I have been a member of the Facebook group ‘I’m Fed Up With
Bad Church Music’ for a couple of years now, and it has provided food for
thought in all kinds of ways. Not least,
in prompting one to ponder the question of what exactly makes church music good
or bad? A minority of group members
believe that there is no objective answer, that such judgements are purely a
matter of personal and cultural taste.
More of us have a gut feeling that we know the good from the bad, or at
least the better from the less good, when we hear it. When it comes to defining our criteria,
though, there are many different attempts none of which seems quite to nail the
problem.
Is bad church music ‘me’-centred, as opposed to good church
music which is God-centred? But are
there not hymn-texts that centre on the singer with a humility and profundity
that few would dare criticize, like ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’? If it comes to that, are not a number of the
Psalms highly, even distastefully ‘me-centred’?
Is bad church music full of repetitions (“7/11 music”?) But
then has not repetition always been used in prayer as an aid to contemplation? Are not psalm chants repetitive, and the
Rosary, not to mention Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus?
Should we insist on a minimum of technical competence in the
composition and performance of church music?
“Three-chord choruses” are a frequent bugbear, as are singers who wail
out of tune, cantors who leave the congregation behind, etc. etc. But then, does God not accept any offering
that is made in good faith? If people
are genuinely trying their best, is not music that involves and includes the
people as they are, a better option than good performance that reduces them to passivity?
Should sexuality be kept out of church music? Well, I detest the aggressive, preening
sexuality of rock music invading the church, but I have myself described the Agnus Dei from Byrd’s four-part Mass,
approvingly, as ‘orgasmic’. In a broader
argument, should church music avoid theatricality, or avoid ‘stirring up’
human, physical passions, as opposed to calming and elevating the spirit? But the line between liturgy and theatre has
always been wafer-thin. Good theatre is
not just a matter of make-believe and histrionics, but reveals profound truths
that everyday life can gloss over: so does liturgy. And humans are body as well as spirit. The whole point of having a sacramental
Church is that it consecrates the physical world: we are not Manichees,
believing in a simple dichotomy between corrupt matter and pure Spirit. Any worship that leaves out the ‘physical
passions’ will be leaving out half of humanity, and any such religion will be a
cramped, etiolated thing. Should we get
out of the difficulty by simply leaving the choice of music to a properly
constituted body with divine authority, as some Catholics in the group
urge? But that is just kicking the can
down the road. People have sung to God
for much longer than the Magisterium has been in existence: the rules follow
the music, not the music the rules. And
music can give intimations about the divine nature that words – including rules
– can never encompass.
Indeed, music is such potent stuff that a proportion of
Christians distrust it altogether. For
obvious reasons, we don’t see many contributors to this group wanting to ban all
music, or restrict it to monotone chanting or even to singing alone. But such Christians do exist. They want a plain religion of words, deeds,
and silence. They are iconoclasts, who
think that all art tends towards idolatry, a focus on the thing created rather
than the Creator. They are represented
in the group by a tendency to think that ‘bad’ church music is, in fact, ‘good’
and vice versa: that simple, corny, clumsily performed ‘worship songs’ with
guitar, and the like, are a sign that a congregation is keeping its mind on the
essentials: welcoming all comers, concentrating on evangelism and good works. Whereas the Anglican cathedral tradition of
choral singing, for instance, has lost its way in ‘pride’ and ‘self-pleasing’.
Which is all very well.
But I believe that God is happy to see us playing, in the deepest sense,
thinking, imagining and creating, as well as working, for His Kingdom. Everyone hungers for beauty as well as for
bread. A church without art risks
becoming dogmatic, narrow and self-righteous, without refreshment from the
well-springs of imagination that go beyond words. I believe, and wish, that far more people
could become involved in singing and playing the finest church music than are
at the moment. The fact that choral
singing has come to be seen as an ‘elite’ activity is just an aspect of the
troubling disjuncture between artistic production and consumption, and between
the ‘high’ and the ‘popular’ (or ‘commercial’) that has arisen in the past
century in the Western world in general, not just the Christian part of it. There
should no more uplifting metaphor for the Kingdom of Heaven than music with
many interweaving voices and many instruments.
Many gifts, all different, all united in a greater whole.
No one cared more than Jesus about feeding the poor, but he
approved of the woman at Simon’s banquet pouring her costly ointment over his
feet, rather than selling it for charity. ‘She has done a beautiful thing for
me.’ God is happy when we do beautiful
things for him.
So, having dismissed all kinds of ways of judging between ‘good’
and ‘bad’ church music, what do we have left?
How can we justify the way that some music makes us bristle up and feel ‘wrong’,
while some is ‘right’? One of my
personal red lines is amplification. I
believe that amplified music in a church building (in the open air it is
different) is utilizing a fake means of communication that, simply by being
louder and making it easier to create an effect, tends to displace and diminish
real physical communication between singers and hearers. It is like over-seasoned food reducing our
capacity to distinguish between subtle flavours. I have a related aversion to ‘multi-media’ churches
designed like cinemas or amphitheatres, as opposed to traditional churches that
were designed to create the most favourable acoustics for ‘natural’ speaking,
singing and listening. But, who knows, I
might one day attend a multi-media church that would change my mind.
The ‘real’ versus the ‘fake’ is a criterion I am still
mulling over. In the church music I
like, I have a sense that the composer’s faith, their intelligence and their
creativity have worked together to the utmost.
No punches have been pulled, nothing held back. Whether a piece of music is simple or
elaborate, or even if it falters technically, if it is the best the guy could
do, I’ll accept it.
And my objection to a lot of today’s ‘praise music’ is that
I sense a faux-naif pose. There is a
difference between being part of a tradition and being impelled to do your
personal best within that tradition, and churning out derivative stuff that is
posing as ‘new’, just because you can sell it.
And there is a difference between having a simple faith, and posing as
having a simple faith in an age when faith cannot be simple without lobotomizing
itself. There is a hypocrisy in adopting
the technologies of a modern age, the marketing strategies, the microphones and
loudspeakers, to promote a faith that wishes to ignore all the ideas, the
better as well as the worse ones, of the modern world.
If one must go down the route of rejecting the modern world,
I sense a greater honesty in the church music that tries to recreate the
contemplative calm and/or simplicity of an earlier age more purely in its
musical style as well as in its words, like that of John Tavener and the
revival of Orthodox music, or like African church music or spirituals. But I’ll take an honest agnostic’s music over
a gung-ho evangelical’s any day: Herbert Howells rather than Stuart Townsend. Anguished doubt, as long as it is wrestling
with faith on the deepest level, is more conducive to true worship than is
complacent, shallow celebration.
But even here, I’m inconsistent, because in practice I can
actually put up with a certain amount of ‘fakery’ in church music. For instance, I don’t mind John Rutter, or
Taizé chants, although Taizé is formulaic, and Rutter quite calculating in the
emotional effects he produces. Really
bad music closes minds, shuts off opportunities, creates a monoculture of the
lowest common denominator. Some
not-very-good music actually acts as a place-holder and a stepping-stone towards
the really good stuff, rather than initiating an irreversible decline away from
it. This is the mistake highly intelligent musicians can make
about Rutter. They claim he ‘debases’
taste, when in practice he acts as a recruiting sergeant for the masters. Someone who is first captivated by Rutter
will be ready to try Wesley or Purcell.
Anyone who likes Taizé may well be open to Gregorian chant. But I fear
that anyone who really, really likes Marty Haugen is in danger of only, ever,
being content with Marty Haugen, and indeed switching off from anything else
before it begins, as ‘too hard’ or ‘too boring’. Call the aspirational side of Rutter snobbery
if you will. I’ll accept being called a
snob, or middle-class, or elitist, or anything else anyone cares to call me, if
only I can have good music.
.
And so … what is good music?
And so we come round to the beginning again …
