This week I received word of the death of my childhood piano teacher, Thelma Rast, in West Columbia, South Carolina. She was 96.
Miss Rast, as she was known to her students, was for decades a music professor at Lenoir-Rhyne College (now Lenoir-Rhyne University) in Hickory, North Carolina. My parents also worked at the college, so it was natural that they would hire their colleague to teach piano to my sister and me.
I vividly remember weekly lessons in Miss Rast’s studio, where she had two pianos, a grand and an upright. She was graciousness personified. Even when I hadn’t practiced enough, which was more often than I care to admit, she never betrayed a hint of impatience.
In my case, piano didn’t quite take. Whether from insufficient effort or lack of ability, I never developed the sightreading skills that would enable me to sit down at the piano and easily play a tune. My sister always did better at this, and so have my three kids.
But one thing did stick with me: a love of music as an art so sublime and transcendent that it surpasses rational description.
It’s no accident that Lenoir-Rhyne, a Lutheran college, would employ great musicians like Thelma Rast (herself a United Methodist) on its faculty. Martin Luther was enraptured with music and commented extensively on its ability to calm the heart and drive away the devil. “Except for theology,” he famously declared, “there is no art that could be put on the same level with music.”
Music, for Luther, had a singular power. “Nothing on earth is more mighty to make the sad gay and the gay sad,” he wrote. “With all my heart I would extol the precious gift of God in the noble art of music, but I scarcely know where to begin or end.”
Luther’s attitude distinguished him from more radical Protestants such as Ulrich Zwingli, who feared the idolatrous potential of instrumental music and sanctioned the destruction of church organs. Of such iconoclasm, Luther didn’t mince words: “I have no use for cranks who despise music.”
I’m a huge fan of organ music, so Zwingli’s iconoclasm strikes me as barbaric. He was so convinced by the Protestant notion of “scripture alone” that he rejected organs partly on biblical grounds, since they don’t appear in the New Testament, his blueprint for the reformation of the church.
This fixation on the word alone fails to recognize the value of instrumental music for conveying the ineffable qualities of the divine. To me, a Bach fugue played on a majestic organ speaks more than can be contained in any book.
Happily, though I’m a lousy pianist and have never played a pipe organ, I now carry a library of professional recordings on my iPhone. My downloaded purchases include not one but two versions of Bach’s complete organ works, and a growing piano repertoire. My wife and I also enjoy sharing music with our kids, two of whom have pursued advanced piano study and one of whom is in the St. Olaf Choir.
I can’t imagine life—or religion—without music. I credit my parents and Professor Thelma Rast for making it such an important part of my spiritual formation.
© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Illustration credits: Thelma Rast: Hacawa 1976, Lenoir-Rhyne College
Grace Chapel, Lenoir-Rhyne University: Photo by C. E. Moser
Bibliographical Note
Martin Luther quoted in Robin A. Leaver, “Luther on Music,” Lutheran Quarterly 20 (2006): 125-145 (quotation on 125); and in Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: New American Library, 1950), 266-68. On the destruction of organs in Zwingli’s Zürich, see Charles Garside, Jr., Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 61-62.