Sunday morning while at church (the local coffee shop) is the time to listen to “Sacred Classics” on Colorado Public Radio classical station 103.3FM. As this is being written Ralph Vaughan Williams composition “Benedicte” is being played. The variety of sacred music played is vast and ranges from 16th to the 21st century. Choral works, orchestral compositions, works for solo instruments and for solo voices. The sounds are amazing and the structure of the music becomes very clear when it is often set against the simple and straightforward text.

This is serious music. By serious I mean it was composed by serious composers and should not ever EVER be confused with Christian music. Not even for one second. A lot of the music played was written for the church at a time when composers were employed by the church and were required to produce music on the scale and speed of an assembly line. Johann Sebastian Bach spent most of his career as an employee of the church.

Having a love for the sounds and structure of sacred music does not automatically make the listener a Christian or a believer. This assumption occurs all to often and is overly simplistic. The sound of the music is separated from the meaning of the text. The text, often sung in languages other than English, simply adds to the overall sound and texture of the piece.