THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONCERT MUSIC AND MUSIC FOR WORSHIP
Although the technical aspects of music are the same for concert and worship music, the function and purpose of music in these settings are different. Understanding these differences is important for church musicians, ultimately changing the criteria by which music is selected and influencing the way in which music is rehearsed and presented.
In choir lofts and parochial offices, an argument as old as the church goes on today. It focuses on the choice of music to be used in the church. On one side are those who assume that church music is to be judged in the same manner as all “good” music, namely, the music of the conservatory and concert hall. On the other side are those who assume that the criterion should be whether the music moves the people in the pews. In the heat of battle, these two sides are often pitted against one another and caricatured. In reality, both arguments involve false assumptions that obscure the real source of tension.
The Church and the Concert Hall
Although I understand the need to establish aesthetic values in the church, I disagree with some of the basic premises of those who uncritically apply the norms of the concert hall to church music. This practice undermines the integrity of the profession by obscuring the relationship between music and the people of the church and between music and worship.
I can explain my point by making a comparison. The members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra are musicians whose social responsibilities are narrow and well defined: they are part of a cultural institution that performs music drawn largely from the so-called “classical” repertory of western Europe. They are curators of this tradition. Their responsibility—to perform the music of that repertory with integrity—extends to the tradition itself and, beyond that, to those who pay money to hear them. They keep that tradition alive and support its transmission from one generation to another.
Members of the church music profession share some of the same responsibilities as orchestra members. We are committed to performing good music well. But our relationship to the people who walk in the door of the church is very different from the relationship of the orchestra players to the people who pay to hear them. There are at least four major differences between what happens in the church and at a concert.
- For an important and extensive segment of our repertory, i.e., hymns, psalms, and other liturgical music, the assembled congregation assumes the role of the orchestra. The people to whom we are responsible are not an audience but a congregation.
- The music performed in church is part of a liturgy, not a concert program, and liturgy is already a very complex art form, in which the music often follows a spoken text rather than other music.
- The primary purpose of liturgical music is to be a vehicle through which people praise God. As part of worship, music is doxological.
- Musicians occupy an important place in a community, and explicit ethical commitments underlie their vocations. Albert Camus wrote, “There is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I would like never to be unfaithful to one or the other.” (Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy [New York: Knopf, 1968], 169f.)
This article will explore the implications of each of these four differences between liturgical music and concert music.
The Congregation as Orchestra
Hymns, psalms, and settings of the mass ordinary form the core repertory of church music. In her book Worship, Evelyn Underhill defines worship as “the response of the creature to the Eternal” (Evelyn Underhill, Worship, reprint [Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979]). Throughout the ages, various art media, especially music, have been used to deepen that response. Thus it is the responsibility of the church musician to train the congregation to express its praise in song.
Church musicians are music educators. To carry out their educational mission, they must understand why people sing and what will promote that activity. They must learn the musical vocabulary of the congregation they serve and use it as the starting point. In some large urban churches, the musical vocabulary may be that of the concert hall, but such is not the case in most local churches. A church musician cannot assume that the music program of the large urban church is a model for the music programs of all churches.
In worship everyone is on stage—everyone performs in the orchestra. If an audience is created by separating the performers from the nonperformers, worship does not take place. The quality of the participation and the status of the participants distinguish ritual from events with distinct audiences.
Worship does not exist apart from the need of the community to engage in it; therefore, there is no such thing as an observer of worship. The more a congregation chooses or is forced to play the role of an audience, the less integrity its worship has. If people sense that the choir and organist are performing a concert series on Sunday mornings, they will settle back and become an audience. When they relinquish the responsibility to raise their voices in song to God and hand this task over to the professionals who do it better, they cease to be worshipers.
The Context of Liturgical Music
To listen to a motet when its text may be included in a subsequent sermon, and to listen to that same motet in the midst of several others in a concert are two distinct experiences. It is a characteristic of our musical culture that the latter is the norm for establishing the musical value of the motet. Church musicians work within the liturgical context, yet for their musical judgment, they often revert unconsciously to the experience of the concert.
Working with music in liturgy entails working with a musical form set within a verbal art form of great complexity. Within the context of this art form music takes on the power and meaning of its surroundings. What happens when a motet originally composed for liturgical use is extracted from that context and put into a concert hall program? The absence of its liturgical surroundings, from which it derived its unique power and meaning, causes the wrong kind of pressure to be put on the music. In the concert hall the music is forced to mean something on its own, and to absorb the liturgical context into itself. Thus a motet about Christ as the bread of life has to impart its meaning in an abstract and ethereal way, apart from its original context as a musical accompaniment to the Eucharist. Performed among others of its kind, the feature that attracts attention and is sought after is not the power of the liturgy but its “differentness”—that which distinguishes it from the similar pieces that precede and follow it.
In a liturgical context, on the other hand, the value of the music immediately before the sermon derives from congruence with its surroundings, clarity of text, and expression. The liturgy may be better served by a simple, unison hymn tune that everyone knows by heart than by a complex Renaissance motet. In the concert hall, technique and novelty are often the predominant musical values; in the midst of the Eucharist, they may be of secondary concern.
Listening to a musical idea preceded by another musical idea differs from hearing it after the reading of a text, and a musical idea that accompanies an action is heard in yet another way. The dominance of the paradigm of the concert hall with its audience quietly listening to one musical idea after another obscures the variety of uses to which music can be put in worship.
A concert performance of music that originally was scattered through the various liturgical occasions can have alarming results. The current interest in early organs and the music written for them is a case in point. An entire evening of organ music written for liturgical occasions—processionals and hymn improvisations used in alternative congregational singing—can be very tedious, even at the hands of great interpreters. The musical invention in a series of three-minute pieces never becomes complex or varied, or at least not enough to sustain an hour and a half of continuous listening. Consequently, the performer does things to the music to make it more interesting, often negating the very authenticity that motivated the retrieval of the music in the first place.
This caution can be carried too far. The play of the musical imagination is behind every musical endeavor, whether the music is designed for the symphony hall or for eucharistic prayer. The point is that church musicians work within certain limitations that do not constrain other musicians. The drama of liturgy also provides unique opportunities to develop music that enhances its theological and aesthetic power. By approaching the work of the church through the lens of the concert hall, church musicians obscure the nature of their task.
The People’s Praise
The primary purpose of music in the church is to enable the people to praise God, but this goal does not fundamentally alter the procedures of the musicians, who must employ the same skills and the same deliberate care, no matter how their music will be used. They must always strive to call forth the highest levels of ability, though their attitudes to learning and evaluation may be affected by the purpose of their music.
In his book Ministry and Music, Robert Mitchell speaks of the shift in values that takes place when one works with a musical organization in the church. He is referring specifically to the volunteer church choir, but his words pertain to many situations.
A kind of conflict of values or priorities is intrinsic to the volunteer church choir situation. The reason for the choir’s existence as commonly understood is to create a product—music—which will be used to enhance the worship experience. Very good—until one attempts to evaluate this task in the light of scriptural teaching. The Bible does not directly address itself to matters of music or art or aesthetics.
Viewed, however, from another perspective, from the nature of the process that goes on as the choir works at its task, there is a great deal of Scripture teaching that is relevant. Intrinsic to this process are matters of relationship … and matters of attitude. (Robert Mitchell, Ministry and Music [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978], 55)
Mitchell goes on to describe how different work becomes when concern for people is the highest value. He decries the tendency on the part of musicians to focus on the final outcome and in the process exploit and harass the people who are trying to provide it.
If church music-makers allowed relationships and attitudes toward people to be their highest values, the choir repertory and its relative importance vis-à-vis the musical life of the congregation would shift. Instead of trying to jam a rocky, hesitant volunteer choir into a practice schedule that would produce an anthem a week or duplicate in dreary mediocrity the repertory of a paid choir, it is better to work on music that is easier to sing and to do less frequent performances. While one should never compromise on the quality of the music undertaken, neither should one use the standards of repertory and performance of an a cappella motet choir of singers from the local conservatory. Good music has vitality at many levels of competence, as anyone who has sat through student recitals knows. Moreover, what constitutes good music varies according to the aesthetic standards of varying repertories: a good motet and a good hymn tune are similar in some qualities, different in others.
Accepting Cultural Pluralism
Shifting the emphasis from product to process in a church music program is an ethical act. It is not, however, the total ethical commitment of the church musician. We do a great disservice to the musical and religious lives of a congregation when we employ only the values of the concert hall to evaluate the music of worship because this approach so often leads to the elimination of other viable musical cultures from the life of the church.
Disguised in the various battles about music in the church—old hymns versus new hymns, Bach versus rock, organ versus guitar, gospel songs versus anthems—is a conflict between the “high” culture of the elite and the cultures of the rest of the population. The university and the conservatory, the training ground for so many church musicians, are centers of this elite culture; its precepts and music standards are talked about, written about, explained, and transmitted along with an unfortunate disdain for other musical cultures. Often no attempt is made in these institutions to judge other musical cultures on their own terms, for they are considered devoid of aesthetic worth.
The profound ignorance of the purposes and values of a musical culture other than high culture pervades the educational institutions that train professional church musicians. This ignorance supports the view that the music of other cultures lacks aesthetic worth. Indeed, ignorance prevents an aesthetic judgment from taking place, since that would entail a prior belief that one is the presence of a work of art (Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981], 98f). In the same way, musicians who categorically reject all nineteenth-century hymnody will not undertake the acts of mind and heart requisite to establishing its aesthetic value.
When the attitudes and standards spawned in conservatories are transported without question into the musical life of local churches, they become the norm by which all various and sundry musical cultures are judged as inferior and inadequate vehicles of the holy. Under the guise of such standards, musicians impose their musical tastes on the congregation and risk suppressing the voice that wells up from the hearts of the assembled faithful. Further, they make certain assumptions about the relative importance of their own opinions compared with those of the congregation. If the people’s musical vocabularies—their taste and training—are not as elevated as the musician’s, the assumption is that they must adjust or conform to his or her superior taste and training.
In Popular Culture and High Culture, Herbert Gans tries to provide alternatives to an “either/or” approach to the problem of aesthetic value in art. He argues for cultural pluralism and for the promotion of cultures that do not now find expression in the elite media of the country. He states that “if people seek aesthetic gratification and … if their cultural choices express their own values and taste standards, they are equally valid and desirable whether the culture is high or low” (Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture [New York: Basic Books, 1974], 127). One evaluates an aesthetic choice by what it adds to the people’s experience, rather than solely by its content. He continues,
The evaluation of people’s choices cannot depend only on the content they choose but must compare what might be called the incremental aesthetic reward that results from their choices: the extent to which each person’s choice adds something to his or her previous experience and his or her effort toward self-realization. (Ibid.)
By calling for cultural pluralism in the church, I am by no means proposing to eliminate the music of high culture from the church’s repertory, nor to discontinue the use of critical standards in choosing music for worship. Mediocre music can never serve any lasting purpose in worship. To paraphrase Underhill, the responsibility of the church musician is to evoke the congregation’s response to their creator. Musicians have long understood that bad music inhibits this response. They are just beginning to understand the extent to which ignoring the musical culture of the congregation also makes it impossible. If the musician’s task is to educate and train the voice of the congregation, then one begins this process by taking seriously the people whose voice it is. Condemning their musical taste out of hand is very poor pedagogical practice, and it ensures that one’s efforts will meet resentment and resistance. Ideally, church musicians should approach any music, regardless of style or occasion, with understanding and the willingness to judge it on its own terms.
Music That Works
The attitude that any music that moves people is valuable for worship reverses the problem discussed above. Here, liturgical and pastoral norms appear to have a primary place, while aesthetic norms are disregarded. Advocates argue that church music is strictly utilitarian; it is fine to use “throwaway” music that dies once its immediate purpose has been fulfilled. Whereas those who subscribe uncritically to concert-hall standards ignore the people who come to church and what they do there, these people ignore the fact that bad art actually suppresses the religious spirit and therefore will never “work” in any correct sense of the term. The continual use of music with no aesthetic worth corrupts the church. In Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer writes:
Art does not affect the viability of life so much as its quality; that, however, it affects profoundly. In this way, it is akin to religion, which also … defines and develops human feelings. When religious imagination is the dominant force in society, art is scarcely separable from it; for a great wealth of actual emotion attends religious experience, and unspoiled, unjaded minds wrestle joyfully for its objective expression, and are carried beyond the occasion that launches their efforts to pursue the furthest possibilities of the expressions they have found. In an age when art is said to serve religion, religion is really feeling art. Whatever is holy inspires artistic conception. (Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953], 402)
Langer’s ideas undergird one of the points that Nathan Mitchell makes in his article, “The Changing Role of the Pastoral Musician” (Reformed Liturgy and Music 13 [1979]: 17f.). He argues that a pastoral musician is
a theologian who confronts us with the immediate raw intensity of the human search for vision, the human search for God.… Our task is to hear what the human search for God sounds like and to shape that sound into music that will challenge, provoke, affirm, annoy, encourage, and delight believers.”
The attitude that any music will do as long as it works betrays a basic misunderstanding of the aim of art and its use in worship. Art’s primary aim is not to be effective, but to allow for insight. The artist creates a form—a symbol—as an embodiment of the life of feeling. To this symbol, we react with recognition or clarified experience. This is what Langer means when she says that music, like religion, defines and develops human feelings. If the artist creates a musical form with the idea that it will move people to tears, or that tears are the only appropriate response to it, he or she is working in a closed process and not allowing listeners the freedom to bring their own experience to the symbol.
When the artist assigns meaning and prearranges a response, the artwork is destroyed. As an example, take the scene of Jesus’ trial in The Passion According to Saint John by Bach. Bach manages to bring us into the room to witness and participate in the scene. But he does not dictate our reaction to the experience. We may have many possible reactions; some are portrayed in the various characters, but many are not. Since Bach relies on us to complete the symbol, we can return to that room over and over again, bringing ourselves each time. And each time we are different. If tears were the only option, the experience would be the same and we would soon tire of it. If the response were so programmed by Bach, we might never make it to the room at all. We return to the scene of the trial in St. John’s Passion because its excess of meaning draws us.
The Musician’s Call
Music in the church should show forth what it means to live faithfully at the end of the twentieth century. Music that is derivative or distorted, or that coats over real suffering and pain and joy with sentimentality and cliché, will never really “work.” Not all music in the church needs to be contemporary, but all of it should pertain to the life of the faithful. Despite their age, Bach’s B Minor Mass, the black spirituals, the motets of Gibbons, and the hymns of Watts and Wesley still carry profound insight into the human search for God.
The task of the church musician who works with many kinds of music is to learn the categories of judgment appropriate to each, so as to judge them from the inside out. Setting criteria for good music involves deciding whether or not the symbol adequately portrays what it intends to portray. A Good Friday hymn need not say everything about the crucifixion, but what it does say should be true to that experience and relevant to the people who must use it to express their faith.
We are in a period of great change in our worship styles. Even well-trained and sincere music ministers often feel unsure in their judgments when confronted with new types of music or new ways of using music in worship. It is part of the risk of our calling that sometimes we will find, after several weeks of rehearsal, that music that originally seemed fresh and meaningful is actually flat and lifeless. Yet we cannot evade the responsibility to apply standards of judgment to the music we use. Mistakes are permitted; indolence is not.