Last Sunday saw what I am certain will be my worst musical experience of 2009. The unfortunate event took place at a local church where we attended a carol service. I will not dwell on the clumsy modern editions of the Bible used for the readings or the insensitive texts that were interpolated between them. But I will dwell on the recording of the song 'Thorns in the Straw' written by one Graham Kendrick that was played during the service. I will never stand in the way of progress, but why this inane and ugly ditty should be played in a place of worship when the musical riches of the Anglican Church and much fine contemporary music are available totally escapes me. I have never heard of Graham Kendrick, but a few minutes research shows that many share my views of his music. Including the author of a recent book endearingly titled 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain:
Happy-crappy hymns are a pestilence. They demean adult worship, dragging it to a level lower than that of Mrs C.F. Alexander's 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' (1848). They are self-obsessed, babyish, clichéd, simplistic... Several authors have written these appalling hymns ... The daddy of them all when it comes to such gloopy nonsense, however, is Graham Kendrick, author of 'Shine, Jesus, Shine'.Last Tuesday (Dec 8) was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. On that day I was privileged to attend a Gregorian High Mass sung in Latin by the monks of L'Abbaye Sainte-Medeleine at Le Barroux in France. The Catholic Church certainly knows how to do inner contemplation. But, I must admit that at one point of high theatre in the Roman rite (think bells and incense) my mind took a massive lateral leap to Bernstein's Mass, which is perceptively subtitled A Theatre Piece for Singers and Dancers. More on Lenny's simple song in Critical Mass.
Familiar old hymns are being ripped away like ivy. Hymns Ancient and Modern, full of muscular harmonies, is being dumped from parish churches as the happy-clappy plague spreads. The green cloth covers of the English Hymnal, filled with Ralph Vaughan Williams' adaptions of medieval English airs, are now rarely seen.
While church attendance figures continue to go gurgling down the drain, supporters of these new hymns argue that there is 'nothing wrong with being happy'. Nothing wrong in it, agreed. But not all congregants want to, or able to, radiate happiness all the time. One of the characteristics of English Protestantism is its discretion and the privacy it allows the worshipper. This has been moulded by our North Europen reserve. It suits the native English character. There may be a time and place for happiness but church worship is a time for inner examination, not bullying, incessant gaiety.
Header image taken by me in the 11th arrondissements of Paris and is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Quentin Lett's 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain was borrowed from Norwich library. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
8 comments:
Sorry to see this post, Bob, which frankly I think is unworthy of you.
My link with Christianity - particularly the happy-clappy type - is tenuous at best, but I have deeply appreciated some of Graham Kendrick's songs. I think a deeper acquaintance with his output would lead you to a more balanced view, though to be fair there are some I detest: 'Jesus put this song into our hearts', anyone? - I don't think s/he did.
Some older hymns are full of spiritual riches while others are meaningless trash, and I wouldn't want to be without the full gamut from plainchant to Kendrick, via Vaughan Williams and Taize - they can all speak to me at different times and in times of different need. The problem in churches comes when worshippers feel brutalised by an incessant diet of one type of music.
To be honest the fact that you employ a quote from a Daily Mail tosser like Quentin Letts to back up your case doesn't do much to bolster your case!
Graham, I sampled a number of Graham Kendrick's songs via YouTube before uploading this post and found them all equally without merit as aids to inner contemplation or any other form of spiritual experience.
I see no evidence that the problems currently being experienced by the established church are due to worshippers feeling brutalised by an incessant diet of one type of music. But I do see a real problem in worshippers being brutalised by inappropriate music - that was my experience on Sunday, and that is why I wrote the post.
I am no fan of the Daily Mail. But perhaps this ancient Acaryas saying applies to Quentin Letts -
The only person who speaks the truth is a madman because he always says whatever he thinks.
P.S. I had a feeling this post would bring out the anonymous commenters.
Email received:
I think this article from the New York Times reveals why we put up with so much crap artistically, these days….
Good Enough is the New Great
"Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere," Robert Capps of Wired magazine wrote this summer in an essay called "The Good-Enough Revolution." Companies that had focused mainly on improving the technical quality of their products have started to notice that, for many consumers, "ease of use, continuous availability and low price" are more important.
High-definition televisions have turned every living room into a home cinema, yet millions of us choose to watch small, blurry videos on our computers and our mobile devices. Cameras capture images in a dozen megapixels, yet Flickr is filled with snapshots taken with phone cameras that we can neither focus nor zoom. And at war, a country that has a fleet of F-16 fighter jets that can cover 1,500 miles an hour is now using more and more remote-controlled Predator drones that are powered by snowmobile engines.
Lo-fi solutions are now available for a range of problems that couldn't be solved with high-tech tools. Music played from a compact disc is of higher quality than what comes out of an iPod — but you can't easily carry 4,000 CDs with you on the subway or to the gym. Similarly, a professional television camera will produce a higher-quality image than a phone, but when something important happens, from the landing of a jet on the Hudson River to the murder of an Iranian protester, and there are no TV cameras around, images recorded on phones are good enough.
In February, a music professor at Stanford, Jonathan Berger, revealed that he has found evidence that younger listeners have come to prefer lo-fi versions of rock songs to hi-fi ones. For six years, Berger played different versions of the same rock songs to his students and asked them to say which ones they liked best. Each year, more students said that they liked what they heard from MP3s better than what came from CDs. To a new generation of iPod listeners, rock music is supposed to sound lo-fi. Good enough is now better than great. ROBERT MACKEY
David Cavlovic
David, it is interesting to compare this NYT article from 2009 with Benjamin Britten's Aspen Award acceptance speech from 1964 -
Anyone, anywhere, at any time can listen to the B minor Mass upon one condition only - that they possess a machine. No qualification is required of any sort - faith, virtue, education, experience, age. Music is now free for all. If I say the loudspeaker is the principal enemy of music, I don't mean that I am not grateful to it as a means of education or study, or as an evoker of memories. But it is not part of true musical experience. Regarded as such it is simply a substitute, and dangerous because deluding. Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener.
http://www.overgrownpath.com/2005/06/is-recorded-classical-music-too-cheap.html
Email received:
The thing is, while I firmly believe that a concert is the best way to listen to music, that has not always been THE way to listen to music. Ever. There were no real concert halls before the 18th Century. “Art” music was not accessible to everyone.
Music was not always meant to be a primary focus. But when it is, even in this day and age, people do not have access to live performances all the time. Must we travel to Mount Athos to hear the monks sing?
More-than-decent bit of stereo equipment (which, alas, has become less common place from the 1980’s on) reproducing a better-than-average-engineered recording, can come as close as possible to being there as one is going to get, provided that one is focusing on the performance AS IF one were at a concert (background noises such as home furnaces or the bacon frying, as Glen Gould used to allude to, are no more or less an aural intrusion than a car going by a concert hall, or someone coughing next to you).
I have never bought the argument that sound recordings are inherently a cop-out, as some musicians have implied (Celibidache, for example). Is watching a movie or Television show a cop-out for going to live theatre in the same way that listening to a recording is considered of music? There is no perfect condition for the performance of anything, music or otherwise. There are always distractions, if one focuses too much on “perfect environment” for an artistic experience (I remember a review of Harnoncourt’s recording of the Water Music totally missing the point about performance practice by sardonically stating that since the recording was not of the orchestra on a barge on the Thames, it’s not authentic enough). Suspension of disbelief does not apply solely to a contrived story line but also to the fact that ANY performance is a representation—an artistic expression—of the human condition; and that condition is imperfect!
The problem I see with technology (beyond what we have already mentioned with regards to settling for convenience over quality) lies with its potential to cocoon or cloister. Attending a live performance, be it music or theatre, is about socializing as much as it is about the actual art form in question. This isolationism should be a big concern about our technological age in general (what with Twitter and Facebook) and not just limited to the ability to recreate an artistic experience in an electronic format.
David Cavlovic
A musician who I have the utmost respect for has sent this email:
Bob, you are quite right about Kendrick, and all his horde. Our vicar has recently forbidden the playing of records in Church, hiding behind the fact that we don't have a licence to perform commercial records, but really for artistic reasons.
In my lifetime, there has been an incredible improvement in professional choral singing, mirrored by a parallel decline in amateur church choirs, largely the fault of vicars, most of whom are ill-educated, and totally unmusical, and therefore resent the attention choirs receive, detracting from that given to their tedious sermons.
at my small parish{Catholic] we had a fine advent carols presentation, well done, tasteful, each "lesson" returning to O come o come Emmanuel,which Is advent .Most "modern" church music has the unfortunate side effect of not promoting contemplation nor adoration, two points I find especially relevant at Mass.That said, there are great,quirky alt musicians with a message, Like Half-handed cloud and Wovenhand,who are wonderful BUT NOT LITURGICAL. I always thought that Liturgy should bring out the best,deepest art.That is just my opinion...
Thanks TWD.
'That is just my opinion...' No problem - that is what this blog is about.
Here are links to the two bands mentioned:
http://www.myspace.com/handycloud
http://www.myspace.com/wovenhand
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