Overlooked Christmas hymns

Ugh, I've become desperate enough to resort to a listicle.

Hopefully it will be at least a somewhat thought-provoking listicle, though. Having now passed through a Christmas season worth of Sundays, i.e. no more opportunities for the corporate singing of Christmas "carols" and songs, I'm left to wonder at what I included that possibly not a lot of other pastors/churches did, what I didn't manage to work in, and what I might never get to in whatever length of pastoral career I might have.

So, without further apology, five hymns of the Christmas season you might not have sung:

5) "From Heaven above to earth I come." Martin Luther, for pete's sake. It's an interesting hymn in that it moves from angelic proclamation to human response. Musically, the VOM HIMMEL HOCH tune is pretty sturdy and maybe not some people's ideal of Christmas Eve, but there's always the Sunday after.

4) "It came upon the midnight clear." Maybe this seems an odd inclusion, but somehow it feels like it's always the first to go, so to speak. In some ways the reference to Christmas is pretty indirect: aside from the angels and their song, there's not necessarily a lot of obvious Christmas stuff in it. What it does is bring that message - "peace on the earth, good will to all" - forward to and through a world that has known more of suffering and wrong than our Christmas services tend to acknowledge, and that makes it worth holding on to.

3). "On Christmas night all Christians sing." For an old English carol (some of which can be pretty trippy and obscure), this hymn actually does some decent theology. It takes up the subject of sin and our deliverance from it and the new life that comes out of that deliverance, things that are often overlooked at this time of year.

2) "Of the Father's love begotten." I'm guessing that not all congregations (or their pastors) are super comfortable with singing a chant tune, one that is typically rendered in an unmetered fashion even in Protestant hymnals. It's a shame to miss this one, though. It touches on the typical Christmas-story stuff but also soars heavenward in its exultation of the One born "the world's Redeemer." Perhaps the most outright beautiful imagery and description of any Christmas hymn I know.

1) "Who would think that what was needed." Much more recent than the above selections, this John L. Bell/Graham Maule text plays wonderfully (as its title suggests) with the upside-down nature of the Christmas event. The final stanza also invites reflection on our current, progressed-but-not-necessarily-improved state, and brings that surprise to us into our very current lives.

All of the above are in Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal. I have absolutely no doubt that there are other such not-so-well-known Christmas hymns out there that are, in fact, not so well known to me. But this simply comes from my own experience as hopefully a prompt to reflect on what the hymnody of the church has to offer this time of year, besides those that have become so familiar as to be almost meaningless.

Ironically, the image comes from a blog entry from Concordia Publishing House, a couple of years ago, doing the very same thing I just did. Two of the same hymns are included: "From Heaven Above" and "Of the Father's Love Begotten."

Dear Pastor: Thoughts on coordination, prompted by Advent hymns

In the previous post we left off with a question about how much it matters if one sings Advent hymns all the way through Advent when your sanctuary starts looking like Christmas at the mall the day after Thanksgiving. This prompts some thoughts that may well open up questions that apply to the song of the church more broadly, not just during this particular time of year.

There is a tendency, all the more powerful for being unspoken, to act in a practical way as if the musical life of the church is somehow a separate and independent thing from the church itself, somehow. (To be clear: music is hardly the only part of the church’s life that can be treated this way – a church’s youth program might never have real interaction with the larger body, to name just one aspect.) This is a more prominent tendency if some part of the church music life “stands out” in some way – a historic or powerful organ, for example, or a choir capable of an active concert life outside of the church’s worship. Note that none of these things are inherently bad. There are few things in the world like a musically prolific and varied organ (which has prompted me to give much larger sums of money to my seminary for the installation of a real live organ than I normally give in one chunk), and a musically talented choir can still be a powerful leader in worship, if the focus on leading in worship is maintained.

Here two past experiences leap to mind, both of which come from my time in South Florida. One was a brief experience of observation, needed as I was teaching at a university where the students were highly familiar with the latest in contemporary worship music (or “praise and worship,” that weird separation of two very integral things) but had never heard “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” This required fieldwork of a sort at a local megachurch, even though I was trained as a historical musicologist and not an ethnomusicologist.

The musical outfit at this megachurch was not strictly a typical praise and worship band. It was a much larger ensemble, even including a brass section, but with the guitars and drums at its core. It also featured not a lead singer or two, but a small ensemble of singers (one might even have called it a “choir”!), again, with a clear “featured singer” as its lead. Stylistically and functionally, though, it was a praise band, and its role was to give in effect a small concert before the preacher took over. (This of course was what was supposed to fill the role of “congregational” singing in this church.)

At that point an amazing thing happened in at least a couple of my observations. After the band finished and the preacher commenced to preaching, some of the “worshipers” left. They actually got up and left the sanctuary, never to return. I couldn’t pursue them to find out why they were leaving and still observe the rest of the service, to my great regret. But one can only guess that they had come for the concert, so to speak, and having gotten what they came for, they were quite content to move on to lunch or whatever came next. This was not widespread by any means, but it was rather jarring nonetheless. Mind you, also, the preaching turned out to have at least as many qualities of a “show” as the music did, and plenty of folks presumably got what they came for in staying for the sermon.

Still, even on that small scale, it does point to an example of how musical life can be its own thing, separate even from the worship service going on around it.

The other South Florida experience, at a church my wife and I attended long-term, was in a very different setting but had a startlingly similar result. Choir and organ ruled in this church, and the choir in particular was the church’s pride and joy. Many of its more prominent singers were in fact recruited from a professional opera company in Miami, whose rehearsal accompanist was one of the church’s organist/choirmasters. Here the “show” was clearly all about the choir, for which Mozart and Brahms and other classical masters were standard repertory, arias and solos from their works were featured with those professional opera singers, and the pastor in this case had no illusions that his preaching was anywhere near as favored (or at least the congregation didn’t). Here the shock value, which took much longer to observe and to sink in, came in the degree to which the singing of the congregation was clearly second-tier. If one of their large choral numbers was coming up after a hymn, a large proportion of the choir would not be singing the hymn. Gotta save that voice, after all. (You’d think it might be useful as a light warm-up to sing along on the hymn, at least?) Correspondingly, even with such a proficient choir, the congregational singing at this church was minimal at best. It was valued by neither choir nor musical leaders nor congregation, and it showed. It got to be embarrassing singing in the congregation. People kept looking at me (and my wife).

(Note: I do not in fact attribute this to the attitudes of the “hired gun” singers, some of the veterans in particular, who frankly seemed as far as I could tell to want to be supportive of all the stuff in worship. Their interest was not particularly encouraged.)

Both of these examples speak to lack of integration in a church’s worship life. And this brings us back to the question of how useful it is to stick to your guns about singing Advent hymns throughout Advent when the church looks like the Christmas tree lot in A Charlie Brown Christmas. (That’s an exaggeration. I hope.) If the choir is already singing Christmas anthems, if the tree is already up and blinking, if the Nativity scene is fully loaded, then your Advent hymns might not be having the effect you’d hope. (A “progressive” Nativity scene, which only fills up over the course of Advent, can actually be an effective means of emphasizing the season, which would in turn work in harmony with your musical and presumably preaching efforts.)

But elements of worship working at cross-purposes with one another are not particularly helpful in proclamation. The inconsistent and maybe even contradictory message is not usually an effective message. And this truth holds no matter what liturgical season is at hand, not just in Advent.

It’s a lesson to learn and apply at all times and in all seasons. 

Dear Pastor: Advent hymns

Note: more illness, more interruptions, and some major ones coming along in the future. But for now, plugging away, and trying to find something else to think about...

I suppose, depending on the church you attend, that either it has been Christmas for a couple of weeks now, or it's not Christmas yet.

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, of course. Christmas is on December 25, most churches have some sort of service on Christmas Eve, and that's how the liturgical calendar frequently used in mainline churches draws it up. The four Sundays prior to Christmas Eve constitute the season of Advent, registered as a two-sided time of preparation; for the birth of the Christ child at Christmas, and for the coming return and reign of Christ for eternity.

It is possible, however, that the music congregations sing might not - not quite - reflect this particular liturgical orientation.

It's just a guess, mind you, but I'm going to wager that guess that some of you, even in seriously mainline churches, have started seeing some decidedly non-Advent hymns slip into worship by now. Dare I say, quite possibly, that maybe some of you sang Christmas carols this morning? Or maybe even last Sunday morning? Again, just a guess.

You're probably expecting some sort of argument (or screed, depending on your opinion) about why churches shouldn't jump the gun on Christmas carols. Or possibly you're making the argument in your head, rehearsing it for when you get the chance to spill it, that there simply aren't enough worthwhile Advent hymns to sing for four whole weeks, and "jumping the gun" is simply a necessity.

First of all, I have to say I can't buy the latter argument, at least not if your church has Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal (or its ecumenical counterpart). They're not all prime, but you can make it through four weeks of Advent on the Advent hymns it offers (especially if you have the wit to break up "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" and its seven verses over two or even three spots in your service, especially on the Sunday of Advent that falls on December 17, 23, or somewhere in between.

However, I'm going to go a different, I think, route with this question. Ultimately, the question of how much Advent hymnody to sing or how soon to jump on the Christmas carol bandwagon is probably best not addressed in isolation. Rather, it should be a part - one part - of a much broader question about how a church approaches the whole season.

A couple of weeks ago this article (over a year old) somehow popped up on my Facebook feed. One doesn't have to take the positions put forth by the visiting couple in the article to open up some fairly serious questions about how the church participates in the season that is currently underway. Indeed, the very identity of the season opens the question: is this the "Christmas season"? Or is it really Advent? And no matter how we answer the question verbally, what, for example, does our sanctuary say about how we answer the question? Even if we exhaust the full complement of Advent hymns in our hymnal, is their message getting lost amidst the wreaths and Christmas tree (even if it is decorated solely with "chrismons" - and what exactly are those supposed to be anyway?) and all the trappings that look like a pale imitation of the local shopping center? (As for the "Chrismon tree" business, am I the only person who gets the sinking suspicion that it was invented as a backdoor excuse to put a Christmas tree in the sanctuary?)

Do we, in short, send a mixed message in what our congregation (or especially a visitor) sees and sings? And what purpose is served in looking like a pale imitation of the mall? Is it possible that what we do with everything in our church during this season - not just the songs we sing, but what we show the world in our place of worship - might be worth reconsidering?

Is this the only visual evidence of Advent in your church?

Note: in the interest of full disclosure, I have recently written a batch of hymns for Advent, which can be found here, here, here, and here; an accompanying hymn for Christmas Eve is here.

Pope Francis (!!!) on choir and congregational singing

A combination of travel and illness has sidelined this blog for a while. How nice of Pope Francis, of all people, to hand me a little boost to get the blog back on its feet and at least starting to recover with a little warmup entry.

Apparently the Vatican welcomed an event with the unprepossing title "International Meeting of Choirs" over the weekend. In giving welcome to the participants in the event the Pope said many fairly boilerplate-type things about the importance of choirs and the power of music and all that. Naturally, one particular, not very boilerplate-type thing (at least in the context of a gathering of choirs) that the Pope said is what caught my attention.

The money quote:

“You are the musical animators of the whole congregation. Don’t take its place, depriving the people of God of the chance to sing with you and bear witness to the Church’s communal prayer.”

Not bad, particularly considering he's speaking to a whole bunch of choir singers. (Not to mention speaking from a tradition that has only been practicing congregational singing for about half a century.)

Of course, choirs can be allowed or even encouraged to outshine the song participation of the congregation. To the degree that significant resources, i.e. dollars, are invested into the program - music, possibly paid soloists, etc. - the temptation to put the choir front and center more often is going to be pretty natural, responding to a perceived pressure to "show a return on that investment." Still, the choir's principal job is to encourage the song of the congregation, and to the degree that it becomes a substitute for the congregation rather than a support to it, the choir becomes a problem.

And let's be clear that choirs are not the only potential such impediments. There is supreme irony that in churches that go the "contemporary" route, the very bands/worship leaders ostensibly hired to lead or encourage the congregation's song can (and do, often enough) end up drowning it out. Heavy reliance on soloists can do it, as can an overzeaous organist.

At any rate, I wouldn't have expected the Pope to be quite so direct on the subject, but hey, when it comes to the encouragement of congregational singing, it's nice to have such an ally, even from outside the mainline.

That headline though:

"Help community sing, don't replace its voice"

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?

Dear Pastor: Vocal disenfranchisement (after John L. Bell)

A few weeks ago, this blog put out a few reasons why folks in our congregations won't sing. They were strictly out of my own head, so to speak, derived from what level of experience I have (which does include a master's in church music as well as one in divinity) as both church musician and pastor; the "research" involved was strictly the "research" of experience.

Well, somebody agrees with me on at least one of those reasons, and the somebody is kind of a big deal.

John L. Bell, he of the Iona Community and Wild Goose Worship Group and lots of gatherings on singing in the church, offered up back in 2000 a book titled The Singing Thing: A case for congregational song. The book has been sitting on my shelf waiting to read for a really long time now, and with getting into this project a little more seriously it has finally forced itself into my reading activity. It's worth the read, though it is directed a little more generally, inclusive of musicians and congregational singers more so than pastors. The understanding still has value for you, dear pastor.

This volume, the first of two, is offered in two parts: "Why do we sing?" and "Why do some people not sing?" Number one of those reasons why some people don't sing: vocal disenfranchisement. The short version of that term is "somebody long ago told me I can't sing, so I believed them."

My way of putting it was a little less polished:

1) Some jerk told them at some point in their lives they couldn't sing. To be clear, there will be people who will, frankly, do more harm than good if they try to join the church choir (and I think I'm in the minority about church choirs not necessarily being an all-come affair), but that's not the same thing. Or if folks have somehow decided that if they don't sing like Placido Domingo (or people don't encourage them with such praise) then they won't sing at all, the sin is in their heart. I'll go ahead and say the harsh thing: to refuse to sing with the congregation is to refuse Christian community. Come at me, bro.But some have been actively hurt by small bitter people and will need a particular kind of encouragement.

But yeah, vocal disenfranchisement.

Bell offers the distressing statistic that in a random sampling, one in four people will say - nay, will insist - that they can't sing. There is, on some level, such a thing as being "tone deaf" - not able to discern a melody or to "match pitch" as it might be called in music. There are some people who hear a pitch, in other words, and cannot replicate that pitch with their own voices. There are some people, yes, but not one-fourth of the population.

For the most part these disenfranchsiements happen at an early age; some unthinking teacher or other authority figure instructs the child not to sing, or to be quieter, or something that imprints on the child the unshakable belief I cannot sing. Such imprints become cataclysmic memories, resonating through that person's life and frankly inhibiting any effort or opportunity to sing that might come along, as Bell describes it.

Bell also, from his perspective, describes this as a particularly British phenomenon. He's from Britain, of course, but hopefully his trips to the States since 2000 have revealed to him that this is an American phenomenon as well.

It isn't my place here to replicate Bell's chapter; go get the book and read it yourself. I do want to make the point that Bell summarizes the remedy for this as "renaming and decision-making"; the non-singer, the supposedly tone-deaf member in the congregation needs to be renamed as a person with a voice desperately waiting to be used in songs of praise to God, and that singer (with the combination of encouragement and expectation from the church) has to make the decision not to be limited by that nasty voice from the past. Who's right, that nasty teacher or the God who instructs to sing?

Obviously it's not as easy as Bell makes it sound (and the chapter does make clear that there's a lot of work involved), but it is doable. I am going to differ with Bell, though, in one particular.

For Bell, this is the work of the church musician. On the most basic level this is true. The church musicians are the ones who have the technical capacity to bring some level of musical example and encouragement and instruction to make it possible for the self-claimed non-singer to cast off that old curse.

However, I'm going to say that the one who sets the tone for this to work, dear pastor, is you.

First of all, you're singing yourself, right? This is the most basic way to set the tone in your congregation: no matter how creaky, no matter how unsteady, when the congregation sings, you're singing.

Secondly, you're the one who impresses upon your church musicians the imperative that part of their work is to encourage the song of all the congregation, and directs that even the non-singers are to be included in that. It's important that you don't get caught in the "I'm not a musician so I can't really instruct the musicians" trap that is too easy for pastors to fall into, as inviting and comforting a trap as that might be. No. It's a call for all the people to sing, and being a pastor to all the people includes opening up the opportunity for all the people to follow God's imperative to sing. (Imperative? What else do you call the statement "Sing to God"? It's right there in the grammar and syntax.)

So, yeah, you have a role to play in liberating the non-singers from their shackles. Don't shy away from it.

Credit: http://www.instagram.com/noelitoflow

Even this attitude would be an improvement. 

Is this you? Come on down to Grace Presbyterian Church and sing with our congregation!

Dear Pastor: Sing with understanding? Do people really want to?

So a few weeks ago now, before a variety of vacations and professional development things and whatnot, this blog put forth an entry that was both tribute to a long-ago professor and a challenge to you, dear pastor, to put forth the effort to give serious theological consideration to the hymns your congregation sings - at least as serious, say, as you give to your sermon or the service prayers or other parts of the service you choose.

Here is where I admit that all of this thought and advising I am presuming myself qualified to give isn't necessarily a slam dunk. What are the chances that, if you go through this effort and invest the time and energy into some basic grasp of hymns for use in worship, choosing with care and seeking to have those hymns working in concert (ha) with prayers and scripture and such, ... what are the chances that anybody will care, or even notice?

Let's be honest, friend pastor: there are going to be people in your congregation whose sole interest in the music in a service - not just the hymns, but anything the choir or soloist does or organist or pianist or band plays - is whether or not it is "pretty." Now I'm not using that word for its literal meaning, although in many cases that will apply - "that was so pretty (or beautiful)..." becomes the end-all and be-all of that member's reaction to or reflection of the music. The choir's anthem might be "beautiful" or "inspiring" or (depending on the style) "fun" or "catchy" or whatever; the soloist's effort becomes "inspiring" or "thrilling" or "powerful"; the organ prelude is "majestic" or "awe-inspiring" or what have you; the band "totally rocked, dude" - you get the idea. Whatever medium or style is being used, there is some aesthetic pinnacle that might be acknowledged for the musical effort that ends up blotting out any kind of more theologically informed reflection or result of that musical contribution.

Blame it on music, or more precisely blame it on the way humans are taught to respond to music. Note I'm not making a distinction between musician and non-musician here. Popular music fans are encouraged to respond emotionally to the music they hear, for sure; classical music patrons are fed all sorts of mumbo-jumbo about The Great Masters and the Power of Music; jazz followers have their heroes and titans. Those who are trained in performance or theory or education add their professional expertise to the mix - technical proficiency or harmonic complexity or what have you - but whatever the case may be, deliberate theological consideration can't be assumed, and the professionals may in fact be more difficult to encourage than the untrained folks in the pews. If you're hiring a band, they may have decided the songs to play Sunday and, well, it's your job to work around them; the hired choir soloists from the local university are likely trying to slip their lesson repertoire in without actually having to think about whether it "fits." (I may be exaggerating a little, but I have seen - from a distance, thankfully - examples of both.)

I cannot offer you a "magic bullet" to make your congregation or choir or singers or band care about the songs they sing in more than aesthetic way. It is admittedly not a concern everybody shares. Writing from the Presbyterian Church (USA) perspective in which I am situated, having embraced the challenge of trying to develop a distinctly "mainline" approach to the question that takes the mind and its engagement in worship seriously, I have to acknowledge that not everybody will care. And some will never care.

But some will.

Someone will notice. It might take a while, but somebody will express surprise at the realization that "everything really went together this morning," or maybe something like "I don't think I ever really got what that hymn was saying, but hearing it after that sermon/prayer/communion it suddenly made sense," or some other reaction.

You've probably seen the meme below, about how we don't really know which sermons are going to "work" and which ones are not; the same really does apply to pretty much everything we put into the service, including the hymns we choose to support the sermon and scripture. We don't know, but we do it anyway, and sometimes it lands with one person, or maybe two or four or ten, and once they've had that experience once maybe (just maybe) they become more open or sensitive to the other things going on in the service in the future.

You teach people how to sing with understanding by presenting the service in such a way that understanding happens. You sweat it out and pray over it and listen for that ever-elusive guidance of the Spirit and, when Sunday comes, you put it out there and it's in the Spirit's hands, so to speak. But it does matter, and it does change how people experience worship. It helps the congregation and it helps you. And maybe you both grow a little.

Sing with understanding, and give your people the chance to do so. If nothing else, it's basic good stewardship of the hour of worship.

Credit as noted. It applies to choosing hymns too.

Comment: Frankensteined hymns

First of all, I don't normally do Christianity Today. And I certainly don't like to take any part in giving John Piper any more publicity, even the miniscule amount of publicity I can offer. But this requires comment.

The article linked here posits that Piper has, among whatever virtues he may have, some inclination for hymn writing. For an event for women sponsored by The Gospel Coalition (another thing I'm not keen to publicize), Piper was apparently saddled with the hymn "Great is thy faithfulness" to follow his sermon. Apparently the hymn was too Wesleyan for the über-reformed Calvinist Piper, so he decided to add a couple of verses of his own to the hymn. After all, nobody tells John Piper what to do. (You can see the added verses in the article link.)

(Personal note: that hymn was sung at my mother's funeral, primarily because as the one who had just started a church music degree at the time I was naturally asked what her favorite hymn was, and that was the one that came into my head. So now that hymn always catches my attention.)

Not surprisingly, I guess, there was a certain amount of kerfuffle over Piper seeking to bend the old hymn's theology towards his own, or something like that. You can, if you choose, finish that article for a batch of comments from varied experts of one sort or another: to me the most useful are those of Constance Cherry, of Indiana Wesleyan University. Piper's emendations don't really pass muster with Cherry's list, particularly #4 -- no one would ever think that Thomas O. Chisolm would have ever written such a thing on a poetic basis alone. For one thing, where Chisolm's text is more God-directed, Piper's is individualistic -- the pronoun "I" suddenly leaps to greater prominence than in any of Chisolm's verses (although it does appear in the refrain). The disconnect is jarring stylistically, before any theological questions even come up.

There are a lot of questions to be asked here; why would any speaker be handled a hymn to follow their sermon without any input? Why could not Piper just ask for another hymn or even write something fully new, if he's that good?

What doesn't need to be fussed over too much is the supposed unprecedented quality of such a move. It's not new. Hymns have been worked over by poetic Dr. Frankensteins before for theological and other reasons. It should be noted, though, that it's impossible for any such alteration, emendation, or augmentation of a hymn not to have theological results, and even seemingly non-theological changes to hymns are usually theological if you dig deep enough. For example, editing of hymn texts to cut gender-exclusive language for God or for humanity absolutely derive from a theological conviction: namely, that women and men are created equal in God's image, called equally by a God who  we cannot confine to maleness without courting heresy. Piper himself would utterly reject such a change, but clearly isn't above such manipulation of hymn texts for theological purity.

But my main reaction, though, is that this has happened before, apparently without complaint, and to hymns far more widely popular than "Great is thy faithfulness." Indeed, possibly the most popular hymn out there for us western Christian types is a Frankenstein's hymn.

Here is the text as written by the original author:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come.
'Tis grace has brought me save thus far, and grace will lead me home. 

The Lord has promised good to me; his word my hope secures. 
He will my shield and portion be as long as life endures. 

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the vail, a life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call'd me here below, will be forever mine.


(Hat tip to Carl Daw for including those last two stanzas in the entry for the hymn in Glory to God: A Companion.)

Mostly familiar, yes? John Newton does a pretty neat trick in this text, speaking for three verses of God's past action towards us, then pivoting at the end of the third verse and looking forward to God's future provision for us for the three final stanzas (with a quick look back in the last half of the final stanza. It's pretty effective hymn writing, and remains consistently focused on God's grace to us in providing for us both in the past and in the future.

We don't get that, of course, with the emendation visited upon the hymn in our modern hymnals. I'm guessing modern hymn singers would get a bit uneasy at that final stanza's thoughts on the earth disssolving and the sun going out, not to mention the mortality of stanza five. Still, our discomfort deprives us of Newton's full message, and leaves stanza four seeming a bit abrupt and out of place for some. There is a loss here. It probably isn't enough to restore those final two stanzas, but there is a loss.

Oh, and there's that other stanza.

When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun,
we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we'd first begun.

John Newton had nothing to do with that stanza. It first appeared in a collection called A Collection of Sacred Ballads, published in Richmond in 1790 (Newton's was first published in London eleven years before). In that collection it was the last of nine stanzas of the hymn "Jerusalem, my happy home" (or at least one version thereof). When you work your way through the nine stanzas, it actually makes sense there. It fits thematically, it fits stylistically, it just fits.

Somehow, across the nineteenth century, that stanza got detached from its original hymnic home and "floated" across texts, eventually attaching itself to "Amazing grace." It was not actually published with that hymn until 1910, but it had apparently become a common alteration to the hymn well before. It is now, of course, inseparable from the hymn, no matter how wildly different in poetic thrust or theological focus it is. I mean, who is "we"? Newton's verses have all been "me." Where is "there" based on the context of Newton's hymn as it is presented (without his last two original verses, remember)? How did we suddenly spend ten thousand years "there"?  It's a stanza about the beauties of the Holy City, not about God's provision for us at all. And yet there it is stuck. It's as if Newton's original hymn was really rejected, a la Piper's disdain for "Great is thy faithfulness," and wrenched into a thing that promises us pie in the sky bye and bye instead of quietly rejoicing in God's, well, grace to us?

So, yes, "Amazing grace" is a Frankenstein's hymn, just without any one individual to whom the alteration can be attributed. Imagine if you will the mob, rather than seeking to destroy Frankenstein's monster, actually adding an arm to him. As long as "Amazing grace" remains in the general repertory of the church, complaints against modern "frankensteining" of traditional hymns, no matter how ethically sound, are going to come off as a little weak, to say the least.

Obviously even Newton's fourth stanza didn't always survive...

Dear Pastor: Why won't they sing?

Time tonight for a few brief thoughts, dear pastor, on one thing that will ultimately vex you to some degree should you start taking this whole congregational singing business seriously. No matter how much encouraging you do, no matter how much support you provide with choir and instruments and helpful guidance, no matter what kind of congregational song you practice, there will be people in your congregation who will not sing.

Why is this?

When singing is about as natural an activity as there is, something that starts happening virtually in infancy, why do so many people stop themselves singing?

A few off-the-cuff thoughts:

1) Some jerk told them at some point in their lives they couldn't sing. To be clear, there will be people who will, frankly, do more harm than good if they try to join the church choir (and I think I'm in the minority about church choirs not necessarily being an all-come affair), but that's not the same thing. Or if folks have somehow decided that if they don't sing like Placido Domingo (or people don't encourage them with such praise) then they won't sing at all, the sin is in their heart. I'll go ahead and say the harsh thing: to refuse to sing with the congregation is to refuse Christian community. Come at me, bro.
But some have been actively hurt by small bitter people and will need a particular kind of encouragement.

2) They aren't used to singing. Let's face it: how many places in society (aside from church) is singing regularly practiced? There are people for whom their only regular experience at group singing is the seventh-inning stretch at a baseball game. (They probably aren't singing the national anthem if it's being "led" by some soloist, but that's another point.) Or if they're a soccer partisan maybe they join in on their club's preferred chants. And that's about it.

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.

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.

5) MEN DON'T SING. Easily the most toxic position out there, and goes with all sorts of other toxic things going on with men in the church.

6) Staying above the fray. Some folks are more inclined to be observers at church than participants. Singing, in that mindset, is too much involvement. Best to remain detached and not do anything that might make me start enjoying this, or - even worse - getting something out of it, or - horrors! - being moved. Worst of all, somebody might invite them to join the choir...

No one of these will explain all the non-singers in your congregation. Some of them may not be present, but I'm willing to bet more than one or a few of them will.

I wouldn't expect this to be a comprehensive list. What reasons for not singing the hymns, or barriers to singing with the congregation, have you experienced? I'd like to hear from you.

...to which some say, "no thanks, I'll pass"...

Dear Pastor: Musical borrowing, cultural appropriation, and "borrowed" song

Earlier this year in one of the "wedding day" series of posts on what the church should sing, I put forth this post on singing "something borrowed." You may recall that post advocating for singing at least some of the song of the global church, broadening the repertoire of our congregations beyond the comfortable "western" stuff we know and taking in music from the continents of South America, Africa, and Asia in particular. (I am far from a significant voice advocating for this: far more notable figures in the church such as C. Michael Hawn, Nathan Corbitt, and even John L. Bell can be counted among those who in one way or another speak to the power and importance of global song in the Western church.)

Such "borrowing," it should be noted, is not without its potential pitfalls. If your principal church musician has a fairly significant academic background (and likes to scare you), or if you have a few professors among your congregation, you might get introduced to the phrase "cultural appropriation," if you didn't run across it yourself during your own education. It's not nothing, and a church can be as guilty as any other institution or group of it, but the simple congregational singing of songs from non-US cultures should not fall into the category of cultural appropriation. Let's talk about why, dear pastor.

A full treatment of cultural appropriation would overwhelm this blog, so we shall try to be brief about it. In short, cultural appropriation involves the lifting of images, creative or artistic works or forms in which such works are produced, religious imagery, folklore, or other creations of a culture without permission or at least acknowledgment. The appropriation factor also often involves a situation in which the culture being appropriated is a minority culture and quite likely one which has experienced dominaiton, exploitation, or abuse in history at the hands of the culture doing the appropriating. (This article offers a fuller exploration of the topic.)

One thing that has to be acknowledged is the degree to which such appropriation does happen in the realm of music. In the United States, such appropriation has long histories in popular music, particularly as early rock'n'roll artists and/or their producers engaged in wholesale grabbing of blues and R&B songs already recorded by black artists, repackaged them with white artists singing, and reaped the profits with no acknowledgment or recompense to the original artists. When Elvis Presley scored a hit with "Hound Dog," there probably weren't a whole lot of listeners who were aware of Big Mama Thornton's earlier, earthier version of the song, and Presley's people didn't much concern themselves with that. 

Not all popular music encounters quite fell into such appropriation. Eric Clapton's wanderings into the blues were generally careful (after a time) to acknowledge masters such as Robert Johnson, the Rolling Stones did generally seek to deflect some attention onto Muddy Waters, and Paul Simon did a reasonable job of putting his South African collaborators in the spotlight to some degree on the Graceland album (not necessarily in the video to the biggest hit from that album, unless Chevy Chase has some South African background I don't know about). In other cases (some recent Miley Cyrus videos come to mind, as well as a recent Coldplay/Beyoncé video heavily borrowing dance and imagery of India), the spectre of appropriation is less successfully dispelled.

The more slang term "cultural tourism" might be useful here. If the music "dabbles" in the culture without any particular involvement or deeper acknowledgment, without the voice of that culture being heard and recognized, there's a decent chance appropriation is happening. In that last video, India (and a fairly stereotyped India at that) is basically little more than a backdrop for a fairly generic (albeit catchy) Coldplay song and a costume department for Beyoncé; the music itself offers no acknowledgment whatsoever.

In the case of the church and its song, if we do it right, these issues don't quite come into play the same way. This does, however, require the church to be diligent about the how and why of singing the song of the whole church. 

Maybe the most significant part is acknowledging these Christians as exactly that: Christians. Not merely objects of mission or "exotic" elements for our fascination, but Christians no less (or no more, although sometimes it's hard not to wonder) than us. It involves regarding Tokuo Yamaguchi, the author of the always-intriguing hymn "Here, O Lord, your servants gather" (Glory to God #311), as a contributor to the church's song in the same way as, say, John Wesley (whose journals Yamaguchi translated into Japanese), if not necessarily as prolific a contributor as John's brother Charles. It means submitting Yamaguchi's hymns to the same theological scrutiny as any other hymn (stands up fine in my opinion, your mileage may vary), and taking the accompanying tune (an appealing use of Japanese gagaku mode by Isao Koizumi made for this text) as seriously and as joyfully as any other we sing. (I do recommend it, for what that's worth.) (Of course, gagaku mode actually originated in China, so there's that.)

That hymn and its tune also lead to another point about global song: very little of it has not already been affected by interaction with the West. While that tune does seem to be reasonably close to gagaku mode (as far as I can tell, and I'm far from any kind of expert), its accompaniment is quite Westernized. Most tunes that come from these traditions are going to have even more Westernish tint to them. This should be no shock in light of history; the West (and the church) was involved in South America for centuries, and parts of Asia and Africa as well. Whether through benign carelessness or more insidious intent, as noted in the earlier blog entry, the "primitive" musics of those peoples weren't going to be heard by those missionaries as anything other than something needing to be suppressed. Western hymns were imported wholesale (translated, possibly, if the missionaries were feeling generous) and given privileged status. The development of a somewhat more indigenous music for singing in church was too often a late twentieth-century phenomenon, by which time much of the musical life (not just missionary music) of those peoples had been highly altered by contact with Western music and musical styles. We're very seldom, if ever, getting any "pure" Japanese or Brazilian or Congolese tunes in our hymnals. So, in a sense, our fingerprints are already all over the music as it arrives into our hymnals and collections.

Furthermore, if you're working with a hymnal of some sort, copyright law provides at least some protection for those creating the songs that come to those hymnals. You will see somewhere on the page an acknowledgment of the source of the tune and text when those are known. Hymnal compilers have had to work out some form of compensation and permission for the use of these texts and tunes (if they're under copyright, of course). This isn't like Elvis lifting "Hound Dog" from Big Mama. (I assume the same is true for non-hymnal sources that might import music, but don't quote me on that.)

Finally, the very point of singing global song in the church is to hear the voices of those peoples, often with histories of oppression, who are our sisters and brothers in Christ; to hear - and more, to experience as much as possible - how images that might seem odd or different (or "foreign") to us nonetheless point us to the one true God, the one Savior, the one Spirit. If that's not part of your reasoning you're doing it wrong. 

Probably more to come on this subject, since it doesn't submit to easy explanation. 

John Bell does do a bit of borrowing in his work...

Dear Pastor: Hymns of human composure

Note: Between travel, some sickness, and the need for some time to step back and regather and reorganize, it's been a few weeks. Hopefully that's over with.

One of the great challenges in the history of singing by the people of God, in a way not confined to professionals or choirs or other select (typically male) voices, is the particular challenge of what was permissible to sing. It ended up depending on which part of the Reformation you found yourself living in.

Martin Luther was a pretty nasty person in some ways; his bitter animus against Judaism can't be ignored or brushed off as his being "a person of his time," having done too much damage by giving aid and comfort to antisemitic hatemongers for literally centuries now (and yes, the likes of Hitler would be included in that). For the subject at hand here, on the other hand, it can't be avoided that Luther was a major force for good in opening up the song of the church to all the people of the church. The creation of hymns as a song for use in the service of worship first flourished in the churches that followed after the Lutheran Reformation tradition. Indeed, Luther himself did contribute (wittingly or not) one of the major contributions to the early corpus of the chorale, the term applied to congregational songs in that early Lutheran practice.

On the other hand, Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, was less of an encourager of music, although some scholars will contend that he was not the virulent opponent of music in the church that history has made him out to be. He was perfectly o.k. with busting up church organs, however, so he can't be a real good guy.

As is usually the case in these things, John Calvin ends up somewhere in the middle. He wasn't too much of a musician himself, but on a human basis (not unlike Augustine) he was fond enough of music to be suspicious of it. His complicated and evolving attitude about music was covered in a previous blog entry; for the moment the idea of interest is that churches of Calvinist background did not sing the kind of texts we would call "hymns," as in texts not from scripture. Texts from the Psalms were the primary stuff of singing, with a few other biblical texts, or canticles, thrown in as well. Mostly psalms, though.

This restriction doesn't endure forever. It is not too many years before churches under the Reformed tradition are starting to expand their repertoire to include what was called in the language of the time "hymns of human composure." The way was somewhat smoothed by the work of Isaac Watts and others, who wrote translations and paraphrases of psalm texts that were "Christianized," or filled out with references to the Messiah as Christians understood the term; where Christian reading and interpretation concluded that a psalm was referring to Christ, Watts went ahead and made the reference explicit.

Even those who were eager for such hymn texts could recognize that Watts was doing something different, though, and that phrase "hymns of human composure" gets tossed around by old-guard types as something that Christians should not be singing in worship.

Now I'm hoping you're seeing several reasons that this particular phrase - "hymns of human composure" - sounds a little strange or even downright weird as a reason to forbid congregational singing. For one, even if the hymns aren't of "human composure," at least one other thing in the service is going to be so humanly composed: your sermon. I mean, I know you're relying upon the Holy Spirit in your exegesis and study and preparation and writing and all that, but ultimately you're still the one who has to put it all together.

Another point of "wait, what?"-ness about this phrase is that, yes, the psalms themselves are of "human composure." Now here you get into potential conflicts about the interpretation of scripture and indeed the very nature of the writing down of scripture, but hopefully the handful of folks who actually read this blog aren't shocked by the idea that human beings actually wrote down the poetic texts that were collected into the book of the Bible we call Psalms. David may have created some of them (probably had a servant or someone else write them down, though); a Temple figure named Asaph appears to have written some; and there are a lot of them whose authorship is simply unknown. But people wrote the psalms in Psalms. So, to put it bluntly, psalms are "hymns of human composure."

Finally, exactly why is a "hymn of human composure" bad?

Hymns can do many things. A hymn of praise offers, well, praise to God. This is, of course, something we are instructed to do in scripture - especially a lot of those psalms that begin or end with the point-blank exhortation "Praise the Lord!" A psalm that teaches falls right in line with those oft-quoted instructions from Colossians 3:16 to "teach and admonish one another." The making and singing of hymns becomes an act of obedience to God, fulfilling not only what God calls us to do but what we need to do, what we must do because of the Spirit moving and leading within us, placing within us not merely the call but the urgent desire to worship God. In other words, inspiring us - even though we don't live in the era of the Psalms. Yes, it's true: divine inspiration didn't stop at the closing of the biblical canon, and that hymn has as at least as much claim to divine inspiration as your sermon.

Hymns of human composure? They're the best kind.

David was human, you know (sometimes painfully so).

Another aside: What we want music to be

           One of the more notorious events, supposedly, in the history of music as usually taught in such classes was the “riot” that happened at the Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps) in 1911. Accounts of said riot range from angry shouted demonstrations interrupting the performance to incidents of violence in the audience to, in the most extreme cases, reports (or rumors) of people stripping naked and running randomly around the performance hall. 

Note the word “supposedly.”

Musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason writes the blog “Not Another Music History Cliché!”, devoted to rooting out and exposing bad writing and bad musicology (and frequently both at once). A recent entry tackled the whole “Rite riot” story with the aid of research by another musicologist, Tamara Levitz, pointing out that no such thing happened; at most a few people in upper balconies might have shouted at each other. (I confess with some horror that the “riot” probably came up in my old lectures, mostly because it came up in the dadgum textbook.)

In short order: it didn’t happen; references to a “riot” take a couple of years to start appearing, instead of instantly; it made for a good story, so it spread quickly; but no, it didn’t happen.

For our purposes the most interesting part of this blog entry is the final part: “why does the myth of the riot persist?” There are, of course, multiple reasons, including the above-noted “good story” point. Also noted is the phenomenon that we moderns with our good sense and taste enjoy having it over on those stupid dolts who didn’t appreciate Stravinsky’s genius at the premiere (when of course the vast, vast majority of us would have been as puzzled as most everybody else at the premiere); and perhaps the most salient or at least interesting point: it tells us a story about what we want Great Art to do. Ordinary, sedate, refined ballet-goers were driven to madness by Stravinsky’s rough, “primitive” (the word used most at the time), rhythmically dynamic music (note we are speaking of the music, not Nijinsky’s choreography). Great Art moves us, makes us do things we wouldn’t otherwise do (so the story goes); that’s what makes it Great Art. Or something like that.

Hopefully you can guess by now why this is worth thinking about in this blog, devoted as it is these days to the subject of congregational singing – which, as inspiring and moving and enlightening as it can be, is really not anyone’s idea of Great Art. That’s not the point of congregational singing. The primary role of congregational song is, in effect, communication – conveying our praise to God, God’s blessing or instruction or comfort to us, our joint instruction to one another about being the church. Colossians 3:16 pairs the instruction to “sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God” with the instruction to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” and to “teach and admonish one another in all wisdom,” suggesting a trio of instructive practices.

And yet we want the music to do more. We want the music itself to overwhelm us, to drive us into spiritual ecstasy. You see it in the contemporary service, the woman “lifting up holy hands,” practically begging to be driven to, who knows, speak in tongues or something Spirit-like. Or the song leader in the big traditional evangelical or revivalistic worship service, gyrating and sweating, urging the congregation to greater and more emotional fervor of song.

We want the music to do the work of the Holy Spirit. And as this blog has already noted, music is not the Holy Spirit. The Spirit may choose to move through it, but is not required to do so. And all our sweating and straining and lifting of hands avails us nothing. 

We want the music, also, to do our work. We want it to be a shortcut through the hard work of prayer, meditation, and study, the things that truly do prepare us to be moved by the Holy Spirit. Music isn’t a shortcut to that preparation. We still need to pray, and meditate, and study. Our congregational song can be a part of all of those things, but it is not a substitute for them.

So sing. Definitely sing.

But study and teach and pray and meditate too. Music will not do that work for you.

Artist's rendering of what didn't happen at the Rite premiere...