The Essay

Is there such a thing as Mormon music?

In his essay for Mormoniana, "Toward (and Away From) The Mormonistic," Michael Hicks tackles the question of Mormon music with uncommon zeal and unflinching candor. Michael Hicks, professor of music theory and composition at Brigham Young University, is the author of the books Mormonism and Music: A History (1989); Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (2000); and Henry Cowell, Bohemian (2002). He begins the essay directly:

Mormons think there ought to be something called "Mormon music." But read that sentence again and you see the problem: "Mormon" is a noun posing as an adjective....

Hicks then presents a facinating overview of liturgical music history and the commonalities of Americanism and Mormonism before he explores how we got here, musically.

One idea for Mormon music's "distinguishing characteristics," this one proposed by British emigrant John Tullidge in 1858, was that Mormonism should have "a different style of music to that dolorous, whining class, so incompatible with praise from grateful hearts." This was clearly spoken by a newly converted immigrant: to those leaving the British Isles, Mormondom represented new hope, "freshness and vigour," as Tullidge put it, optimism and liberty. What he didn't acknowledge, perhaps did not even sense, was that for American-born Mormons (certainly first-generation ones), Mormonism was blanketed by a sense of tragedy. The illness, bloodshed, imprisonments, torchings, and ransacking the American Saints had endured certainly would have led to the "dolorous" (if not the "whining"). But the British emigrants, by dint of their numbers and their superior academic training transformed the implicit sorrow of at least some Mormon music into fanfaring jubilance.

At the end of the nineteenth century, LDS composer and Mormon Tabernacle Choir director Evan Stephens echoed the requirement that Mormon music be resolutely cheerful, as Hicks writes:

...The sound of Mormon music, he said, is "that which breathes optimism and not pessimism." If Mormons composed any somber music, it "must not predominate, but be used only as a means of contrast to heighten the effects of the bright." Mormon communities instinctively understood that, he noted. When music was presented to them that did not seem optimistic, he said, it should be publicly censured. (It usually is not, he added, simply because of the innate charity of those hearers who rightfully disapprove it.)

The essay continues with a chronicle of the upheavals of the twentieth century, particularly of the 1960s, their effect on American culture, music and on the Mormon church as an international entity.

In the latter third of the twentieth century, an unsually self-reflective period in Mormon history, with the church now well-established as a major religion and not just an embellishment to Protestantism, intellectuals and artists were really surveying the church as part of Mormonism, rather than vice versa. Mormonism and Mormon culture were somehow deeper and wider than the institution of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--not just rivers flowing around the church but the ocean in which the church was an island. The question became this: if there is such a thing as Mormonism, a peculiar world view, then we should ponder its salient traits. If Impressionism could yield works that were Impressionistic, shouldn't Mormonism yield works that were Mormonistic? A heavy responsibility rides on any "ism"; Mormonism seemed at last prepared for (and by some, eager for) the burden.

...What is most delightfully Mormonistic about the visual and musical art presented here [in Mormoniana] is that it is all over the aesthetic map. It wanders from one frontier to another, confident in a love of the senses and a belief in beauty as a corollary of truth but mistrustful of any attempt to say that it is what it should be, according to some commonly held orthodoxy of art or Mormon-ness. For these artists the aesthetic canon of Mormons is not only open, it is palpably unfinished--and must always remain so. No creeds for these musical and visual artists, who have essentially nothing in common but their membership in a church that enjoins the divinity of all and the sanctity of the senses. Their Mormon-ness as Mormons may be rooted in common convictions and moral values, along with their sense of consecrating their art to the God and church they celebrate. But their work, their business, is independent, at last, in an individual sense. It springs (without the necessity of words) from each artist's continuing progression, not the safety of the community or the stasis of orthodoxy--that is, from the prophetic quest, not priestly guardianship. And what could be more hopeful to a culture than that?....