Notes from a Frustrated Composer

This post was written by Daniel Paul Horn, and posted on August 12, 2007 | Filed Under music and religion, music | Double-click any word for more info | View other posts by Daniel Paul Horn | | For info on this author, visit http://

I’ve been asked to help write a blog, and I thought I had better take full advantage of the annual lull in the pace of my day-job to get at least one post written before said pace picks up in just a few short weeks, and carries my free time away.

What am I doing here? I’m a pianist, educator and administrator whose work has long been rooted in my love of God, and in my passion for discovering what my love of God has to do with my love of music. The obvious answer is, of course, “everything,” but it seems to me that if the Christian life, which takes just a moment of submission to begin, reaches its fullest consummation only through all of Eternity, then there must be a lot to think about when it comes to integrating the artistic life with one’s faith, and claiming the arts for the Lord. My connections with Soli Deo Gloria are numerous. I can remember hearing about it as a young opthamologist’s vision for the future while riding from Milwaukee to Wheaton years ago in the back of a minivan, and since then I’ve had many opportunities to help behind the scenes, in rehearsal rooms, and even on stage.

When I consider my reasons for being involved with this project, lurking in the background is perhaps the biggest reason of all, which I must confess before blogging any further: I am a frustrated composer. As a child, I was capable of improvising endlessly at the piano. It’s good for posterity that those ramblings weren’t preserved, but I did it anyway. In junior high school, my class notes were often decorated with fugue subjects in the style of Hindemith. (That’s nerdy even by musicians’ standards.) Despite all this, I was either too intimidated or too impatient with myself to produce much more than a few hymn-tunes, one of which serves as a sort of unofficial alma mater for the institution at which I work. Perhaps piano-playing alone was so hard for me that it left no time for another musical challenge. At any rate, I’ve contented myself with being curious about new composers, and have occasionally had the opportunity to work with some of them, at times even closely. I have enjoyed the challenge exploring a new work with its composer, sometimes catching misprints, sometimes having my thoughts on the piece totally overturned, and sometimes even surprising and delighting the composer with points of view he or she hadn’t anticipated. I’ve learned that composers aren’t always the strict, authoritarian figures one might imagine them to be. (When I approached an austere, elderly New England composer on my graduate school’s faculty about a piece of his I wished to play for him, he replied: “ Oh yes. I remember that waltz. I wrote it. I’m sure you can play it. I’m sure you’ve spent more time on it than I did.”)

I am particularly fascinated by how composers address Ultimate Questions. An unfortunate administrator once told a friend of mine that “people at Juilliard aren’t interested in personal things like religion; they are here to study their art.” While there probably are artists with blinders on as this fellow imagined, I suspect they are relatively few and far between. From the ecstatic heights of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony to the epic spiritual struggles of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, to the post-transcendentalist memories of faith in the works of John Adams, one will find few composers who are completely tone-deaf to calls from Beyond. I’ve always been particularly thrilled to discover the voices of composers who are unafraid to let a genuine commitment to God inform what they do, whether they write abstract instrumental works or large-scale vocal works on biblical texts. They may be voices in a wilderness within a wilderness, often as ignored or misunderstood by believing brothers and sisters as by the unbelieving culture at large. Even so, they are being faithful to a call, have much to tell us, and deserve our attention and encouragement. For me, they are saying things that I’d like to say, but can’t articulate through my own Hindemithian doodles.

I’ll try to drop in here from time to time between lessons, committee meetings, rehearsals, practice sessions and domestic responsibilities to comment on things I hear or work on, and people I meet — anything about which I think someone with an interest in music and faith should know. We’ll see what comes of this: I hope it ends up being an interesting and edifying conversation.