Yesterday included two meetings. I spent much of the day reading 16th century journals and fooling around with numbers, so I expected the meetings to be welcome breaks. And indeed they were.
The first one was lunch with Janalisa. Among the useful business things, she also told me that I was not unreasonable to be a little bit stressed.
You might have noticed, if you read this xanga regularly, that I have been a little stressed lately. Now I feel justified.
The second was a music meeting. That was quite a surprise. I thought there would be a few of us with notebooks and pencils, debating the style of music suitable for the early service demographic and making a short list of possible soloists for the offertory. In fact, there were six of us, and we gathered around the keyboard and sang. Then we ate cake.
What a lovely surprise!
Just imagine, if some of the times when you go in to a meeting, instead of flip charts and discussions of whether the analytics are accurate and if so what does this mean for your conversion rate, you got to gather around and sing. Wouldn’t you feel much less stressed?
I do.
We sang “Whispering Hope,” a song which my mother has talked about but which I’d never heard before, and “It is Well With My Soul.” We sang “Jesus is Coming Soon.” I love to sing that song. It is so much fun. I learned it in a Baptist church, where they believe this sort of thing and preach about it. You will never hear that sort of thing in a mainline Protestant church, so we were just singing it for fun, but I was thrilled. I was also very pleased, now that I am heading up the music ministry team, to find that there was a grass-roots movement toward producing a little choir for the early service.
Having heard in a meeting just a day or two ago that the early service didn’t respond well to “old-timey” music, I was surprised that the group was stuck so firmly in the 1890s. I mentioned this. They stared at me. They assured me that they, all of whom actually attend the early service, loved old-timey hymns. They rolled their eyes about how right now they have contemporary music all the time. They represented about 9% of the congregation at that service, so it may be that they are a revolutionary group trying to force the congregation to sing “Church in the Wildwood” when they would really prefer to be singing stuff from Jars of Clay, but if so, they hid it well. No one spoke up for Beethoven, but otherwise it appeared that they were pretty openminded. And, if indeed they are a subversive group, it was clever of them to disguise the fact with cake.
On the ride back to town, the driver confided that she was sometimes frustrated by the casualness of the music at our church. “There is no standard of excellence,” she said. And indeed I have noticed that there seems to be a feeling that actually knowing the music is optional, and rehearsing a thing long enough to do it well is somehow being a spoilsport.
One of the other singers, she said, has specifically rejected the suggestion of polishing pieces up before presenting them on the grounds that she doesn’t like things to sound planned.
There might have been a bit of a silence there while I tried to assimilate the idea of actually wanting your public performance of music to sound unplanned.
The driver could tell that I was a kindred spirit. She had heard me say, “How about if we divide this up into parts?” and “Let’s just sing through that second line again — I know I’m not singing what’s written there.”
We plan to subvert the early service.
This is something I’ve struggled with since becoming a church musician. No one actually likes their music to sound casual, but you have to realise that you’re working with a volunteer force. True, they are there because they want to be there, but most of the time they are not trained musicians. You cannot force trained musicians to care about the perfection of a piece.
Any musician can tell you that perfection of a piece is not only the norm but also entirely expected. Professional musicians know that if you have a single note out of place it is the difference between a sparkling review and a career damaging one.
Church choirs are for the people who think of music as a hobby. Or for people who didn’t have the kind of personal motivation it takes to be a musician. Regardless, they are people who are there for the fun of it, who never gasp when the dynamics in a Verdi piece are disregarded, who don’t car one bit for era appropriate stylings.
Church choirs, by definition, are casual.
Correction on the 1st paragraph: You cannot force UNtrained musicans et cetera. sorry.
Church choirs can produce a wide range of sounds, though. The attitude that if most of the choir recognizes the tune and has some concept of their part, you don’t need to rehearse any more, is not essential for volunteer choirs.
The unplanned performance of “Whispering Hope” goes like this: “Whis… whis… whis… whis… per… whis… ing.. whis..hope…” and then maybe half a dozen other people chiming in with more whisses as the rest of the group heads into the next line. It’s wonderful.
Does the name Marty Haugen (sp?) mean anything to you?
… At our last church, the one where I was so angry all of the time, 95% of all music sung was written by Marty Haugen. I don’t remember if we ever once sang anything older than the 1970’s, except for one wretched period where (to celebrate Black History Month) they sang “spirituals”. Mind you, they were not sung with a “spiritual” style beat or ryhthm – they were slowed down to a stately crawl. And they had the very white, operatically trained music leader up there, putting operatic pronounciation and emphasis on passages containing words like “dem” and “we is gonna”. It was horrific.
That “Don’t break the chain” thing looks very stressful.
I like the idea of a subversive church choir subgroup. I’m sure you could base a good story around that
Oh and I love the song ‘Whispering Hope’. When I was playing mandolin in a band, ‘Whispering Hope’ (Along with ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, and ‘nearer My God to Thee’) were among my favourite concert regulars. (Not so much my mother’s favourites to play however, because the steel guitar sections were a lot more difficult that the mando sections. She had tricky counter melodies and obligatos , we concentrated on melody or harmony lines mostly and our obligatos were easier than hers
)
I just have to ask why don’t mainline Protestant’s think Jesus is coming soon?