Confession: I just Frankensteined a hymn

You might recall a comment from some weeks ago about an overly well-known evangelical figure penning two verses to the hymn "Great is thy faithfulness" to bend it more toward his own theology (supposedly), and making a poetic hash of it. You might recall also that "Amazing grace" was also identified as a "Frankensteined hymn" because of the historical amputation of two of its original stanzas and addition of the current fifth stanza, making (unpopular opinion alert!) a bit of a theological hash of that hymn.

Allow me to introduce myself: I'm Dr. Frankenstein.

With a special event coming up in two weeks, I had an urge to use the old G.K. Chesterton hymn text "O God of earth and altar." I was mildly surprised to find it had not made it into Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal, and had to go looking in the 1990 Presbyterian Hymnal to find its most recent appearance in my experience. I had not realized that its appearance there was in a "Frankensteined" form, with an edit made in the second stanza and a new third stanza by Jane Parker Huber.

Two problems here. First, the Huber portions are under copyright, and getting that permission in time was probably not feasible. (The Chesterton text is public domain.) Second, those edits didn't really work thematically, in my humble opinion. Regarding part of the discussion in the previous blog entry, the Huber stanza is rather dramatically different from the original Chesterton stanzas in language -- Huber has, again in my humble opinion, always been a bit self-conscious about sounding "modern" in language and a bit susceptible to what might be called "hymn buzzwords," and that tendency grated against Chesterton's older poetic impulse.

To be honest, the copyright problem was enough to throttle that idea, but the second problem sent me off searching for Chesterton's original, or as close as I could find, which meant a visit to hymnary.org, which is usually a fairly trustworthy source for such things. It did not disappoint.

That hymn can therefore be examined here.

You can probably guess where the issues are. Chesterton's verse about "all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men" made sense enough in 1906, as women generally weren't voting at that time, but it simply doesn't work today - perversely, because women do not need to be let off the hook for cruelty. Everybody can be cruel. And that third stanza made sense at the time, I guess, but having to explain just the first line, "Tie in a living tether the prince and priest and thrall" would largely undermine the whole point of using the hymn. Finally, considering that the service in question is on the theme of peace, that line about "lift up a living nation, a single sword to thee" is probably a non-starter as well, unless I wanted to use it as an example of the mindset that got Britain into the bloody and destructive morass of the Great War just eight years after Chesterton penned these lyrics. And indeed, that idea might make it into the service somehow.

But instead, I did something foolish. I performed my own surgery on the hymn.

For the "cruel men," the line will read "from all the easy speeches that lead us wrong again." Not very Chestertonian, I'm sure, but I will say it does get at the point Chesterton was rightly making.

The new third stanza is as follows:

God, be our only Ruler, our Guardian and our Guide;No more let earthly rivals distract us from your side.Bind all our lives together, rebuke and save us all;O God of earth and altar, now hear our desperate call.

I will confess that I was self-conscious about trying to get a little closer to Chesterton's style here, though I won't claim to have succeeded. There is, you can see, some direct borrowing from Chesterton (such as "bind all our lives together" and the echo of the opening phrase) in hope of making the connection more viable.

So there's my confession: I'm bending ol' Gilbert Keith a little bit for my own purposes. My hope is that the adjustment is not too violent or ruinous to the hymn, and that it will work for the one occasion on which it is likely to be sung. But I am now guilty of (along with Jane Parker Huber, I guess) making a bit of a Frankenstein's monster out of this august hymn. Guilty as charged.

But we're still gonna sing it.

Sorry, Gilbert Keith.

Dear Pastor: Bad spaces and bad leadership

Having worked through most of John L. Bell's The Singing Thing it seems only fair to see it through, right? There's not too much left, and the points left to cover are worth thinking about.

Of his four reasons people don't sing, we have addressed the questions of vocal disenfranchisement (people having been told long ago they can't sing) and the effect of performance culture on the church (people believing they shouldn't sing because they don't sound like the person up front). The last two can be covered, I think, in one post here, not because they don't matter so much but because there may be less to unpack about these and, in one case, there may only be a limited amount one can do about it.

3) Acoustics, or the qualities of the space in which singing happens that enhance or dampen the sound the singers make. In many cases little can be done; the space was built decaces or centuries before and the necessary changes are financially or practically prohibitive. On the other hand, if the building is old enough, it may actually be of superior acoustic quality - those old European cathedrals are often acoustic marvels for having been built so long ago. (The things you learn when amplification doesn't exist...)

There are other factors that may more adjustable, depending on your circumstance. Does your congregation sit somehow facing one another, in an arc or some other shape that brings the folk into eyesight of one another at least a little bit? This could help. Do they sit in long fixed pews facing the front, towards the pulpit and possibly choir? Probably not good, plus it has the subliminal effect of suggesting that the choir provides the "real" music for the service. Is the space heavily carpeted? Ick.

How much can you do to improve your space's friendliness towards singing? I certainly can't tell you.

4) Bad leadership. Yeouch. The uncommitted band members who barely show up, the unprepared organist, the slovenly choir...it's the horror-show chapter. And this is the place where, if your church is infested with such a problem, you are inevitably going to be required to intervene. Sorry.

The book's final section addresses the ambiguities of congregational singing, things that are quite often not under your control or that of anyone else in leadership. People who have unnatural or irrational aversions to guitars or organs or pianos or drums, due to associations you cannot possibly know; the accrual of familiarity to a particular song or sound around which congregants put up walls to protect themselves from anything different or challenging; attractions and aversions to particular musical styles, harmonies, tunes, instrumental timbres; the ambiguity or unfamiliarity of certain hymnic language - words like "Zion" or "Ebenezer," or even more familiar words like "peace" - what does that really mean? Absence of war? A treaty or armistice? Shalom?; language archaic or new that puts off one faction in the congregation and attracts another; language for God or for humanity that is not exclusive; the list could truly go on for quite a ways. And some of them will simply call for someone (likely you) to lead your congregation to discern the way to go, and some of them will simply be vexations that you will face, and just have to find a way through them.

The book is worth having, although occasional parts of it may be a little outside the grasp of the non-musician. Bell generally does a decent job of explaining those parts, though, so that should not be a reason not to get it.

Turns out this is just part one. We'll get to part two at some point in the future.

Dear Pastor: More on performance culture and congregational singing

Last week's entry considered the impact of what John L. Bell called "performance culture" and its impact on the folks in your pews and their willingness to sing, particularly considering the impact of that performance culture and its infiltration into the church itself. That was not, however, the impact Bell was necessarily thinking of in The Singing Thing, and the impact of performance culture itself on the willingness of the folk to sing does need to be considered as well.

Bell states that "we are almost unconsciously entering an era very different from any Western civilization has previously known" (113) concerning emphasis on select performers over mass singing. Perhaps things were/are different in Bell's Britain. In the US performance culture has never been far from the center of any cultural life, and such communal singing as did exist did not always do so in a way that was as widespread as it might seem. Take, for example, the singing schools of colonial and early Federal New England.

These robust gatherings, social events as well as musical lessons, addressed a particular concern that we might share: the poor state of singing in the church. Itinerant singing masters established these singing schools as far as they could travel, offering instruction in enough of the rudiments of music to help congregation members have a fighting shot at singing the hymns in the service without evoking nightmares. Inevitably the singing schools themselves became the attraction, but the effect of people learning how to sing (at least a little) was a boon to the church.

The church in New England, that is, and maybe a little bit of the mid-Atlantic. This wasn't a nationwide phenomenon, and thus its impact was necessarily limited. (It did leave behind some fantastic music, however. Go listen to some William Billings, like here or here - or here, though the latter was not so much a church song. These were part-time musicians, by the way -- Billings was a tanner and other things, and Justin Morgan, heard here, was a horse breeder. Yes, the Morgan horse was his doing.)

Serious question: what would it take to make singing schools a thing again? That would be fascinating.

Likewise the shape-note or fasola singing phenomenon was thoroughly grassroots, but not geographically unanimous. Borrowing some elements from those New England singing schools (including some of the music - here's how one of those Billings tunes translates into shape-note style) but fleeing the increasingly urban East for the rural frontier, and using an ingenious system of assigning shapes to notes in order to make basic intervals easily singable, the shape-note tradition took root in the then-frontier Midwest and South. It was a rural phenomenon, not at all respected in urban climes. (The tradition survives today, and has in some cases taken on a more urban audience than its early practitioners would have ever thought.

Even as these popular traditions found their homes and adherents, performance culture also found its footing, particularly in the mid-nineteenth century in a two-pronged approach. As virtuoso performers (frequently European) figured out there was money to be made performing in the US, they started making their way to the States accompanied by Barnum-esque hype (literally so in the case of the soprano Jenny Lind, whose first US appearances were engineered by no less than the circus huckster P.T. Barnum himself - that much of The Greatest Showman was true.) At the same time advancing technology in the form of sheet music brought a form of "performance" culture to the good ol' American home, where your daughters could be primed to be prize catches by learning to play the piano and sing appealingly. In different ways both of these pulled against the practice of singing together, one by emphasizing the performer and the other by emphasizing the individual. 

One could push against other factors in American cultural life - the elite emphasis on good music of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, the middling and uncertain emphasis on teaching music in schools, and yes, the advancement of broadcast culture (from radio to television to streaming tech) and its hyper-glorification of the "star" as other factors that have pulled against much of a sense of communal singing as a valued quality, perhaps amplified by the sheer size of the US and the greater challenge of anything becoming culturally dominant in such a large country.

So where does public communal singing happen? You could point to community choruses, to the degree that a town can support such a thing. Oddly enough, one of the few places where true communal singing sometimes happens is at sporting events. Baseball still offers up "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when the seventh-inning stretch comes along, except when national television broadcasts ruin that by inserting a useless soloist (and having survived, at least in some quarters, the militaristic usurpations of "God Bless America" that infested the sport after 9/11). Perhaps the most song-friendly sport is, of all things, soccer. Supporters groups have their songs and chants at the ready, which is wonderful ... unless you're for the other team. (Here's an example from the club down the turnpike in Orlando. It ain't Bach, but hey, they're singing.)

And then there's the church, where the singing is a little about being community, but so much more. More than community, its about being "body" - the body of Christ, to be precise. To a great degree the world is not going to be a lot of help facilitating and encouraging our singing, dear pastor. So how do we do it?

Dear Pastor: Performance-culture fallout (also after John L. Bell)

Continuing to follow some of John L. Bell's points on why people don't sing (in church or much of anywhere), we come to his second reason, in a chapter titled "The fallout from a performance culture." While my earlier blog on similar issues didn't make that explicit claim, a couple of points I did include are related from or perhaps derivable from such a claim:

3) Singing, or perhaps singing with others, isn't "cool." This would the the wannabe-rockstar position, not wanting to share the stage with others. Not super common, but out there.

And:

4) "I don't sound like the person leading the song, so I shouldn't sing." A greater risk in more contemporary settings, where a single lead voice is more likely featured. Also a greater risk if the leader can't resist particular "soloistic" touches in leading the folk. I doubt it's intentional, in most cases, but it still can intimidate folks in the pews out of their comfort with singing.

As noted in the earlier blog, the first of these positions isn't necessarily all that common, but it does happen. If the singer in question is not "in the spotlight," so to speak, it's hard for that person to care enough to sing. This suggests a whole lot of other issues going on in that person's heart, mind, and soul, perhaps beyond the scope of this blog.

That other position, however, is pretty directly related to Bell's point. More precisely, it is a consequence of the importation of that performance culture into the church.

Protestantism in its various forms in the United States has run the gamut of attitudes about the song of the people, from almost a reverse-snobbery of glorifying the rough voice in certain frontier traditions to the near elimination of the song of the people in some more elite Protestant quarters. Different models of providing leadership and guidance to the singing congregation have come and gone, none perfect but some cerainly more effective than others. It isn't as if the focus on individual leaders is new; from "song leaders" to "ministers of music" to cantors borrowed from Jewish tradition, using an individual as leader of the congregation's song (or an ensemble in some cases, such as the paid quartets that sang almost everything in some emerging mainline traditions in the late nineteenth century) has a long history in this country.

In these cases there was and is always the risk of the soloist, often of professional status, intimidating the people in the pews by sheer force of voice, no matter how unintentionally. Being a leader of others in singing makes a peculiar set of demands that is not shared by more straightforward professional singing roles, and not all singers catch on to that. But to understand the particular dangers of which Bell seems to be speaking, it might be more useful to refine the word that Bell uses; perhaps instead of simply speaking of performance culture, it might be more precise to speak of "soloistic" performance culture.

Performance culture can be collaborative. Soloistic performance culture focuses on the "star," for lack of a better word. A "star" doesn't need to worry about whether others can keep up; what he or she does is the focus.

Good leaders, perhaps with some training, are sensitive to the need to lead in such a way that the people are not only able to follow, but are in fact encouraged to do so. This doesn't consist only in the call that "everybody sing!"; it also includes the leader providing a model for singing the song in question that makes it easier and more feasible for the congregation to learn and to sing (particularly in those style traditions where new songs are constantly feeding into the pipeline from Australia or wherever).

And when you're out in front with guitar in hand or behind the keyboard, and you've got a voice that can be soloistic, it can be awfully hard to remember that. And in the end, dear pastor, it may yet fall upon you to provide the corrective and to remind your leaders in whatever style or format that their job is to lead and not to star.

Hear me out here; is it possible that, just maybe, this (while killer for an arena show) doesn't necessarily help a large group of people sing together when they all know they can't sound like this?