An aside: thoughts on "music without words" in the church

The primary interest of this project is the song of the church, more specifically the song sung by the congregation, the “body of Christ” in full. Choral music may require some discussion on occasion, but will not be a principal subject of discussion.

Instrumental music, naturally, will be even less so. However, some discussion of the place and use of instrumental music in the church will be helpful, particularly about music that comes with no attachment to words at all – in other words, piano or organ arrangements of well-known hymn tunes of the type found in more churches on a Sunday morning than I care to count is not what we’re talking about here. Here we are speaking of music with no attachment to a text whatsoever.

Some churches seem to avoid such altogether. Prelude, offertory, postlude – all are filled with hymn arrangements in those corners. In some churches the organist – typically such churches use organists and not pianists – can play all the Bach preludes or fugues he or she desires in those spots. And then the great mass of churches falls in between, with the determination largely made by, frankly, whatever repertoire the organist has available at the given time. (Full disclosure: this is largely the case in the church I serve as pastor.) In other words, it’s not the subject of much thought.

I know by experience in some cases there is a fear on the part of the players or pastors or ... somebody about doing something not explicitly religious. I can’t always say why, but there is a sense that whatever music they play has to have some kind of explicit religious connection. This is particularly true of pianists, whether they are providing the primary accompaniment for a full service or are merely playing one element during the service.

Organists, on the other hand, have an out: Johann Sebastian Bach. The strong association of Bach with sacred music or religious subjects seems to give organists a pass to play whatever Bach can be played for a particular function or moment, whereas music by, say, Mozart or Beethoven with no textual associations doesn’t get the same pass. (One other composer who might get such a pass is Felix Mendelssohn.)  Other composers “don’t do” religious music, or somehow it isn’t “right,” but any old Bach prelude or fugue or toccata will do just fine. 

Honestly, this baffles me. It’s inconsistent at best and thoughtless at worst.

It is worth the question of whether or how non-textual music fits or doesn’t fit into worship. I’ll spill up front that I’m good with it, with the usual caveats about discernment applied (maybe it’s possible, but I’m not convinced that, say, a Schoenberg piano variations will really work in worship). But some people don’t seem to hold to that, and I wonder why.

OK, I don’t really wonder that much. Unless I miss my guess, the issue is that unless some music has some words attached to it in some way or other to tell us it is “sacred” or “religious,” we’re not capable of interpreting it as or believing that it is “sacred” or “religious.” “Prelude in B-flat” (unless it’s by Bach) doesn’t sound religious, but even something so generic as “Meditation” doessound religious, even if the two are the exact same music.If you were to take the generic name off a bit of lesser-known Haydn or Brahms or whoever and slap a religious-sounding title on it, we’d find a way to convince ourselves that it’s somehow “sacred” in some way, and happily allow for our service musicians to play it. Without that sacred marker, we get uneasy.

This isn’t true of all churches or church musicians, not by a long shot, but it happens just enough to be a curious phenomenon, and one that does have at least a little impact with how music functions in the worshiping life of the church.

What may be more interesting here, though, is what such a belief or attitude reveals about how leaders of worship, be they pastors or organists or pianists or music directors generally, want music in worship to be.

We want it to be controlled.

We want the music of the service, I fear, to do what we tell it to do, to produce the particular reactions we are looking for, to herd the congregation like so many sheep into exactly the same pasture. And music that has no particular “word” attached to it – no hymn being evoked, no meditative or spiritual dimension automatically suggested – is risky. People might start thinking of or reflecting upon…anything. Or nothing.

We want it to be safe.

And music isn’t safe. Not when it’s really music.

Where music might take the heart, mind, soul, or strength (those parts of our being with which we are called to love the Lord our God) is not something we can know. It’s risky that way.

We want it to mean something in particular, something we can define and specify.

Felix Mendelssohn probably offers the best warning against that. It was he who famously offered that music, instrumental music – the best music as he understood it – could not be forced into or assigned meanings that could be pinned down with words. 

In response to a question about some of his “songs without words,” Mendelssohn rejected the idea that these brief pieces (songlike in melody and structure but, as the label says, without words) meant anything beyond (I’m paraphrasing here) “just the song as it stands.” Music without words won’t submit to our desire for control, and it’s risky that way. So, we stay away from it. We stick with things we can pin down.

Again, music without words is not the principal interest of this project. Still, understanding something about how we view music without words can be instructive about how we want to use music with words. It can also provide some cautionary instruction against any temptation to think that any of the music we use in worship is something we can (or should think we can) control. It has great capacity to evoke, to prompt, to enliven, to cajole, to enrapture, to do many different things. But we really can’t know what it will do until it happens. We can’t know how the congregation or the individuals in it will respond, if at all. 

And in those cases where we can (or think we can) control or know those things, it’s not music anymore. It’s manipulation.

I should probably defer to those Mendelssohn experts I know, but my guess is that Felix wouldn't have been pleased with the added title to this "song without words"

Dear Pastor: Sing with understanding

*Note: yes, the title is a bit of a tribute or homage to my first teacher on the subject of hymnody and congregational song, the late and highly esteemed Hugh T. McElrath.

If, as I've been suggesting for quite some time now, you are a needful leader in congregational song (and even in some cases the "buck stops here" person in your church on what gets sung by the congregation in worship), it would behoove you to develop some understanding of those songs being sung and the repertoire of congregational song from which you might choose, in order both to make better choices for your congregation and also to be a more skilled and diligent interpreter of those hymns yourself.

Some of the discernment involved in hymn choosing inevitably has to be musical. If you don't have a lot of musical background you may need help with that part of the analysis, possibly in the form of a church musician helping you sing through the song and get a feel for its singability and playability in the specific context of your congregation. Some things, on the other hand, you can probably figure out yourself; if you find your voice straining because the tune is so high or so low, there's a decent chance that some chunk of your congregation will have the same struggle, and (unless you have a crafty church musician who can adjust the tune on the fly by raising it up or down ("modulating" is the fancy musical word), you may want to pass that one by.

On the other hand, the theological content of the hymn should be right in your wheelhouse, shouldn't it? Being able to grasp spiritual references in the text (hymnals will frequently help with this), theological ideas found in it, and direction of the text should be part of your skill set.

Direction of the text: to whom are the people singing -- to God, to one another, to themselves individually? To God is hard to argue against; most hymns of praise will be directed Godward (or Christward or Spiritward, if you want to break it down by person of the Trinity), for example. Hymns directed people-ward, typically songs of encouragement or exhortation (think of "Sing praise to God, who reigns above," which for all its God-language is an exhortation to the people to praise God) are also useful in a church's repertory.

Inward-directed hymns can be problematic. On occasion such a hymn (one that will tend to use the pronoun "I" rather a lot) can be possessed of theological richness and/or scriptural quality to be good viable hymns for a congregation to sing (note that "Sing praise to God, who reigns above" does have an inward-directed stanza). On the other hand, a lot of "I" hymns are frankly over-indulgent sentimental claptrap. At the risk of tons of offense, "In the Garden" would be exactly such a song. Particularly when paired with the tune most typical of it, it's a syrupy enough concoction to send even the healthiest into severe sugar shock.

"I" hymns and songs tend, at the risk of overgeneralizing, to correlate awfully closely with "I" churches. Churches that don't have much of a mission profile or even a basic awareness of the world around them, perhaps also struggling to articulate much of a theology of God or Christ or much of anything else, but always quite focused on its own fulfillment or the interests or satisfactions or even mood of its own people...there's a decent chance you might notice an elevated level of "I" singing in that congregation. You don't want to be that church, do you?

In short, if you can apply your skills of theological interpretation to the task of studying scripture and preparing a sermon, you can spare a smidgen of that interpretive skill to the task of picking the week's hymns. And the good news is that you won't have to translate from Hebrew or Greek.

*More on this subject later, but likely a hiatus as I'll be away for a couple of weeks.