The piano/organ is the one instrument that carries all the rules of music with in itself and yet churches have taken to throwing them out.

“You play a trumpet, for example, and you only play one note at a time because the issue isn’t worshipping God in Spirit,” says Jordan. “Music, especially religious music, has just become a personal god for people and it has all but replaced the duties and responsibilities and work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of most Christians to affect their spirit, soul and body. Lots of folks get tricked by this stuff because they don’t know any better.”

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When the Body of Christ is working properly based on sound doctrine, it will be “fitly joined together and compacted,” as Paul says, and the same is true of its music.

Just as the melody is where God’s truth can be put into a person’s heart, the harmony’s designed to affect the soul (where the heart’s located) with the truth and bring the senses—the emotions—into line with the truth. It supports the melody.

“There is harmony with a clean sound and then there’s the dissonant kind of sound that is disjointed,” explains Jordan. “Harmony can produce tension and various feelings, and when the tension comes up, it’s designed to have resolution in it. If music’s used properly you don’t leave a person hanging out there. Isn’t it confusing to leave things unresolved? What kind of music’s going to please God? I Corinthians 14 tells us, ‘God is not the author of confusion.’

“Nowadays people do that (unresolved stuff) so they can show you they’ve got a big range. It’s, ‘I can hit all these notes in between and then I get to the real one—see how talented I am.’ Now who’s the issue? The issue isn’t the melody, the issue’s the performance. So who are you singing for? Yourself.”

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Oriental music or Islamic music is not tied to any science.

Jordan explains, “The Greeks back before the time of Christ developed modern music, and they developed the seven-note scale based upon the physics of the universe and the science of timber and sound.

“In the Orient, they actually had 20 or 22 notes, none of which are tied to anything except what the guy who wrote the note wants it to be. That’s why you get all these goofball sounds. I mean, they’re real sounds but there’s no science to the way they’re put together like in the music you’re used to.

“That’s the reason modern music . . . it’s fascinating to study . . . you start with the Greeks and you go through the Dark Ages. Well, people weren’t allowed to sing in the Dark Ages—if you weren’t Catholic priests, or in academia, you couldn’t sing just like you couldn’t have a Bible.

“But when the Reformation and the Renaissance came along, what did people do? They got a Bible and you know what else they got? They got a song book. You know who designed the hymns that you sing—the structure of the hymns?

“Martin Luther invented the chorale, and in your hymn book the way our hymns are structured . . . the meter structure of hymns is designed according to the chorale.

“By the way, did you know rock music is the structure of your hymn book with a pagan beat to it? One of things you have in chorales is repeats; they’re called chants where you repeat it.

“I was with some kids the other day listening to stuff and I said, ‘What are they saying?’ They couldn’t understand the words either and you know what it was? Just noise.

The beat, the rhythm was in the melody, which makes the melody something carrying your flesh, not your spirit. You see how that stuff can degenerate and not be good for you?

“After the Reformation, that was the time of the King James Bible and the founding of America—the time of the greatest evangelism period the world had ever seen during that period socially. Musically, it’s called the baroque and early classical period, which is the romantic period.

“Music reached structurally its highest form in the late baroque and early classical. That’s the time of Handel and Bach. When you get to the romantic period, that’s Beethoven and Beethoven hated God.

“Beethoven used all of the baroque structure but emphasized the emotion and you can listen to some of his sonatas and literally see in your mind the leaves falling out of the trees he’s so effective with it! Because the melody puts thoughts into your mind; makes you think. But what’s he making you think about?

“Every one of (Bach’s) chorales is something about the Lord Jesus Christ and the truth of the Word of God. Beethoven hated God but he used the music and that’s when it began to degenerate. And after the romantic period comes the modern period and that’s the Big Band era—Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and those guys; they took that structure.

“You go out into the jungles and in primitive cultures and they’ve got musical instruments—most of them are drums—and occasionally they’ll take different sizes of chords and have a few little different sounds to it, but the most primitive form of sound is not melody; it’s not the complicatedness of a chord and the physical structure of the chord, it’s the thump, the rhythm.

“That’s the simplest, most basic form of music, and what the Big Band did in the modern period is they added the beat. Do you know what made the Big Band sound? They took the saxophone out from the back and put it in the front row. And then they added the beat to the melody. And now the beat is in the melody, so whatever the words are, the harmony’s carrying the beat and melody and now you’ve got the thing inverted.

“Out of modern period came what’s called ‘popular music,’ which is just a totally disintegrated form of music. Music, as it’s done today on the modern scene, is called ‘free flow.’

“You’re the avant garde if you’re free flow. When you were in school, did you learn to write poetry where you don’t go by the rules? It’s called abstract poetry. See, you throw all the rules out and that’s where you come up with the jazz, the bluegrass . . . you start making the beat the melody.

“If melody pleases God, harmony pleases who? Man. Now who’s left for flesh to please? You know what Jesus said: ‘The flesh profits nothing.’ Now, either you believe that or you don’t.

“God isn’t against interesting music; He’s just against bad music. Good music is music that’s balanced. It has melody, harmony and rhythm all doing their job and there’s not one trying to do the job of the other and taking over.”