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?