What am I listening to?

 The title question popped up on Facebook a couple of days ago (I think?), from a colleague/friend asking what music others were listening to right now. I did not answer at the moment, being a bit busy and distracted (my default state these days). When I had a moment to stop and check myself I didn't answer either. I still haven't, mostly because when I finally put my finger on the music that was most occupying my ears and my mind right now, neither of them seemed to be a "jam," and the question did ask what was one's "current jam." Making a currant jelly joke seemed a reach, so I left it.

In fact there are two things that have been lodging themselves on my sonic devices in particular - one which has been occupying my mind for quite a while, and the other coming to the fore more recently, apparently tied to the advent of the Advent/Christmas cycle now upon the church. 

When last I darkened the door of this blog I confessed to an ongoing obsession with the late piano sonatas of Franz Schubert. At that time his penultimate sonata, no. 20, was foremost in my ear and mind. Since then my listening has broadened...all the way to his last sonata, no. 21. In particular the second movement has taken hold. (Fair warning: this movement itself is about ten minutes long, although obviously I consider such minutes to be well spent.)

You will note that this movement ...  is ... slow. Now this is not itself so odd; your average Classic/Romantic era piano sonata has a slow movement. What's odd here is that in this particular case, the first movement of Schubert's sonata is also rather slow, and two slow movements back-to-back is less typical.

Also, this movement is not only slow, it is quite spare, for lack of a better word. Aside from the slightly faster and somewhat fuller middle section, this movement is joltingly spacious in its texture. Rather than being spun out in a line (a not-atypical way to talk about musical melodies or motives), these notes and figures seem almost suspended in empty space. Laden with the burden of pandemic time, it almost sounds as if the notes are socially distanced.

Even when things seem to get busier, the musical activity often consists of repeated notes or figures, which manages to sound busy without necessarily sounding full, at least as Schubert deploys them. And even then, after what passes for great agitation in this movement, the music ultimately returns to the arrestingly spare sonic space of the first section, with slight tweaks of harmony and rhythm,  the emptiness of notes and motifs hanging from gently swaying mobiles in a darkened room. It is not the sound of silence - that is Simon & Garfunkel's territory - but perhaps it is the sound of quiet - quiet in the way Frederick Buechner describes a room where people are not speaking; the room is darkened, perhaps, but not empty. 

I hesitate to guess why this movement has latched on to me of late. Maybe in the deafening emptiness of pandemic-tide the genuine quiet of the movement provides sanctuary. Maybe I'm just really geeked by Mitsuko Uchida's interpretation of the sonata. Maybe it's just the pleasure of ten minutes that invite me not to be overwhelmed or ragged or confronted with the endless rounds of I don't know how to do this that constitute so many of my days in this time. Or maybe it simply invites me in the direction of mystery, and some part of me that is normally shouted down and drowned out sneaks into my consciousness through it.

The second, more recent, more seasonal, and shorter fascination of late is a more modern composition, by an American named Daniel Pinkham. It is the second movement of his Christmas Cantata, a setting of the ancient text "O magnum mysterium." You might notice some similarities to the sonata movement among the obvious differences. 

I have had the intense pleasure of singing this work a couple of times. "Spare" and "spacious" are fitting adjectives here also, and the hints of medievalism add to the effect. This is a movement to tax the breath control of the finest choral singers and brass players, and the sheer length of notes makes more space rather than filling it. 

The effect is, to be sure, deepened by those initial words of the text - O magnum mysterium, "o great mystery." The hearer is led directly into that contemplation, in this case the mystery of the Nativity and Incarnation. The mystery does not avoid the seemingly ludicrous; barn animals the first witnesses of the infant Messiah. There is a thickening of the music as the Blessed Virgin gets her shout-out, a build to a volume climax spiced with discordant intervals and the long sustained notes underneath it all interrupted for a fraction of a moment, and yet at the last it all collapses in slow motion back into the space, the quiet, repeated motifs from the brass and organ strung together and fading away, to one last unresolving chord. 

It is a text for the Nativity, but musically it is all Advent - waiting, quiet, unbearable anticipation. It is much shorter than the Schubert sonata movement, but it is still music that demands time. Somehow, I guess this is something I need in some way or other. 

Anyway, that's what I'm listening to.

Wordlessness, mystery, and Schubert piano sonatas

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort, … than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer. If we choose to seek the silence of the holy place, or to open ourselves to its seeking, I think there is no surer way than by keeping silent.

--Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. 

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

--Aldous Huxley, "The Rest is Silence"

People often complain that music is too ambiguous; that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech, but also with individual words. These, too,, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite...

If you ask me what I ws thinking of when I wrote it [one of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words"], I would say: Just the song as it stands. And if I happen to have had certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to different people. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling which is not expressed, however, by the same words.

--Felix Mendelssohn, letter to Marc-André Souchay, 1842

I am, dear reader, about to engage in what does seem an extraordinarly ironic effort: I (a pastor whose business involves a lot of words) am going to write a lot of words to encourage you to be...less bound by words.

This particular Lent has probably been the most challenging I've known in many, many years, as I suspect it might have been for some of you too. It was a little less than a year ago that I underwent that major surgery thing, one which is now inescapable in its consequences for my daily life even as I am expected to be more or less "back to normal" (a word I refuse to use for my life anymore; the closest I will come is "routine," in that sometimes my life might be close to having one). Things started off well enough, and I even got to enjoy some beach time and a spring training ballgame, and then of course the world went splat and we all had to go home. More and more we seem to live in a place that simply cannot take care of itself or be trusted to do the right thing for the great majority of people, and that's a wrenching place to be. 

Not shockingly, I turned to music. But it turned out that not just any music was going to work this time.

Normally this time of year I'd have been listening to all the Lenten music I've got - passions and other oratorios, Liszt's Via Crucis, MacMillan's Seven Last Words (and any other composers I could have gotten hold of), anything with a Lenten or especially Holy Week theme that I could load onto my computer (and then download onto a flash drive for driving listening, with my car no longer having a CD player). That project kept not happening, and then was scuttled for good. What ended up getting so recorded instead, for reasons I'm not even sure I fathomed at the time, was a whole bunch of music by Franz Schubert. Not the songs (or Lieder) for which he was most famous, but instrumental music - symphonies, violin sonatas, and especially piano music, including several piano sonatas.

The latter are, for the uninitiated, (usually) larger-scale works for the instrument, consisting of three or four movements most often. Neither Schubert nor the piano sonata as a genre was ever a particular subject of study for me during my academic years, so it's not as if it was a matter of returning to old favorites (as it is when I pull out the music of George Whitefield Chadwick, my dissertation subject). In fact, for a long time pretty much all I knew of those works was that a main melody from one of the late sonatas got appropriated and reworked into the main theme of the extremely average 90s sitcom Wings. Music scholarship pushed me into other musical directions, so that middling familiarity never germinated into anything in particular; it was classical radio programming and broadcasting that finally allowed me to hear the full sonata (Piano Sonata in A, D.959 - it deserves much better than that pop-culture affiliation). 

So, I listened to those piano sonatas. I listened on the way to and from Vero Beach some; I listened around town; and especially when we became homebound by Covid-19, I listened. It became, out of no particular identifiable impulse, my Lenten discipline. 

It took me a while to figure out why this happened. As the coronavirus situation disintegrated and epidemic was plowed over by pandemic, we were all inundated with instructions about what to do; washing hands and using hand sanitizer when washing had to wait (I finished off a small bottle of the stuff that I had had since I moved here), then the particular instructions for social distancing (keeping my distance from people in crowds is a thing I consider a specialty, so...), and finally the call for full-fledged isolation once the NBA broke down and major sports, theme parks and other entertainment edifices began to close. As church gatherings became prime opportunities for spreading the virus, the instructions continued, under the guise of "support" - how to put your service online, the various technologies available to do so (all hail the great god Zoom, at least until "Zoom-bombing" became a thing), and the various imperatives about what worship looks like in a time of isolation. Again, it took time for me to realize consciously what my subconscious evidently grasped very quickly: I needed a place to get away from the Hell (and I use that word most theologically) of words.

Frederick Buechner, quoted above about the need to shut off the chatter, was no word-hater, clearly - he has written a ton of them in his career, and has also had things to say about the power of words that themselves are among the most powerful words I know. Nonetheless I was forced to be reminded again by him that words are sometimes oppressors, and I needed a place to flee from them for a while. It is a strange thing to find myself in agreement with Aldous Huxley, but his appreciation of music (often snipped and turned into overly cute inspirational memes that would no doubt make Huxley gag) became my quest. Silence is impossible these days? Let the music drive out the noise. 

And, pace Mendelssohn, the music needed for the moment was music not bound by words. Not that Mendelssohn was devoid of song with words - he wrote plenty, not to mention two whole oratorios and other choral works, not to mention instrumental works with words attached, so to speak - his three main non-choral symphonies, after all, have descriptive titles: "Italian," "Scottish," and "Reformation," the latter of which quotes the melody of Luther's great Reformation hymn "A mighty fortress is our God," making it inseparable from words even further. No, what was needed here was that could only mean, as Mendelssohn put it in writing to his wife's cousin, "just the song as it stands." Not that there was no meaning at all - far from it - but the meaning was not going to be bound by words, not going to be reducible to words. 

Schubert's piano sonatas, it turns out, are pretty good vehicles for such un-worded listening. Unlike, say, certain Beethoven piano sonatas ("Moonlight," "Pathetique," "Appassionata"), most of Schubert's big works in the genre have no descriptive titles attached. In addition, they're quite "roomy" works. This does mean, among other things, that they're long, but it isn't length itself that makes for "roominess." Here further elucidation from Huxley helps. In the same essay as above he also writes: 

Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking.

(So no, I'm not really a Wagnerian.)

The Schubert sonatas (again, especially the late ones) are pocked with silences - frequently unexpected and unprepared, and all the more arresting for their surprise upon the listener. At the same time, the sonatas are also frequently "roomy" in their measured pace; tempos might be fast or slow, but no idea is cut short or deprived of its opportunity to be heard and received and reflected upon in a measured and fuller way than, say, even some of Huxley's favored Beethoven. For music that is present, music that allows the mind or soul to be invited instead of merely demanded, it works pretty well. It does not submit to our words, no, but allows us to be drawn along instead of pounding the soul into submission. For this moment, it was (dare I say literally?) a godsend.

As this progress continued, I began to wonder where this particular bit of ... reflection? meditation? contemplation? might fit into my increasingly desperate quest for spiritual preservation (I dare not be so optimistic as to hope for spiritual "growth" in all of this, just let me survive...). In trying to look around ... I wasn't encouraged. Let's be honest; virtually all of the modes of meditation or contemplation or reflection or what have you in the Christian tradition (where I live) are pretty word-based. As for Buechner's declaration above, true silence is pretty elusive in the Christian tradition. And when such silence is in fact desired or explored or achieved, the end result pretty much turns out to be ... words.

So I wonder: is it possible that music - wordless music - might be an aid towards a form of silence, at least? Is it possibly, pace Buechner, an aid in clearing away the verbal clutter that so often and easily overwhelms our minds or souls, that tells us our feelings or emotions or spiritual yearnings are not "real" unless we can put them into words? (Never mind the Spirit's interceding for us with "sighs too deep for words" in Romans 8:26...) Might that things that, after silence according to Huxley, best expresses the inexpressible be a means towards finding some space for silence in our harried spirits? Might "just the song as it stands" (or the piano sonata, or the symphony, or whatever we can find - I have to believe there are options outside the Euro classical tradition for such un-worded listening but I claim no expertise to say) be a means to work towards mystery?

To me, that's where this becomes a thing I'm still grappling with. We stink at mystery. We have frankly turned the word into a literary genre about following clues and solving puzzles to catch criminals, so to speak, and lost the concept of mystery - that which lives outside of us, that which does not submit to our glib explanations and easy conceptualizations, that which is larger than us (and boy, do we hate to admit anything is larger than us!) and not controllable by us.

I have realized, I guess, that I am woefully ill-equipped to deal with mystery, and (distant enough from my scholarly past, I guess) am looking at musical experience as maybe, possibly, a portal into at least some form of spiritual mystery (as opposed to mysticism, I think). We end up suffering, I fear, when we cannot cope with mystery and the unknowable (trying to grapple with the unknowable was damn near killing me for a stretch over the past few years), and at least for the moment this kind of listening is helping me in a different way than I have known before.

So that has been this Lent's discipline, so to speak. I don't think this is one I can immediately give up or walk away from. Maybe I can listen to something besides Schubert, though. But I have to hope there is hope, or refuge, or I don't know what in the simple yet maddeningly difficult act of listening to music, unfettered by words, not seeking to describe or understand or analyze or break down or anything but listening, experiencing, maybe even feeling. At any rate, I have to keep going, I think.

Yep, pretty sure this would make Huxley gag.

Hymnody held hostage!!! (or, the perils of popularity)

So an article came across my news feed sometime in the past week I suppose, on a subject I'd so much prefer to avoid talking about mostly because my body is still easily subject to nausea after that surgery five months ago today. Still, I gagged my way through enough of it that it did get me to thinking about one of the challenges of singing "something new" in worship, having to do with the sources of our "new" songs for worship.

As described in this strangely unthoughtful article, performers of great popularity in the realm of music known as...is it Christian contemporary music? Contemporary Christian music? I honestly have no idea, it's been decades since I paid attention. Anyway, whatever it's called, some CNN type somehow decided it would make a good article to wonder why such performers didn't have something to say, to their audiences or in their songs or whatever, about the current occupant of the White House and his, shall we say, controversial nature. Apparently the occasion of the Dove Awards, the Grammys of the Christian music world (I guess that's still what they say?), provoked the thought somehow.

As I've indicated, it's a strange article, not least because it somehow fails to consider the possibility that such performers don't criticize that person because they like and support that person. It does happen, particularly among Christians, and especially particularly among certain categories of Christians (though such support is pretty broad). The performers in question are pretty good at mouthing biblical-sounding platitudes sans context to justify their silence, so there is nothing particularly informative about the article in the end except that large-scale national media continues to have less-than-zero clue of how to report on religion.

Still, though, the article does, in a sideways fashion, set me to thinking about the very different business of planning and preparing music for congregations to sing. (Note: I am not particularly interested in parsing the relationship between that music genre and congregational singing at this point; my interest is particularly not in offering particular critiques of musical styles per se, except so far as the theological content songs of whatever style may or may not offer. So, no comment there. As for CCM, whichever order the C's go, it's not a genre I follow these days. I'm mostly listening to jazz.)

The essential thesis of the article seems to be that such performers avoid comment in their songs because they don't want to lose their audience. Apparently such audiences are regarded as pretty controlling and quick to take vengeance on those who stray from the "true faith," which I guess is defined as whatever they think? There is in that fear, though, a lesson for the mainline pastor whose challenge is to select and prepare hymns and songs that, like the scriptures themselves and the prayers we pray, encompass a full and representative range of the the human response to God.

Given that need, there is a clear and present danger in being trapped in an extreme reliance on one particular style or another of songs for the church to the degree that particular styles tend to associate exclusviely or nearly so with particular theological postures. And no, dear pastor, I'm not going to name names. The theological discernment is your job, just as it is with scripture and prayer and liturgy and confession.

That said, I'm not above being unable to make the leap to use particular hymns, until it becomes impossible to avoid doing so. It's pretty much impossible to avoid singing "Seek ye first" (one of my least favorite bits of religious song ever) when your sermon is on the very scripture passage quoted in the song. The one hymn I can think of that I simply cannot bring myself to choose at this point in whatever ministry I have is, in fact, in a musical style that I find at least kind of interesting.

I can't bring myself to use "For everyone born," Glory to God #769, in worship. Musically it is an interesting or at least distinctive song, with a slow and even subdued tune marked by sometimes challenging syncopations and off-beats, that gains a bit more energy and uplift at the refrain. The music might be challenging to get some congregations to sing, but I can't get around the fourth stanza. To put it bluntly, I can't ask an abuse victim to be at table with her/his abuser. Leaving aside any theological questions or arguments, as pastoral care goes it feels like (swear word alert!) shit. Maybe my mind will change in the future, but as of right now I can't use that hymn no matter how popular it is. (And no, I'm not really looking to get into any arguments on the subject.) I have thankfully never been a victim of abuse, and I don't even want to come close to presuming what victims of abuse should have to go through in worship.

On the other end of the spectrum, the desire to curry the congregation's favor does put you, dear pastor, at risk of a kind of theological imprisonment. Not all musical styles are necessarily locked into particular theological topics or modes, but some are, and if you can't stray from that style when the need for a lament or something else arises, you've got a problem (this one I have seen from experience, though thankfully I wasn't the one in charge).

Musical choices have consequences, and sometimes those aren't always clear or expected. My only recommendation to you, dear pastor, is to keep your theological-discernment hat on at all times, and never let it be knocked off by a gust of popularity. You will likely have plenty of opportunities to "play favorites" in your church, but those can't stand in the way of being able to sing a hard word when it is necessary to face painful realities or hard truths.

As much as you cannot avoid hard scriptures at times, you're going to need the hard songs to go with them.

Lament is just one possible hard choice one might need to make...

New music in the church, or "newmusic"?

OK, working on getting back on track here after, what, a month and a half?...

One of my many previous jobs in my life was as a classical radio announcer. After a year or two working the Saturday afternoon pre- and post-opera broadcast shift, I actually got to move into the weekday morning slot, at the point the principal live local broadcast at this particular public radio station attached to FSU, where I was doing my graduate work. It was actually a pretty good situation for me; It got me up early and thinking about music for three hours, after which I went home and wrote on my dissertation. In truth, if it had been possible to make a living doing that, whether there or elsewhere, my life might have taken a completely different path. I think I was pretty decent at it.

Beyond the straightforward playing of classical music (mostly from CDs at that time with some LPs), my job also included the occasional live on-air interview, mostly with local musicians but occasionally pre-recorded interviews with more national or even international figures (I think the conductor Robert Shaw, who regularly came to Tallahassee for performances with the local community chorus, and the violinist Gil Shaham was probably the most famous musician I interviewed).

One interview I remember at least for a particular moment was with one of the associate deans at FSU at the time, who also worked on the annual festival of new music at the school. Now for those who are not terribly familiar with the classical music world, it helps to know at this point that when it comes to a very large part of the classical music spectrum, the church can look like a radical avant-garde movement by comparison. For an awful lot of listeners and not a small number of performers, even with only three letters, "new" is a four-letter word. Playing particularly avant-garde works on the air simply didn't happen, because the powers that were didn't want to put up with the virulent and potentially violent blowback that would result.

The task in this case became to convince listeners that a new music concert didn't necessarily mean a barrage of atonal fright sounds. I remember floundering around for a bit before finally putting the question forward for the associate dean to answer: "OK, is this concert about new music or (air quotes only visible in the studio, dramatic vocal register change, words run together) newmusic?"

There can be similar reaction to the introduction of a new hymn or song in worship, at least in some cases. Here, though, the discussion is complicated by the division of labor in congregational singing. Remember, the technical meaning of the term "hymn" encompasses the text being sung, with the music to which it is being sung being identified as the "hymn tune." While songs in more contemporary genres of church music tend to be more fixedly associated in tune and text, hymns have the inherent possibility of being sung with more than one hymn tune. Admittedly no one is ever likely to set the tune NEW BRITAIN, the one most commonly assocaited with "Amazing grace," to any other text, it could be done. Many writers of new hymns take advantage of this by writing new hymns that can be sung with already-familiar tunes. Not being a composer by any means, I am among this number when I engage in hymn writing. It's not that I have any problem with a tunesmith creating a new melody for anything I write, but I can't do it myself and attaching a familiar tune makes the hymn more accessible more quickly.

At any rate, a good marriage of a new hymn to a familiar tune can ease a lot of the apprehension about singing something new. In a sense, the new text is eased into the minds and mouths of the congregation by the tune.

Still, the advancing of new tunes as well as new texts needs to be a part of a congregation's worshiping life as well. There is too much risk of stagnation without some infusion of new musical life. Furthermore, God did not quit inspiring composers after 1900. God gives creativity as a gift to many different kinds of artists, and those who choose to use that God-given creativity to compose new music for the church should not be met with indifference and point-blank rejection.

Furthermore, a church that can only repeat and parrot words (or tunes, for that matter) decades or centuries old is dying. There it is. Ancient truths speak in new words and sing in new tunes, presenting to every generation in words and music that arrest the attention and provoke the soul to new heights of praise and new depths of understanding. Cutting itself off from that is just a good way for the church to go stale and lifeless.

Make use of your instrumentalists, dear preacher, in first of all determining the singability of a new tune for your congregation, and of all your musicians in teaching the tune to the congregation. Give it time to be heard and let the congregation join in as ready, at least the first time a new song is introduced. These are fairly basic steps that help take away the fear of the new, or at least calm it just a little.

But singing something new - not everything, but something - is vital for the life, energy, imagination, and intelligence of the church. For goodness's sake, don't choke that off.

Mind you, in some styles new music is actually welcomed and craved...

Book Review: Holy Disunity

Stepping away from the music-themed stuff (which has obviously fallen off a bit...) to give a good word for a good book...


Williams, Layton E. Holy Disunity: How What Separates Us Can Save Us. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2019.

A desperately needed book for a contentious time.

Here is a book that dares to speak what is deeply uncomfortable for many to contemplate: unity – human-instigated and human-enforced unity – is not the end-all and be-all of the Christian faith. Not only does it make this needed claim, it also explores strategies and thoughts on how to deal with disunity by recognizing the forces and injustices that drive us apart from one another. 

The author makes the stakes clear quickly; just two pages into the introduction comes the throwdown statement: “…I believe that when we pursue earthly unity at all costs, it becomes for us an idol – a distraction from the greater unity that comes from God. And in fact, I think this sort of unity – which seems to value collective togetherness over genuine complex relationship – is unholy (emphasis mine) and is driving us farther and farther apart.”

With the stakes established, the author turns to those means by which disunity manifests itself – difference, doubt, argument, tension, separation, vulnerability, trouble, protest, hunger, limitations, failure, and uncertainty. While the chapters that address these points of division speak of “gift,” the author makes clear that these things themselves are not “gifts,” but provide the opportunity for relationship to be worked through and possibly even strengthened, although that isn’t always guaranteed. For example, chapter 7 (“The Gift of Trouble”) offers the caution that “in our rush to put distance between ourselves and what troubles us, we end up putting distance between ourselves and other people whose realities make us uncomfortable. By refusing to see the full scope of their story we also fail to fully see them” (111-112). Remembering this risk prompts us to listen with renewed sensitivity and compassion, opening the possibility for greater understanding and even reconciliation.

The author, an ordained Presbyterian minister, speaks from experience, and unflinchingly names those events and places in her own life that have made these lessons necessary. That experience, honestly recognized and reckoned, gives the book an authority and depth that might be possible for others who might seek to address this subject.

There is no such thing as a perfect book, nor is there a book with which you will agree with everything said (unless you write it yourself, and maybe not even then). This book, though, is undeniably necessary in a fractious time when division and strife is too readily met with demands for unity at the expense of things like justice and mercy, things that are mandates to anyone who would claim to be a follower of Christ. Read it. Get others to read it. Get your church folk to read it. Recognize those things that trouble you or provoke tension or uncertainty or doubt, and listen to those points of conflict, and learn how relationship might yet still bloom when unity is in doubt.

Worship is a concerto (grosso), not a symphony?

I don't know for sure how old it is, but it's been out there for a while: the metaphor of worship as drama. There is some logic to it: a pastor or worship leader (or is it God) might be the director, and each has a part to play, etc. Except that if worship is a drama, who is the audience? Of course the answer is "God," in which case we are all the "actors" and ... it gets confusing.

Of course, there are other ways to think about worship and help it make sense to all who participate, some of which are better than others. Perhaps the key might be to understand the particular ideas about worship being communicated.

When it comes to the music of worship, it can be a little tricky. The musical life of a congregation may operate on many different levels even in the course of one worship period. The congregation may sing (good Lord, one hopes the congregation sings!), there may be a choir or other leading vocal body that sings separately at times, and one or more instrumentalists are likely involved as well, possibly together (if more than one) or maybe each separately.

But it's more complicated than that, even. The congregation is likely to be accompanied by one or more of those instrumentalists, as is the choir. One instrumentalist, depending on the instrument, may even be accompanied by another. So there are a lot of different possible levels going on in what is meant to be a unified whole of worship.

And all of this is made a little trickier by the theological hope that, no matter what variety of musicians may be involved in a given service, the most fundamental musical act of worship is that of the singing congregation. This is not to say that there is never a service in which a choir or other ensemble takes the lead (church choirs gonna cantata, apparently, even in the mainline), but it is to say that such services are exceptions and not the rule.

And of course, there is more than music going on in any given service. A pastor or layperson may lead in prayers or spoken responses, and (surprise!) there's usually a sermon as well. Looking at a service in which musical acts are blended in with spoken (and maybe other?) acts, the texture gets fairly complicated to capture.

As a metaphor for all this, drama certainly has some positive attributes, but it has a few weaknesses as well. The cast of your average drama may be quite large, and yet the action might well be confined to a few characters. We could reach back to good ol' Greek drama and bring up the idea of the chorus that comments on the action, but that doesn't quite work; we want the congregation to be doing the work of worship, not merely observing or commenting upon it.

I wonder if the historical world of music (my world, in many ways 😎) might offer a closer, if not so well-known metaphor or two.

Perhaps the most obvious model that might come up is the symphony. It involves a large body of musicians playing together, obviously, and that makes a fairly decent comparison to a congregation (leaving aside the issue of how large or small your congregation is). At one point I thought that would be the metaphor, but now I'm not as convinced. As noted above, worship frequently includes what might be thought of as "solo" parts, to a degree that most symphonies do not. (For the musically learned and persnickety: yes, I do know that symphonies can in fact have solo parts, and very important ones at that, like this. Chill.) Symphonies can have solo parts, but those solo parts are not characteristic of the symphony, as a rule.

Also, there's the troublesome question of who exactly is the conductor in this scenario. The quick and easy answer might seem to be "God," but if God is the audience for this music, that doesn't work. I don't think the pastor works well as conductor either; one of the soloists, to be sure, and maybe even the orchestrator depending on how services get planned in your church, but I don't think that "conductor" really works as well as it might seem to describe the pastor's role. If nothing else, the pastor seems (not literally of course) to be one of the musicians, if one who has a particularly tricky and fairly long (but not too long!) solo to play.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure there's an equivalent to the conductor. The choir director may literally conduct the choir, but is unlikely to lead any other part of the service. A lay liturgist may seem to lead much of the service, but is also likely to fade from prominence at some point; that, too, seems more of a soloist role.

At this time my best-suggestion metaphor for the church at worship is the concerto.

The concerto is also an orchestral or larger-ensemble work, but one that specifically includes a soloist or soloists. What the soloist or soloists do can be pretty elaborate (although they aren't required to be), as can be the case in certain parts of worship (and no, I'm not going to accept any claim that just anybody can get up and preach, or at least can't get up and preach well). Not everyone is particularly well-suited to read scripture aloud or lead in liturgical responses, and while everybody can sing (no matter what some jerk told them when they were younger), not everybody should sing in the choir. This holds true in much the same way that not everybody should be involved in cooking when it's time for the congregational dinner, or not everybody is well-suited to tend to the nursery. Different gifts are expressed in different roles, and all are needed.

In fact, I'll go even more specific (if perhaps a bit more obscure) and suggest that worship can be decently compared to a specific type of concerto, one known as a concerto grosso. This particular genre is found mostly in the so-called Baroque Era of the western classical music tradition, and specifically makes space for two or more soloists. Furthermore, it doesn't necessarily require a conductor, as seen in this video; a soloist or keyboardist (if there is one) might give occasional cues for the ensemble, or the ensemble may simply be so much attuned to one another and to the musical score that a conductor is not necessary (really, when thinking about a congregation, that'll preach!). And while the soloists certainly play important roles, the concerto grosso doesn't work at all without all of the members of the orchestra executing their parts.

(An aside: you'll notice that the ensemble in that second video is not very large. Just making an observation...go ahead and draw a conclusion from that...)

No analogy is ever going to be perfect, and there are certainly flaws with this one. For one thing, lots of people have no idea what a concerto grosso is. (If you mention Bach's Brandenburg Concertos to them, that might help for some.) But there's something to it. There are many voices, many parts that are necessary for worship to be carried out with both theological integrity (no accidental heresy, please) and a certain level of performative skill (dirty word, "performative," I know, but still needed). Whatever individual or "solo" moments may take place, worship doesn't work unless every member of the congregation plays her or his part.

Let the concerto be played.

Singing and listening

It was around spring or summer of 1994 when, having left behind the pursuit of a career in church music, I ended up in…a church music job. Arriving at Florida State University for doctoral study in musicology, I could not immediately get the job on campus I wanted, and ended up falling back on my old experience to have even a pittance of income.

In this case the church was in a town so far south in south Georgia that it was almost in Florida, and thus not far from Tallahassee. The choir I was to direct consisted of about seven singers; singing even in three parts was a major challenge, and many Sunday “anthems” were sung in unison. The singers knew their limitations and coped with them without too much grief, and I was not under any particular pressure to perform miracles.

When looking for accessible songs during a period when one or two members would be away, I turned to some songs in the still-new-ish Presbyterian Hymnal (1990, hereafter PH90) that the congregation used. While not nearly as plentiful as in the denomination’s current hymnal, Glory to God, hymns of global origin were present in PH90 to a degree not previously seen in one of that denomination’s hymnals. It gave the choir something to sing that, in most cases, could be learned quickly; it counted as sacred song; it was new to them and to the congregation, and therefore offered the opportunity to introduce them for possible future congregational use; and it allowed me to feel like a teacher, which I was aiming to be at that point. 

A couple of those newly-introduced songs were introduced with no particular trouble or comment. It was time to introduce the Latin American representative in this series, the song “Lord, You Have Come to the Lakesore” (Tu has venido a la orilla), by Cesáreo Gabaráin, in an English translation by Gertrude Suppe, George Lockwood, and Raquel Achón, one of the several newly-introduced global songs in this particular hymnal and one quite different in style, I was pretty sure, than this congregation or choir had encountered yet.

After a couple of passes at the song, one of the ladies of the choir spoke up. Angular face, reduced version of standard Southern high hair, and something of a reputation as a church enforcer surrounded this woman, so I was prepared for what I had feared when I decided to run with this project. (What follows is my best attempt to recreate what she said; it has been around twenty-five years since then as of this writing, and I cannot claim my memory to be that precise, but it does capture the impact of her words.)

“I was shocked,” she said, “when we went through that second verse. I would never have imagined seeing the word ‘weapons’ in a hymnal, ever. I couldn’t imagine ever thinking of that idea (the phrase, given to the singer of the song, goes ‘in my boat there’s no money nor weapons’; it has been slightly modified in GtG) being something to sing about in a hymn.” Here it comes, I thought.

She did continue, but not as I feared. “But then I realized that of course I wouldn’t imagine such a thing. I’ve never really had to worry about that kind of violence in my life, not like has happened there (violence, particularly drug-related violence, in different countries in South and Central America had been a staple of the news for some years at that point). If I’d had to go through what people have had to go through there, that might very well have been on my mind even in my singing a song to Jesus. Maybe I’d want to say that my boat was a safe place for Jesus to be when I offered it to him.”

Well, that was unexpected, but she wasn’t through. “But then I thought that maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to assume that was something that only happened in other countries. There might be places in this country where violence is a part of life enough that it might be part of how somebody might respond to Jesus – not with a boat, I guess, but maybe wanting to welcome Jesus into their home and reassure that there were no guns there. I mean, even here there might be places in our little town where that might be a thing to think about.” (A couple of shooting deaths had in fact come across the headlines in this small town at that point.)

Finally she concluded, “It’s not something I would have thought about, but maybe I should. Maybe we all should. I guess this was a good song to sing.”

To this day, that remains the best experience I’ve ever had in trying to introduce a new song in any way to any part of a church.

This is what can happen when singing is joined to listening. It’s not guaranteed to happen by any means, but it can. Particularly for safe and privileged Christians in this country (most typically white Christians at that), the singing of global hymnody is about more that simply singing something new or checking off some presumed list of virtuous things to do in worship. It is about listening as much as it is about singing.

Many if not most folks in our congregations will not travel overseas. Of those who do, most of them will not travel in areas that might produce such a hymn. We simply don’t encounter many of the citizens of the world, particularly not the poorest or most oppressed, outside of the distorting glare of news headlines or political slander. We don’t know those experiences.

Singing one hymn won’t fix everything. Singing a bunch of global songs won’t fix everything. But if even one door is opened, even if one mind is challenged, even if one soul is opened to the realization that not all of the church experiences faith the way we do, and that it might behoove us to listen to the experiences, the fears, the hopes of our sisters and brothers in Christ, isn’t it worth it?

Isn’t it?

Singing can be listening, and singing and listening might just be a seed for understanding, or at least for wanting to understand. With its capacity for getting under our skin in a way that even the best sermons or lessons or studies can’t, maybe some of the songs we sing ought to offer this opportunity.

Sing, and listen.