[Ep05] Powerful Praise and Worship Music from Searched Hearts w/ Classical Composer Lennart Östman

In this thought-provoking discussion on praise and worship music, and Christian music in general, Magnus Gautestad and Lennart Östman explore the concept of creating music that glorifies God, emphasizing the importance of the heart behind creativity. They discuss the interconnectedness of beauty, truth, and goodness in music and the significance of being in the presence of God to understand His character. Lennart invites listeners to explore his music on platforms like Spotify and YouTube, highlighting the profound connection between music, faith, and personal expression, and the potential for music to communicate and reflect the divine.

This episode reflects the speaker's belief in the power of collaboration among Christian artists and the value of receiving feedback to create impactful music that reflects and glorifies the Lord. The speaker emphasizes the potential for reaching people outside the church and revitalizing worship, inviting engagement and interaction on Instagram to foster dialogue and connection within the community.

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Transcript

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In the episode today, we will be illuminating some key factors in creating beauty. Number one, to look to the best classical composers of all time, which is God, and to flow from there, be intuitive to him and faithful to the ideas that we have been given and stewards of. We're going to get a glimpse into the attitude of somebody who writes a lot of beauty and see how we can learn from this in our overall discussions on how to glorify God more fully. Let's tune in. There's a war in our churches between modern and traditional music. But the question is this, can we creatively integrate the best of both worlds to unify the body of Christ and glorify the Lord more fully? Join us on this podcast as Christians from various dance share their voice and come together to develop new creative arrangements and compositions that will help us to worship the Lord more fully and to empower evangelism. I'm Magnus Gautestad, and welcome to SDG Music Radio. Greetings and wake up. I am grateful that I can be here today with Lennart. Lennart, how are you today? I'm very well, thank you. We have been discussing recently, Composer to Composer, about music and what music glorifies God. We were corresponding back and forth on emails. He had, especially one of those emails that really touched me and so many of the thoughts that I've been circulating through my mind in recent years. He just put it in some way even better than I could explain it. I had this feeling of, Oh, it's not just me that are thinking these things that are wanting to reflect God instead of expressing or whatever and all of these things. We decided, okay, let's have this discussion so that we all can learn from it. Because now is a time that we come together and learn from each other because there's so much riches in different churches and through history. What if we found a way to worship in the best of those worlds? Is there any way where we can learn to worship God more fully for all these attributes, and also to teach the whole Bible through music. There are some objective standards that we can lean toward, and I think we can all agree on is true and good and beautiful. But there are other things that are more tricky. Let's just jump into an introduction here and we're going to get into the discussion today about music and especially music in the Christian life. Leonard Ostman, he's a Swedish and he's been making music for 50 years, and it's been a journey closer and closer to God. Over the years, he have learned the craft of composing and orchestration by trial and error. And when asked, he state that he have thorough musical education from the Conservatory of YouTube under the leadership of Professor Spotify. He comes from a prog rock background. When he was young, he had left the initial pop and hard rock phases. He got into bands like Genesis, the Aenid, and Renaissance. Organizons and music got more and more part of it. He found a new love of classical music. I think we have some things to call in common there. I played in rock bands growing up as well, and I gradually started to listening to some crossover. One of them was from Sweden, has neoclassical metal and listening to Baroque there. He was my gateway drug to Bach, so to speak. It was actually beauty that drew me to sit in the church alone and just taking in the beauty of the architecture, the beauty of the music, and where I heard the gospel. I have a very close heart for the crossover journey. But sometimes we can just reflect God in music and people will start to wander in a deeper way maybe than they ever had. We're going to be diving deeper into some of these important topics in this day and age when so many are hungry for beauty. The people in the street are more and more hungry for beauty. Now, I want towanted to ask you, Leonard, what type of music gives glory to God and what doesn't? Well, I think every style of music can give glory to God. It's all about the heart, actually, I think. Why are you creating the music? Are you following Jesus when you do it? Are you sincere? Are you true to yourself and to the Lord? It doesn't really matter if that's classical music, it's pop or rock or even hard rock or dubstep or whatever it is, the heart behind it is what's important. Because when you create music, you put a lot of your own soul and spirit into it, but you also put the spirit that you follow into it. If you follow Jesus, you put the spirit of God into the music. If you don't follow Jesus, you put a very different spirit into it. That spirit can be concerned or it can be deserved, I think. You can hear it. It's something special. This is, God is here. You can hear God is here, but he's not really there. I think that's the difference what's important, the heart behind it. Not so much the style. But then music is a thing that you use, and you can use it in different settings. If you use it in a church service, if you use it in a concert, if you listen to it on Spotify, if you play it yourself, that's different arenas. There might be certain things that are more appropriate to one arena than to another. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are bad or not okay. But everything should go into its right place, I think. There's a certain fittingness that some music fits in one situation, but it doesn't fit in another situation. For example, if there is one type of people you want to reach with the music, there's certain music that would be beautiful and fitting there. But if you put that in another situation, it might change. Like you're saying, one thing is where it comes from. One of the fundamental phases will shine through, so to speak, or draw on people in one direction or the other. But there's also a certain fittingness. Just to riff a little bit on that, is there some music that don't reflect God? If God has a certain type of character, he has some order, there's a beauty, there's a Majesty with him, but we also see him as a humble servant in Jesus, incarnate. He has many different attributes. Do you have an objective guiding principle that, okay, whatever style I use, whatever the way you compose your music, that you think about it needs to reflect one of the ways that we see God in the Bible? Or do you have other objective standards to go by? Well, God has many faces and I tend to stay away from things that are noisy and chaos. Because God is not chaos, his order, but his power too. I can have let my music be powerful. I don't use… I write music for chamber settings mostly, and electronic music. I'm a synth nerd. I use drums and I can write a piece when I have very busy, noisy drums like this. But. I always make sure that they reflect power, not chaos. You can have power. You can have da, da, da, da. If you have that for half or one bar, it's okay, it's power. If you have it for 37 bars, it's not power, it's chaos. There is a difference. We have to use the different expressions in music to reflect the Lord. That can be a lot of things, but there is also a lot of things that it cannot be like chaos. You can have chaos in a symphony too. If it's very eternal, that's chaos. I don't like that at all. You can give it everything you can have with the breath. Yes, for sure, time, it's power. God is power. For a longer time, no, no, no. It becomes unpleasant. It becomes chaos. I think it's a... That's my guiding principle when I make music. Right. I think that was very practical and clear, and I think it's something we can all keep in mind there. Is basically saying you have... There's two principle in one there. One is this type of sense of now it's losing ground, it's losing order, it's losing shape and form. It's so fleeting and then it's chaotic. Then the other one you have there is that there's also some form of balance because you're talking about that if an element is used too much, for example, then is also where it becomes chaos. Order is basically also linked to a certain harmony or a certain balance between the different elements. There's some way where things fit together where it doesn't give you this type of that you feel completely lost or-. Yes, but it can be okay to have chaos too. Right. If you resolve it into order, because that's a picture of what God does. He takes what's chaos inside of you and he brings it into order. That's what he did with the world when he created it. It was chaos and darkness and God's spirit was hovering above the water and he made something in order with that chaos. If you have chaos in your music a short period and then let it resolve into order, so that can be a very powerful picture of the Lord, I think. Right. That's what he does. Right. Here you're basically talking about just like any good story has contrast. Any good story has a conflict, and even the Gospel has a major conflict in it. There is tension in the Gospel, right? There can be a great use of dissonance. But like you're mentioning here, if you're going to reflect the Lord and that people are going to get to know God better if they only listen to the instrumental music. Because sometimes people say the message justify the means and they just put some music under the lyrics and the music doesn't really say what the lyrics saying at all. But if. We- It doesn't really work like that. Right. We need to have other discussion stuff, people thinking more like a film composer, I think. But when it comes to just the music itself, which is your domain with more instrumental music, at least from the music I mainly heard from you, that this music in itself can use elements of chaos. I think all music have to use some dissonance or else it becomes very cheesy or superficial, right? Yeah. Look at the jobs. It can be Night Black, but God, you will save me. They can be despair, but God is there. He has this. It's the same with the music, even if it's instrumental that's the chaos. Yeah, it's going to be bad, but God. Right. I heard in, and this is also from my own experience, every time I visit modernist museum, I joked one time that my mother, she likes some of these stuff, and she invited me to a modernist museum and I was there and after one hour I was depressed and I didn't want to be there anymore. I went out from the place and I just said, Thank you, Mom, because now I love the world less, so I can love God more, I told her. She laughed and she's not a believer, but she could take it with a good heart. But my problem is in there, it's not that they are seeking justice. It's not that they want to put light on what is the suffering. To say we can't be escapists and be so heavenly minded, we're no earthly good, that we are so just waiting for heaven and thinking about heaven that we separate ourselves so much from the world because that is not reflecting the character of God either. It's very, very clear with Jesus when hes made... God made the clearest example of himself in Jesus. That is definitely to have a great compassion for injustice and those in suffering and all of that. But what I see is that the classical tradition also focus a lot on the difficulties of the world. You have paintings of martyrs, horrible martyrs, and just paintings of the cross, the innocent Lamb of God being tortured in the worst possible way, dragged out way, horrible way. Still, you can look at many of those paintings and you will find it beautiful. It will fill you with faith and will fill you with hope. When I talk with people, It say it can give you the bad news. It can meet you where you are in the darkness, in the suffering, but it doesn't leave you there. And I think that to be able to take somebody and have empathy and be with them and then take them to another place, there is a certain necessity of power and encouragement or just clear beauty or some truth or some goodness that needs to take them out of theirs, that needs to transcend their reality. That is where excellent music and intentional music and wanting to have love happening through the music. Basically what I'm saying, do you see parallels with your concept there of like, Yes, we can focus on all of these things, but we need to make sure if it reflects chaos and the ugliness and all of these things, it needs to be resolved for it to be music that glorifies God. Can we be that bold to say it like that? Yes, I think so. My music is 100% melody based, as opposed to atmospheric based or rhythmically based. It's melodies at the center. That's the way God has led me to make music. I very often find that I don't have really control over what melodies comes. My music tends to be positive, to be happy. I almost always write in major, but not always, but very often. I can have ideas about music, other people's music, but when I write it myself, I'm not really in charge of what's coming. That's the way the Lord has led me to make music. He has led me to sing the melodies, not necessarily play them, but to sing them. I couldn't really sing it. My life depended on it. But that doesn't matter because I get them down. When I do like that, it's not really a smaller step for the whole spirit to steer me in the right direction. If I play with it, I get stuck in my usual patterns. But if I sing it, I get a melody and I can harmonize it later in whatever manner I think is appropriate. Because there's two stages there. It's the composition stage, and it's the arrangement stage, and the orchestration stage. A lot of chaos comes into the composition stage. But when I'm arranging and orchestrating it, there can be chaos, there can be power. But there I used those expressions as tools to move the piece forward and to highlight certain things in the melody. But it's important there to resolve. It's always to resolve to something beautiful. I. Understand. I can end on a powerful ending, but I never end up in chaos. Right. I hear you. That's also a very good, just practical peek into your creative process and why you tend to have more order and beauty in your music because of the compositional practice you use. I can agree. If I start off my compositional journey with improvisation, I get different results than when I hear an idea in my mind and I just get that... Then I start humming it and then I get that down, and then I use that as my basis. Everything out of that will have a certain quality based on that idea than if I start from another direction. I think we can be open to many processes because if we are always starting from the same point, we might not get the full holistic expression we could have done. But I think that I've been talking with a composer named Dimitri for once, who is an amazing, partly self-taught classical composer, very much like Bach was. He had some lessons from his brother, but other than that, he used a lot of, more often, intuitive approach. There might be that some of the music that becomes what many interpret as ugly is because we write it with our hand or we write it with our rational brain too much and we haven't really been trained to listen. I can say, for my sake, I had an enormous turning point when I went through a course called Listening to Western Music by Craig Wright, where I had a semester where I was forced to go through exercises and listen through all the music of the Western history and do exercises and really just train my ear. And my life was never the same after that. From that point, the music in my mind became so much clearer that I could hear several layers at the same time. I couldn't do that before. I went through most of my life, I didn't know that I was able to compose music. As soon as that happened too, my composition just immediately came together. Before that, I was thinking too much. I was planning too much. I do plan out some principles before improvisation. I want to get familiarized with this and this and that, and then I go into the battle. I think that is a skill in church we might need to think a bit more about, because we have a lot of expectations that in our church and in our style, this is how we do it. This is the da-da-da-da. This is how we follow it. We have fallen into very many patterns. That's why many churches, they do some things pretty well, but they get very reductionistic in a few ways, maybe because they are too controlled by expectations. Maybe what you're talking about here is something we should develop more in the musicians and start to listening more from that angle and see also what music that we consider is beautiful, is God-honoring, and learn what do you do, and start to have more of those composers learn more about their process. What do you think about that? Yeah, absolutely. There are so much inspiration that can be gotten from different places. Often when I'm composing, I find that I go in and I listen to some special music because I want to see how did they do it. That could be anything. I've listened a lot to Hayden. He's one of my favorite composers, and especially his string quartets and more so, of course, and what is his name? Renaud, made baroque music in France, a French guy, and everyone has something special that you can use and you get more and more tools. When you are creating music, I think it's very important to look at the biggest master composer over them all, and that's God. How do he create? Well, if you look at a leaf, it can be very simple in its form. But if you take a closer look, the edges are very fractal, and you had… It's not a green leaf. It's a tone map of several green and yellow nuances. Add to that, you have small imperfections, and that gives it a much deeper design. I try to make use of that in my music. Because what do you see when you see God's creation? It's abundance. It's a great variety. There is meaning, and there is beauty and there is structure. There is a lot there that you can take and you can apply to music and also look at different composers. Whenever I'm writing string quartets. I look a lot to Hayden. How did he do that? And a most that. I find that all right, that's very good. I have had to learn from that. But I also get to a point where I, I don't like that. I don't want to do it like that. Then I can listen to one of the others. How did he use reverb? Or I can listen to Pink Floyd. How did they do this? You can find a lot of inspiration and know-how. Find tools that you can use and discern what you like and what you don't like by listening to different composers. Back on track. Yeah. Okay. I think you have some really good points there. That was just so powerful. The greatest composer of all God. To mainly look at him. You will see that the design of this podcast is a stage where there's just a big king chair in the middle of the stage. If you see the whole design, I'll put it out online somewhere, you'll see that they have a band in the back, they have an orchestra in the back. It's like the whole theater thing is just looking at one glorious God-centered worship. That is what we want, that all of these rivers are leading us to come closer to God, to be in the presence of God, to get to know God better for all this, like you say, variety. Yes. I don't know how it is with you, but for me, it's like this. I very much receive the music from the Lord. I'm just the first lucky guy to hear it. My biggest, what I'm aiming for is really to mess it up as little as possible. Sometimes I succeed. But. I get something. I'm looking forward to when I go to Meet the Lord and I will hear all this music that I made and how it was supposed to sound. I hope I didn't mess it up too much. I love that perspective. Actually, I compose in a lot of the same way. All the ideas comes as a pretty finished theme or motive in the mind. It's like the rhythm and the form is pretty consistent. Then I might work with that and then I have a counter melody for that. But I've seen that if I keep defining the original idea too much, trying to perfect it too much, criticizes too much, the whole thing loses that power. But if I can keep the original idea pretty intact and then be very more academic and use more craft with the orchestration and everything like that, that's okay. But that core idea that that can really blossom. You see, Beethoven, he said, That core is genius. That core is genius. When it comes to that. I don't know, I don't want to say the word genius. I have some different thoughts about the word genius, really. But yeah, I'll take that back. I don't have a clear stand on what I know about if I stand for the word of calling musicians genius or not, I know some people say they're in contact with the genius, but I think if we start to call people geniuses, I think that's one quick way to get proud or to make others into idols. But anyway-. I think genius is overrated. Right. You had a comment there, I think I distracted you. If you. Have nothing else- I think I distracted myself, actually. What was it? I don't know. But anyway, that can lead us into a last question. I just wanted to bring this a little bit together now as we're going toward the end here. That is, how can Christians come together to make more beautiful music? When I say beautiful, I believe that beauty and truth and goodness are in one. You remove one of them, you remove the others too. When I say something is beautiful, they will also be true and good, or else it's not really that beautiful anymore. You can observe that tendency. But how can we come together to make more beautiful music, both the more the modern part of the church and the more traditional church. What's your take on that? Well, that's a difficult question, actually. Because how do we come together to make music? They are the longer state, the lonely phase, and you compose it. You don't sit together a group of people and compose together. You can do that, but I don't think it's as useful and powerful that if you have one person that goes in and have communication with God and creates something, but then you need people to perform the music. About everything, I think we can learn from each other because we can learn from... You can learn a lot from an electric guitarist and a clarinetist or a violinist and a church-oriented musician. And a choir leader. We have all this knowledge that God has put into different people that we can learn from, that we can use and that can edify us and bring what we do up to a higher level. I think that's a very important part of it. I want also to come back to this question of what we can learn from people from different styles. For example, B. B. King, he said that when he's playing guitar, he's always hearing a trumpet sound in his head. I have heard actually my guitar teacher, he said that if you want to get really good phrasing, listen to Woodwinds because they need to breathe. When we can come closer to the human voice in our melodies, there is something universal that we are getting closer to in terms of being able to actually communicate with other people. That would be one example. Other examples when it comes to what we can learn from each other is, I think like you say, the pure ideas comes to the individual, right? But then there is all of this creative work that can be done with how we orchestrate things, which timbre we use, which way we perform it so that you can have one piece. If it's arranged a little bit different and performed a little bit different, that will have completely changed his character of being approachable maybe to people it's usually not approachable to. I think we can start to be a bit open about that. Again, think about our audience. Who do we want to reach? Can we reach with those pure, beautiful, true essence coming from the right place? Then if we are true with that, then there are room to just like when Paul said that he will be adapting to so he can save some he wanted to. But I think some take that principle that we can just be completely like the world and just be a chameleon. But I don't think that was what he meant. I think he was very clear on, just like Jesus, when he says that we are in the world, but not of the world. There's something that needs to be holy and separated. But then at the same time, there is a certain level of freedom, and I think we are called to being able to communicate it correctly. I don't talk about God the same way to a 15-year-old and to an 80-year-old. There are certain ways that I communicate the same truth in different ways, and there's room for that to do with music too. I think we just need to stop here, but I would love to go for a few more hours here, Lennart. They've been so rewarding to listen to your thoughts. I sure had things now I want to meditate on and really get my attitude and my mind right. Because the more we can be in the presence of God, the more we can think about God, the more we can know His character. I think that is one of the most important things we can do as musicians. We can become smaller that way and he can become bigger in our musical journeys. Thank you so much. I think a lot of what you said now was just us getting a little bit more out of the way and leaving the way for the Lord there. How can people find out more about you, find your music? Where do you want people to go, Leonard? Well, the big bulk of my music is on Spotify and YouTube. If you search for my name, Lennart Östman, or if you don't have. An Ö on your keyboard, I think it will work with Lennart Ostman too, means cheese man in Swedish. But anyway. Yeah, then it's easier to remember, right? Yes. The same goes for on my YouTube channel, which also has my name on it, I have a playlist with all my music basically. I can be find on many platforms, these are Apple Music all over the place. Okay, wonderful. That is Lennart, it's L-E-N-N-A-R-T. Then, Ostman, that is like an O with two dots, the Swedish style, and S-T-M-A-N. For those who are listening to this on podcast directories. We're also on YouTube. There you can listen to or watch the shows with subtitles. I usually like to do that to remember things better. You can also leave your comments there. If you think we left out something or we said something that is not correct, well, correct us. We don't want to be standing here in error. I'm very much open to being challenged. I think when we can have the guts to do that, that is when the Christian artists can really come together here and we can have a bigger impact. There is a lot of potential for the artists to both in terms of reaching people outside the church and give new fresh and vitality in worship. I see lots of potential, and I think it starts with the artist that has a real, true passion for making new music and to making the music as best as he can to reflect the Lord and glorify him coming together for that. I think that is the type of things we can pray for, that is the will of God, and that is he loves to open the door and to answer when we pray in that type of way. So we're also on Instagram. We're just starting the show here, but please follow. I will give a few highlights there from various quotes or from episodes. So you can follow us there and you can also engage. So thank you very much.