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A friend recently gave me a CD of the Beatles' Love album. There is plenty of interesting innovation in the sound, and in the remix, that I appreciate—like the inclusion of the sitar in some songs, and the merging of one track into the next. When you go from "I Want to Hold Your hand," complete with screaming girls in the background, to the rather inscrutable "Hey Jude," you wonder if this is the same band.

This made me long for more such innovation in contemporary worship. Every week at church, it's the same drums-guitar-keyboard-base combo. With a congregation of 2,000 plus, surely there are some who can play the cello, sax, or trumpet. Or could we just shut off the electricity for a moment and have a trio of trained singers sing "Amazing Grace" a cappella?

I'm reminded of the most concise critique of contemporary worship I've heard—from that great cultural critic and philosopher, Hank Hill, from the TV series King of the Hill. On one show, his son Bobby befriends a Christian rocker, and when Hank hears his band play he says, "Can't you see you're not making Christianity look better? You're just making rock 'n' roll look worse."

But this is less about critiquing worship music than it is about aesthetic experience. The same week my friend gave me the Beatles CD, I bought a Vivaldi CD, specifically for one movement of a concerto that I heard on the radio. It's a four-minute andante from Vivaldi's concerto for violin and two string orchestras in B-flat major (listen here). When I heard it on the radio at work, I was entranced by the beauty of the piece. When I heard it was Vivaldi, I was surprised. No composer's name had entered my mind while I listened, and this is not typical. I know Vivaldi's work fairly well, and this didn't sound like anything I'd heard by him, or by anyone else.

When I bought the CD, my first few listens had an effect on me that no other music has. I laughed and cried at the same time. The piece seemed to pull tears out of my eyes. Other music has had this effect on me, and some pieces have not taken my tears as much as my breath—they're literally "breathtaking." The pianist Alfred Brendel has done this repeatedly with one subtle expressive change of rhythm in a piece by Bach.

But I've never laughed. Smiled, yes. Maybe shaken my head in awe. But with this Vivaldi piece, my eyes teared up, and then I laughed. It was an odd combination of joy and awe, from the experience of intense beauty of a particular character. There is mystery in the music; there are echoes, louder and softer. I can't quite get my ears or mind around it; I'm not sure which instrument is playing which notes. And it opened windows in my mind, through which visions entered—of dazzling, airy, infinite, heavenly places, of flower pedals falling through sunrays in a forest of lofty trees.

The CD booklet describes the piece as "an emotionally charged andante in the form of a chaconne, its splendid theme, sundrenched, broadly sweeping and no longer specifically Baroque, being among the most beautiful ever written by Vivaldi. It provides the starting point for a set of variations of palpable sensuality, with a long-breathed amplitude …. Never in Vivaldi's works have virtuoso ornaments appeared as intimately integrated into a melodic texture which, with each succeeding variation, gains in expressive tension."

Who would think to describe instrumental music as "sundrenched"? It's perfect. After a few days of listening, I wondered if it had ever been played for a wedding; it sounds perfect for such an occasion. But I wouldn't feel right having it played at my wedding. I wouldn't feel worthy. It's too much for an earthly wedding—or an earthly anything. It may only be fitting for the wedding between Christ and his Bride, at the end of time, when we meet in the air.

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