At its most basic, music is a collection of sounds. How those sounds are organized varies by country and culture and reflects their values, history, and heart-longings.

Join Tokyo-based American musician Roger W. Lowther on a journey through the landscapes of Western and Japanese classical music and explore their unique and fascinating differences. Roger will lead from the piano as he demonstrates the musical languages of each tradition and show how they contain hidden pointers to gospel hope in a world full of suffering and pain.

This dual-format lecture-performance is geared toward a general audience; no musical background necessary.

About the Speaker

Roger W. Lowther is the founder and director of Community Arts Tokyo, director of Faith & Art at Grace City Church Tokyo, and coordinator for the MAKE Collective, a global network of artists working in foreign missions. He has been serving with Mission to the World in Japan since 2005. Roger received a master of music from The Juilliard School and a bachelor of science from Columbia University. He is currently pursuing a master of arts in theological studies at Reformed Theological Seminary.

Roger has won numerous organ performance competitions and released five albums, most recently COVENANT, with works by Bach and Beethoven. He has also authored The Broken Leaf: Meditations on Art, Life, and Faith in Japan (2019), Pippy the Piano and the Very Big Wave (2020), Aroma of Beauty (2021), and A Taste of Grace (2024). He lives in downtown Tokyo with his wife, Abi, and has four boys. www.rogerwlowther.com

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If there was a “bestseller” book of the Bible in the European Middle Ages, it would be the Song of Songs. When read allegorically, in the manner of medieval theologians like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the book tells the story of the romance between Christ and the soul that culminates in Christ’s love shown on the cross. This is a story of mutual pursuit, the pain of desire and sacrifice, sensual delight, and true union. The idea of Jesus as a longing lover of each individual soul appeared everywhere by the later medieval period, in art, poetry, sermons, and the devotional writings of men and women alike.

These themes and images can strike us as strange, even uncomfortable. An illustrated poem for nuns depicted the Song of Songs like a cartoon strip. Prayer books of wealthy nobles portrayed Christ’s wounds intimately. Poets wrote Christ in the role of a chivalric, wounded knight weeping and waiting for his lady. And yet, examining this ancient imagery of Jesus our Lover together can challenge us to greater vulnerability with our Savior, to refreshed understandings of God’s hospitality, and, in the words of Pope Gregory the Great, can set our hearts “on fire with a holy love.”

About the Speaker

Grace Hamman, PhD (Duke University), is a writer and independent scholar of late medieval poetry and contemplative writing. She is the author of Jesus through Medieval Eyes: Beholding Christ with the Artists, Mystics, and Theologians of the Middle Ages. Her work has been published by academic and popular outlets, including Plough Quarterly and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Grace also hosts a podcast called Old Books with Grace, which celebrates the beauty and joy found in reading the literature and theology of the past. She lives near Denver, Colorado, with her husband and three young children. Read more about her work at gracehamman.com.

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