Today it is time for a rant about church music. My parish choir is a good one, but members
are ageing and numbers are dwindling, and the children mostly seem to leave
when they reach the turbulent teenage years.
We sing core Anglican music – anything from Byrd to Rutter by way of
Stanford and Elgar, and traditional psalm chants and hymns with organ
accompaniment. There are eight or more
other Protestant establishments in the town none of which does anything like
this, and even at our church, you get the impression that the majority of the
congregation are indifferent to or at best tolerant of the music supplied, and
would be quite happy to see it replaced by guitars, amplified pre-recorded
music and ‘worship songs’. Why is this?
Why do the majority of Christians think it
appropriate to include infant-school songs with actions in church services,
forcing respectable, arthritic elderly people to beat their chests like
gorillas and sing ‘Who’s the King of the Jungle’?
Why do most Christians – even the most morally
conservative – feel it right to address the Almighty in song with the moaning,
sobbing and gasping that were developed in commercial music as indications of
extreme desire for sexual intercourse, if not the act itself?
Why do pillars of the church establishment readily
dismiss a great variety of traditional hymns as ‘dirges’, when most of these
are demonstrably more interesting, musically, than ‘worship songs’?
Why do most Christians refuse even to sample the
heritage of traditional church music, but call traditionalists who dislike pop
‘narrow-minded’?
Why do they work and scheme to get traditional music
edged out of the few places where it is still in use, and label anyone who
stands in their way ‘intolerant’? Why,
in short, do they define themselves as victims when they are in control, and as
rebels when they are a conformist majority?
By now someone will be pointing out that most
cathedrals (and Oxbridge colleges) have perform traditional music, that the
Royal School of Church Music is at the heart of the Establishment and that
grand state occasions still showcase the Anglican classics, etc. To which I reply, yes, but are not these
beleaguered islands whose supports are being washed away by the floods of
uncaring ignorance that surround them? I
don’t know, in fact, whether things are getting better or worse. The signals are mixed. What we are seeing now may be a slack tide
which is about to turn, or the lull before the final assault. The Church of England has a musical tradition
that is unique in Europe and perhaps in the world. But if it vanished, how many people would
actually notice?
I have stood in the choir stalls at a sung Eucharist
at our church, moved to tears as a soaring treble sings Holy, holy. It is better
than any concert you could pay to get into in this town all year. It’s better than any concert, in fact,
because it has a purpose beyond entertainment.
And it’s free. Yet there are,
what, twenty people in the congregation if we’re lucky. Does anybody care?
It is much easier to ask these questions than to get
answers. In fact I have been pondering
them in a melancholy way for most of my life.
Why don’t people value what seems self-evidently beautiful?
The problem, of course, extends beyond the Church to
society as a whole. The ‘decline of
classical music’, or rather its demotion by the cultural establishment, began
in earnest in the 1960s. It was then
that the Left got its hands on the levers of power, and decided that to promote
high culture, especially classical music, to the people at large was
patronising, a hegemonic imposition of elitist values, an abuse of power. The people must be allowed to make their own
choices. The Right was not too upset, as
its members had quietly realised that it was more profitable to sell the people
disposable crap anyway. So the people,
of course, ‘chose’ what was most vigorously sold to them.
The Left by its nature is deeply suspicious of enjoyable
music, art and literature. Enjoyment is
a distraction from the class struggle; it is morally wrong to enjoy anything
while misery and injustice stalk our world (in other words, ever). Art is good if it has a social message. It is allowed to be ‘challenging’, i.e. ugly,
horrifying or incomprehensible. Or it
can be enjoyable at an ironic level if it is frankly rubbish, kitschy, popular
in the commercial sense. Because then it
demonstrates the decadence and approaching collapse of the capitalist
system. Here an unholy alliance develops
between socialism and consumerism. As
Ursula Le Guin pointed out long ago in her essay ‘The Stalin in the Soul’, late
capitalist society needs art to be disposable.
‘They want products to sell, quick turnover, built-in obsolescence.’ (I
saw an example of how far this tendency has convinced the consumers in a shop
where a toddler was asking his mother to hire a video. ‘Not that one, darling,’ she smilingly said,
‘you’ve had it before.’)
After about fifty years of this two-pronged attack,
we have got to the point where the man or woman in the street knows nothing of
classical music, and doesn’t want to know, because they have an overwhelming
impression that, whatever it may be, it is a bit ‘snobby’ (the left-wing view),
and also ‘uncool’ and ‘boring’ (the commercial contribution). When I was in my teens most schoolchildren
had at least heard the names Mozart and Beethoven, even if they only understood
that they were cultural bugbears to be laughed at. Now most have probably never heard of them at
all. The exception is a determined
minority of the upper middle class. What
the lefties always claimed – that classical music is only for a privileged
elite – may not have been true then but, thanks to their efforts, it certainly
is now.
This is where congregations are coming from. In the churches the dynamic is very similar –
indeed, it has been going on for much longer.
Socialism, after all, derives directly from the puritan and millenial
wings of Christianity. The refusal to
accept pleasure that does not contribute to the class struggle is just another
avatar of the old refusal to enjoy yourself in this life because you are saving
your pleasure for the next. There has
always been a strong iconoclastic strain in Christianity: the fear that in approaching
God by means of imagery in art or music, the believer will be deflected from
the truth and end up worshipping the image, the creature rather than the
Creator. The effort devoted to the image
– the art or the music – risks becoming an end in itself. So thought the reformers who knocked the
heads off the statues in Ely’s Lady Chapel.
So, in their more moderate way, think high-minded pastors who want their
church members to flourish in faith and good works, rather than expending their
energy and resources on ‘difficult’ music.
By taking a relaxed approach with some simple choruses and three-chord
worship songs, they hope to create a ‘prayerful’ atmosphere that will be
‘inclusive’, not putting off any ordinary person who happens to stroll in from the
street.
All well and good, but do such Christians ever
wonder if they are perhaps being too ‘inclusive’ of traits in modern society
which most thoughtful people agree are not such a good thing? Passivity, addiction to undemanding entertainment,
demand for constant novelty – all those same consumerist tendencies that have
sneaked in under the radar of the cultural commissars of secular society. Fans of ‘worship songs’ are mostly
evangelicals. In some ways, they are
ready to take a stand against modern culture.
They may reject the theory of evolution, or the liberalisation of sexual
morality. But they ought to watch out
that they don’t reject the good and thought-out ideas of the modern world, while
unthinkingly accepting the bad.
I can see plenty of reasons why traditional church
music no longer holds immediate appeal for the average church-goer. What I still do find hard to understand is
what they like about the stuff they do. Evangelicals
believe in a God who is very strict and quite scary, who is ready to send the
unrepentant to hell. But he doesn’t seem
very dignified, if choruses of ‘Who’s the King of the Jungle?’ please him. They think it right to fear God. But they don’t seem to reverence him
much. Reverence is not really a word in
the evangelical vocabulary. Over the
centuries, God has been given many names: Creator, Father, Lord, Author of
Life, Supreme Spirit, Eternal Love. But
in an edition of the New Testament handed out to converts by the Bible Society,
he is introduced as ‘the big boss’. It
seems to me that in their attempt to marry a conservative theology with a
modern consumerist culture, evangelicals have the worst of both worlds. Their God is arbitrary without mystery, matey
without loving-kindness. He’s awfully
... corporate. How fitting that he should be worshipped with
motivational slogans, carpet tiles and overhead projectors.
Easy enough to rant, much harder to persuade people
to broaden out from this horribly ‘relevant’ style of worship. What might be the best way to set about
it?
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