The Treasure of Lutheran Sacred Music

In this series, Benjamin Kolodziej reflects on several figures in American Lutheran sacred music history. This series is based on his new book Portraits in American Lutheran Sacred Music, 1847–1947, which is available now from Concordia Publishing House.

Does it seem like there is a lot of singing in a Lutheran service? Indeed there is — and our musicians must cultivate certain skills to make church music happen. From choir directors and organists to instrumentalists and vocalists to the pastors who support them, music plays an integral role in Lutheran worship. This is no accident, but stems from a long history in The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. The Saxon immigrants who settled Missouri in 1839 brought along with them all manner of cultural implements and necessities for worship, including a pipe organ and a cadre of orchestral instruments.[1] C.F.W. Walther himself composed hymns (see LSB 480) and, through the example of his congregations in St. Louis, ensured that the Missouri Synod remained faithful not only in theology, but also in worship, revitalizing hymn singing and ennobling sacred music.[2]

For many years, teachers’ colleges in the Missouri Synod prepared students not only for the classroom, but also for sacred music, with teachers also serving as church musicians in their assigned parishes. Sacred musicians, many of whom were teachers, served humbly and with little acknowledgment. The Rev. Theodore Graebner, co-editor of The Lutheran Witness during the 1940s, sought to change that.

Graebner — pedagogue, writer, theologian, administrator, and longtime professor of philosophy and New Testament interpretation at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis — recognized the need to support pastors, teachers and musicians in their pursuit of quality Lutheran sacred music. He enlisted Walter Buszin, a noted church musician, liturgical musicologist and professor who would teach church music at Concordia Seminary from 1947 until 1966, to help write music-related reviews as well as practical and theological articles of musical interest for The Lutheran Witness. Buszin had served on the LCMS Committee on Hymnology and Liturgics since 1929. In the early 1940s, he had nearly single-handedly reorganized the music department of Concordia Publishing House and, as a result of his European travels, collected much sacred music which would find its way into CPH’s catalogue.[3] In September of 1940, Graebner announcedthat “The Lutheran Witness is happy in having obtained the services, for its musical reviews, of Professor Buszin, [one] of the highest authorities in Lutheran music for choir and organ which we have in our country.”[4] Buszin’s contributions to the pages of LW encouraged the practice of authentic Lutheran music.[5]

In 1946, the two men conceived of another way to support church musicians, Graebner announcing Buszin’s “willingness to supply [a] series of brief sketches of our Synod’s composers for choir and organ.”[6] Initially intended only to feature living church musicians, Buszin’s task would be to introduce “Missouri Synod composers and choir directors to our people in brief biographical articles. … By doing so we are not so much honoring men as a great and increasingly important profession as well as service rendered to the church and its Lord.”[7] Eventually, it was decided candidates for consideration should only include those who had already died. Yet, due to various editorial committee disagreements and Graebner’s death in 1950, this series never took shape in The Lutheran Witness.

By 1969, Buszin, lamenting the lack of progress on the series, still pondered “whether it would not be well for some of us (not just one or two) [to] prepare a list. Some people’s names are being forgotten … not all of them deserve to be remembered, but we can do our own cause much good by having an archivist who keeps his eyes wide open for all worthwhile developments from all good sources.”[8] Buszin continued to collect archival documentation on some of the historical figures about whom he had intended to write, but the project never saw fruition. Buszin died in 1973.

Fortunately, Walter Buszin’s daughter, Constance Buszin Seddon, an active member of the Concordia Historical Institute, cherished her father’s archive, preserving and adding to it through the years with her own research, even publishing several articles in the CHI Quarterly about her father’s life and dedication to church music. She had always hoped that she could see her father’s project, that of documenting some of the important figures in American Lutheran sacred music, to conclusion. Connie Seddon died in 2022, but not before passing her father’s archival documents on to the Rev. Scott Schilbe of Redeemer Lutheran Church, Overland, Mo. I received these archival documents from Pastor Schilbe shortly thereafter, and resolved that I would continue this work in some way. Thus, I wrote Portraits in American Lutheran Sacred Music: 1847–1947, a book that will be released soon from CPH, utilizing the research framework established by Buszin and Graebner in 1946.

Portraits in American Lutheran Sacred Music 1847–1947 is available now at Concordia Publishing House.

In this new book I have attempted to bring to life 13 eminent figures in Lutheran sacred music, most of whom have been almost entirely forgotten, even though their work lives on. Some, such as C.F.W. Walther and C.A.T. Selle, were primarily pastors, and yet were responsible for setting the Missouri Synod on track as a singing church. Walther himself was practically an organ virtuoso. So, too, Friedrich Lochner, pastor at Trinity, Milwaukee, and eventually professor at the Springfield seminary, wrote extensively on liturgical music. Another, Ferdinand Winter, came over from Saxony to teach at Altenburg, Mo., where he was the first teacher and kantor in what would soon become the LCMS. Others, such as Karl Brauer, the first full-time music professor in the LCMS, and his successor Albert Kaeppel, represent 19th-century sacred music pedagogy at the Addison seminary, before it moved to River Forest, Ill., where it became Concordia Teachers College (represented in my book by faculty Martin Lochner and Albert Beck). I tell the story of St. Louis musician Walter Wismar, for decades serving Holy Cross Lutheran Church and forming the first Bach choir of St. Louis at the seminary, as well as his friend Edward Rechlin, the first concert organist in the Missouri Synod. Eccentric but motivated by his love for Lutheran hymnody, Rechlin, who had studied under Widor and Guilmant in Paris, performed thousands of concerts, including at the White House, and served as house organist for aristocratic families on the East Coast. I tell of Fritz Reuter, brought to Canada by the Missouri Synod but subsequently serving as a professor in the Wisconsin Synod, raising their standards of church music and composing the tune REUTER (LSB 582 and 647). Two professors at Concordia, Seward, represent the American heartland: Karl Hasse, who collected organ settings of every hymn in The Lutheran Hymnal,and the gregarious Theodore Stelzer, whose educational credentials included two undergraduate and two masters degrees, a doctorate in music and a Ph.D. in psychology, all of which benefited generations of Seward students.

These figures all tell interesting stories, but more important is their lived witness of the Gospel, which their music sought to proclaim. Friedrich Lochner wrote in 1872 that the “school teacher and the church organist [are] branches of one and the same tree, auxiliary offices of the sacred office of the Word, both serving to make the Word grow hither.”[9] Karl Brauer noted that the Lutheran Church “has ever made music and put it at the service of the glory of the living God; [this] is the spirit that inspires the poet and composer of the hymn ‘A Mighty Fortress’ …  the spirit of Luther, in whose writings we find so many wondrous expressions of the great utility and the tremendous power of music.”[10]

These persons all exemplified Luther’s dictum that music was to be accorded highest praise, its importance second only to theology. This hearkens back to St. Paul, who wrote in 1 Cor. 14:15, “I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also.” Hopefully Portraits in American Lutheran Sacred Music: 1847-1947 will serve to reveal how these pastors, teachers, and musicians during the first century of the LCMS taught and conveyed the Gospel to their students, congregations or audiences.

The Lutheran Witness has published online brief biographies of six of the aforementioned figures from the book, thus finally fulfilling, in a rather modern way, Graebner’s and Buszin’s unfinished project from 1946. Hopefully these serve as a worthy testimony to their legacy, not promoting them as individuals, but focusing on the message of the Gospel as promulgated in the sacred music heritage of the Lutheran Church.

[1] Theodore Graebner, Unsere Pilgerväter: Geschichte der sächsischen Auswanderung vom Jahre 1838 (Concordia Publishing House, 1919), 9.

[2] For more on Walther as a musician, see Jon Vieker’s “Born for Nothing But Music,” 7 October, 2011 https://witness.junkerge.org/2011/born-for-nothing-but-music-10-2011/ (accessed 1 June, 2025)

[3] Connie Seddon, “Buszin, Walter E.” Biography for the Walter E. Buszin (1899-1973) Papers, Concordia Historical Institute. https://concordiahistoricalinstitute.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/711 (accessed 2 June, 2025).

[4] Theodore Graebner, “From a Pocket Note-Book,” Lutheran Witness 59, no. 19 (17 September, 1940): 321.

[5] For more on Buszin, see Kirby Koriath, Music for the Church: the Life and Work of Walter E. Buszin (Fort Wayne: Good Shepherd Institute, Concordia Theological Seminary Press, 2003).

[6] Letter from Theodore Graebner to Walter Buszin, 1 August, 1946. (Seddon archive.)

[7] Letter from Theodore Grabner to Martin Bangert, 20 September, 1946. (Seddon archive.).

[8] Letter from Walter Buszin to Ed Klammer, 4 February, 1969. (Seddon archive.)

[9] Friedrich Lochner, “Aphorism über das Orgelspiels,” Evangelisches Lutherisches Schulblatt 7, no. 8 (August, 1872): 230. Trans. by author.

[10] E.A.W. Krause, “Rede zur Feier des Jubiläums des Herrn Prof. K. Brauer,” Evangelisch Lutherisches Schulblatt 27, no. 1 (January, 1892): 5. Trans. by author.