A couple years ago, my mom bought me a Life Is Good t-shirt that read something like “Music: The Universal Language.” I haven’t worn it. Not, I assure you, because I didn’t appreciate the gift or love my mom (hi Mom!), but because I can’t quite bring myself to endorse the shirt’s claim.

Although it has long been imagined as a universal language, music is as deeply historical and cultural as any other human activity.

I spent several years learning about medieval music, but I still struggle to “get” or “love” it, because it’s a foreign musical language. It takes work to really hear. And the same is true of every kind of music I didn’t grow up on, from Indian classical music to hip-hop to Eurodance. Understanding is not automatic; it takes time and effort and immersion.

European classical music, which enjoyed tremendous cultural prestige within the world’s imperial center for several centuries, has often had a particularly strong hold on claims of universality.

The theologian Karl Barth wrote that “Mozart is universal,” that—take a deep breath!—“everything comes to expression in him: heaven and earth, nature and man, comedy and tragedy, passion in all its forms and the most profound inner peace, the Virign Mary and the demons, the church mass, the curious solemnity of the Freemasons and the dance hall, ignorant and sophisticated people, cowards and heroes (genuine or bogus), the faithful and the faithless, aristocrats and peasants, Papageno and Sarastro.” All right, calm down, Karl.

But Barth’s not alone. The film Amadeus famously called Mozart’s music the “very voice of God.” Similar praise has been heaped on Bach, Beethoven, and later Romantic figures like Mahler and Richard Strauss, who often did even more than the precurors to encourage this kind of talk. “A symphony must be like the world,” Mahler said, more than a little self-servingly. “It must embrace everything.”

But of course, European classical music has never embraced everything. It has marginalized performers, people groups, and musical styles that do not fit its image of perfection and excellence. Other musics around the world have repeatedly been judged “simple” or “inferior” or “primitive” simply for being different.

Musicologist Susan McClary has shown how the tonal patterns of tension and resolution used by composers like Mozart are rooted less in divine structure of the universe than in the desires of upper-class Viennese society. And violinist Lara St. John is currently uncovering how the tradition’s patriarchal structures continue to catalyze sexual abuse of women musicians. Classical music has been imagined as the voice of God because it has actually been the voice of the some of the most powerful humans on earth.

Into this context comes Nagamo, a new album of choral music by the Cree composer Andrew Balfour. “Nagamo” means “sings in Cree,” which is exatly what the album offers: a collection of old European music, especially from the Renaissance, rewritten and re-texted in the Cree and Ojibway languages. 

Balfour calls the album a “reimagining of history,” a reckoning both with the larger colonial past and with his own story of being “taken from [his] Indigenous family when he was a baby” while also being “luckily. . . raised in a loving and very musical family.” In his translated pieces, the Christian scriptures and hymns are transformed into “a more Indigenous perspective of spirituality, but keeping the beauty of the polyphony intact.”

If we return to the music-as-language metaphor, then rejecting universality leaves us with two options. We could stay at home in our individual language groups, or we could embark on the awkward but rewarding work of translation. Music’s power to connect and reconcile, like that of language, is not automatic; it has to be built. Balfour offers one example of how to do this: refashioning one tradition in the vocabulary of another, and questioning some of the music’s deepest spiritual assumptions in the process. 

Balfour hopes that his work is “only the first step of many more towards a deeper understanding of Indigenous healing and artistic perspectives on Mother Earth now, and in the future.” Music is one kind of step: protests and legislation and mutual aid and cultural exchange are others. These, too, depend not on pre-existing solidarity, but on various kinds of translation work, on coming to see the world through new words and strange-to-us syntax.

I invite you to listen to Balfour’s album and imagine a world where music can create and embody unity—not because it’s inherently universal, but because we’ve given up on trying to “embrace everything” in our own language.

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The Friends of the Institute for Christian Studies and the Reformed Journal
are very excited to announce a presentation called 

Free to be Faithful…Stepping Forward with Courage and Conviction 

featuring a conversation between Nicholas Wolterstorff and Kristin Du Mez!

They will be talking about the Reformed tradition and the broader North American church — past, present, and future. Wherever you find yourself on the faith spectrum, you will enjoy hearing this conversation! The conversation will be facilitated by Jeff Munroe, editor of the Reformed Journal, and there will be a time of Q/A as well.

We invite you to attend in person at Eastern Avenue Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, May 3, 7pm
or you can tune in to the livestream of the event.

This is a free event but registration is required.
Register here to attend this event in person. 
Register here if you would like to participate online via the livestream.