The effect on church music of
the contemporary reforms in worship has, if anything, been even more
bitterly criticised than the revision of liturgical language. It is all
but impossible to find a distinguished ecclesiastical musician,
organist, choirmaster or chorister, in the Anglican or Roman Catholic
Churches, to defend aggiornamento unreservedly, in the context
of musical art, and to argue that liturgy has been improved,
devotionally and aesthetically, in its musical component, by the
so-called 'renewal'.
As in the case of language, heinous fictions with regard to music
have been propagated by modernising liturgiologists about the former
worshipping arrangements, in order to discredit them. Just as it is
erroneously alleged that Latin and Tudor English were so complex as to
be incomprehensible to congregations for four hundred years, it is
asserted that the church music of the past was operatically polyphonic
and so monopolised by choirs as to exclude the people from singing the
Lord's song or joining in the worship chorally offered. Such an
argument, also, is based on the shallow, literal-minded definition of
'participation' in corporate prayer as occurring only when a worshipper
is audibly saying or physically doing something.
Certainly polyphony and other ornate musical forms demanding choral
expertise were normal in most cathedrals and those parish churches with
strong musical traditions. But in the later nineteenth century, in
Roman Catholicism, the primitive and essential accompaniment to the
Latin mass, the Gregorian chant, had been recovered after some
centuries' neglect, and provided a mode for liturgical singing as
unadorned as could be imagined. Similarly in Anglicanism, with the
post-Tractarian revival of the eucharist as the principal Sunday
service, the sixteenth century setting of the Prayer Book by Merbecke
provided a singing line, at the communion, like Gregorian chant, shaped
to the cadence of the speaking voice, properly placed in the middle
range convenient for all singers, and perfectly adapted to the aural
and accentual qualities of the text. This was music in which everyone
could, and did, participate.
These plainsong settings (as they are so aptly termed) possessed,
moreover, the timelessness of plainchant - dating from at least as
early as the sixth century - and, thereby, a purity, universality and
stability of idiom in contrast to all subsequent musical fashions. Yet,
as Thomas Merton perceived from his familiarity with Gregorian chant in
the monastic choir, it is the paradox and genius of plainsong that its
apparent simplicity will, after repeated use, yield devotional
subtleties:
Gregorian chant that should, by rights, he monotonous
because it has absolutely none of the tricks of modern music, is full
of variety and infinitely rich because it is subtle and spiritual and
deep..... Those Easter 'allelujas', without leaving the narrow range
presented by the eight Gregorian modes, have discovered colour and
warmth and meaning and gladness that no other music
possesses.[1]
The same testimony comes from Lois Lang-Sims about the use of
plain-chant in Canterbury Cathedral:
Such music is passionless and anonymous; and yet no
human passion could be so intense, and no expression of human
individuality so tender and intimate.[2]
Both emphasize the numinousness of this music, how it is evocative of
the transcendental, yet profoundly human in character. While Mary
Shelley, after visiting the churches of Rome in 1819, commented that
therein 'you hear the music of heaven'.[3]
For modernisers who have largely succeeded in disposing of Gregorian
chant, of polyphony, Merbecke and most of what used to be known and
celebrated as the 'Anglican cathedral tradition' (having eliminated
Matins and Evensong, for which much of this music was written), as well
as vandalising hymnody in the name of the eradication of sexism,
militarism ('Halt, Christian Soldiers', as one wit has put it),
authoritarian paternalism, Zionism and so on, such perceptions are
meaningless or irrelevant. As Judith Rice notes, in Places where
they sing, those who have abolished centuries of inspired artistry
have done so on the conviction that choruses, 'folk and charismatic
tunes', are 'the only medium for evangelism', particularly amongst
youth, in spite of the fact that at Winchester Cathedral today, for
example, 'a growing number of young people attend the Sung
Eucharist...wanting to hear great religious music in its proper
liturgical setting' and that 'this ancient and sacred music is an
increasingly popular buy in the record shops'.[4] In any case, as with
modern liturgical language, the 'pop' music churches provide is not the
same as that enjoyed by youngsters in the secular world, but a lame
parody of it.
In Anglicanism, the disposal of the heritage of genius in the works
of its great Tudor composers can only be described as an appalling
tragedy. Much of this music, as C.H. Phillips argued, is strikingly
simple to perform and easily receptive to understanding and
appreciation by all - it is not the exclusive property of accomplished
musicians:
Tye's 0 come ye servants (Laudate nomen) is
little more than a hymn-tune with a 'point' set in the middle, and
the contemporary Lord, for lily tender mercy's sake of Hilton
... is similar.... Tallis offers two little gems, If ye love
me ... and 0 Lord, give thy Holy Spirit, and Byrd a deeply
felt Ave verum corpus, while Weelkes provides in Let thy
merciful ears a tender miniature of no great difficulty
-- and many more besides. That this body of work came into existence,
of course, was due to the fact that these composers were 'moved into
utterance' by great texts:
In music written for the church service the notes
must catch fire from the words, themselves aflame with the deep
meaning behind them. The composer must he moved by the words into
music.' In the sixteenth century, as Phillips argues, there were both
the great words from Cranmer, and composers of genius to appreciate
them and set them to immortal music.
The contemporary division and debate between what Erik Routley has
called 'the trend-seekers and the traditionalists' in church music is
brought into clear focus in an ecumenical collection of essays, In
Spirit and in Truth, by eleven English writers, most of whom are
full-time church musicians The editor, Robin Sheldon, who is on the
side of 'renewal', denigrates what remains of old musical customs in
worship as 'a hangover from the culture of the privileged classes',
with 'triumphalistic affirmations of the Lordship of Christ which is so
often different to real life as lived from Monday to Saturday'.[7]
'Real life' - whatever that may be - and 'relevance', the very
buzz-word of the liturgical movement, are refrains in several of the
essays in the collection:
....we need great sensitivity to the way in which
music of cultural relevance can convey by its own nature the power of
the gospel being proclaimed.[8]
That the power of the gospel might abide in its irrelevance to our
cultural priorities is undreamt of in this philosophy.
'Culturally appropriate' music in church, it follows, must be
attuned to 'pop', as Graham Gray insists in 'Justice, Rock and the
Renewal of Worship', a title succinctly embracing the modish trinity of
sociology, populism and aggiornamento, enthusiasms which have
dominated the Western Church for a quarter-century:
rock and pop music must be taken seriously... Rock
music with its great variety of styles and forms is the music of most
ordinary people and it is essential that music in worship be
accessible and appropriate to ordinary people. [9]
With breathtakingly patronising condescension to the very 'ordinary
people' (whoever they might be) he is supposed to he sensitive towards,
Gray insistently sets clear limits on the aspirations and capacities of
worshippers if you are an 'ordinary person' you could not possibly be
inspired by Talus, Palestrina, Bach or Stanford, nor should you be
expected to be - and denies any desire they might have to be lifted out
of 'ordinariness' to the vision of extraordinariness which it is the
fundamental purpose of worship to convey. And what of that vast number
of Christian people who are not 'ordinary'? If Gray's suppositions are
true, why should these people be subjected to the lowest common musical
denominator? But his true intentions are political and sociological
rather than theological and spiritual. Through music, he would
break down the elitist barriers between different
musical styles and social groups. [10]
Ambiguously affirming 'renewal' while revealing a conservative temper,
Stephen Dean (of the Music and Liturgy magazine) argues, in his
essay on 'Roman Catholic Music: The Recent Past and the Future', that
satisfactory forms of musical accompaniment for the new vernacular mass
have not been produced for the simple and obvious reason that leading
composers have failed to he inspired by 'the poor quality of the
texts'.[11] Folk mass settings have been popular, he acknowledges, 'in
spite of the crudity of their words and music'.[12] But it should not
be supposed, he wisely warns, that such wide usage is due to
congregational preference for this banal material. Rather, he suggests
that the faithful are induced to use it through appeals to their 'sense
of duty'. He has yet to observe 'real enjoyment or motivation to do
so',[13] and he closes arrestingly:
[Christian music] should point to the beyond, rather
than maroon us in the here and now. [14]
Going to the heart of one of the main reasons for the errors and
acrimony associated with the liturgical movement at large, the Director
of the Royal School of Church Music, Lionel Dakers (in The
Establishment and the Need for Change), exposes, from a musician's
perspective, the clerical manipulation of the liturgical changes which
are nonetheless introduced in the name of improving the laity's
worship, and the ignorance of most of the clergy in these matters.
The liturgical movement, in this sense, is an extraordinarily
conservative phenomenon, for it is the expression - perhaps the last,
in our culture - of the will of an authoritarian power group (the
ordained ministry) being imposed upon a passive constituency (the
laity). But, as Dakers argues, many lay people today are far better
educated musically - as, indeed, in every other way - than their priest
or minister, 'through records and tapes, radio, television and the
concert hall', and are far less likely, than previous generations,
to accept a lessening of musical standards or quality
when they are worshipping.[15]
If this is forced upon them, by the clergy, they will simply stay away
-as they are doing, in droves:
[as] the clergy are for the most part musically
uneducated, is it any wonder that through ignorance or uninterest
they repeatedly come up with the wrong answers?... When clergy equate
their authority with autocracy, is it surprising that disastrous
consequences result? [16]
The principal disasters Dakers identifies come from the convictions
that what is appropriate in church music today is 'the casual, the
unstructured, the quasi do-it-yourself approach', from the obsession
with 'virtually non-stop participation' and a 'seemingly relentless
urge to discard moments of silence'. The catastrophic result is that
'there is little encouragement for serious musicians nowadays to
contemplate working for the Church', [17] whether as performers or
composers.
The most extreme espousal of the iconoclastic approach in this
collection comes from Philip Lawson- Johnston, in Power in Praise -
Worship, "Cloud", and the Bible. He emphasizes the movement in
contemporary worship 'towards everyone being fully involved and giving
out rather than sitting back and receiving', perpetuating the
modernisers' preposterous myth about the spiritual indolence of
previous generations of Christians, and - surprisingly, from a musician
- failing to recognise that some, in any congregation, are incapable of
'giving out' musically. Modern choruses
provide a good and simple means for us to express the
feelings of our hearts to the God we love. [18]
This, and much more in this mode, reveals an emotive and simplistic
conception of faith that immediately excludes that host of Christians
-perhaps the majority today - who find that to pray, worship and live
the Christian life is not a matter of straightforward platitudes,
patient of a 'good and simple' means of expression, but a complex issue
- vitiated by doubts, backslidings, and even despair, but supported by
moments of insight, understanding and vision, of ecstasy and
exaltation: 'sometimes a light surprises/ The. Christian, while he
sings', as William Cowper wrote. To reduce everybody's faith to the
level of jejune sentiments, infantile lyrics and rhythms, may achieve
participation, on the same debased stratum, by everybody. But
participation in worship to the point where all intellectual and
spiritual discernment, and its variety of expression in literature
through the Christian centuries, are denied, is a mockery of true
religion in its liturgical dimension.
Unexpectedly, even Lawson-Johnston, much later in his essay, begins
to perceive the stupefying shallowness of his polemic:
It seems that when you try to please the maximum
number of people by including something with which each one feels
comfortable, then you run the risk of pleasing no one, because no one
feels that you have included enough of their own particular
preference." [19]
Such are the shortcomings of a liturgiology bereft of objective
principles of worship and faith and subservient to the subjectivity of
personalities and the whims of individuals.
The most persuasive voice for the alternative, classical tradition
of liturgical music, in this collection, is Christopher Deamley's,
coming from his experience as organist of St. Paul's Cathedral. Of
'pop' music in church, he remarks:
...by its very nature lit] has to be constantly
updated, but classical music has an enduring quality that can speak
anew long after it was originally composed. It has the power and
subtlety to express faith and the longings of the spirit that can
rarely be contained, through its naivete' and over- simplification,
in ephemeral music. [20]
Like Erik Routley, who denounces a former Bishop of Leicester's call
for 'popular' music in church as a 'repulsive piece of ignorant
philistinism evincing an attitude of deliberate misunderstanding which
is painful in the ill-informed but catastrophic in the influential',2
Dearnley berates the Church for so rudely discarding its heritage:
No civilised society, however primitive, neglects its
arts or, in the long run, ignores the insights and inspirations of
its men of genius in the field of the arts. [22]
Yet the society of Christians, having done just that, has impoverished
its spiritual life. The Western, Christian, musical tradition provided
an 'ambience for purposeful listening', space to 'loiter with God':
a framework for those who commit themselves to
prayer, a 'zone of stability' for searchers for areas of calmness, in
busy lives, or just an opportunity to eavesdrop on a godly
conversation. [23]
Routley similarly sees the purpose of church music 'not to attach [the
worshipper] to the sensations of this world', but to facilitate
transcendence:
....its purpose is to assist the believer in his
journey towards God. [24]
Those who want music that, in style and expression, is 'easy and
familiar', are driven by 'a lust for quick results'. This is music that
requires no effort or imagination and, thus, seeks 'to bring men to
Christ by a route which bypasses the way of the Cross. Music come by in
that frame of mind will not profit the people of God'. [25]
The strongest protests, however, have been against the revision of
hymnody which has been most radical, for it is perceived as the musical
domain in which the laity most actively participates. As with
liturgical language, lay people are told by the clergy what is in their
best interests as worshippers, and if they complain they are either
rudely rebuked or insulted with responses astounding in their
ignorance.
So, the Bishop of Chester, the Rt Revd Michael Baughen, having
received a flood pf criticisms of the 'dreadful doggerel' in Hymns for
Today's Church (the result of ten years' labour and for which he was
Consultant Editor) responded, not with the eirenic analysis one might
have expected of an episcopal reviser of poetry, but simply with abuse
irrelevant to the precise critique:
'Who wert and art and evermore shalt be'- that is
really ridiculous. How on earth cat' you sing that in Toxteth [the
inner-city area of Liverpool]? [26]
Not everyone lives in Toxteth and no argument is given for taking it as
the measure of literary standards in the Church, nor is the layman's
correct description of the version of the twenty-third psalm, in this
collection, as 'doggerel' answered:
The Lord my shepherd rules my life
and gives me all I need.
To sustain this crass rhythm, language must be tortured:
Though in a valley dark as death
no evil makes me fear
-producing a syntax, taxing even in Toxteth, more complicated than
Coverdale. There is laborious emphasis:
While all my enemies look on
and perversion of meaning:
Your goodness and your gracious love pursue me all my days....
For in contemporary meaning 'pursuit' has the connotation of
hostility - as in 'hot pursuit' - alien to the psalmist's concept of
pastoral solicitude.
In the liberalising Protestant Churches, the very home of hymnody,
revision has known no bounds. Supposed sexism having been eradicated,
the modernisers then turned their censorious attention to alleged
militarism. 'Onward, Christian Soldiers', 'Fight the good fight', 'A
Mighty Fortress is our God' and so on have had to go, for 'we are
starting to realise our language is militaristic'. [27] This
revelation, however, does not appear to have been accompanied by the
appropriate corrective that this is the language of poetry. For the
Revd Dick Wotton, hymnody with imagery from soldiering and battle, and
even scriDtural references to 'putting on the armour of God' and,
incredibly, 'fighting against the devil',
teaches children from the start that fighting and warring is OK. We
just don't have to sound like warmongers when we talk. [28]
Incapable of understanding that St Paul, the psalmist, and the hymn
writers were using military symbolism not to urge Christian people to
worldly battle, but to spiritual warfare, Wotton has obviously never
heard of a metaphor. Yet he has the temerity to revise poetic
language.
It is the sexism of traditional hymnody, however, that has most
preoccupied the modernisers. Shamelessly revealing her iconoclastic
temper, Judith Maizel, of the working party for the new Methodist hymn
book, remarked that she took 'great glee in ruining ['Rise Up, 0 Men of
God'] for a number of people who have not noticed that [masculinist]
imagery before'. [29]
The problem with this zeal, driven by feminism, is that it requires
the revision of most of the hymns in such collections as Ancient and
Modern Revised. And such revision, in many cases, amounts to
elimination, for the offensive imagery is present not only in passing
phrases, which can be reformed according to feminist ideology, but
informs the entire metaphorical and narrational structure and process
of numerous works. And il these hymns, composed by such purveyors of
sexism as Charles Wesley, are censored and destroyed, then to whom
shall we go today for worthy replacements?
That well-known and loved paean of adoration, 'At the name of Jesus/
Every knee shall bow', concludes, in its seventh stanza, after an
elaboration of metaphor, thus:
Brothers, this Lord Jesus
Shall return again,
With his Father's glory,
With his angel train;
For all wreaths of empire
Meet upon his brow,
And our hearts confess him
King of glory now.
Sexist, patriarchal, monarchist, imperialist, implicitly militaristic -
there is nothing to redeem this stanza (or the hymn as a whole, for
this is the culmination of its imagery) from its ideological
unsoundness. And to make matters worse, it was written by a woman!
In a review of Hymns for Today's Church in the Times
Literary Supplement, Michael Trend remarks that the principles upon
which the revision of Anglican hymnody has proceeded 'spell misery',
and he argues that the volume is likely to be strongly resisted in
parishes, for worshippers, having endured the turbulence and difficulty
of the 'recent years of liturgical experiment and change' draw solace
from the traditional hymns that have continued to be used in services
otherwise in modern language. [30]
The audacity of revisers in disposing of the works of some of the
greatest poets and composers in the tradition, to replace them,
moreover, with their own ephemeral and second-rate productions, drew
the ire of Richard Ingrams in his review of Hymns for Today's Church,
entitled 'Look what they done to your songs, Lord'. This work of
revision, if it must be undertaken,
should be done, like all works of restoration, by
people with some respect for their predecessors; in the case of
hymns, by people with some feeling for music and poetry. Otherwise,
as with the new Church of England liturgy, the result is
disastrous.
From Hymns for Today's Church, Newman's 'Lead, kindly Light' has
been omitted, so too has George Herbert's 'Teach me, my God and King',
and Christina Rossetti's 'In the bleak mid-winter', with music by
Gustav Holst. Blake's famous words for 'Jerusalem' are rejected -
'their meaning is presumably thought to be obscure' - and 'the
compilers have not hesitated to change the words even of writers like
Milton'.
Ingrams is referring here, no doubt, to 'Let us with a gladsome
mind', which becomes 'Let us gladly with one mind', with the outrageous
notation - 'after John Milton'. Should we expect that the Rev'd Michael
Saward, who has had the vanity to presume to improve upon Milton, will
turn his attention next to Paradise Lost?
No less than twenty-six original compositions by Saward are included
in this compilation which judges the poetry of Herbert, Newman and
Christina Rossetti inferior and unworthy, in spite of the fact that
those writers have indisputably touched the souls of countless
worshippers. Ingrams quotes one of Saward's verses:
Fire of God, titanic Spirit,
Burn within our hearts today.
Cleanse our sin
may we exhibit
lowliness In every way...
commenting:
Quite apart from his audacity in rhyming 'spirit'
with 'exhibit', it may strike some people as rather extraordinary
that a man who has devoted so much time to pruning what he thinks are
obsolete words and phrase~ from other people's hymns should use the
word 'titanic' which If it means anything to 'today's churchgoers' is
the name of an expensive and ill-fated hulk lying at the bottom of
the sea. [31]
Clearly Ingrams foresees the same fate for Hymns for Today's
Church.
Certainly, his point about the selective updating of allegedly
incomprehensible language is copiously substantiated in this
collection. Milton's flavoursome and joyous 'gladsome' is not allowed
to stand, yet -- in the very next hymn -- 'pavilioned in splendour' is
permitted to survive. If the ignorant laity (as they are always
envisaged by liturgiologist priests) cannot cope with ‘gladsome'
(as they have somehow managed to do, for three hundred years), with Its
simple Old English derivation, how are they to understand and envisage
the rococo 'pavilioned'?
But the most thorough analysis of the contemporary revision of
hymnody is the critical essay of 1990 by Professor Margaret A. Doody,
'Changing What We Sing', [32] which reviews the past decade's rewriting
and censorshlp of 'the standard Christian hymns of the Protestant
tradition'.
As an Episcopalian professor of literature, she argues that hymns
are poems--
hymns are songs reaching to the divine, and also
moments of the divine touching the human, and they are the product of
individual human persons, men and women, who can be individually
named as makers.
Toplady himself was a real individual; 'Rock of
Ages' had its origin in an experience of his own, as he tells us,
when he was sheltering from a storm (p. 316).
To subject these individual utterances, as various Church committees
have done, to 'wholesale and merciless revision', is to deny the
integrity of the experiences they record and the inspired creative act
and expression in which their writers recorded it. Presenting us with
such 'tinkered and adulterated goods', the revisers are revealed in
self-parody. For, in fact, they are 'denying God and denying his
presence, potential or actual, among real live human beings':
Their denial of authorship, imagination and
individual creation spells a certain assent to the proposition that
there is no Author of Creation (p.336).
By what authority do they make these changes? Doody notes that the
'revisers' overt attention is always benevolent' (pp.316-17). So, in
the new hymn book of the First Congregational Church in Amherst,
Massachusetts, where military metaphor is banished in the name of
pacifism, the negro spiritual 'We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder',
has had the last line of the first verse altered from
'Soldiers of the Cross' to 'Bearers of the Gross' (a different
statement) (p.317).
In America, all monarchical metaphors associated with the Deity in
hymnody must be purged, in the interests of republicanism, so Robert
Grant's 'O worship the King' has been rewritten thus:
But with this censorship in metaphor, goes the power of the original
poetry. Doody recalls the qualities of Grant's poetics, derived largely
from Cowper, of which arresting symbolism is the most prominent.
However, the revisers, having placed monarchical metaphor on their
Index of proscribed language, literally and figuratively emasculate the
hymn. They also dislike its imperative voice, Doody argues, because, in
the best modern way, they 'have an aversion to all exhortation':
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