The Daily Mail has an amusing article today regarding music in churches. According to an online survey of 400 UK readers of the men’s magazine Sorted, the majority of blokes who responded said they ‘enjoyed singing – but added comments showing they preferred anthemic songs and ‘proclamational’ hymns as opposed to more emotional love songs.’ They also dislike flowers, embroidered banners, hugging, holding hands, dancing and ’sitting in circles discussing their feelings in church’. Oh dear.
One of the characteristics of much contemporary worship music is that it gives expression to the emotions that hymns do not always evoke. Directed straight to God, they express love, devotion and emotion – sometimes in terms that can only be described as ‘pseudo-erotic’. I remember someone describing it as ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’ music.
Hymns, by contrast, are often giving expression to thoughts about God rather than feelings towards God. Hymns were deliberately written in ways that could be easily learned and remembered by everyone, whereas many contemporary songs are defined by rhythm, not predictable melody. (I remember being asked by an elderly man what ‘kerof’ meant. He was struggling with the Graham Kendrick Creed which proclimed: ‘We / believe / in God the Father, / Ma /kerof /the universe’.)
The real issue here is not primarily to do with style of music (which is often a matter of cultural taste or habit), but what vocabulary the music is giving to a congregation to articulate the common experience of life it brings in to worship. Jesus’s hymnbook was the Book of Psalms from the Hebrew Bible. Contrary to some perceptions of the Psalms, most are not words of praise to an egotistical God; rather, they give expression to individual and corporate experiences such as lament, complaint, questioning, and so on.
I guess the question here is: how does the diet of songs in our churches provide a vocabulary for the experiences and circumstances of the diversity of people in the congregation?
One of the great losses from the Anglican experience of worship is the recital of the Psalms. No, I don’t want to go back to chanting – I could never manage that anyway. But reading the Psalms in order meant that we were forced to read aloud expressions of ‘worship’ and experience that might not at that moment be mine. But it would remind me of the needs and reality of others in the church whose current experience was different. It might even feed or stimulate my prayers for them and awareness of them.
So, having spent years leading worship, teaching songs and playing in bands, I have come to this rather meek conclusion: ‘Wet’ songs are OK and have their place, but only as part of a diet of songs that ask questions, express regret and fear, recognise the variety of people in our midst, make statements about God and the world, and have some integrity theologically as well as emotionally.
Worship is a communal experience, not an individual indulgence. Which means that I often find myself singing songs I hate – but find myself coughing at the bits where I stare into Jesus’s eyes and tell him he is lovely…
The Top Ten hymns in the survey were:
Onward Christian SoldiersDiscuss!
May 6, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Have only just skimmed this, but will come back and read properly later and probably comment fairly extensively.
May 6, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Please do.
May 6, 2009 at 5:37 pm
[...] This post was Twitted by nickbaines – Real-url.org [...]
May 6, 2009 at 6:46 pm
I doubt if ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘All People That On Earth Do Dwell’ feature high on the list of regular church goers. No surprise that men like strong ‘anthemic songs’ – football songs and armed services anthems reflect this.
As for the feminization of the church, this has been obvious for a long time, and recent trends, whether from the charismatic or ‘liberationist’ wings, have only reinforced it.
May 6, 2009 at 10:12 pm
We have the neverending hymn game on i-church.org/publicforums, where we exercise our imagination. Its great when a hymn you love comes up. But some people, know quite obscure titles.
But a good exercise in remembering hymns sometimes from childhood, (to long ago to remember) suddenly coming back to memory.
I would love to sing in a choir, but am well and truly vocally challenged.
May 6, 2009 at 11:34 pm
It is interesting- reading Wright’s ‘Simply Christian’ made me appreciate traditional worship far more than I had done before. I’m personally fine with the contemporary ‘pseudo-erotic’ stuff, but it was eye-opening to see the theory behind reading scripture, liturgical prayer etc. The liturgical prayer was especially ironic, since I have been really against it in younger years- reading Wright on it made me realise my personal situation only appropriated it more than most other people!
May 7, 2009 at 6:17 am
I have a number of questions and thoughts about this.
How can we define ‘wet’ or ‘girly’ music? Of the poll respondents, how many like or dislike that sort of music in non-church contexts?
And how much of the judgement of that is based on the text, and how much on the harmonic and melodic information?
I don’t think it’s possible to generalise much about tempo; “Amazing Grace” just sounds silly if taken too fast, as does “How Great Thou Art”. I don’t know one or two of the hymns there but all the ones I do know are major, but that doesn’t say a whole lot as a strong majority of hymns are set in major modes rather than minor.
I don’t know that the text is really a good indication either. I mean, the second verse of “Guide me, O thou great Redeemer” starts “Open now the crystal fountain / whence the healing stream doth flow”. Crystal fountains? Healing streams? “Be thou my vision” contains the perhaps-clingy “be thou ever with me, and I with thee, Lord.” I’m not sure all of those top 10 hymns really conform to the ‘macho’ stereotype if you look at the text. Even “Onward Christian Soldiers” has an awful lot of singing and happy throngs.
In fact, I’m going to respectfully submit that a similar poll of female respondents wouldn’t necessarily have had hugely different responses with regards to music in worship. I don’t think this is really about gender. I’m basing that on a sample of one (me) and on what I think some of the women in my life would say, so there’s a big problem with sample bias and peer selection, but no worse than that of the magazine poll.
I happen to like most of those hymns but I’d be embarrassed to write stuff like that in a greeting card. Why does it work in hymnody?
Short version: Luther knew what he was doing.
Perhaps some of that is simply that bad hymnody doesn’t tend to stand the test of time. Old 100th (the usual tune for “All People That On Earth Do Dwell”) was harmonized by John Dowland (1563-1626); the melody is from the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of 1560. People have been singing it for at least four hundred years! I don’t know my history well enough to know whether that particular tune has come in and out of fashion during that time, but it remained enough to surive in modern hymnal. But there is plenty of other religious music from that time which simply got abandoned or forgotten. Some of it is pretty good. Some of it is dire–and that’s just the stuff for which we have preserved source documents, the material which was considered valuable enough to keep. Newer music hasn’t had the chance to go through this process yet and so we end up with some things that will, in their time, end up on the compost pile. That’s okay–it’s a necessary part of adding to the library, too–but a hazard of only using new music is ending up with a higher proportion of compost (and alienating those who want more traditional music in worship, and so on and so forth).
I think that one reason talking about healing streams and the still dews of quietness and so on doesn’t feel so downright embarrassing in hymnody is partly due to the nature of poetry; if we allow ourselves to get lost in the imagery we don’t feel quite so self-conscious.
I also think a good tune helps. And “good tune” is not the same thing as it might be in art music or in pop music: it has to be interesting enough to be worth singing, but singable enough to be manageable by the congregation. As you say, worship is a communal experience; the reason chanted psalmody doesn’t work in many congregations is that it isn’t easily accessible to participation by those with little musical training, especially in today’s culture where most people consume music passively rather than participating more actively (oh, there’s a dissertation in there, but I’m not going to go into it further here). I love sung and chanted psalmody of various sorts, and I sing psalms every day, and I can read music very fluently, but I only use my Common Worship psalter about 30% of the time because putting in that much information is simply distracting before I’ve learned the tunes. Underlaid text (rather than pointed) might help but increases the printing cost by a huge factor and makes the music less accessible to those who don’t read dots. It’s easier for me (since I’m generally praying alone) to do free improvisations of the psalms instead. If it’s not accessible to me as a trained musician practising every few days, it almost certainly isn’t accessible to most congregations which gather once per week.
One reason it is inaccessible is that it is not metrical; metrical text is another strength of hymnody. You touch on rhythm briefly in your post to say that much contemporary music is ‘defined by rhythm’ but I think this is not entirely accurate; hymns are nothing if not rhythmic. Yes, even if they’re sung way too slowly, they do have rhythmic patterns. When if you take away the melody, the poetry of most hymns is strongly metrical and people saying it together will end up in a sort of unison. This is a lot harder to do with a non-metrical text; even reading relatively well-known psalms responsively with no music leads to a lot of stop-starting as people are not quite sure when to say their bit. (I’d love to know how this varies with different translations, for example I know some translations of the psalms try to keep the meter of the Hebrew poetry which has three strong beats (and any number of weaker syllables) per line, and I suspect that these translations may be easier to read as a group than translations which are written purely for accuracy and without regard to word stress.) Give them a metrical text instead, especially if it’s written out in lines and has some rhyming to cue that something is going on, and this difficulty pretty much disappears. So one reason hymnody works well is because it is easy to sing it together.
Another reason it works well is that it’s in verses rather than through-composed. Most people are more comfortable reading words than music dots (which is why I’ve ended up owning several hymnals: when I do have the chance to go to church I want to read the dots and I invariably find that asking someone to find me a hymnal with full music is a bit of a bother right before the service when the musicians are usually concerned with other things) and the repetition makes memory easier.
Aural memory is a pretty powerful thing at times, too. I can remember playing piano for my grandmother, who had Parkinson’s disease. Long after she had lost the ability to speak she could still sing tunes she knew and even get most of the words in. As the disease progressed she couldn’t sing the words any more but still managed to match pitch, still could have (and did on some occasions) continued the melody after I stopped playing. Most of those tunes were hymns.
While hymnody is accessible on a fairly immediate level to many people, it also offers plenty of flexibility. It can be done as a unison melody line with no accompaniment if need be. It can be adapted, fairly easily, for full choir and even orchestra and the congregation can still sing along on that unison melody line. I think of a hymnal as similar to a book of jazz lead sheets with melody and chord symbols: a skeleton or framework of songs that can be arranged or adapted in all sorts of ways.
I pretty much agree with you about a healthy diet of music for worship including a wide variety of subject matter. I think if we focus on being sweet and happy all the time we run the risk of trivializing the very real pain of being in this world. As soon as that happens people will turn away, feeling unsupported and unloved. I don’t even know if I call myself Christian but I don’t think that’s what church is for.
I also think worship music should include some variety of musical style; I think there can be room for chanting, room for hymnody, room for more contemporary worship songs. But all of these have to be approached slightly differently if they’re going to support congregational participation… which traditional hymnody as I understand it seems to do fairly well and which much of the newer music doesn’t. And MadPriest’s views on mission are important to consider in musical and other aspects of worship: people do not generally like doing embarrassing things and it’s important to be sensitive to that.
I’m somewhat biased but I’d like to see more new work with metrical psalmody, more new work with established folk tunes which lend themselves to metrical verse. (That goes the other direction, too; Ilkley Moor was originally a setting of “When Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night”…)
I’m not very aware of most of the new work being done in music for worship, so perhaps people are looking at this already.
Background: I grew up with hymnody in the United Church of Canada; I was always involved in the musical side of things. I later spent several years pursuing Orthodox Judaism, which has a very different (but still very beautiful) musical tradition. I’m only now starting to scratch the surface of music within the Church of England and I have little experience of other denominations. So I speak with considerable ignorance, and huge biases. But music has always been important to my experience of worship, and so I care very much about the subject.
May 7, 2009 at 8:36 am
“One of the great losses from the Anglican experience of worship is the recital of the Psalms.” What about the Daily Office? We use the BCP pattern and work through the psalms every month, but even if you stick with CW it gives a pretty thorough grounding.
May 7, 2009 at 9:18 am
Wow, a great post and great responses! For my part I see this as a start for further analysis and discussion…
It seems to me there is still a major point missing which stems from the separation of ’sacred and secular’ although personally I see it as ‘church and mainstream’.
There does seem to be so much effort going into pulling the veil of the temple shut and potentially it will be soon be tightly closed again. All the girly music (to define: crass and banale lyrics with weedy, wimpy music culturally set in West America circa 1970s!) is often marketed as ‘inpsired’ by the Holy Spirit (to define: if you don’t buy this then you are not lose holiness points!) and because of the success of ‘Worship Music’ the mainstream record companies are buying up the so called ‘Christian’ record companies because they can make so much money within a closed marketplace.
Anyway, where I want to get to is that why do we ignore the fact that God’s image in our mainstream writers and performers is generally far more intact than in the sub-culture ones? Hence the lyrics and music is not only superior they often express deeply spiritual and theological thoughts succinctly.
So I am happy to report that songs like Robbie Williams ‘Angels’, ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay, ‘Intervention’ by Arcade Fire and the incredible ‘One of Us’ by Joan Osbourne get aired (unplugged / acoustic) in services I’m involved in (sadly Leonard Cohen’s brilliant ‘Hallelujah was recently hijacked by X-Factor). It helps we have an adventurous and inspirational Rector!
The point here is that these songs fulfill the anthemic and gutsy preferences listed above and are appreciated by both the open minded worshipping community as well as the occasional visitor who can so easily wonder what on earth(!) is going on with either trad or girly music.
Personally I am a ‘Beer and Hymns’ type of geezer, so I’m pretty comfortable with most of Nick’s list but that familiarity is because I was brought up that way. It will be very sad if the church keeps on promoting the idea of being ‘of the world and not in it’ rather than the opposite. So my passion is to reedeem culture (Brian McLaren’s phrase) so that we are accessible rather than exclusive.
Banksy
May 7, 2009 at 9:29 am
Exactly. But this has been lost in much of the Anglican tradition (particularly Evangelical) that doesn’t use the Lectionary, doesn’t do the Office and has abandoned the Psalms in public worship. There’s a lot of it about.
May 7, 2009 at 9:33 am
Thanks for the response. I will do a follow-up post on this. My last book, Finding Faith, has every chapter based on songs by Beatles, Dylan, U2, Clapton, Paul Simon, etc., and much of the media coverage on it picked up some of the points you make. I also did an interview recently for the Financial Times on worship and rock music (as well as a Radio 2 documentary last November on Leonard Cohen, being interviewed by Guy Garvey of Elbow). Watch this space!
May 7, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Just read your blog with great interest. So glad I found about this.
You baptised and confirmed me last night at St Dunstans in Cheam, which by the way was such an emotional and exciting evening for me. I honestly cant explain what happened and why I feel like I do but its fabulous and I’m excited for the future.
Looking forward to your future postings on here and many thanks for a wonderful service last night.
May 7, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Toni, it was great to meet you last night and a privilege to baptise and confirm you. I am only sorry we didn’t have longer to talk before or afterwards. Do feel able to keep in touch. I look forward to seeing you again.
May 7, 2009 at 9:22 pm
I went to your sessions at Spring Harvest last month so was interested to read this post after your brief comments on ‘I’ songs and ‘we’ songs at SH.
I agree with your comments about ‘wet’ songs having a place but only in the context of a more complete hymnody. I love singing and leading modern worship songs (as well as hymns old & new) but have become aware that there are a disproportionate number of the ‘Jesus is my girl/boyfriend’ type songs. There are obviously many men who don’t find these kind of songs a problem (although it does say something about a somewhat limited theology – we learn a lot of our theology from what we sing!) but there will also be many as well as (presumably) men who are not yet Christians for whom these songs are not helpful.
Having said that, there are many contemporary worship songs with theological integrity – notably from Stuart Townend, Keith Getty, Matt Redman – ‘Blessed be Your name’ is especially notable as a song recognising that Christians go through low times.
For worship leaders, I do think it’s important to recognise this last point (made well in your SH seminars) that although we worship corporately, everyone will not be in the same place in their relationship with God. I also think that part of worship leading is to lead a congregation on a journey – starting a service with what you term a ‘wet’ song is usually not appropriate and yet this may be suitable during for example a time of response later on.
Of course, there’s a whole debate which could be had about what constitutes a hymn as opposed to a song…..!
May 8, 2009 at 8:45 am
Great post and discussion. I am particularly interested in how we can recover the use of the songs of Scripture and especially the Psalms in our worhip. One thing that does strike me is that if we are to do this then we need to make sure that there is proper teaching to accompany their use in worship. I’ve posted on a good little resource I’ve come across ‘Recovering The Lord’s Song’ at http://tiny.cc/fvZnw
May 8, 2009 at 8:52 am
Sorry +Nick the link on my comment is wrong. It should be http://tiny.cc/NVEZg
May 8, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Why is it that when the church is naff in any form it is to do with the feminisation of the church?!
May 8, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Yes – it’s language again isn’t it? I didn’t like the use of “girly” either. Why girly instead of “maudlin bloke”
May 12, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Actually I’m Rev Sam’s wife.
I like the comment above that we learn a lot of our theology through what we sing as that is completely true of my experience.
When I was eight, I was lucky enough to go to a school which had its own Chapel and Chapel choir and a headmaster who knew exactly how to preach in a respectful and deeply worthwhile way to children. This is where I learned all the traditional hymns, and as I sang I worshipped and as I worshipped so I grew. Now, I find the ‘wet’ songs often deeply unsatisfying and frustrating, though there are one or two which never fail to move me inspite of myself. It is primarily the weakness/wetness of the music (lack of a good tune?) coupled with the lack of poetry, and by poetry I mean to include meter (as commented above – very true) and also the joining of words to create a meaning that is greater than the sum of those words. I have always been perfectly happy to sing of crystal fountains and healing streams. And how much I prefer those images to the cushy, prosaic, politically correct and crass phrases that I find are the diet of my own children now in Church!
Another point is that, like many who grew up with hymns, I’m sure, often I find a tune comes into my head and it is only as I keep singing it that I remember the words, which invariably speak to me in an uncannily appropriate way.
And another is that many of the hymns I learned as a child I did not understand until years later. But when understanding dawned – it brought immense pleasure! In a way this is a far richer experience than an approach wherein a hymn that cannot be fully understood first time is deemed ‘inaccessible’ and to be avoided. What a loss that is!
May 12, 2009 at 1:47 pm
Rev Sam’s wife, you raise a number of important questions – especially regarding immediate accessibility. Why do we have to reduce everything to the immediately comprehensible? Is there no room for growing into comprehension and growing up knowing there is ‘more’? Very helpful comment – thanks.
May 12, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Timothy Dudley Smiths versions of psalms are great, very singable and yet have the spirit of the Biblical psalm.We sing hymn versions of psalms a lot and this is one way of doing so without chanting or reading or making amazing poetry of God’s word sound inaccesible.
May 12, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I completely agree with ‘Rev Sam’s wife’ (who is also a person in her own right!!)that it is not necessary to understand everything the first time you say/sing it. I grew up with the prayer book and A & M, and knew the words from a very early age, long before I understood them. What a gift that has been to me. When the words are firmly rooted like that, the meaning tends to stay firmly rooted too. I fear that my children won’t have that wonderful experience of sudden illumination – they haven’t had the same service all the time, and although I love Common Worship it hasn’t the resonance of Cranmer. It’s true of hymns too – try reading about Moses, Song in my Heart, and ‘Guide me O thou Great Redeemer’ makes perfect sense! Although I enjoy singing many modern songs, I do miss in some of them an enriching depth of biblical reference.
May 14, 2009 at 5:37 pm
I agree with Mark B. – many men, myself included, tend to prefer this type of “diet” of songs as a way to flirt around the edges of what we feel and want to express without actually confronting it directly
Thanks for the interesting read Nick!
May 18, 2009 at 8:43 am
Coming back to the ‘political correctness’ theme – is there really any point in rewriting some of those old favourites. The hymn at the top of your list is ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ – has anyone read the revised version in Hymns Old and New – it really doesn’t make sense at all. Can’t we just acknowledge that some of those old favourites were written for a different time and situation and sing them with a bit of nostalgia.
On the point of Psalms and the translating of them – the same applies to many modern translations. I regularly have to go back to my Authorised Version after a service to make sense of the readings from a Sunday morning -especially some of the Epistles of Paul – which are hard enough at the best of times. It seems that the latest thing is to remove any word that might seem a bit old fashioned and also to remove all the poetry. The Psalms in the AV are just that – Poems not Prose. If we returned to the poetry, they would be easier to sing
May 18, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Claire, good points with which I largely agree. Just one caveat: the list wasn’t mine. It was the top ten voted for by the respondents to the online survey.