Musing Grace

There is a significant amount of music that I simply cannot bring myself to enjoy, because even though I revel in diversity, I strive for personal excellence, [and] I truly believe that there is music of poor quality—far too much of it—right alongside the good music. —Harold M. Best, Music Through the Eyes of Faith

"There is no screwing up in church," a kind bishop once reassured me as I, a substitute organist, apologized for a grossly under-prepared account of the service music. "We simply offer up to God whatever we have in us at the time."

And it's true—sincerity and truth are what make an offering holy. Ananias was struck dead not for the meager size of his gift to the church, but for cynically offering less than his all in purported service.

At the same time, vague notions of "sincerity" do not substitute for a commitment to quality. When the psalmist exhorts us to sing with all our skill to the Lord, surely it is with the presumption that the song itself is worth singing.

Loud Clashing Symbols

Praise him with trumpets;
praise him with lute and harp!
Praise him with drums and dance;
praise him with strings and winds!
Praise him with sounding cymbals;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!
—Psalm 150:3-6

In 1973, composers Stephen Paulus and Libby Larsen founded the Minnesota Composers Forum with a small grant from the University of Minnesota. A non-profit organization since 1975, the renamed American Composers Forum (ACF) is a clearing-house of opportunities for composers all over the United States. One of these is its annual Church/Synagogue Residency Program, which teams up composers with congregations to write music for their services, at no cost to the churches.

According to former program director Liz Schmidt, the project began in a conversation with Phillip Brunelle, organist-choirmaster at Minneapolis' Plymouth Congregational Church. Brunelle, whose Plymouth Music Series (PMS) choir and orchestra are internationally renowned for bringing new music to concert audiences, also maintains a high standard for music used in the church itself. Each year, the choral fare spans from the Renaissance to newly composed works, the latter sometimes being imported from the PMS repertoire. Not every congregant likes every piece, but the people are proud of their music program and supportive of its mission.

But though the musical border between the concerts and the services is porous, the series is strictly independent financially, renting office and rehearsal space in the church from its own revenues. This money frees up resources for the church's outreach projects, including a foodshelf program and a drop-in center for the residents of neighborhood group homes. The series also underwrites public school residencies by African-American musicians as part of the group's "Witness" program, an annual celebration of African Americans in music.

Brunelle and ACF president Linda Hoeschler agreed that it was time to remedy the deterioration, over the last century, of the historic symbiosis between composers and churches. The only criterion for churches' participation in the program is that they have a full-time music director; style is not a consideration, and approaches to sacred music have varied widely among the various congregations.

The program teaches composers to create across denominational lines. One of this year's participating churches is Minneapolis' Hennepin Avenue Methodist, which, according to choirmaster William Mathis, has a long history of commissioning new works. "The interesting thing about working with this program," he explains, "is that someone is writing for three churches at the same time."

Composer Denise Rippentrop had her work cut out for her in this respect, as Hennepin Methodist and the evangelical Wooddale Church, another residency program participant, have markedly different expectations.

"We are so self-definedly liberal," says Mathis, "and Wooddale Church is so evangelical. [Music minister] David Bullock said in our first meeting with Denise, 'Ninety-five per cent of the texts we sing have to be scriptural.' And he didn't mean they have to agree with scripture—they have to be scripture. And I said in the same meeting that 95 per cent of our texts have to be inclusive!"

Mathis believes Hennepin's commitment to high-quality music sends an important message. "We don't do pop music in church," he states. "We do basically serious music all the time. That's not to say [exclusively] composed music, because we do American folk hymns [also]. But when we do a brand-new piece, it's a serious piece. It says to the congregation—and for them it feels like it—[that] we are taking worship importantly."

Speaking in Tones

Beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
—Philippians 4:8

The Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers (CFAMC) "seeks to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ and help build his kingdom by encouraging the work and witness of Christian composers of symphonic and chamber music, opera, and other serious concert works." Its projects include print and electronic postings of opportunities for composers and a new young-composers scholarship. Founder Mark Hijleh describes his two-fold mission—bringing art music to Christian communities, and Christian witness to the concert hall—as a personal vocation, rather than a scriptural imperative.

"The scriptures don't necessarily point the most efficient way for Christians to insert themselves into the world and spread the gospel," he admits. We must insert it first into our own work. "If we are in art music, then we need to be putting the gospel into art music," even if it isn't the easy or obvious way to reach masses of people.

"I understand the efficiency argument," he concedes, "and that is probably the impetus for the movement toward pop music: that this is what's going to communicate most quickly. But of course the other side of that coin is, what are you saying with pop music about the character of God? Is God always quick, easy, and efficient? If you go to church and everything is entertaining and easy to comprehend, what is that saying?" Jesus, after all, spoke almost entirely in parables—hardly the most efficient way to spell things out.

Hijleh offers proof, from his own experience, of the power of music that is complex enough to mirror the complexity of Christian mysteries. "For years I was a Southern Baptist. And I wrote bi-tonal and aleatoric hymn arrangements, and I took them to little Baptist churches in the middle of Missouri and played these things as part of worship services. And because they saw who I was as a believer, and because of the way the hymn tunes were woven through the arrangements, these people accepted this stuff, even though they didn't have much education musically. So I've proven to myself that [art music] is not going to get in the way of people's worship if they're open; in fact, it might enhance it."

Taking the Church to the World

"Hear, O kings; give ear, O princes; to the Lord I will sing, I will make melody to the Lord, the God of Israel."
—Judges 5:3

Gospel music is not like a loaf of bread that comes up the same however you slice it. Rather, it is like yeast hidden throughout the black church.

"The churches that focus exclusively on gospel are often your smaller churches, where your music ministers don't necessarily have the skill in the other areas," says J. Donald Dumpson, founding director of Westminster Choir College's Jubilee Singers. The college, part of Rider University, inaugurated the program four years ago to diversify the renowned sacred music school's offerings.

But gospel itself is diverse. In addition to being only one among several styles often offered at the larger churches, gospel music is a protean thing when it does appear.

"You go to one church, and they have a traditional gospel choir," says Dumpson, who is also on the faculty of Cheney University—the nation's oldest historically black university—as well as the music minister at Philadelphia's Bright Hope Baptist Church. "You go to another church, with a very [youthful] ministry, and they are singing Kirk Franklin and John P. Kee. At another church they only sing Negro spirituals. But they're all beautiful in their differences."

Gospel music has also leavened secular pop in America. African-American church music has had "a tremendous impact on secular music," says Dumpson, whose J. Donald Dumpson Productions produces many of the Philadelphia area's major concerts. And while it is true that such artists as Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, James Brown, and Marvin Gaye brought gospel style to the mainstream, the situation has changed since the Motown era.

"In the present day," says Dumpson, "gospel music is impacted by what's happening on the larger scene." For any secular pop style, he says, there is now a gospel equivalent.

Yet pop music, which is essentially performance-oriented, is at odds with the historical development of gospel in some ways. Growing out of the Negro spiritual tradition, in which African folk elements such as call and response cross-fertilized with the composed music of white churches, gospel was traditionally characterized by spontaneity, interaction, and a worship setting.

Spirituals could be described as an organic outgrowth and expression of a people's experience, part of their own tradition; their child, gospel, is rather a product designed to communicate a message to hearers at large. In a tradition with such close ties to popular music, the definition of "quality" is elusive, and the potential for equating it with slick production is great.

So when the Wynans or Commission—or Dumpson's own choir at Westminster—present a gospel "concert," are they offering a message or an image?

"We need to keep in mind," Dumpson says, "that there's a larger issue, and that is worship and the praise of God. It's not so much the issue of whether it's at the concert hall or at the church, but of the purpose of this music. When Kirk Franklin performs in a stadium, with thousands of people coming out to hear him, and young children are coming to Christ because of what he is doing, that is ministry—that is church."

O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, and raise a loud shout to him with psalms!
—Psalm 95:1-2

"One doesn't have to commission in order to do new music," says William Mathis. "One has to have an adventuresome spirit." Churches without the resources of Hennepin Methodist can still sing to the Lord a new song. "I get probably a packet a week from music publishers full of choral music, and it's all brand new," Mathis continues. "And those pieces cost a buck a piece. So there's plenty to choose from if you don't just keep picking the same kind of thing over and over again."

With the food of the spirit, as with bodily food, presentation is essential. "I find the way to introduce new things is to first tell the congregation we have some new things we want to do, and if anyone would like to join us in this process, they could purchase the music," Mathis explains. "Then the congregation a) knows it's coming, and b) a few of them already have a stake in it."

"And when we sing it," he continues, "someone will say something to relate it to the [liturgy of the] day, and there will be written program notes—even if it's only a couple of lines—to help them listen to it."

By suggesting that congregations can benefit from a wholesome diet of quality music administered by trained church musicians—by even using the word "quality"—I realize that I am setting myself up for the charge of "elitism." One community choir director told me that many of her singers refused to read music, because written music constitutes a "classist and elitist system." When I asked if they read words, the conversation abruptly ended; yet why is the encoding of language in writing any less "classist" than printed music? The charge of "elitism" is often nothing but an adult extension of the playground taunt, no more—or less—meaningful than "brainiac" or "pencil-necked geek."

But whether our tradition is a literate or non-literary one, our training academic or experiential; whether our offerings of music are liturgically programmed or whether we believe, as the self-described mystic Mark Hijleh does, that God works on us through art and beauty whether they are pegged to the lectionary or not—in short, whatever our stylistic predilections, what counts is that we sing (and pray and serve and minister) "with all our skill," and not with laziness, cynicism, or crass wholesale capitulation to the commercial values of the secular world.

Worship is a valiant enterprise. As writer and educator Harold Best put it, "The beauty of all of this is that excellence and diversity are compatible. And for those who own Jesus, a thousand musical tongues will never be enough to praise him."

SCOTT ROBINSON is a composer and free-lance journalist living in Minneapolis. The first part of this series appeared in the September-October 1997 issue.