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

Singing in Georgia

I have just spent an exciting and interesting three days at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta attending a conference with the cool--yet oddly familiar--title "The Singing Church: Current Practices and Emerging Trends in Congregational Song.”  I will be processing all I learned heard and sung for many weeks and months to come and my thoughts stimulated by this conference will spill out on this blog. 

One of the highlights for me was the session led by John Bell from the Iona community. I read his book The Singing Thing: a case for congregational singing several years ago -- many of the ideas in his book have percolated into my own attempts at leading singing. I was pleased to discover that the sequel, The Singing Thing too,  was on the GIA bookstall. In this book Bell gives a practical guide to teaching congregations to sing. In his workshop on the Tuesday night he gave a demonstration of his skills -- particularly teaching songs without using written notation (an unusual experience for western white churches). Instead, as he teaches he signs the pitches in the air with his hands. It takes him several pages in his book to describe this technique. It helps to see him in action. You can see how quickly he teaches a congregation a short song in three parts in this video:

Singing in Mississippi

Dee Thomas-Bomer working with the altos

I have just spent a remarkable weekend in Oxford, Mississippi catching up with old friends and singing. Oxford is the home of the University of Mississippi and I first arrived there in 1997 with a guitar and a suitcase seeking my fame and fortune – or that is what I jokingly tell people these days.

I went back this year to attend the Music of the South Symposium and also the Black Alumni Reunion Weekend. The symposium was organized by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and I was asked to speak on a couple of panels. To prepare for the “Music, Religion and Creativity” panel I reread the master’s thesis I wrote 13 years ago. The thesis--Singing a New Song--was on the University of Mississippi Gospel Choir (UMGC) and sitting on the flight to Memphis I read this:

The Hymns We Used To Sing

This past Sunday we sang "Father Hear the Prayer We Offer." It is a hymn I have known and loved since childhood. It caused me to reflect on the way our hymnody shapes our theology. Certainly the sentiments of this hymn seem close to my own convictions--Christianity as a courageous not an easy calling. 

We sang Libby's harmonies to the melody that Ralph Vaughan Williams "adapted" from an English folk tune. I remember watching a documentary that explained how Vaughan Williams passed-off as "traditional" a number of the tunes he wrote for the English Hymnal (1906) -- I wonder if this is one of them. Anyway, Libby's harmonies have a little of the South African quality to them.  . . we'll do it a bit faster next time.

Father Hear the Prayer We Offer. (audio) (sheet music)

z

Before Christmas I came across this interesting "survey of 28 mainline Protestant hymnals" of the last 130 years or so (Christianity Today, March 2011). The result is the top 27 Protestant hymns. Cast your eye down the list below and see which ones you know. 

At the end of last semester I passed this list out in a couple of my classes. Now keep in mind that these are all religion majors many of whom want to go into some kind of Christian ministry and who are very involved in their own churches. I asked them to give me their personal score. The rule was that you had to be able to sing the first line.  What was interesting was that some students scored very highly while the rest barely made it on the board: either in the high teens or below five (I scored 22). This seems to confirm the observation that for many younger Christians there has been almost a complete break with their musical heritage.

I will not join with the creaking traditionalists who automatically think that if something new displaces something old then that is a Bad Thing. However, it is interesting to contemplate what such a clean break with the past suggests about the way churches today view both their own pasts and those who seem reluctant to make such a clean break. It also makes me wonder if the new praise songs sung by my students will be unknown to their own children?

As long as my kids are still singing #s 13 and 19 by mid-century, I will be satisfied! 

Martin Luther King Jr.: The "Vast Unity" of Worship

  

It is Martin Luther King Day here in the United States; it is also the start of a new semester. As I was preparing to teach my course Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, I ran into a sermon King preached early in his ministry at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Here is an excerpt:

Although private worship is significant and uplifting it must not be a stopping point. A worship period on the radio cannot be a substitute for a worship period in a church Worship at its best is a social experience where people of all levels of  life come together and communicate with a common father Here the employer and the employee, the rich and the poor, the white collar worker and the common laborer all come together in a vast unity Here we come to see that although we have different callings in life we are all the children of a common father, who is the father of both the rich and the poor. This fellowship and sense of oneness that we get in public worship cannot be surpassed.

“Worship,” Sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 7 August 1955.

King preached this sermon in the middle of the Montgomery Bus Boycot during the early days of the civil rights movement. Dexter Avenue was a society church and it is reasonable to assume that King's insights came more from his recent experiences of the mass meetings in churches like Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist than from his own congregation. It was from the maids and college professors, the lawyers and laborers rubbing shoulders and singing hymns together at the mass meetings that King glimpsed the "vast unity" created and celebrated in Christian worship.

What is your personal 'worship style'?

I don't often rant on this blog -- but today is an exception.
I was looking at the website of a United Methodist Church in Ohio (it will remain nameless) and I saw its list of Sunday morning services:

Worship at [Big Methodist Church] is offered in a variety of formats knowing that we all experience God in different ways.  

• The 8:15am worship is a quiet & reflective experience with communion offered weekly.

• The 10am worship is a classic service with organ, choirs and favorite hymns.

• The 11:21am is a high energy worship experience designed to take the message of God's hope, mercy & forgiveness deep into your life to impact the world.

Then comes the invitation that blows my little theological mind:

Regardless of the style, all our services are rooted in the Biblical lectionary and offer encouraging words for your life. . . Stop by for a visit to see which one best fits your worship style.

This is rampant consumerism matched with an ultra-Protestant notion of church. Clearly for the author of this website, all the elements of a worship service (other than the sermon) are a matter of personal preference not a corporate practice. Clearly behind the suggestion "see which [service] best fits your worship style" is the idea that a church design multiple services to cater to the preexisting personal preferences of its members and anyone who might wander in.
Why? Because "we all experience God in different ways."
What ever happened to the idea that the worship of the Church shapes us? That from our different experiences of life and God we come together to worship God who has made us one in Christ Jesus?
When we gather together we are shaped by corporate prayer, hymnody, the Eucharist, Baptism and, yes, the reading and preaching of God's Word. 
To be the Church of Christ--the community of dissimilar people, the gathering of reconciled sinners--we are going to have to do a whole lot better than internally segregating our congregations based on the paltry and ultimately spurious categories of "worship style." After all. . .

Who we are is who we love NOT what music we like to listen to.

A subcategory of folk music

We are heading into a new year of congregational singing at Ashland First. The end of 2011 has been a busy and wonderful month -- this is the fifth Sunday in a row we have been leading singing at church.

A good number of good people showed up on Christmas morning for a communion service and carols. We led the singing with a guitar and accordion (Joy to the World, Love Came Down at Christmas, Go Tell it on the Mountain, What Child is This). For a couple of the great carols we ditched the instruments and relied on the voices of the 50+ people present. I introduced Hark the Herald Angels Sing with these words, "We are going to sing this carol the way our forbears sang it. We will use the sacred harp--our voices."  The work from the carol singing school really paid off: we heard four-part harmonies coming from the congregation.  For the closing carol we had the two sides of the sanctuary stand and face each other as we sang O Come All Ye Faithful.

It seemed that no sooner was Christmas over than we were preparing music for New Year's day which fell on the following Sunday. As usual we chose music which spoke to the theme of the service, was singable for the congregation and was playable for the musicians. Red Team's lineup changes frequently -- this Sunday we had two guitars, two fiddles and piano/accordion.

This question of "singabilty" is at the heart of a recent (somewhat grumpy) reaction to the poor state of congregational singing by Grove City professor T. David Gordon.   Gordon summarizes his book Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns (P&R Publishing, 2010):

I attempt to locate some of the cultural forces that have caused hymns to sound so foreign to this generation that they feel they need to replace them with something contemporary. I also express misgivings about this circumstance.

Gordon argues that our immersion in pop muzak means that the average person doesn't recognize other forms of music as good music. I am not sure I agree with this thesis. In an article in Christianity Today, composer Lawrence R. Mumford points out that "the simple truth is that our culture has not eliminated all other styles. . . the pop song genre is certainly not the only music that any churchgoer hears, absorbs, or even enjoys between weekend services." Mumford points to symphonic film scores and even computer game soundtracks as one counter example.