Posted on 12/01/2004 7:48:32 AM PST by sionnsar
[Please read the comment following, to get the context of this posting, before starting into this article. --sionnsar]
The Catholic church has been fighting a running battle with narcissism in worship ever since apostolic times. There has never been a shortage of people who want to take over public worship for their own purposes. In this battle–really a tug-of-war–two powerful forces struggle for supremacy. On the one side there is “me”: the personal dimension of religion. The faith of Christianity must involve the personal, private relationship of the individual ("me") to the personal Jesus, who will always listen to every prayer. On the other side of this tug-of-war is the job of faith. Christians come together to worship as a community. The Mass is a public, communal effort, in which individuals act and pray as a group. Tension between the private and public sectors is inevitable.
We can see this tension in two thousand years of Christian art for a liturgical setting. The painters of the Byzantine icon, for example, were ready to burst with emotional religious fervor and yet at every stage of artistic creation they pulled this zeal back; they held the reins tightly, as it were. They would not permit themselves the luxury of painting their own version of what they felt. Instead, they submitted to a canon of taste that belonged to something larger than themselves: the highest expectations of the community, the culture, or, if you wish, the tribe. The painters of the icon put their private, inner faith into the painted image but they did so according to strict conventions and traditional formulas; in this way they communicated to the beholder the message that the image went beyond the mere feelings of the artist and beyond the commonplace.
The church insisted on obedience to a great Unwritten Law which went something like this: “As a creative artist you may follow your own instincts but your art or music for the church must not clash with the liturgical function; it must take its place in the objective liturgical setting and not seem like an intrusion. Your creation must display a degree of quality and craftsmanship which will be agreeable to prince and peasant, male and female, young and old. Everyone who sees the artwork or hears the music must sense a group endeavor, a group prayer: maybe something performed by the assembly or by a choir acting in the name of the assembly, maybe a painting that seems to sum up the highest religious aspirations of a whole people. In the past the icon painters prayed and fasted as they struggled to put the holy images into the exacting forms prescribed by tradition. You must try to do something similar.”
The composers of … reformed folk music have created a large repertory of songs with mild harmonies, comforting words, and a sort of “easy listening” sound; it is all so very undisturbed and appealing, the musical equivalent of the warm bubblebath. The whole enterprise has been resoundingly successful and some publications sell in the millions…. For the time being, the reformed-folk repertory (also known as “contemporary” church music) occupies the high ground; it has the advantage of appearing to possess a musical and a moral superiority. It enjoys the reputation for being “new” and “what the people want.”
The victory of the folk style, reformed or otherwise, is so great and so blinding that many people cannot see beyond the apparent success to what could mildly be called the problem with this music: simply put, nearly all of it–no matter how sincere, no matter how many scriptural texts it contains–oozes with an indecent narcissism. The folk style, as it has developed since the 1960s, is Ego Renewal put to music.
“I” and “me” songs or sung versions of intense personal “conversations” with God can be found in the psalms and in almost two millennia of Christian worship, but great care was taken to make sure that the music would not sound like a presentation of individual “I-me” emotions. The words of the psalm might say “I” and “me,” but the music, intended for public worship, said “we.” A good example of this can be seen in the various settings of Psalm 90/91, a song of comfort and a reminder of God’s abiding protection. In the Middle Ages, the words of this psalm were lifted out of the common place and uttered in the Latin language (Qui habitat in adjutorio Altissimi …); the sentiments in the text were then twisted in the unusually shaped melodies of chant, the musical equivalent of the icon. These two “artificial” steps (the Latin language and the odd melodies) reminded everyone that this particular text, as sun, was not the personal property of the singer but an integral part of a public act of worship.
The early Protestant reformers translated the same psalm into the vernacular so that the congregation could sing it, but they too kept this important element of distance and “artificiality”; that is, they preserved the ideal of the “icon in music.” The words of the psalm were jammed into the pattern of a strict poetic meter with rhyme. ("O God, our help in ages past,/Our hope for years to come …") Melodies were foursquare and totally without a sense of private intimacy. Sometimes the melodies were so “neutral” and generic that a tune could be used for any kind of psalm: one with a joyous text or one with more mournful words.
Now, with the above versions of Psalm 90/91 in mind, analyze the same text as found in the song On Eagle’s Wings by Michael Joncas. Note the enormous difference. The Joncas work, an example of the reformed-folk style at its most gushing, does not proclaim the psalm publicly; it embraces the text–lovingly, warmly, and even romantically. That moaning and self-caressing quality of the music, so common in the reformed-folk style, indicates that the real topic of the words is not the comforting Lord but “me” and the comforts of my personal faith.
One composer of “contemporary” church music described perfectly what is going on in this type of music. He said that in his own compositions he tried to bring out the “felt meanings” of the sung words. There is indeed something quite tactile about the way this music manipulates the words; the meaning of the text has to be molded, shaped–felt. As a result, the performance of reformed-folk music depends heavily on a dramatic realism, on the ability of soloists to communicate personal feelings, felt meanings, to a congregation.
The music of the St. Louis Jesuits, the Dameans, the Weston Monks, Michael Joncas, and all the others is, without any doubt, a revolutionary addition to the Roman Rite. These composers have, as it were, smashed the icon, an exceedingly revolutionary act.
If a choir performs while everybody else listens, it is just as bad as if there is a praise band up there.
All singing should be corporate.
I wrote an editorial in the college newspaper ripping the praise songs at the college chapels last year. I learned my lesson and won't go there again.
There are some good praise songs, but unfortunately, the ones that become popular usually aren't those...
A local group did that one here for years. It was always a sellout, and sung entirely in Latin. They projected English subtitles up on a movie screen at the side of the stage.
The leader and organizer, who also played Herod (a star turn, he played him as a paranoid schizophrenic correct in every detail, or so a psychologist friend of mine told me, he was scary as he could be even 60 feet away on the stage), just finally burned out after 15 years.
I love the Indelible Grace stuff.
But if the choir is where it should be (in the rear gallery or behind the roodscreen) and in a church with good acoustics, it is not a performance per se. You can't see the singers, and the sound seems to come from around and above you. No single voice stands out (except in the incipit to some anthems), and the ideal "English" sound is clear, pure, blended, and as far from individual emotionalism or exhibitionism as you can get.
Now, I happen to believe that any congregation can sing chant if you concentrate on a couple of the most popular tones to begin with and teach by repetition. We are proving that in our church since our new music director came in -- you can actually HEAR the congregation singing now, and it's sort of a domino effect, they're singing the hymns now too!
God of Wonders is good stuff.
Bless the Lord by Jeff Deyo rocks!
And the Caedmon's Call praise CD is really good.
I play "I Boast No More" a lot from Caedmon's.
I do like Here I am to Worship
Church just isn't church w/o a pipe organ! The bigger the better! :)
On another note, that Eagle's Wings song is one of my pet peeves. Corny and sophomoric.
I knew I could count on you guys :)
AHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh! Get out of my mind! Oh, wait .... you posted first. AHHHHHHhhhhhhhh! I must get out of your mind!
Comfort is good as far as it goes, but I personally don't want "comfort" in church music -- I want something that takes me out of myself. A Talis canon, properly done, is truly awe-inspiring. Our choirs have done some anthems that have brought me to tears.
One of the Godliest moments of my life was when our kids' choir performed selections from Mendelsohn's Elijah. And on that note: having seen a group of 2nd-6th graders put those very difficult pieces together from scratch in a week of choir camp, and still be singing it from memory months later, makes me want to injure those kid choir directors who waste the kids' talents on insipid crap. Our choir director has found that the higher he raises the bar, the better the kids like it. (He's exceptional, obviously....)
Some guitar band repeating the same phrase over and over cannot compare. Then again, the composers can't compare to the masters, either....
I simply mean that the musician believes in what he has been taught - just as the Polish lancers charged the German tanks because they believed in the weapons they had been trained with. (Even if some say that story's apocryphal, it still makes a point.)
I am trained in the old English high church tradition, with all that implies - clear tone, no vibrato, crisp attacks and cutoffs on the vocal production side, and Renaissance polyphonic music with its distinctive harmonies and moving tones. So that music sounds most "correct" to me for a high Mass.
Kids can sing much better than they're given credit for. (Small brag - my mom's a music professor at a local college, and she made a tape recording of my THREE year old daughter singing part of the Queen of the Night's aria "O zittre nicht . .. " which she played for her class just to prove that kids could sing. Daughter is 16 and a mezzo now.)
Great minds and all that . . . < g >
I.G. is awesome!
It's good to hear of your experiences in Christian music. I have a very wide scope of taste when in comes to music, and I do not expect everyone to be that way. Perhaps if I get wiser with age, my tastes will change in kind.
Just for my own information, could folks here state examples of music or bands that they consider to be to repetitive or annoying. I'd like to avoid choosing those songs!
Society for a Moratorium on the Music of Haugen and Haas
They are only partly kidding.
Is that an eyeopener. Thanks for making me better informed. I thought the parodies were a laugh.
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