Keeping in Tune with the Times-Praise & Worship Music as Today's Evangelical Hymnody1 in North America (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dialog, 2009
In the heated discussion about different church music styles, one aspect often gets overlooked: the similarities between traditional hymns and the modern or contemporary Praise and Worship music (P&W). Aiming at unfolding some of these similarities, this article contemplates technological, sociological, and theological perspectives to reveal parallels between the two practices and postulates P&W as today's evangelical hymnody in North America.
A Cosmopolitan Dichotomy: Mainline Protestantism and Contemporary versus Traditional Worship Music Faced with a twenty-first century crisis of cosmopolitan identity, North American mainline Protestants have turned to dichotomized musical diversity. For the better part of United States’ history, White-Anglo-Saxon Protestants had seen their identity and worship practices established as hegemonic norms. However, since the 1950s, these mainline denominations have been shaken by steady losses. Taking stock and noting that their historical evangelical Others using more “contemporary” music were thriving, mainline churches soon had their own miked singers, guitarists, and drummers leading praise and worship choruses in addition to hymns, pipe organs, and chancel choirs. Despite increasing relativism, globalized mainline cultural positions, and liberal theology, the musical expansion was quickly channeled into a Contemporary versus Traditional worship music binary that continues to dominate discourse and practice. During the Worship Wars of the 1990s, the two styles came to be seen as largely incompatible and churches now often have separate Contemporary and Traditional services. The first section of this chapter analyzes why, given the many styles, genres, and traditions actually played in these churches, mainline Protestants have essentialized the musical, cultural, and theological omnivorism of their ecumenical cosmopolitanism into an oppositional either-or choice. What prompts a local congregation choose to channel their music through this pervasive dichotomy? In the second section, I draw upon Sznaider, Beck, Rommen and fieldwork among Presbyterians in Tennessee, to demonstrate how one mainline Protestant congregations has engaged with the Contemporary-Traditional dichotomy to position themselves within broader flows of Christian media and meaning. Analyzing repertoire choices, performance choices, and congregant reception, I demonstrate how this congregation embraces the broad label of Contemporary, but brings the details in line with their local vision of self-identity. This chapter provides an analytically contextualized case study of how, by adopting and adapting the symbolic categories of Contemporary and Traditional, mainline Protestant churches are using music to assert themselves as part of a dynamic Christian network engaged in a discourse of cultural vitality.
Religions
In the recent study of Contemporary Praise and Worship (CPW), many studies have focused on musical repertory, including its text, music, and performance, as the foundational text(s) for theoretical analysis. In particular, scholars have relied on lists of the most popular songs that have been reported to Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI). This essay points out several critical weaknesses in the current overreliance on this methodology and instead contends for two underutilized methodologies—liturgical ethnography and liturgical history—that need to be developed in the scholarship. The essay argues that such a cultivation of methodology will enable the burgeoning scholarship on CPW to gain richer insight into the range of theological meaning expressed in CPW contexts.
Examining Contemporary Congregationsl Song - beyond sung theology
2013
What Christians sing as they worship is a focus of considerable attention in the contemporary church and yet it has been a contentious issue at almost every period of Christian history. Since the mid-twentieth century, significant social, cultural, and technological changes, all against a backdrop of increasing global consciousness, have affected the way music functions and the ways opinions about repertoire and performance practices are formed. The primary focus of this project is the analysis of eight songs composed between 1983 and 2001. The essential question is how musical analysis contributes to a greater understanding of the nature of contemporary congregational song and various performance practices. This project will focus on analysis of harmonic structures as the major element. This will provide a framework from which comparisons of other musical elements can lead to a greater awareness of the issues of music and worship, and of music and theology. Developing a greater und...
Style Matters: Contemporary Worship Music and the Meaning of Popular Musical Borrowings
This article, appearing in vol. 32, issue 1 (2017) of the journal Liturgy, chronicles the “style periods” of contemporary worship music in the USA from 1960s to the present, showing the range of differing, sometimes conflicting beliefs and concerns communicated by musical stylistic choices. Liturgy is quarterly journal of dedicated to pastoral liturgy published by The Liturgical Conference, intended for both scholars and church leaders.
European Journal of Musicology, 2021
onique Ingalls’s Singing the Congregation: How Contemporary Worship Music Forms Evangelical Community is a landmark publication, inviting vitally diverse readings. Fusing distinct disciplinary traditions and settings of field research, the book offers much more than a fresh understanding of popular religious music. With ethnomusicology and congregational music studies at the foreground, Ingalls’s undertaking spans popular music and media studies, sociology, theology, among other fields, to propose an analytical model for congregation and worship. The book evokes a novel understanding of the reasons and ways in which contemporary worship music constitutes congregation; an understanding that, even though primarily addressing the North American evangelical context, concerns broadly the shaping of worship within and between certain denominational families across the globe today. The model comprises five distinct ways in which congregations are formed through music-making. These musical ...
Exploring the Contemporary Congregational Song Genre: Texts, Practice, and Industry
PhD Thesis, 2016
Contemporary congregational songs (elsewhere referred to as ‘praise and worship’ music, or contemporary worship music) began some forty years ago in Western Pentecostal/Charismatic contexts, but their influence is now worldwide and pan-denominational. While professional and popular discourses relating to this genre are widespread, scholarly engagement is still nascent. Where it is available, it is most often the examination of a specific contextualisation of the genre. Moreover, the music of the genre is under-represented in analyses because researchers have preferred sociological, historical, or theological methodologies. Finally, lacking from the contemporary congregational song (CCS) discourse is a research method and meta-language to facilitate a generic understanding of the genre; its texts, producers, and consumers. This thesis provides a broad scholarly platform for CCS; a framework for their creation, analysis, and evaluation upon which future scholarship can build. This thesis identifies, defines, and explores the CCS genre, its texts, its production and producers, and Christians’ engagement with these mediated texts as individuals, and in corporate worship settings. The methodology employed to achieve these aims is a tri-level music semiology (Nattiez, 1990). At the first level, twenty-five of the most popular CCS sung in churches around the world are subject to individual and collective analyses, based on their most-viewed YouTube versions. Key lyrical, musical, and extra-musical characteristics were identified. At the second level, Christians attending CCS-oriented churches were directly surveyed to ascertain their engagement with CCS. Two key questions were explored: What can Christians sing? And, What do Christians want to sing, and why? Supporting data from the 2011 National Church Life Survey (NCLS) was also analysed and cross-tabulated. Finally, key CCS writers/producers/performers were interviewed to ascertain the degree to which they considered diverse and localised congregational engagement. This study sheds new light on the CCS genre, articulating its musical, lyrical, and extra-musical elements in greater detail and depth than has previously been available. It also reveals CCS as primarily a functional genre, facilitating musical worship for individual and gathered Christians. Furthermore, CCS is a contested genre, constantly under a process of negotiation and transformation by various stakeholders. Tensions between the new and the familiar, the individual and communal, the professional and vernacular, all contribute to the formation and evolution of the contemporary congregational song genre.
This dissertation critically evaluates the portrayal of the doctrine of inaugurated eschatology in an identified core repertory, the most-used contemporary congregational worship songs in churches in the United States from 2000 through 2015. Chapter 2 explores views on the role of congregational singing as it relates to the presence of God and the spiritual formation of the believer. It compares Edith Humphries’ concept of the worship service as “entrance” with Ryan Lister’s view that God’s presence is both a goal and a means of accomplishing his purposes. Then, using the work of James K. A. Smith and Monique Ingalls, chapter 2 explores the role congregational song plays in forming the identity of churches and believers. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the aesthetic paradigm of Nicholas Wolterstorff has useful implications for the manner in which congregational singing serves as the occasion for entering the divine presence. Chapter 3 maps a typology of themes related to the doctrinal umbrella of “inaugurated eschatology,” as codified by George Ladd and now a widely-used term in evangelical scholarship, so as to provide nuanced categories by which one can evaluate the content and scope of eschatological thought in American evangelical life. After a brief survey of the doctrine’s historical development, tracing the contributions of George Ladd, Anthony Hoekema, and “progressive dispensationalism,” the dissertation traces the biblical data to highlight ways in which Scripture speaks of the kingdom of God’s current presence (the “already”) and future arrival (the “not yet”). The chapter then considers believers’ experience of the “already” and the “not yet” in language of affection, spatiality, and chronology. Chapter 4 traces these eschatological themes in American evangelical hymnody from ca. 1700 through 1985, addressing a few representative hymns from each hymnic era by way of illustration. Drawing upon the work of Stephen Marini, Eric Routley, Richard Crawford, and others, the chapter surveys select examples of American evangelical hymnody from four time periods in US history (beginning in 1737) and finds that many of these historic hymns contain substantive reflections upon robust eschatological themes. Chapter 5 surveys the core repertory of CWM across the span of years from 2000 to 2015 for a portrayal of the themes of inaugurated eschatology. Using Richard Crawford’s concept of “core repertory,” it synthesizes CCLI reports of song usage over a defined recent period (2000 to 2015) to identify a core group of songs for analysis, and derives a body of 83 songs. Using the lens of inaugurated eschatology developed in chapter 3, it concludes that elements of “not yet” are underrepresented in contemporary evangelical congregational song. Chapter 6 proposes practical ways that church leaders of worship can better represent these themes as they plan services for the health and sustainable growth of their churches. Chapter 7 summarizes each of the chapters, draws implications, and suggests areas for further research.
Methodist history, 2014
For the historical development of hymnody, nineteenth-century America is a particularly fruitful period for research. Building upon the foundations of European tradition, Christians in the United States began developing a hymnic corpus unique to their own experience. American hymn writers began composing their own texts; the folk shape-note expression of the era furnished hymnody with many enduring hymn tunes (i.e., “Amazing Grace”/“New Britain,” “Foundation,” “Beach Spring,” “Holy Manna”); the African American spirituals were forged in the crucible of slavery and continued legal forms of oppression (i.e. Jim Crow segregation); finally, from these many sources, the uniquely American genre of gospel music was born, developing and strengthening at camp-meetings and revivals that swept across the American landscape. With Methodism’s close ties to the frontier religion of the camp-meeting and revivals, the story of U.S. Methodist hymnody is intertwined with that of gospel music, as many...