Fellow Travellers

I was excited to stumble on Wendell Kimborough's blog called "The Church Music Blog". Wendell is the worship leader at an Anglican church plant in Washington DC. Here is what he says about his blog (and his ministry):

"this blog has been making one sustained argument: that the most important thing music should do in church is get people to sing.  I am trying to paint a picture of corporate worship in which the people in the pews are co-creators of a beautiful sound together"

 So I encourage you to check it out.

Recording a Singing Church

Red Team has just started the process of recording a new album of the songs we sing with the congregation at Ashland First. I am going to try and produce an album which is true to my theological vision of a singing church. This means:

1. All the singing on the congregational hymns/songs will be by a group, not a solo vocal.
2. This group will be representative of the whole congregation - in age, sex and ability. (OK, in the interests of quality I should probably say "somewhat representative")
3. We are going to use the talents we have to hand in the congregation which means we will have an unorthodox mix of instruments. 

I know that I will fight some of my natural producer's instincts on these rules and will probably have a number of compromises -- one I have made already is that I shipped in a drummer which we don't have on a regular Sunday.

It is interesting to consider that most recordings of "church music" are built either around a solo vocal (contemporary praise and worship) or an accomplished choir (classical music). Black gospel music is, of course, built around both. Where are the voices of the congregation?  It makes it difficult for congregations and musicians to imagine what this music would sound like - church music where the voices of the congregation praising God together is the music of the church.

The Difference between Praise Choruses and Hymns

Here is something making the rounds of the interwebs -- it made me smile.

Hail the Day

Ascension Sunday and there was quite a volume of singing in the sanctuary of First United Methodist Church, Ashland this morning.
A number of forces came together to encourage congregational singing:
1) Two of the three hymns were known to the congregation and are very 'singable'
2) Red Team, in its current unamplified incarnation, has reached a critical mass of singers - three on melody, two altos, two tenors and two basses.  I think I have discovered that--when unamplified-- a group of people singing is a good way to encourage a group of people to sing!
3) Libby spent a lot of time with the arrangements to make sure that our odd little ensemble sounded good. It is a strange assortment: clarinet, trombone, accordion, violin and two guitars.
--
Check out the volume of the congregation:
Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise
The Head That Once Was Crowned With Thorns

The final hymn was the South African, Hallelujah We Sing Your Praises.
I think we sound good but we didn't do enough to make the congregation feel comfortable -- and the interesting clapping at the end probably didn't help (memo to self: sort the clapping out before you start!)

Learning from Folk

A new hit with an unknown oldie

Nothing much to report other than our discovery of a GREAT old hymn that I dug up via YouTube for today's lectionary reading (Jn 15:1-8). What I heard was an old American hymn called "I am the Vine" with those beautiful open fourths and fifths. A bit more googling found me the score. Libby and I worked on it with guitar and accordion and suddenly we had something that sounded like it belonged on the Cohen brothers' True Grit! We took it down a whole step to make the chorus a little more comfortable.
This morning we added Mary and Allie's fiddles.
I was sure the congregation would learn it quickly -- when I listened back to the recording I was amazed to hear the congregation come busting in on the first line after the fiddle had played the melody once.
Check it out: I am the Vine
In introducing the song, I asked people to let me know after the service if they had sung it before -- no one had.

We also did a couple of other unusual numbers: the spiritual Lord I want to be a Christian  and Sidney Carter's Lord of the Dance set to the Shaker Tune SIMPLE GIFTS. I didn't think Lord of the Dance was unusual until the organist who has been at her console for around forty years told me the congregation had never sung it before.

Can you hear us at the back?

The view from the back of AFUMC

As we continue with the mic-less experiment at church, it is difficult to get a sense of how much people can hear.
A couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, the sound man Tim broadcast the service on the web via the small mic on his i-pad. His i-pad was sitting on the desk at the back of church. When I streamed the recording, the first thing I noticed was that you could hear all of Red Team's voices and instruments.  This was a relief. 
I then compared it to the recording I had made using my Zoom H2 recorder. The Zoom has four mics which gives it ears in the back of its head. I place the mic in the front pew with two mics directed at the music team and the other two pointing at the whole congregation. I then mix the four-channel recording down to stereo. 
Anyway, when I compared the two different recordings I noticed that the balance of instruments was better from the back of the church. Most noticeably the violin floated over the top of the voices.
--
I Love You Lord (Zoom H2)
I love You Lord (i-pad - recorded from internet stream) sample 1, sample 2
--
The second thing I noticed was that on the i-pad recording the congregation sounded muted -- nowhere near as loud as it was on my recording. Of course, this makes sense too. When you are sitting on the back pew, the congregation are all singing away from you.
As I continue to think about congregational singing without amplification, I think there are some interesting things to consider here. How do you encourage those in the back half of the sanctuary to "sing lustily and with good courage" when they are not surrounded by the sound of their neighbors singing? 
One solution is to change the seating arrangement -- you move the congregation so they can hear each other wherever they are sitting. In Jean Halden Kilgre's excellent book When Church Became Theater (OUP, 2005) she explains why in the late eighteen hundreds churches with  curvilinear pews and inclined or bowled floors became so popular. The architects and congregations were responding to a new democratic impulse: people in the pews wanted to see and hear each other. Kilgre points out that this change in design coincided with the "zenith" in congregational singing (p.133). 
AFUMC's sanctuary--built in the 1950s and influenced by the liturgical renewal movement--is arranged in good medieval fashion facing front. The the pews are straight, straight ahead and bolted down!
If you can't move the pews, perhaps you can move the singers. In eighteenth century England, faced with medieval churches and a desire to "improve the quality of psalmody," the reformers of congregational singing raised galeries at the west end of parish churches from which the newly formed choir led the singing. These West Gallery musicians went out of style with the influx of organs in the nineteenth century -- a struggle immortalized in Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree. Ashland First United Methodist church has the advantage of already having a west gallery. The acoustics sound good too -- check out the Palestrina piece below.
--
Here are the sounds we have been making:
Palm Sunday (April 1, 2012)
Hosanna Loud Hosanna
Ride On, Ride On in Majesty - Libby's setting of the Palm Sunday hymn to Palestrina's Jesu Rex Admirabilis.
I Love You Lord/Hosanna (during communion)
Easter 2 (April 15, 2012)
Rise O Church - a four-part call to worship set to the great hymn tune CWM RHONDDA
The Head That Once Was Crowned With Thorns
Father God in Heaven