Guitar vs. Organ articles

[Anna Nekola]

Hi everyone,

I've had a few requests for copies of the _Worship Leader_ articles I mentioned yesterday and so I've uploaded them to Dropbox and have created a public link to them (click on it below to automatically download the articles).  I've included two columns by Chuck Kraft, the reader replies to Kraft's first column, and an article about a church in Minnesota that discusses how they balanced guitar vs. organ, contemporary vs. traditional in their services.  All the articles are from 1993, the second year of the magazine.  As I noted before, I'm not sure where or when this specific discourse of guitar vs. organ begins exactly, but hopefully these columns by Kraft help us in charting its power and spread.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11709844/Worship%20Leader%20articles%20on%20guitar%20vs.%20organ%20%28ANNA%20NEKOLA%29.pdf

Here's a link to the 1999 Hamilton article from _Christianity Today_.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11709844/Hamilton_TriumphOfThePraiseSongs.pdf

Best wishes,

Anna

 

Anna Nekola, Ph.D. Visiting Assistant Professor Denison University Granville, Ohio

[Harris, Robin]

Related to the topic of the historical spread of both traditional and contemporary styles to other countries, here’s a link to a pdf of some Worship Leader articles that some colleagues and I did in Nov/Dec 2010.   

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27400104/Worship%20Leader%20-All%20%28compressed%29.pdf

 

This particular WL issue was on “global worship” and brings ethnomusicology approaches to bear on the “worship wars” issue, giving suggestions to those interested in moving toward a multi-cultural approach to congregational worship. I have since expanded the lead article for an academic audience and it will be published in a forthcoming book, Worship and Mission for the Global Church: An Ethnodoxology Handbook: http://missionbooks.org/williamcareylibrary/pages.php?pageid=12

 

All the best,

 

Robin Harris

PhD Candidate, University of Georgia Athens

Associate Coordinator, World Arts Program, www.GIAL.edu

 

[Deborah Justice]

Anna,

Thanks so much for posting these articles! Really great resources -
but, you're always right on the ball with such things :)

--Deborah Justice

Quoting Anna Nekola <annan...@yahoo.com>:

--
Deborah Justice
PhD Candidate, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Indiana University

[Duncan Vinson]

I have learned a lot from this exchange and the resources that have been posted!

I would like to comment on the 1999 Christianity Today article. I have more than the usual interest in this article, because I grew up attending one of the other large Methodist churches in the suburbs of Birmingham, and I observed firsthand the process that is described. My parents keep me informed of goings-on, and I have stayed in touch with the music director, who has provided valuable advice for my own career.

I think the most provocative idea in the article is that musical style represents a new kind of denominationalism, and people join churches now based not on the doctrine of baptism, etc., but rather based on musical style. I think there's some truth to that, but this idea doesn't quite explain churches like my parents', where there are now two separate services simultaneously meeting at opposite ends of the building with different worship styles. I'm not aware of any church that, for example, baptizes by sprinkling in one room and by immersion in another.

But what strikes me most about this article is, oddly, its lack of historical depth, given that its author is a professor of history. He keeps referring to the baby boom generation as the explanation for what he observes, but in true baby boom fashion, he thinks history began when this generation was born. In the first paragraph, he writes that the music director selects "standard hymns" from the Methodist hymnal - and then singles out the hymnwriters Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and Fanny Crosby as examples of "standard hymns". Surely he realizes that within the lifetimes of people alive today, many people rejected the idea that a writer of popular poetry like Crosby would be spoken of in the same sentence as highly educated, ordained men like Watts and Wesley.

Today it's hard to imagine a Protestant hymnal without gospel songs, but go back 100 years, and these songs were controversial and divisive, for many of the same reasons we find today with CCM. For example, here's what the president of Wake Forest University (Southern Baptist) wrote in 1921:

"The music of the cheap 'hymn' now demands our attention, and it may be said at the outset that the 'composers' are far more responsible for the sorriness of the combined product than the 'poet'. ... The 'composers' have abandoned utterly the spirit of worship, and have fled, bag and baggage, to the dance hall, the musical comedy, and the cheap movie for their inspiration. The result is that thousands of our churches and Sunday schools are using the same sort of music exactly as is jingled forth by the electric piano at the picture house, the pony ballet in the theatre, and the jazz orchestra in the public dance hall."

(Poteat, Hubert McNeill. 1921. Practical Hymnology. Boston: Richard G. Badger, The Gordon Press. Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1975.), p. 69

Here's an Episcopalian in 1910:

"Fortunately the cheap tune is usually associated with cheap words, and our Church is saved from a deluge of inanity both in words and music by its wise provision which permits nothing but duly authorized hymns to be sung. While we thus escape the maudlin sentiment of the Gospel hymn-tune we are by no means free from the musical upstart who cannot appreciate sterling worth, and to whom the value of tradition is nothing."

 

(Lutkin, Peter Christian. 1910. Music in the Church. Milwaukee: The Young Churchman Company.), p. 48)

Some people were more positive:

"For myself, I am disposed to believe that the original impulse toward the so-called 'Gospel Hymns' was emphatically good, that much of their practical use has been worthy, and that some of them are likely to continue useful in many conditions. I even think that the whole movement has tended to break down whatever of stiffness and frigidity there is in our hymnody, and to liberate it from what in other fields would be called its 'academic bias'."

(Pratt, Waldo Selden. 1923. Musical Ministries in the Church: Studies in the History, Theory and Administration of Sacred Music. 6th ed. [1st ed.: 1901.] New York: G. Schirmer.), pp. 59-60

 

 

I myself lean toward Pratt's view when thinking about CCM in mainline worship. My read on the situation is that there has been a paradigm shift since the 1970s, beginning in the charismatic churches, then proceeding to the evangelical ones, and then finally to the mainline by the 1990s. (Also at the same time, a parallel movement among Catholics put in motion by the Second Vatican Council.) This music seems revolutionary, because the period from 1930 to 1970 or so was one of relative stasis in church music.

But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the gospel hymn was the paradigm shift. These songs were not sung by choirs to organ accompaniment at first. Like a lot of CCM, many of them began outside the churches at events such as revivals, such as when Homer Rodeheaver blared out the latest gospel songs with his trombone at Billy Sunday revivals. It took a couple of generations, but the church music tradition eventually digested the best of these songs, rejected the worst, and now they are simply one more item in the hymnal. 

The same thing will happen with CCM, if it's not already happening. For example, I have the hymnal "Worship and Rejoice", published in 2001 by Hope, and it has songs from both Protestant and Catholic contemporary writers, including "Shout to the Lord," "Lord, I Lift Your Name On High," "On Eagle's Wings", and "Be Not Afraid", to name a few. The Methodist hymnal "The Faith We Sing" has a lot of songs of this type. It will be interesting to see if the rumored revision to the Episcopal Hymnal 1982 (the most anti-gospel of the denominational hymnals I know of) also does.  

--
Duncan Vinson, PhD - educator and church musician
Director of Music, First Congregational Church, Melrose, Massachusetts
duncan...@gmail.com
http://duncanvinson.blogspot.com