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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We want it to be controlled.

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

We want it to be safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Pastor: Sing with understanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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