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Christopher Anderson 
Why Music Matters 
Homily delivered at Perkins Chapel, ok��Դ��, November 6, 2025  
 
 
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.  
— Genesis 1:1–3 (NIV) 
 
In November 2004, Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and director of the American Symphony Orchestra, delivered an address to the United Nations General Assembly called “Why Music Matters.” He observed that music “can renew our respect and gratitude for our own life and the lives of others. The experience of music,” he continued, “reminds us of our own limited time of life. Whether the existential consciousness that music creates can be a basis for a politics that redeems the possibility of harmony, peace, and freedom with tolerance for the diversity … of persons throughout the world is an objective we can wish for.”¹ For the Christian and not merely politically engaged listener, this all may seem a great deal to put upon music, which in our time and place is often indulged as a casual and negotiable adjunct to acts of worship, largely irrelevant to Christian living. We may be hard pressed, in fact, to answer the question of why music matters with anything beyond the usual inventory of platitudes that serve either aesthetic or functional ends—music beautifies the service and enhances attendance, a kind of liturgical window dressing, a marketing tool masquerading as evangelism.  

But this is not why music matters. Today we come together in the wake of the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, rites that point to the cloud of witnesses who have gone before. We likewise find ourselves in the month of the feast of St. Cecilia, patroness of music and musicians. And so it seems timely to attend to Botstein’s elevated talk of music’s “existential consciousness,” and its pointing toward “our own limited time of life.” Though he did not mean it that way, Botstein proposes a worldview with distinctly theological overtones, one inevitably enmeshed in questions of faith. This is no accident. For most of Judeo-Christian history, questions about music have been questions about God. Only in the more specialized modern period, as the musical experience has become increasingly commodified, shrink-wrapped, and marketed, have we become accustomed to imagining music as a poor stepchild to theology. The very idea that we need to ask why music matters to Christian theology should be read as a symptom of the modern condition. Yet if our own time-honored sacred music program at Perkins is to be considered anything more than the beautification department for liturgies that orbit around sermons, we must be alert to the ways the business of music is the business of theology, the senses in which the work of the liturgy is the work of the musical. 

But much in our culture militates against this way of thinking. On the first page of the Metaphysics, Aristotle famously teaches that sight is the primary sense by which we know the world.² Seeing is believing. Prophets see; they do not hearken—hence we call them visionaries. Perception is grounded in sight—hence our opinions and positions are called viewpoints. Our western culture is deeply ocularcentric, anchored in the fetish of the eye. That inclination must exist in tension with a religion in which Thomas is reprimanded for basing his belief in the resurrected Jesus on seeing (John 20:24–29), in which “we walk by faith, and not by sight” (II Corinthians 5:7). 

The writer of Genesis suggests a helpful truth. To be sure, light is the first of created things. But God does not create by the wave of a hand, or by text message, or by thinking the world into existence. Creation gets done orally, aurally. Sound supplies the necessary condition for sight. What is heard, which unfolds in time, precedes what is seen, which unfolds in space. Modern physics studies the complex relationship between time and space, and some theories now seek to explain space as an emergent property of time. So does the writer of Genesis. This resonates with our own experience: whereas it is possible to escape sight, it is not possible to escape sound—even what we call silence is a species of sound. Sound in its temporality—which is to say, in its endless act of becoming—is fundamental to the very condition of being alive. Sound mirrors life in that sound always changes. Sound is transformation made audible. If John Newton’s sinner was blind but now sees, it was God’s acting through the dynamic sound of grace that made it so.³ If Charles Wesley puts “music in the sinners’ ears,” it is because such music is the sonic agent that liquidates “fears” and “sorrows” in favor of “life, health, and peace.”⁴ If Genesis 1 opens the portal of creation with sound, I Corinthians 15 signals its termination in the sonic: “the trumpet will sound … and we will be changed” (I Corinthians 15:52).  

And so, we move closer to why music matters. Why music? Why do we need a thousand tongues to sing the Redeemer’s praise? Can’t we just read it at home or file it in the policy statements of the syllabus? That would, after all, leave more time for the sermon. Why does the writer of Ephesians, in a letter so concerned to forge unity in diversity, expressly counsel communal music-making as an enactment of holy living? Because music, as the supremely heightened form of sound, in fact lies at the foundation of our be-ing. And because of that, we are gifted the ability and the mandate to be musical. Just as the sound (the music) of God’s voice provoked the creation itself, so too is it the business of music to transform into one voice the individuals who commit to its ways. The great jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has said that to be musical together means “to chase the direction of deepest coordination. Are becomes is.” What is musical “is ethics, not laws. You choose not to have your way so that we can find our way.”⁵ There is no better definition of communal singing than this. Augustine writes, too, of a “compact unity of the well-ordered city” mirrored by musical harmony placed in God’s service.⁶ 

“Are becomes is.” Music matters because it tells us about what God is. In connecting with it we connect with the things of God. “Let those refuse to sing that never knew our God,” writes Isaac Watts in 1707.⁷ Watts knew that our gratitude for and use of creation’s gifts (sound as most elemental of those gifts) is bound up with the freedom of faithful living. We know God through music, but musicality itself is not a thing of knowing. It is a thing of doing. It is not laws, but ethics. And if anything concerns the writer of Ephesians, it is ethics. Since coming to Perkins I have learned that musical matters fall in the wheelhouse of a thing called “practical theology,” certainly a virtuosic tautology dressed up in academic garb.  

We should pray to be more practical. Botstein is right. Music can be foundational to communities “that redeem the possibility of harmony, peace, and freedom with tolerance for the diversity … of persons throughout the world.” It can do this because music issues from God. It is the voice of harmony that is divine. It is the sound of the Gospel—the viva vox evangelii—that is transformative. And it is the music of our living that bears ultimate witness to the work of the Christian community.