GENERATION GAP AND THE NEW COMMON-SONG

The traditional hymnals are getting tossed.  Younger, elder-free congregations, in reaction to the ennui of old forms, are replacing them with “hit” Christian tunes, mainly in the styles of pop, rock, country, etc., consistent with their media indoctrinated upbringing.  Considering the musical paucity of so many of the old hymns, this is not surprising.  At least the newer songs are more meaningful and vibrant by comparison.  It seems a reasonable compromise.  And compromise it is. 

The new commonsong [see ON MUSIC, Segment 9] is indeed common song.  On behalf of the young, it is a kind of catch-up being played in church with secular musics.  That is, with the style of the musical accompaniment.  Only the words have been changed, messages altered to suit the perceived market.  This has actually been a practice in church music for centuries:

“These contrafacta, in which a secular text has been replaced by a sacred one, . . . represent the continuation of a tradition that was already strong in the thirteenth century.”⁸⁷ 

The difference between then and now, though, is that the church has become a demographic of the music industry, a consumer of product originating in commercial industry, an end-user in a course of business begun in the secular world.  “Christian” music is a market fast-become economically self-sufficient.  It appears even as a way to spread the Gospel.  Money, fame, and the spiritual.  Perfect!  

Really?  Let’s examine it.  What is the differences between this new Christian music and the secular?  Nothing.  The words might be Christian-centric, but what is being demonstrated is how much alike is the Christian experience to any other, including the manner of its presentation - show-biz Christianity.   

If in fact the music was different, it would stand little chance of breaking through in the music industry.  The channels within are very tightly controlled.  There are “rules” in the industry, conjointly with the media, a song must  follow in order to be acceptable.  Two of them are that a song must have a catchy “hook” and it must be danceable. 

A “hook” is a repeated word or phrase that grabs a listener’s attention memorably - often used as the title of the song.  Usually the hook is part of the lyric, but it can also be in the musical arrangement.  “Who listens to the words!” has become a popular aphorism.  Not entirely true, but true enough.  What the musical arrangement means to do is get the body dancing.  After that, little else matters - what we’re seeing in some churches, the body dancing, little else mattering.  It is definitely not music worked out from the contemplative.  Not that there is anything wrong with dancing.  But, what is the difference between the music that inspires secular dancing and the music that inspires spiritual dancing? 

The generation gaps are reflected in the musics being heard among the various sectarian congregations.  Following in these ever widening gaps, the new commonsong in the future, ironically, may not be so common between generations.  Americans seldom outgrow the music that appealed to them in their adolescence.  As the Americanism goes - “For kids of all ages.”  Each generation emerges with its unique anthems.  The generation now putting its music into Christian practice, is yet another in a line of generations fed on a steady, fast-food diet of low-nutrition music. 

The so-called “new” Christian music, deriving as it does from industrial forms, is retrograde art uninformed by more than a century of musical developments.  The ear continues to be deluged daily with automated music of the low-nutrition sort.  It is unavoidable.  Several decades ago an author published a book about the cultural “dumbing down” of America.  I don’t think even he had foreseen just how universally-mechanized it would become, as well as its deadening effect.  Stores, telephones, elevators, offices, restrooms.  And not only do people need to close their ears in order to get on with the business at hand, but are in training to not listen to music when it’s being played.  By it being everywhere they are becoming deadened to its presence.  The ear is saturated with the standard diatonic scale and its scaletone chords.  

By contrast, music deserving several listenings, that which draws upon 20th century developments in harmony seldom gets a single hearing.  People need a place to go to be able to listen enough times what’s truly new in order to become accustomed to it.  The innovative, often challenging, requires that sort of thing.  Many years ago, not liking a particular composer, I was told to listen to his work anyway, that it was possible to learn to like him.  Well, I did, and that’s exactly what happened.  And I have played his pieces on piano ever since, to my lifelong satisfaction.  The composer was Johann Sebastian Bach.  

Rap is certainly evidence of commercial music’s exhaustion.  Although coming from a slightly different source, this “son” of Rock, having nowhere else to go within its fostering genre, must get the “beat” to be even bigger and more at the center, leaving melody and the simplest harmony even further behind.  And to be more than music - to be socio-politically didactic, for instance.⁸⁸ 

Further evidence of this tonal exhaustion are court cases mounting between songwriters suing one another over who wrote such and such melody.  It’s just as likely that the melody in question, undoubtedly a common air, has been around longer than the litigants have been alive.  It’s only a matter of who was going to latch on to it, copyright, and record it first.  

Commonsong being second-rate compared to what is possible in music is not a new situation.  The older commonsong in the 19th century, generally, was also second-rate when compared to the fine music of its time  This was true, too, of the Victorian imitations in the secular world of the Romantic classics - the popular sentimental-song sheetmusic business and dance hall tunes, which in turn affected gospel music.  It is a period that created the parameters for our own contemporary popular music industry.  

Throughout history, secular “airs” have found their way into church, some better than others.  Some have regarded the aria, introduced around 1600 in Italy, which popularized solo voice with accompaniment, to have been a degenerating influence on Catholic liturgy.  But Victorian dance hall tunes were even worse for Protestant liturgy.  

Charismatic preachers have said that a thing or a person being popular is evidence of God’s blessing.  There are Christians who place photos of Elvis Presley equally next to imaginative drawings of Jesus prominently in altar-like settings in their living rooms.  In a nation obsessed with being popular, this is not surprising.  The result is that today’s pop incursion into the sanctuary is a one-way course - the world entering the church but nothing returning from it to the world.  

Satisfying the musical demands of commercial industry is the reason “Christian Music” has become a marketing demographic within it.  By competing along lines drawn outside its presumed ethos, “Christian” music is now just one among many in the d.j.’s domain?  

“Augustine says that his purpose in the work [of writing De Musica] is frankly to provide a gradual passage from devotion to art to devotion to God.  He assumes that the properties of verse are well known to most people [as is clear with pop songwriters], but that the properties of abstract music are not so well known [as is clear with pop songwriters], and that he can reach his goal best by starting along a familiar road. . . . Music is more like immutable truth than poetry, in as much as it is less bound up with matter and with created things.  Augustine’s declared purpose is -

‘to separate growing man, or men of any age, not violently but by degrees, from the carnal senses and carnal letters, to which it is so difficult for them not to be attached.  Reason must lead them to attach themselves in love and without the interference of nature to the unchanging truth of the one God and Lord of all things who presides over human minds.’”⁸⁹ 

Music in church should be different from that which is heard out in the world.  For sixteen hundred years the greatest music was made in church because the church supplied a home for music  It channelled and utilized God’s gifts born of talent.  Then the music and the musicians got tossed into the streets.  For a couple of hundred years the aristocracy picked up the pieces.  Democracy put a stop to that.  These days, considering the modern problem overpowering media presents, and the need to resist, production and introduction of new music probably shouldn’t take place in church - the reason for a separate location.  

We could do with less cheerleading on Sunday if it resulted in more pastoring during the week.  Pastoring can be a catalyst.  And pastoring can reach out to studied, creative musicians and artists who, because of their innovative bents, are effectively outcasts living somewhere in a community not too far from a church.  And provide a place for them.  Christianity has been more accommodating to different societies and cultures than any other religion in history.  So, it should not be a problem, right?  The church being a hub.  

CHRISTIAN MUSICS

I took an informal survey of 38 churches in Los Angeles - 34 Protestant, spanning several different denominations and non-denominations, and 4 Catholic - to ascertain music policy among the approximately 18,000 church goers represented, about 6,000 being Catholic.⁹⁰   Almost all of them, of course, used some form of traditional hymn or common-song.  Those that did not, used Contemporary.  Roughly two-thirds of them also used Contemporary as well as Country and Gospel.  Gospel is, perhaps, the first American-originated music to be accepted across denominational lines.  Also, several of these churches utilized a form of MMO.  MMO, “music minus one,” refers to tracks of pre-recorded music purchased through mail order, along with matching lyric sheets, for otherwise unaccompanied singers to sing to.  In the bars, it is known as “Karaoke,” especially popular with the Japanese, who developed it.  Like the bars, some of our churches find it expedient to no longer pay a living piper.  What tells the story also is that repeated image on Trinity Broadcasting Network, of a singer before an unplayed grand piano performing to pre-taped music. 

A couple of churches said they used jazz, which turned out to be a middle-brow contemporary music known as Fusion.  About one-third of the churches, including most of the Catholics, used what they said was 20th century classical music on occasion.  Pre-20th century classical has been the norm.  With that, there is consistency in the musics being used throughout the churches.  The varieties of musics being used by them, all function within the major and minor scales, making no reference to the harmonic developments that have occurred in music in the 20th century.  Already into the 21st century, and virtually no stock taken by American Christendom of the organic growth of music throughout the entirety of the 20th century. 

I was struck by the emphasis several gave to their “O, no” in response to the question asked, “Does your church ever use jazz?”, a few with disdain and a couple evincing mild shock at the question. 

Aside from the survey, I noted various other churches employing Revivalist, Blues, Funk, Rock (including Heavy Metal).  Recently on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, a Christian television network, Rap was featured. 

“What is it that we want church music to do for us, and is it supplying what we need?  We have reached a point where roughly one-third of the Sunday-morning service is given to music, whether it be vocal music in the form of hymns, responses, and anthems, or instrumental music prior to the service proper; music to fill awkward pauses, or a few phrases to permit the seating of latecomers.  For such a relatively large, and proportionately important, part of our service we have achieved no great degree of agreement concerning what is proper and desirable.  The demands placed upon congregations by the ruling bodies of the several denominations are often couched in generalities that are subject to a number of interpretations and often culminate in endless debate.  Presbyterians are warned that ‘in singing the praises of God, we are to sing in the spirit of worship, with understanding in our hearts,’ and that ‘hymns should have the note of praise, or be in accord with the spirit of the sermon.’  No matters of musical style or artistic taste are considered in the volume from which the quotation is taken; the implication is inescapable that decisions of appropriateness will be based on current values, if they need be made at all.  Canon 24 of the Protestant Episcopal Church states, in part, that ‘it shall be the duty of every Minister to see that music is used in his congregation as an offering for the glory of God and as a help to the people in their worship in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer. . . It shall be his duty to suppress all light and unseemly music and all irreverance [sic] in the rendition thereof.’  Here the restrictions are more completely spelled out.  (It is interesting to note that some of the recent appearances of the jazz idiom have been in the Episcopal service rather than in the comparatively unrestrictive Presbyterian.)”⁹¹ 

The problem for modern music, or music with a suspect name, has always been in getting a fair hearing (which, of course, again underscores the necessity of Centers).  That usually means passing inspection of the music director and/or the pastor, sometimes one and the same.  But, as one book agent in Christian publishing lamented to me, ministers are being graduated from seminaries woefully uneducated in music.  And music directors, in my experience, are trained up in the major mode of music with a minimum of 20th Century to their education.  Which is one of the reasons, though, that they’ve got the job.  There is little reason for them to take additional work upon themselves if there’s no outcry for it.  As with bureaucracies and most established institutions, a church usually functions at the convenience of its staff. 

Gatekeepers in churches with large music programs that could possibly have accommodated innovative music, given the chance, can be amazingly cold towards considering it.  More than a couple of those situations appeared to be a defense against allowing anyone else “in” to what apparently is the music staff’s exclusive “franchise.”  These were churches usually involved with record and tape production of their music for public sale.  

As for jazz, some people can only imagine jazz by what regularly goes by the name “jazz” on popular radio and television stations, such as the likes of Kenny G or David Sanborn or a kind of mindless “groove” under repetitive chord changes, of a sort heard in countless local jam sessions that serves to facilitate pre-digested soloing. 

“The popular [form of jazz] that is most widely heard in our time lacks both the rhythmic complexity and the melodic or harmonic improvisation that mark the true styles of jazz.  In fact, much of it contains less of the jazz element than does some of the church music that is in use in several denominations.  To return to Ostransky, we see that ‘the jazz quality of a piece is determined by the manner in which it is played,’ and not by the way in which it was written.  Applying this criterion to church practice, we find that certain approaches to jazz style are made every time a pianist underlays the singing of a hymn with scale elaborations, arpeggiated figures, rhythmic, driving bass patterns, or any of the other devices employed in so-called evangelistic piano playing.”⁹² 

For several generations now, jazz has not overcome the bad press given to it throughout most of its history and still sticking in the minds of many.  The “morality” taken by many in the Christian churches for their musical stance is really only their attachment to what they have been accustomed to hearing from childhood.  Minor modes have been censored from their lives, in the belief that “all music written in minor keys is pernicious (or like the more familiar fiction that all minor keys are mournful).”⁹³   Respecting the latter, in an interesting, perhaps self-critical, critique, I rather like what John Wyclif (d. 1384) wrote:

“In the old days, men sang songs of mourning when they were in prison, in order to teach the Gospel, to put away idleness, and to be occupied in a useful way for the time.  But those songs and ours do not agree, for ours invite jollity and pride, and theirs lead to mourning and to dwelling longer on the words of God’s Law.”⁹⁴ 

And the difficulty with younger people with respect to 20th century music is their attachment to products of the “Hit Parade.” 

“For if a man has been reared from childhood up to the age of steadiness and sense in the use of music that is sober and regulated, then he detests the opposite kind whenever he hears it, and calls it “vulgar” [“unworthy of a free man”]: whereas, if he has been reared up in the common hackneyed type of music, he declares the opposite of this to be cold and unpleasing.”⁹⁵ 

“Whatever style in music is to be presented, it must be done with the understanding that communication needs to be achieved between composer and listener.  Music is not, as the old saw would have it, a universal language.  Any form of communication must be equally clear to both the communicator and the auditor.  Jazz is no more universally understood than is Arabic or Hindustani; our current church music is likewise incomprehensible to a majority of the world’s people.”⁹⁶