Locating Music and Expanding Our Musicality

by | September 2, 2011

This post was written by Tracy Howe Wispelwey.

My friends in Burundi approached their local worship team and asked if they would start to incorporate traditional Burundi drumming and song into the music being used in liturgy. Burundi has a rich tradition of drumming and song. However, that expression never found its way into liturgy as colonialism physically overtook the great lakes region of East Africa and colonial ideology wove Western culture into Christianity. Moreover, indigenous and native cultural expression was systematically extinguished as the violence of colonialism permeated physically, culturally and spiritually. Now there are many who cringe to find the top ten CCLI songs being sung in a small village in East Africa, because it points to a continuing dominance of Western cultural export, as well as a decline of native expression and the stifling of promising, new and unique voices. There are many in Africa (and in the West) who long for a restoration of indigenous and unique expression throughout Christianity, but especially where colonialism perpetuated/s creativity’s destruction.

However, the young people in the worship band simply loved to play guitar. They countered that being pressured to use instruments and sounds they did not want to use would be to wield the same kind of colonial methods that the older generations lament. Many liturgists and pastors I know in the United States resonate with this – there is a desire to move beyond commodified music, to explore the depth of many different traditions of music and song in liturgy. Yet, there are also reasons a song becomes mass-produced – many might honestly cling to it, but that connection is incorrectly codified and distributed as normative for everyone. Is there a way to use and share music without letting our call to creativity atrophy in our communities?

I love global connectivity, and the fact that a song can travel like worldwide sonic wildfire these days. But something is wrong when there are just a few sonic fountains, or if current economic privilege allows a single culture to dominate the global distribution of worship and liturgical resources.

I offer two suggestions. First, we can locate our music and songs. To know the fullness of a person’s story deepens the testimony of her or his life. Can you culturally and historically locate all of the songs you use in worship gatherings? Can you give a song new depth by offering your community a reason for why it will be sung in your context? African-American spirituals continue to inspire myriad Christian traditions, and are enjoyed outside of faith communities in part because the songs evoke the strength, perseverance and hope of very specific people in a very specific place and time. Locating music reminds us that we are part of a global community and it connects us to legacy and history beyond our lifetimes. I also hope it reminds us of the power and longevity a song holds, and therefore the tremendous call and responsibility we possess to continue writing and creating!

Second, we can expand and enrich our musicality. I am both a songwriter and composer. The genre I work in is electroacoustic composition, which gathers field recordings (the sounds of life, a city, nature) and uses them like instruments in the composition of a particular piece. Recalling the young worship band in Burundi that wants to play the popular Christian music on guitars – what if we expand our musicality to include the sounds and textures of their community as well? Can we actively expand our musicality as a spiritual practice in our own spaces? Regardless of where we gather – Can we really know and listen to the songs we sing, the music we play, and then open our ears to the breath of our neighbors and the sounds of the cities in which we live?

Ultimately, we are listening for the Holy Spirit to reveal the fullness of beauty and life, and fully knowing and hearing our songs and music is often a great place we can start.

© Tracy Howe Wispelwey

Image © iStockphoto

Tracy Howe Wispelwey’s creative identity is The Restoration Project under which she has released multiple albums and toured to many places. She is also founder of Restoration Village, a nonprofit that seeks to facilitate and nurture creative partnership, and a member of la Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana through which she is working with others to build a network of theologian-artists and liturgists resourcing communities of faith. She and her husband live in Cambridge, MA.

Like The Restoration Project on Facebook and follow Tracy on Twitter.

 

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How Big Is Your Musical Pond?

by | September 1, 2011

I have ruined my children. Yep. My kids were nurtured in an auditory environment where much of what was being celebrated in popular music (Christian or otherwise) made me want to puncture my eardrums with the nearest dull object. Despite our best intentions, all the kids are musicians: bass for the eldest, alto sax for the middle, and violin for the youngest. They run their scales. They can spot a I-vi-ii-V progression. They know that dissonance is ridiculously awesome sometimes. These little people woodshed with the fundamental spiritual insight that the music is a force bigger than they are, a living place where their voice is really only made possible by the people that have come before them, a place where identity (and music) is only as meaningful as your ability to collaborate and make music with other people.

Their musicianship is the source of a lot of fun moments and a great source of mama-bear pride for me, but nothing compares to the lesson they’re constantly teaching me about the transformative power of artistic integrity and self-awareness.

Kids are the best representations of artistic integrity–which ultimately, isn’t about excellence or quality; it’s about honesty. Kids create out of their own desire to give something to the world, not just to “say something.” Their art comes directly out of their minds and imaginations because they don’t know how to be false. Their pleasure over what they’ve created, what their friends have created, is contagious. On the other hand, you’re not going to find my six-year-old’s art hanging in the MOMA exhibit next month. Kids get, without getting their feelings hurt, the idea that there is honest art and then there is skilled art.

And maybe, just maybe, you can be honest without being skilled, but in order to be culture-changing skilled, you’ve got to be honest.

When Christ said that the Kingdom of GOD belongs to those who are like children, I’m firmly convinced that this attitude of honesty and imagination is what he envisioned.

This is more than music, art, writing. There’s an intense, interdependent relationship between our own artistic integrity, our self-perception as artists, and our own willingness to be spiritually formed.

This became more and more apparent to me when I began worship coaching, working with church musicians during the week and heading off to my “professional” gigs later on in the week. At the church, I would often be one of the strongest musicians in the group, but on a gig, without question, I was often the weakest link and almost relished the opportunity to get shredded by people who were much better than I was. The skill differential that existed between the church musicians and the “pros” wasn’t what freaked me out as a newly-returned-to-the-church Christian: it was the attitude I got from so many of the church musicians I played with; an attitude that said they were the better musicians despite the fact that they had to capo to play in anything other than four or five keys, that all of the music was a carbon copy of a carbon copy of some song they heard on the radio. Not only could they not do it–they resented that I asked them to do it. I’ve got story after painful story about getting nasty comments and passive-aggressive attitudes from church musicians because what I asked of them musically was exposing–on many levels. And without exception, the most visibly irritated players all thought: They. Were. The. Stuff. Not outwardly, of course, and maybe not even very consciously because I truly doubt most people are that sinister, but to any outsider it was like a neon sign hanging around their neck. And yet they seemed completely unaware of their own musical inadequacies or disjointed self-perception. Or the connection between their own artistic process and their spiritual formation.

Big looming question: If you can’t confront your own music in a neutral and honest way, how can you confront the rest of yourself? If you can’t perceive the reality of your musical skills and voice in an objective, “we’re-all-on-a-journey” kind of way, how do you open yourself up to the disturbing beauty of personal and spiritual formation? If you need to keep the musical pond small so that you feel safe, how small do you have to keep your GOD?

So, how big is your pond?

Image © iStockphoto

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Humming with the Angels

by | August 31, 2011

I have a confession to make: I’ve got some baggage when it comes to Christian Music.

You see, I’ve lived through the Contemporary Christian Music era and The Worship Wars, and played in worship bands where “worship” was synonymous with “feeling moved by music.”  So, for me, Christian Music, at its worst, can feel insincere, manipulative and feeble.

This is a travesty because Christian Music, at its best, has the power to fill a spirit like almost no other medium. There are many, many songs I can’t sing without being sure the angels are humming along.

This baggage and this belief in the power of music together drove me to make two lists, both of which I am happy to share with you:

  1. A list of questions I bring before all my worship leaders about the purpose and nature of music for worship so that they will approach it in a healthy, scriptural way.
  2. An ever-expanding playlist I call “Totally Un-Cheesy Christian Music” (By which, I mean that the artistic quality of these musicians is such that they are able to communicate, in an honest and transparent way, the complexities and full spectrum of emotions of the faithful life – but it’s easier just to say “Un-Cheesy.”)

Questions to discuss with worship leaders (guaranteed to spark some interesting conversations):

Why do we have music on Sundays? Does worship equal music?

What’s the difference between performance and worship leading? How can musicians be pastors?

What does it mean to lead the congregation? How do you invite people to join in?

What does it mean to lead the musicians? How will you create community among the choir/band members?

What musical styles work best for our setting? Are there any that wouldn’t work? Why/why not?

Where is the place between quality which is so good it draws attention to itself and quality which is so bad it draws attention to itself?

How will you respond if the congregation is not very outwardly responsive to music? How do the responses of introverts, intellectuals and contemplatives differ from those of extroverts or more emotionally- and physically-expressive personalities? How can we give all kinds of people permission (not pressure) to engage?

What is the difference between corporate and private worship?  How can you remind worshipers that they worship as a community?

Familiar music is comforting but new music brings freshness.  How will you balance the two?

How will you measure “success” in what you do?

What would you add to the list of conversation-starter questions for worship leaders?

Totally Uncheesy Contemporary Christian Music:

Check out these totally un-cheesy artists and albums:

  • You’ll see why the band chose the name, The Innocence Mission when you listen to their collection of hymns, Christ Is My Hope.
  • All kinds of hymns are hidden among the Christmas songs on Sufjan Stevens’ five disc album, Songs for Christmas.
  • Almost all of the recordings by Sons of Korah are devoted to simple arrangements of the Psalms.
  • Aradhna is an Indian-American Fusion band whose lyrics are Christ-centered but composed primarily in Hindi language.
What songs or artists would you add to the list?

 

[I]t’s important that we urge our congregants not to think of the worship service as a concert hall, as a time that we come to receive something, but to think of our worship service as a banquet hall where we come to participate in something together. While so many churches around the country are being divided by music, what I’m excited about . . . is seeing communities strengthened and unified through the songs that we sing. - Isaac Wardell of Bifrost Arts

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In the (Liturgical) Mood

by | August 30, 2011

In the history of humankind, we have only had two basic conceptions about the nature of music and its impact on us.

The first idea was conceived roughly twenty-five hundred years ago by the Greek philosopher, Pythagoras. He found that when a string of a certain length was plucked it made a certain sound, while a string of exactly half the initial length made a different sound that was harmonically consonant with the first. Following this line of experimentation, Pythagoras discovered that regular mathematical ratios correspond with pleasant harmonies. This, thought the philosopher, provided irrefutable evidence that there is intentional structure and intended meaning underlying this grand universe we inhabit.

Pythagoras’s mathematical music philosophy remained virtually unchallenged until the twentieth century when musicians like John Cage and Arnold Schoenberg began composing works that contradicted that ancient conception in nearly all ways. Cage’s works emphasized randomness and “sounds” (over expected structure and accepted harmonies). Schoenberg–who claimed his own musical work to be as historically important as the scientific work of Einstein –composed music in which all twelve chromatic tones in an octave have equal weight. This contrasts dramatically with the music of the past that was dominated by fixed key signatures and tonal centers.

For the first time in recorded history, music shifted from being an art grounded in universal laws and reflective of the great Mind behind all creation, to being an art that more than anything else reflected the mind of the individual, human composer.

Robert R. Reilly claims that this re-conceptualization of music was nothing short of a “catastrophic rupture” that

… severed the composer from any meaningful contact with external reality. As a result, musical art was reduced to the arbitrary manipulation of fragments of sound.

“The Music of the Spheres, or the Metaphysics of Music” (Intercollegiate Review, 2001), 12.

In other words, music used to be objective. Now, suddenly, it was completely subjective. This shift from the objective to the subjective characterizes just about every other shift we’ve seen as we make our way across the threshold from modernity to postmodernity. Most of us in the Church don’t like it.

I see this move to a more subjective approach to music composition as beneficial to art in general and a boon to liturgical art, in specific.

Here’s why: Just as our non-musical liturgy has been “message” heavy at least since the Reformation (if not for a much longer period) so has our church music been burdened with the requirement of ‘making sense.’ Certainly, music – any music – carries with it an emotional-spiritual quality that transcends the intentions of the composer. But, music in church has by-and-large been used for communication. Communication, that is, from persons to persons (as in antiphonal exhortative songs), from persons to God (as in prayer songs and songs of praise), and even from God to persons (as when prophetic texts are set to a tune).

Communication is good. Without God’s communication to us through his Word (the bible and the Son) we would still be just as “in the dark” as was Abraham, even after he had his close brush with God (Exodus 33). Still, we must believe that our gatherings have another function beyond the simple transmission of a message.

Beyond communication, worship music can help create a liturgical mood that I suppose one could say “speaks” in its own way. But, this kind of communication is far less mathematically precise. For instance, when music is purposed as “soundtrack,” there is a subjectivity that involves risk. The risk is that not everyone will be “put into” the same mood at the hearing of the same sounds. With deeper consideration, I think we must admit that this same risk is similarly present in music that is message-heavy.

So, what exactly is liturgical “mood” music? Liturgical mood music is textually minimalistic in contrast to the text-heavy music that is used for communication purposes. That is to say, it is often instrumental, or mostly instrumental. And the text, if any, takes a more poetic, concrete form.

We could also characterize liturgical mood music as being open-ended, both in length and in content. Songs that are open-ended in length are musical loops that are intended to be played without a plan for when they will end or how many times they will repeat. Songs that are open-ended in content consist of layers of music that are pre-conceived, but only to a point. When it comes to the “performance,” the composition of layers may not resemble what was rehearsed and in fact, may never again be played the same way.

Musical open-endedness conjures images of club DJs. More and more churches are embracing this form for worship. But “live” musicians can also play open-ended loops. Pentecostal musicians have done it for years. It is the improvisational quality that creates a mood or “vibe,” which is tailored in the moment, for the moment at hand.

Next time you are charged with the music for worship, try using your resources toward creating a mood, more than just communicating a message. This could be as simple as assembling a recorded mix of songs that can be played before and after the service, and at key moments throughout, in order to set the specific tone you seek to achieve. This approach may not be radical enough to make John Cage proud, but then again, some of his compositions do have an eerie resemblance to liturgical silence.

Image © iStockphoto

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Is your worship music repertoire old or new?

by | August 29, 2011

I just spent the weekend up in the San Gabriel mountains leading musical worship for a group of seminary students. The group was diverse in its representation of worship traditions. A week ago, I was thinking: Hmmm. How do I choose music for a group that includes Presbyterians and Pentecostals among numerous other worship traditions? My solution: Hit the CCLI top 25 list - and hit it hard! And, be sure that there is a healthy dose of “ecumenical” hymns.

As my guitar player said after he saw the set list for the weekend, “This reads like the greatest hits of 2006.” He was not entirely incorrect. (The current #1 song on CCLI was written in 2004.)

I have the opportunity to lead worship music in several such “random” gatherings a year. It wasn’t long after I first started leading these that I learned a several important strategies for choosing the right songs.

First, hit the CCLI list – and hit it hard! Personally, I despise (this may not be too strong a word) many of the songs on this list, but the fact remains that this list is made up of the songs that are actually being done in congregations all over the place. Second, include at least one hymn in every set. Third, if you want to introduce a brand new song (like one you’ve written or one you are sure the group will not know) choose only one and repeat it often. Fourth, be ready to adjust your set lists as you get a sense of the music people connect with.

Of course, the approach for choosing songs is different in a regular, local church context. In this case, you already know which songs people know and which ones they don’t. You know how many hymns are expected or comfortable for your people. When it comes to introducing new music, you also know the rate at which you can successfully do so.

When I was a full-time music pastor, I worked at a church called New Song. We were very true to our name. We would introduce a new song nearly every week. Sometimes the songs were original. Sometimes they were drawn from the blossoming praise and worship movement that was prolifically provisional for many leaders like me at the time. To help people in our congregation keep up with the new music, we would repeat each new song for three consecutive weeks before giving it a break. This meant that on any given week, half or more of our set list would be new songs.

Other churches go a completely different route, choosing to emphasize songs from the ‘past’ and reserving new songs for special occasions.

What about your songs? Is your music repertoire made up of mostly old or mostly new songs? I realize ‘old’ and ‘new’ are vague terms. This is intentional. Share with us your method for developing your repertoire and give us your definition of ‘old’ and ‘new’ songs for worship in the comments of this blog post.

This week’s related poll…

About how often do you introduce a previously unknown song to your congregation?

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