Unlike his counterparts, moreover, Luther was personally a fervent music lover, who played several
instruments, loved to sing and even composed a bit, and who did not fear the seductiveness of melody the
way Calvin or Zwingli (following St. Augustine) did, but instead wished to harness and exploit it for his
own purposes. His most widely quoted remark on music—“Why should the Devil have all the good
tunes?”—speaks directly to this wish.^1 Even more unlike the Swiss reformers, Luther urged the
cultivation of polyphonic or “figural” music in churches and schools as well as homes.
But the polyphonic church music he favored was still of a different order from anything we have seen
up to now. It was not totally divorced from the music of the ars perfecta, since Luther wanted the music of
his church modeled after that of Josquin des Prez, which (like many Germans) he treasured; and Josquin
had been a great figure for the ars perfecta, too. But still, Luther opposed professionalization and
hierarchy, seeing his church (in accord with his conception of the original Christian church) as a universal
priesthood of all believers.
The music he wanted for it was not the music of a professional choir, but a music of a Gemeinschaft
—a congregational community. He described his musical ideals in the preface to a schoolbook called
Symphoniae jucundae (“Pleasant polyphonic pieces”), issued in 1538. All men are naturally musical, he
begins by observing, which means that the Creator wished them to make music. “But,” he continued,
“what is natural should still be developed into what is artful.” With the addition of learning and artifice,
which corrects, develops, and refines the natural music, then at last it is possible to taste with wonder (yet still not
comprehend) God’s absolute and perfect wisdom in his wondrous work of music. Here it is most remarkable that one
single voice continues to sing the tenor, while at the same time many other voices trip lustily around it, exulting and
adorning it in exuberant strains and, as it were, leading it forth in a divine dance, so that those who are the least bit moved
know nothing more amazing in the world. But any who remain unaffected are clodhoppers indeed and are fit to hear only
the words of dung-poets and the music of pigs.^2From the previous chapter we recognize the kind of music that Luther is praising here with
characteristic delicacy. It is the Tenorlied, or as Luther would have called it, the Kernweise, the
peculiarly German song genre in which traditional cantus-firmus writing, increasingly outmoded in other
European centers, was given a new lease on life by the growth of the printing trade. Luther was a great
devotee of the genre, and of its foremost practitioner. Next to the divine Josquin he worshiped Ludwig
Sennfl, just the sort of composer the other continental reformers despised. “I could never compose a motet
like Sennfl’s, even were I to tear myself to pieces in the attempt,” Luther marveled; “but on the other
hand,” he could not resist adding, “Sennfl could never preach as well as I.”^3
He said this after receiving an actual musical tribute from Sennfl, with whom he corresponded, and
who, while never declaring himself a “Lutheran” or breaking with the religion of the Holy Roman Empire,
his employer, sympathized sufficiently with Luther the man to egg him on at a low point in his career (his
confinement under arms at Coburg in 1530) with a motet based on Psalm 118, verse 17—“I shall not die,
but live, and I shall declare the works of the Lord”—based on the traditional Mode 7 psalm tone as sung
in Germany. Luther took the verse forever afterward as his motto, and even tried to make a setting of it
himself, as if vying with Sennfl (though never seriously) in the ars perfecta.
In Ex. 18-1a Luther’s tiny setting, in traditional tenor cantus-firmus style, is set alongside the portion
of Sennfl’s motet in which the tenor gets the tune. They make a touching contrast. Luther’s is a musically
amateurish but eloquent shout of faith
EX. 18-1A Non moriar sed vivam (Ps. 118:7) as set by Martin Luther and endurance: there are no actual errors, but the outer
voices move uninterestingly in parallel tenths (a technique much used in “supra librum” or improvised polyphony, and taught to
composition students as a quick fix) and the altus is all too clearly a filler, with little melodic profile. Sennfl’s setting is the suave
work of a professional, full of subtle stylistic felicities: “Vorimitation” in the soprano, the lilting metric displacement in the outer
voices (on “sed vivam”) to bridge the gap between tenor phrases, and so on and on.