Like most religious people of his time, Brigham Young grew up firmly believing that listening to fiddle music was akin to dancing with the devil.
But later in life the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints admitted that the admonitions against popular music only made him want to hear fiddlers all the more.Young eventually became a champion of music and musicians in the early LDS Church, recognizing, as his predecessor Joseph Smith did, the ability of music to rally and sustain the often beleaguered Saints.
That example, according to a new book by a Brigham Young University music professor, illustrates how music in the LDS Church has been dominated by the tension of two discordant notes: the church's desire for progress vs. its fear of contamination by outside influences.
"There's always been a controversy about the role of music - or any of the arts - in Christian life, since anything that smacks of pleasure could be considered sin or worldliness," explains Michael Hicks. His book, "Mormonism and Music," was recently issued by the University of Illinois Press as part of its multivolume "Music in American Life" series.
Hymns and hymnals abounded in the early church, since most converts came from the rich Protestant musical tradition. In fact, one of the LDS Church's earliest revelations, Section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants, concerned the creation of a hymnal.
"That revelation firmly settled the question of whether or not to sing in church," a question that divided some Christian denominations of the day, says Hicks. "What the revelation did not do was also critical: It did not command the new believers to write new hymns."
Hicks then traces the origins of some of Mormonism's most enduring hymns, many of which are adaptations of traditional hymns and folk songs, reset to reflect uniquely Mormon themes, such as the restoration of the gospel, Joseph Smith's first vision and latter-day prophecy.
For example, John Taylor's tribute to Joseph Smith, "The Seer, the Seer, Joseph the Seer," was quite transparently modeled after a then-popular song by Barry Cornwall, "The Sea, the Sea, the Open Sea."
But not all aspects of music were readily accepted by the early church. Brigham Young, for example, abhorred what he termed new, "dissonant" trends in music and spearheaded a move for simple, home-produced music as part of his campaign for self-sufficiency among the Saints.
Hicks draws portraits of the major figures in the LDS Church's early musical history, the majority of whom were European - in particular, English - immigrants: C.J. Thomas, who organized the orchestra of the Salt Lake Theatre; John Tullidge, Mormonism's first music critic; composer George Careless, who conducted the first Western U.S. performance of Handel's "Messiah"; and long-time Tabernacle Choir conductor Evan Stephens, who brought modern vocal and compositional methods to the Great Basin.
Hicks finally looks at the future of music in the LDS Church, which he believes will be seriously affected by the large numbers of Third World converts, who bring to Mormonism their own, unique and often distinctly non-Western musical traditions.