artsyhonker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
artsyhonker) wrote2017-01-20 10:15 am
artsyhonker) wrote2017-01-20 10:15 am
Entry tags:
another possible PhD topic
So I've been mostly looking at musical transformations/reformations and accessibility, at ideas around what is "accessible" in church music and how this has affected a) various movements/styles in the past and b) contemporary sacred choral music.
This is an idea I've been playing around with basically for ever, or at least for over ten years.
I have a theory, or maybe better to call it a conceit if you will -- if you look at various movements in sacred Christian music, they usually start out from an intention of making music more directly communicative and understandable; and then they get... more complicated, because that's what happens when you have a bunch of musicians who rehearse together regularly. This is repeated throughout history. So, Gregorian chant wasimposed centrally encouraged by Charlemagne as part of broader liturgical reforms and measures of control, partly because the myriad local chant traditions had grown really wild... some of the pre-Gregorian chant we have involves pages and pages and pages of melismata, you basically have to be a virtuoso to sing it, and even the average monk, let alone the average punter, isn't going to understand it readily (bear in mind that the relationship of clergy to laity was rather different at the time, for example that cathedrals and abbeys were very often places where public business was done in the nave and liturgy happened in the quire -- but I digress). The new, Gregorian chant repertory, synthesized from many sources, was simpler and more direct. But it became more complicated, eventually developing harmony (starting with fauxbourdon) and polyphony.
There were various attempts to simplify polyphony, too: attempts to rule out repetition of words, or differnet lines being sung by different voices at once, or polyphony itself. It is instructive to study the music of Tallis and Gibbons, in this respect.
The Reformation brought metrical psalmody in the vernacular languages, music meant to be simple for the Reformers (often persecuted) to sing at home or in small meetings as well as at church, and often based roughly on plainchant tunes (metricised -- Luther did some of this) or folk music; it developed into West Gallery music (in England) and other traditions. Hymns were included too, though at what point varies from one tradition to the next. I can't say a lot about the other traditions but West Gallery music got less homophonic and less simple and less strictly scriptural as time went on, then collapsed with the industrial revolution meaning town and country parish churches collapsed in size while city churches were overloaded with factory workers who didn't have two hours to rub together but definitely needed a larger instrument to lead the singing rather than a small motley band (remember: no electroacoustic amplification yet, so the pipe organ being loud actually mattered quite a lot), and theimposition encouragement of a more staid, "seemly" hymnody by the Oxford Movement (and by some of the Evangelicals, at least in the C of E -- Methodists were all for the music of the West Gallery but then they decided to go around ordaining people without a bishop's involvement and it all went a bit pear-shaped). The West Gallery Music Association and anyone who has read too much Thomas Hardy will tell you that WG music was "suppressed" in favour of the increased control you get with an organist and a choir that is made up largely of children; in some places I'm sure this was true. But I've also seen what happens when you attempt music of a certain style in a parish that simply doesn't have the resources, and it isn't pretty: the music sounds bad, the singers know it sounds bad, and the whole thing is just a bit horrid. This is one reason we did quite a bit of plainchant at St Andrew's in my time there: working with a small choir, it was more realistic and more rewarding to do plainchant well than sing Stanford in C badly.
Another instructive area for study here is to look at the difference between, say, the Very Very Protestant French Protestant psalters, and the chorale preludes of JS Bach (which I think weren't really intended to be sung in isolation: they're the congregational part of a longer work, led by a small-ish group of moderately capable musicians. Insert the rant here on choral societies with 100 people singing e.g. the St Matthew Passion when it was meant for no such thing. Worth also noting that Bach's Passions are also grounded in a Catholic tradition of Mystery Plays ("secular") and sung proclamation of scripture (no microphones, and eventually they got bored and started having different singers sing different parts); the way the Reformation played out/is playing out in different places has a profound effect on the music.)
Contemporary Christian Music, which is what most of the drums-guitars-soloist church music groups out there call themselves these days, also started out as a sort of reformation, trying to make music "accessible" to "the average person", not always realising that the Victorian hymnody it replaced had been doing exactly the same thing. But syncopation, and entirely new repertoire every year à la Hillsong, and soloists who have incredible range and/or a personality cult following? These things don't help ordinary people sing (though they might sell a lot of albums to "insiders"). Not all CCM is like that, of course -- but a good chunk of it is.
And that last bit about CCM brings in another factor: 200-ish years ago, in an average church, lots of the people there would have had common musical heritage. Moving around took a long time and was slow, so in communities where people stayed in one place long enough to build a church, a large percentage of the community would have known one another all their lives. Adn if you wanted to listen to music, it was necessary to play/sing it yourself, or be in the same room as someone who was. There were always people who travelled, pilgrims or itinerant merchants or whoever, and they included musicians, but they were largely in the minority; even agricultural workers would have travelled less than they do now. There were some class-based differences in who had been to which parties with which musicians (royalty could afford orchestras), and written sheet music could circulate of course, and the industrial revolution brought piano factories and access to non-artisanal instruments, but fundamentally music was a communal listening experience for most people.
That listening experience changed profoundly in the 20th century, first with broadcast media meaning music could be disseminated over a wider area much, much faster; then with physical sound recording technology going portable so you could go over to your mate's house and listen to their LPs, then cassettes -- and finally, with the advent of headphones. This took off in the 1980s with the Sony Walkman. Imagine, you could go running with your spouse and each of you could listen to different music! I can turn off the Bach B minor Mass halfway through and go to the loo and then eat my lunch and then read a book and then go back to it, and my housemate doesn't even know about it! Physical analogue distribution still meant musicians had to play nice with record companies to get anything done, though, so a lot of listening was still "mainstream" even in the 80s. When things started to get cheaper, that fell apart too -- remember mixtapes? Remember borrowing a friend's tape player so you could record onto one tape, then play it and record that and an additional layer onto another? (Surely not just me...) My father was jealous of the first stereo I owned, because it had high-speed dubbing. A few years later it was possible to download music from the internet. Now I can record an album in my living room and sell it to you. (Note, the production quality is rubbish, but that's because of my lack of skill and arsedness, not because this stuff isn't available cheaply. It and my other albums there were an experiment. The result of the experiment is that I've decided I don't want to record my own audio.) Now it's normal to listen to very different music to the people you go to church with, and it isn't a neat generational split any more, and it isn't limited to subcultures either. So, in this context, what "style" of music is accessible?
I have some ideas on that. I also think that both congregational singing and congregational listening are valid in the context of music for worship in the Christian tradition, and that being aware of this and having a variety (within whatever musical tradition is right for your context) is pretty important.
This is still a really interesting area, which I feel is important, and it would make a good topic for me: much of my own music attempts to straddle a line between accessibility (either to singers or listeners) and other factors, and I am definitely interested in exploring that more, both through my composing and in terms of actually writing about it. I might need to cut it down somewhat, perhaps limit it to psalmody for example. And I think I have an external constraint of "choral" rather than "congregational" music, so there's that to consider. But it's sortof a huge topic as it is, so those constraints are good. I'm not sure where I would start with exploring how other contemporary sacred choral composers have engaged with accessibility, and I would run the risk of going on a diatribe about the Western academic canon and its sometime disdain or disregard for what it views as popular or common audiences. That may not be the best path for me to take.
But I'm also interested in the place of lament in sacred choral music. This morning I wrote some (rather religious) tweets about not knowing the answers, feeling frightened, feeling wounded, maimed and broken; I think in our society, we are often told that it is not okay to be weak or hurt or to bear wounds. And I think churches have been complicit in that, sometimes; but that they can also be places where lament is safe, where we can cry and wail and yell. And sometimes the function of choral music is to enable us to do that, before all we hold sacred or know to be holy, when words or silence or hitting a pillow just won't cut it.
Also, I write a lot of "sad" music, or music that contains at least an element of lament. This is partly because I find it therapeutic to do so. In light of the "keep your chin up" surrounding culture, perhaps an exploration of how the church can and should, through music, be a place of grief, lament, remorse even, would be more helpful than yet another person talking about what is and isn't accessible.
The two are not entirely unrelated, because one of the problems with selecting music that allows or even invites lament is that the person selecting it will be told they are making the church "sound too depressing" and that "nobody wants to be sad all the time". In my estimation, such complaints are usually more about the comfort of the complainer than the potential new listener... No, nobody wants to be sad all the time; but avoiding it all together is not healthy. I wrote a sermon along these lines at one point.
In this case, my writing would be around how other contemporary sacred choral composers have engaged with lament, how the Western academic canon composers have engaged with lament, and how my own composing does this.
This is an idea I've been playing around with basically for ever, or at least for over ten years.
I have a theory, or maybe better to call it a conceit if you will -- if you look at various movements in sacred Christian music, they usually start out from an intention of making music more directly communicative and understandable; and then they get... more complicated, because that's what happens when you have a bunch of musicians who rehearse together regularly. This is repeated throughout history. So, Gregorian chant was
There were various attempts to simplify polyphony, too: attempts to rule out repetition of words, or differnet lines being sung by different voices at once, or polyphony itself. It is instructive to study the music of Tallis and Gibbons, in this respect.
The Reformation brought metrical psalmody in the vernacular languages, music meant to be simple for the Reformers (often persecuted) to sing at home or in small meetings as well as at church, and often based roughly on plainchant tunes (metricised -- Luther did some of this) or folk music; it developed into West Gallery music (in England) and other traditions. Hymns were included too, though at what point varies from one tradition to the next. I can't say a lot about the other traditions but West Gallery music got less homophonic and less simple and less strictly scriptural as time went on, then collapsed with the industrial revolution meaning town and country parish churches collapsed in size while city churches were overloaded with factory workers who didn't have two hours to rub together but definitely needed a larger instrument to lead the singing rather than a small motley band (remember: no electroacoustic amplification yet, so the pipe organ being loud actually mattered quite a lot), and the
Another instructive area for study here is to look at the difference between, say, the Very Very Protestant French Protestant psalters, and the chorale preludes of JS Bach (which I think weren't really intended to be sung in isolation: they're the congregational part of a longer work, led by a small-ish group of moderately capable musicians. Insert the rant here on choral societies with 100 people singing e.g. the St Matthew Passion when it was meant for no such thing. Worth also noting that Bach's Passions are also grounded in a Catholic tradition of Mystery Plays ("secular") and sung proclamation of scripture (no microphones, and eventually they got bored and started having different singers sing different parts); the way the Reformation played out/is playing out in different places has a profound effect on the music.)
Contemporary Christian Music, which is what most of the drums-guitars-soloist church music groups out there call themselves these days, also started out as a sort of reformation, trying to make music "accessible" to "the average person", not always realising that the Victorian hymnody it replaced had been doing exactly the same thing. But syncopation, and entirely new repertoire every year à la Hillsong, and soloists who have incredible range and/or a personality cult following? These things don't help ordinary people sing (though they might sell a lot of albums to "insiders"). Not all CCM is like that, of course -- but a good chunk of it is.
And that last bit about CCM brings in another factor: 200-ish years ago, in an average church, lots of the people there would have had common musical heritage. Moving around took a long time and was slow, so in communities where people stayed in one place long enough to build a church, a large percentage of the community would have known one another all their lives. Adn if you wanted to listen to music, it was necessary to play/sing it yourself, or be in the same room as someone who was. There were always people who travelled, pilgrims or itinerant merchants or whoever, and they included musicians, but they were largely in the minority; even agricultural workers would have travelled less than they do now. There were some class-based differences in who had been to which parties with which musicians (royalty could afford orchestras), and written sheet music could circulate of course, and the industrial revolution brought piano factories and access to non-artisanal instruments, but fundamentally music was a communal listening experience for most people.
That listening experience changed profoundly in the 20th century, first with broadcast media meaning music could be disseminated over a wider area much, much faster; then with physical sound recording technology going portable so you could go over to your mate's house and listen to their LPs, then cassettes -- and finally, with the advent of headphones. This took off in the 1980s with the Sony Walkman. Imagine, you could go running with your spouse and each of you could listen to different music! I can turn off the Bach B minor Mass halfway through and go to the loo and then eat my lunch and then read a book and then go back to it, and my housemate doesn't even know about it! Physical analogue distribution still meant musicians had to play nice with record companies to get anything done, though, so a lot of listening was still "mainstream" even in the 80s. When things started to get cheaper, that fell apart too -- remember mixtapes? Remember borrowing a friend's tape player so you could record onto one tape, then play it and record that and an additional layer onto another? (Surely not just me...) My father was jealous of the first stereo I owned, because it had high-speed dubbing. A few years later it was possible to download music from the internet. Now I can record an album in my living room and sell it to you. (Note, the production quality is rubbish, but that's because of my lack of skill and arsedness, not because this stuff isn't available cheaply. It and my other albums there were an experiment. The result of the experiment is that I've decided I don't want to record my own audio.) Now it's normal to listen to very different music to the people you go to church with, and it isn't a neat generational split any more, and it isn't limited to subcultures either. So, in this context, what "style" of music is accessible?
I have some ideas on that. I also think that both congregational singing and congregational listening are valid in the context of music for worship in the Christian tradition, and that being aware of this and having a variety (within whatever musical tradition is right for your context) is pretty important.
This is still a really interesting area, which I feel is important, and it would make a good topic for me: much of my own music attempts to straddle a line between accessibility (either to singers or listeners) and other factors, and I am definitely interested in exploring that more, both through my composing and in terms of actually writing about it. I might need to cut it down somewhat, perhaps limit it to psalmody for example. And I think I have an external constraint of "choral" rather than "congregational" music, so there's that to consider. But it's sortof a huge topic as it is, so those constraints are good. I'm not sure where I would start with exploring how other contemporary sacred choral composers have engaged with accessibility, and I would run the risk of going on a diatribe about the Western academic canon and its sometime disdain or disregard for what it views as popular or common audiences. That may not be the best path for me to take.
But I'm also interested in the place of lament in sacred choral music. This morning I wrote some (rather religious) tweets about not knowing the answers, feeling frightened, feeling wounded, maimed and broken; I think in our society, we are often told that it is not okay to be weak or hurt or to bear wounds. And I think churches have been complicit in that, sometimes; but that they can also be places where lament is safe, where we can cry and wail and yell. And sometimes the function of choral music is to enable us to do that, before all we hold sacred or know to be holy, when words or silence or hitting a pillow just won't cut it.
Also, I write a lot of "sad" music, or music that contains at least an element of lament. This is partly because I find it therapeutic to do so. In light of the "keep your chin up" surrounding culture, perhaps an exploration of how the church can and should, through music, be a place of grief, lament, remorse even, would be more helpful than yet another person talking about what is and isn't accessible.
The two are not entirely unrelated, because one of the problems with selecting music that allows or even invites lament is that the person selecting it will be told they are making the church "sound too depressing" and that "nobody wants to be sad all the time". In my estimation, such complaints are usually more about the comfort of the complainer than the potential new listener... No, nobody wants to be sad all the time; but avoiding it all together is not healthy. I wrote a sermon along these lines at one point.
In this case, my writing would be around how other contemporary sacred choral composers have engaged with lament, how the Western academic canon composers have engaged with lament, and how my own composing does this.
no subject
1) How serious is the institution going to be in defending the Western academic canon from scrutiny?
2) Does either topic have enough for 15k words and an hour of music? (Yes this PhD sounds easy, shut up, composering is hard)
3) How serious is the institution going to be about this being about sacred choral music, which is not in a perfect overlap with the Western academic canon by any means?
4) Can I do "lament and accessibility in contemporary sacred choral music"?
no subject
no subject
Do I want to do that about accessibility or about lament?
Hmm.
no subject
There seems to me to be a great point of overlap. IME, music of lamentation skews very hard away from being accessible for less expert singers; that is it is rare for songs of sorrow to be congregational or even for less advanced choruses. I think of lamentations as things assigned to virtuoso soloists, or small groups of experts. I cannot off the top of my head think of any songs of grief that are in any sense sing-alongs[*][**], or think of any mass choral works that are traditional at funerals.
If this is true, it raises the questions of why and should it be? Is there a need for more accessible music of grief/sorrow? Or is the music of grief/sorrow best left to experts? Or is there not much demand for it because it's hard to sing with a lump in your throat or because quality of music matters so much at an observance of loss?
(I am reminded of the opening of McCaffrey's Dragonsong.)
[* Except, admittedly, the one I conducted at a funeral as such, but that was a weird personalized exception, and not usually thought of as a funerary song, or even usually recognized to be terribly sad.]
[** Okay, two, the other one is Don McLean's "American Pie".]
no subject
In my tradition there are a few congregational hymns sung at funerals, some of which I would say count as lament in and of themselves, others of which have become de-facto lament because of their association with funerals.
Even funerals without a choir or soloists will generally include some congregational hymns. The issue is that there is a trend toward only including the somewhat cheerful, well-known ones, especially in situations where the deceased (or their mourning family) are not regular churchgoers and so less likely to know a variety of tunes. Many schools over here involve religious (CofE) input (most of the schools were started by the CofE), so people who don't go to church have hymns/songs they remember from school at weddings and funerals.
Further, there is a repertoire of Lenten and Passiontide hymns, some of which I would count as lament; and some of the more difficult psalms are used at this time of year, and making those congregationally accessible is easy. (And Lent is the time I was most likely to hear complaints about the music being "too dreary" -- sigh.)
So, I'm not sure there is a dearth of non-specialised lament, so much as a more general discomfort around lament.
That said, I suspect your point may hold for choral (as opposed to congregational) music: perhaps we only "keep" the difficult-bordering-on-virtuosic pieces, things like the Allegri Miserere, because for a work to stay in the repertoire despite being miserable, italso needs to be impressive; whereas fairly banal happy stuff gets sung a lot simply because (again, in my tradition) you do need an awful lot of sets of canticles for Evensong.