Music for the Lenten Season

A selection of excellent music for your listening

From the beginning, Christians have been writing music and praising God with song. Adam sings in the Garden of Eden (and how could he not!) There is an entire book of the Old Testament devoted to songs. Mary’s response to Jesus in her womb was to sing. Singing is and should be as natural to the Christian as breathing. With thousands of years of history behind her, the church has now built up an astounding repertoire of hymns, psalms, and songs for every time of the year, and still she continues to add more. Even the secular world still recognizes parts of the church year with music, as every December we hear Christmas carols played in stores and on radios across the whole country.

As today the church begins the season of Lent with the observation of Ash Wednesday, it is an excellent practice to add a rotation of sacred music to your every-day life and habits for the next 40 days, just as you would at Christmas time. Indeed, as Lent has historically been a time to practice the Christian habits of fasting and prayer, substituting Lenten music for your favorite albums is a way of doing both. Good sacred music is nothing but prayer and preaching set to music. Filling your ears with it during the next few weeks will provide benefits far beyond the simple enjoyment of beautiful music.

With this in mind, here is a playlist of music written for the Lenten season. It is filled with excellent recordings of excellent pieces, ranging from hymns sung by a congregation of untrained singers, to Passion settings written by some of the greatest composers who ever lived and performed by musicians known around the world. The playlist can be listened to in order, to preserve the correct ordering of the long works included, but it can also be shuffled to experience the wide variety, the depth and breadth of the musical meditations that have been written on Christ’s suffering and death. Since it is a long playlist, it isn’t intended to be listened to in one sitting, but rather returned to day by day.

Included here are psalms, hymns, and liturgical texts set to music, the settings ranging from Gregorian chants to Anglican choral settings, to the great classical German composers, to 21st century avant-garde settings. Many are in foreign languages, especially Latin and German. There are even six different Passion settings here, which are settings of the text of the passion accounts from the Gospels, interspersed with hymns and arias responding to and commenting on the text.

If you listen to no other part of this playlist, I would especially urge you to find the time over the next 40 days to listen to the entirety of Bach’s two Passion settings, St. Matthew and St. John. These are two of the greatest works of art ever created, and while you can listen to them without knowing the text, I would encourage you to find the time to devote your attention to them and follow along with the text as you listen. This could be done in one long sitting (perhaps on Good Friday), or it could be done by listening to a few sections every day. The texts and English translations for the St. Matthew Passion and the St. John Passions can be found at those links. If you do listen through them and follow along, then by the time you finish you will have spent 5 hours reading, listening to, and meditating on Jesus’ suffering, death, and sacrifice for you on the cross, a very worthy endeavor indeed.