St. Augustine and Sound Reinforcement

It has been a few weeks since my last post and Red Team has continued with the mic-less experiment. The new semester is also well under way and I am teaching a course on the history of christian worship. Inevitably, I am drawing comparisons between contemporary worship practices and the description of older practices.

Something I will be researching and writing much more about is the movement in American Protestant churches to model (or re-model) their sanctuaries as concert venues. Consider this example of a church in Alabama.

The worship center was originally part of the First Baptist Church's campus in the heart of Bessemer, Alabama. The room was a stylistically traditional facility with a typical stage, choir loft, organ and bacony [sic]. Ricky Todd, worship pastor, expressed concerns early into the project about the traditional nature of both the acoustics and the unusually high ambient light levels due to the 20-foot tall windows running down either side of the facility. . . In late 2006 The Foundry pressed forward with the complete renovation of the facility's interior.

The renovation included the instillation of theater lighting, a complex sound system and state of the art video and projection equipment (hence the concern over the "unusually high ambient light levels"). It also included "acoustical materials that were installed on the side walls and the balcony face, as well as the materials that would be suspended overhead" to remove those troublesome "traditional acoustics" (acoustics which were designed to naturally enhance a congregation's singing but which prove too live and unruly for an amplified rock band).

"Their desire," the article explains "was to transform the space into a uniquely modern, multi-functional venue." Now, since remodeling, the building "has successfully hosted a number of concerts and community events, as well as their regularly scheduled Thursday and Sunday night worship services." What I want to draw attention to is the implicit assumption that the physical and technical properties of a concert venue is the same as a sanctuary. The two are now interchangeable.

While most small to mid-sized churches cannot afford this sort of renovation, many aspire to it. My guess is that this concert venue aesthetic only really started making inroads into regular sanctuaries in the last 15 years. What this means is that there is a new generation of Christians who have very different expectations for Sunday morning worship than their parents. Just consider the change in congregational singing. Most people focus on the change in repertoire, but in this post I want to think about volume.

Worship Music for Reconciliation and Justice

By a fantastic stroke of good fortune I stumbled across New City Fellowship's music conference in St Louis. It has the intriguing title "Worship Music for Reconciliation and Justice." The lucky part is I am actually in St. Louis teaching at Covenant Seminary for a couple of days.

The New City Fellowships are a group of congregations in the PCA that are deliberately multi-ethnic. They each--apparently--work to develop their own worship music that is authentic to their congregations. This means not just embracing different styles but also different languages. The New City Fellowship congregations in St Louis include a significant number of West African immigrants (I met people from Congo and Liberia this evening).

I gatecrashed the first evening session and recorded the worship group Voice of Africa from St Louis. Here is a sample. It is Brule En Moi (click to listen)
And here is there opening number Yeasu-way Mar-waya (click to listen)
It was incredibly moving to sing in this congregation.

I spoke with Elaine Ramos, the director of music at New City Fellowship in Fredricksburg, VA. I asked her if it was demanding to have a congregation sing in different languages -- she answered that of course it was but "praise is a sacrifice."

A Singing Congregation

Sunday was wonderful -- the congregation demonstrated its growing confidence in its own voice. We continued to apply the lessons learned. We mixed familiar tunes with hymns new to the congregation. Two of the hymns we sang a cappella. 

This was the first Sunday I used my new audio recorder (Zoom H2). It proved a wonderful little device that can record in 360 degrees so it points at the congregation as well as the musicians. I plan to use this recorder as I travel the country in search of congregational singing . . .

Anyway, you can hear the results below. As you listen realize that this is a very average congregation led by musicians with no amplification.

The opening hymn/call to worship was a setting of Psalm 139, "Search Me O God" by J Edwin Orr (1936). We set it to the tune EVENTIDE by Monk (1861) which is associated with the hymn Abide With Me - but the mood seemed to fit and it is too good a tune to leave just for funerals! (click to listen)

We chose "How Deep the Father's Love" by Townend (1995) as the second hymn.  This is a beautiful hymn (We have re-written a couple of lines to take out the echos of the doctrine of limited atonement and (to my mind) a cold understanding of penal substitutionary atonement that takes away Christ's agency). (click to listen)

Our closing hymn (coming after the offering) was Isaac Watt's setting of Psalm 106 (1719) to the OLD 100th from the Genevan Psalter (1551). We book-ended the psalm with the familiar "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" (Doxology). The congregations volume swells as the psalm progresses. From the front we could hear harmonies coming from the pews. (click to listen)

After the service we received a great deal of positive feedback. It was not the generic "we enjoyed your music today." Instead, we had people asking us about tunes etc. Libby observed that folk are starting to have a sense of ownership of their singing in the service. One father of an eighteen year old said his son loved singing his own harmonies . . .

Learning

It is the 4th of July weekend - always tricky for an Englishman in the US - even trickier for Christians wanting to be avoid idolatry while at the same time recognizing the importance of place, tradition and history.
This was our first time leading worship after our last slightly tricky attempt. I am pleased to say that we actually managed to implement the lessons we learned. Libby did a god job of leading the congregation in the Tallis Canon. We also reintroduced Libby's hymn Make Us New set to Cyril Tawney's frequenty covered folk song Grey Funnel Line (the refrain is based on Barry Dransfield's version).

I say reintroduced because we had played this hymn with the old amplified Red Team. Now without piano and with the need for multiple voices to make the harmonies heard, Libby worked up a new arrangement.
One point of interest in the arrangement is that the tune is in the tenor sandwiched between treble and bass lines. We learned this lesson/trick from the shape note arrangements in the 1834 Southern Harmony hymnal. Men and women can sing the line (an octave apart) giving a strong lead to the congregation. It tends to mean that you can keep the range within the abilities of the average worshipper (not too high or too low) without pushing it too high because of the need to fit 3 parts underneath it. Also the strong male voices can carry the tune and lead the singing.
I first ran into this at River Hills Church of Christ in Oxford, Mississippi in 1997. River Hills is a small African American  congregation with a fantastic singing tradition shaped by the Church of Christ's prohibition on the use instruments in worship. It is where I first heard and sang Charles Tindley's hymns . . . but I digress.

We knew this was an unfamiliar melody for the congregation, so we used the first verse as a call to worship - we had eight voices. It then served as a closing hymn with 2 guitars, 2 violins and a cello (thanks again to all the fine musical volunteers).

We were able to set up much closer to the congregation this week and from where I was strumming and singing it felt like it worked. By "worked" I mean I could feel my own voice as part of the congregation all raising our voices together.

U2, Glastonbury and Congregational Singing

Last night I watched the BBC broadcast of U2 at Glastonbury festival. Towards the end of their set there was an extraordinary moment. Bono led the tens of thousands of festival goers in singing Coldplay's "Yellow."

It would be fairly safe to say that the vast majority of the audience singing at the top of their lungs in the dark and the rain at Glastonbury do not sing hymns in church. Rock concerts and football/rugby matches probably  serve as the last remaining place British 20-somethings experience the power of congregational singing. 

I think there are more similarities between this singing and congregational singing than simply a bunch of people singing at the same time.

This struck me a couple of years ago listening to Coldplay's free live album. U2's music is famous for its spiritual leanings and anthemic sing-a-long songs (Pride, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Where the Streets Have No Name, One etc.). I think of Coldplay as a kind of U2-light. They are clearly influenced by the seminal Irish group both in sound -- anthemic songs replacing Edge's sonic pallet with Chris Martin's piano-- and in lyrical content (a little more deeply meaningless perhaps).

Now at Glastonbury 2011, Bono leads his congregation in singing a song from this new hymnody they helped create. Interestingly enough the crowd is able to join in because they are all familiar with the song.  To enable congregational singing you need a common musical vocabulary. Also  interesting is that as U2 and countless other rock bands know, if you want to move people from being a passive audience to one that sings loudly together with you then in addition to singable choruses, the band has to drop its volume so that people can hear themselves. It is this group/congregational singing that creates the community whether at a U2 concert or in church.

The Devil's Music!

A Tricky Sunday

Come, O Creator Spirit Blest, Rha­ban­us Mau­rus, c. 800; trans Cas­wall 1849, TALLIS CANON

Thomas Tallis 1505-1585

Clap your hands, ye people all, Charles Wesley, LLANFAIR 

Servant King, Kendrick

Soon and Very Soon, Andrae Crouch

Jubilate Deo, Praetorius c.1600 

Come to the Water, Foley

  

Well it had to happen, we have had three successful unplugged Sundays and so we should have expected a bump or two in the road. So what happened? Well it was an all singing all dancing Cecil B. DeMille cast-of-thousands service. Ascension Sunday + Baptism + Confirmation + Communion + Big choral number.