Olaf College Choir and cultural father of the Norwegian-American choral sound. Some of my best memories of choral singing involved his exceptionally thoughtful but gorgeous arrangements of those Lutheran hymns.
My unceremonious dropping out of college meant I would never be in the Luther College Nordic Choir, but hearing them sing Christensen’s music drops me right smack back in that Iowa cornfield.
One of several tasks confronting me last week was to find ways to encourage my students to engage in the contradictions. Some of the most beautiful things in the world can be the most painful. Understanding how that occurs in one’s own life can help show how different combinations of experience, tradition, and community might affect others.
In many ways, the intersection of musical practices and history provides emotional insights that can be healing personally, while generating empathy for those histories and practices that are not our own. The particular choral tradition in which I was briefly trained sat a little off-kilter upon that intersection. Close to my heritage and personal experience, but enough removed that I was always an interloper. That is probably the point, though. To be in community is to be an individual in community. As I often tell my students, the quest for pure, authentic experience always leads to a dead-end. That’s a whole other discussion, but it is one that enables the contradictions of cultural practice to be productive, not simply frustrating. It is what enables an incomplete but functional repair of broken cultural connections. And that tenuous, reparative intersection is a good site from which to develop empathy.