“Church Music” and “Religious Music”: Church Music Theory of Albert Gereon Stein

   Drawing on the church music theory written in 1864 by Albert Gereon Stein, a church musician and Catholic priest, this paper examines what kind of common understanding of church music he shared with his contemporary critics and how he perceived the relation between church music and the worship of the church.<br>    Objecting to bring the secular, such as opera and the instrumental music, excessively into the church, Stein expressed the Masses of the three great masters of the Viennese classics were not appropriate to the worship of the church. Although he had agreed with the creed of “the Cecilian movement,” he didn’t merely regard the Masses as having been “corrupted.” He realized the Masses as music to express the religiousness of the new age by distinguishing the “church music” appropriate to the worship from the other “religious music” and separating the Masses from the “church music.” We can see this by his agreement to the studies of the critics close to “The New German school” such as Franz Brendel, who discussed about the church music without the consideration of the worship. By accurately evaluating the Masses which is unsuitable for church services, Stein groped for how the “church music” should be as regards the worship.<br>    We generally think that the Cecilianists pursued the ideal to the old style and kept a distance from the new art, but Stein took a different path from it. His method to decouple the Masses from “church music” doesn’t merely deny the secularity of the Masses, but it was an attempt to compromise with them. His study shows a struggle of the “modern” Catholic intellectuals to adapt to the modern times. Moreover, it also contributes a new perspective to understanding of the Cecilian movement, which has often been said to represent the Catholic Church’s retrogression.