John Ahern
11 articles
An Introduction to the Sacred Music of Josquin
This essay is adapted from my articles in Theopolis’s In Medias Res as a series of Holy Week meditations. Like many celebrities such as Kanye or Beyoncé or Adele, Josquin des Prez (d. 1521) was often known only by his first name, in his own time as now. “Josquin” is…
Holy Toledo: A Critique of Eclecticism
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Plato and the Danger of Musical Theater
And you’ll feel something akin to the electric thrill I enjoyed when Gilmour, Liberate, Pat Conway, the Great Creatore, W. C. Handy, and John Philip Sousa all came to town on the same historic day. This, like everything else in The Music Man , is a lie. Professor Harold Hill…
The Case for Shorter Hymnals
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
A Hermeneutic of Riddles
Maybe this is not the best venue to reveal that I sometimes wonder about all that deep exegesis: the chiasms, the numerology, vowel modifications, the typological labyrinthes, the innumerable exodus patterns that are so often limned by Peter Leithart or James Jordan or Alastair Roberts. Maybe it’s because I am…
Theses on Church Music and Economics
American church music is in a slump. To get out of the slump, we need a 10-year plan, a 50-year plan, and a 100-year plan. Many are doing extraordinary work on reforming church music in the near-term, and a few in the mid-term. What is desperately needed is the 100-year…
Moving Past Musical Dystopia
I’ve been honored and delighted to read the responses to my essay on church music and secularity from an incredible slate of respondents. I am lucky enough to be able to close the conversation, which means my voice is the last one ringing in the room, a privilege I’ll try…
Secularity and the Problem of Church Music
There seems to be an intractable problem that faces liturgy and music in the modern American church. It is a tension between what I will call vernacularism and traditionalism and it seems impossible to resolve. But why is it so hard? It is easy enough to find prooftexts in Scripture…
A Positive View of Music
It is not coincidental that John Calvin speaks most strongly in defense of vernacular language just after his defense of singing in church. "From this also it plainly appears that public prayers must be couched not in Greek among the Latins, nor in Latin among the French or English, as…
Music and Drunkenness, Part 2
For Part 1, click HERE . How did Paul’s earliest commentators view his juxtaposition of music and drunkenness, and did they connect it to the ancient Greek ideas of musical ethos described in Part I? Origen, one of the earliest commentators on Paul, writes about Ephesians 5:18-19: One, however, who…
Music and Drunkenness, Part 1
Perhaps it is because I am a musician that I have always found Ephesians 5:18-19 so arbitrary. But isn’t it a little odd to contrast music and drunkenness? Perhaps it is not obvious that that is what Paul is doing; I know, for myself, that it is remarkably easy to…