Church Music- Regressive

[solicitr]

Great news! With Advent, our parish is changing its Mass setting to Schubert's German Mass! Huge improvement from the Haas pap we're using currently.

[Primula Baggins]

You can't go wrong with Schubert.

So I take it you're a member of the Society for a Moratorium on the Music of Marty Haugen and David Haas?

I'm not so familiar with Haas's music, but oh boy does my Lutheran church sing a lot of Marty Haugen's work. I'm on my church's committee that selects hymns and other music, and we go back and back to those for our less-traditional service. Yes, there is better music out there, and we also use that, but the "contemporary" songs by Haugen et al. are easy to sing and bring the congregation together—they like them. And they're lightyears better than the popular and easy-to-sing hymns many Protestants grew up with, which are theologically verrrrrry bad, some of them.

For listening, such as offertories, preludes, and postludes, I say the better the music is, the better (our music director is a superb pianist and often plays Bach for those).

But there's more to congregational singing than aesthetic elevation, at least in the Protestant tradition. It's a tool of community. Bach knew that—look at the way he wrote so many chorales based on simple hymns everyone knew, which he embroidered around and interwove with other melodies while still allowing the plain singable line of the hymn to come through.

[solicitr]

But there's more to congregational singing than aesthetic elevation, at least in the Protestant tradition. It's a tool of community. Bach knew that

As did Schubert, writer of Lieder: many composed on guitar! After all, this one is alternatively titled the Volksmesse.

(BTW- what's theologically wrong with Nun Danket Alle Gott or Ein Feste Burg?)

[solicitr]

Two thousand years of talent brought us Gregorian chant, Victoria, Palestrina, Bach and Mozart, and we have to listen to "Gather Us In" every Sunday

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho
Haugen-Haas have got to go

[Primula Baggins]

The old standards I'm thinking of are more along the lines of "Shall We Gather at the River?", "In the Garden," "Softly and Tenderly"—easy and fun to sing, but often emptily sentimental in their 19th-century way. The Lutheran church itself never featured these, at least the branches of it I know—but that was because most of us arrived in the United States long after they were written, and Lutheran church services in English were rare until the 1920s or so.

New members now often do come from churches where those were sung.

[solicitr]

Well, you still have, in the 19th-c English tradition, the great wealth of Wesley and Wesley-inspired stuff, with which one can rarely go wrong (and which are eminently singable by congregants). Even when they're slightly sappy, they're not remotely as sappy as the stuff from the Gather-and-Praise mafia.

What I find tragic is that some parishes, including one I used to call SS Peter, Paul and Mary, maintain a bigoted ban on Luther and even Bach, as if they might transmit some lethal Protestant virus by their very intonement!

[Primula Baggins]

No Bach? Seriously? Wow. That's cutting off your nose to spite your face, definitely.

Though Bach is insidious, you know. A number of serious Japanese students of his music have ended up becoming Lutherans. I remember reading an interview with one who said something like, "Once I really understood the meaning Bach put into the music, it simply became necessary."

Luther, well—after some of the things he said about the Pope I can understand being deeply annoyed. . . . Diplomatic he was not, and he had some appalling prejudices.

He did write some beautiful hymns, though.

[Crucifer]

We're doing Faurés Requiem for All Souls...



But seriously, the music was written for the worship of God, not to say "Oh, I'm an Anglican. I write better music than you."

We sing music by all sorts of people in my church. Bach, Schubert, people still around, Gregorian Chant, Anglican Chant, Mozart, Elgar, Stanford, Wesley, Howells, Joubert...

[Primula Baggins]

And so do we, including music from the Lutheran church in Africa.

In the late 1960s and 1970s there was a big movement in mainline churches toward "contemporary" services and masses, a revulsion against the "stodgy" hymns and liturgies that had prevailed up until then. Now some of the "contemporary" music has ossified a bit itself.

[Crucifer]

Nothing wrong with a bit of contemporary music either.

But you can't simply cast aside a huge chunk of the repertoire because of who wrote it.

[Primula Baggins]

No, but in the year or so I've been on the music committee I have seen that we cast aside hymns that our music director thinks are inferior musically, and the pastor is in there vetoing anything militaristic or triumphalist. An awful lot of hymns dearly beloved by our older members are all about flaming swords, marching to Zion, and God trampling this or that.

[solicitr]

You do realize that "Onward Christian Soldiers," having been written for the Salvation Army, is metaphorical?

A big problem is that we're stuck with a lot of stuff that may have seemed 'contemporary' around 1970 or so, and now unfortunately smells more of patchouli oil and cannabis smoke than incense.

[nerdanel]

You are KIDDING me! There is this whole group of sane people who want a moratorium on the works of those two clowns? Oh boy...if I'd realized that, I might have stayed Catholic. Sure, there were minor theological quibbles I had with the religion, but really, having to sing and play (violin at church) the music of those two complete clowns was what pushed me over the edge.

[baby tuckoo]

You do realize that "Onward Christian Soldiers," having been written for the Salvation Army, is metaphorical?

Well, I think I do. But what is metaphorical (like Scripture, for many people) soon becomes literal.


Amazing, Crucifer . . . I just played Fuare's "Requiem" for myself this evening. The voice exchages are wonderful.

[Primula Baggins]

Faure's Requiem is lovely.

Nel, you might have liked our church's music program (= anyone from 8 to 80 who can play any instrument and cannot run fast enough to escape the music director). We like Bach, for example, but on Palm Sunday we do a New Orleans-style brass marching ensemble to lead everyone into the church.

We sing some Haugen-and-Haas type music. We listen to better. And our pastor and music director have written a lot of liturgical music together in recent years and are publishing it. Some is extremely beautiful in the classical way. Though their Lenten liturgy is very, very bluesy.

[Crucifer]

Oh please! All those militaristic ones are about fighting sin and evil and hell and so on. People of God arise and put your armour on, for example, is about putting on the armour of God's love. Those hymns are the best! You can belt them out full blast and just let rip!

Of course, occasional music is very important. The music has to be appropriate to the occasion like. You can't have the Hallelujah chorus on Good Friday for example...

[Primula Baggins]

Crucifer, those hymns aren't always seen as metaphorical, especially during wartime. They've been explicitly used to assure people that God is on their side and hates those other guys.

And outside of actual war, even the metaphor is troubling: life isn't war and God's not a general, so why foster the image? There are other ways of understanding a powerful God than singing about "his terrible swift sword."

Your mileage may vary, but that's my view.