The Songs We Sing: A Textual Analysis of Popular Congregational Songs of the 20th and 21st Century (original) (raw)
Related papers
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...
Examining contemporary congregational song - beyond sung theology
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.
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.
2013
© © U Un ni iv ve er rs si it ty y o of f P Pr re et to or ri ia a This theoretical section leads to a catalogue of criteria for "Good songs": These are criteria for quality, for "Good Text", such as biblical and theological value, how easily it is understood, whether it takes human experience seriously and its poetic value. Criteria for "Good Tune" include its level of difficulty, how heavily it depends on accompaniment, and its balance between the familiar and the interesting and new. The third category of criteria evaluate the match between text and tune in mood, rhythm and climax. The last category looks at the balance in the song between different polarities, such as, amongst others, the balance of past and present, cognitive and emotive elements, between challenge and affirmation, and between universal and particular emphases. This list of criteria is then tested on three songs each of four different songwriters: two traditional and two contemporary: Paul Gerhardt, Charles Wesley, Graham Kendrick and Noel Richards. In each case a background is given, an overview of their work as a whole and a detailed analysis of each song. In the end the criteria themselves are evaluated as to their usefulness and user-friendliness. Suggestions are then made how these criteria can guide worship leaders in their choices of songs for the Sunday service.
This research article is based on the author’s doctoral research into the question of quality criteria for Christian songs. In many Christian congregations today, the question of music is an emotive issue as the service and its music touch the heart of people’s faith life and shapes people’s theology. Of the many issues that were investigated in the dissertation, this article focuses on one question only, the question of the ‘cognitive’ and the ‘emotive’ value of the songs that are sung in a Sunday service. It will be argued that, in ‘good’ songs, there needs to be a good balance between ‘cognitive’ and ‘emotive’ value. The general question is how to identify songs that can nurture faith and sustain people through life. Characteristic of such songs is, amongst many other criteria, a good balance between the cognitive and emotive value of the text and the tune. In the discussion, the author focusses largely on her own Lutheran liturgical and hymnological tradition as well as on the ‘Praise and Worship’ movement which has a dramatic impact on churches all over the world. The author argues that finding songs that balance the emotive and the cognitive component is an effective way to bridge the divides on worship music within a congregation. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Within the discipline of hymnological studies, the article opens a ground-breaking new way to analyse and critique music used in worship with objective tools for analysis. This is, as far as the author knows, new for this discipline, and it also has an effect on other disciplines.
Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs: Assessing the Debate
The New Testament contains very little explicit information concerning singing in Christian churches, and yet debate about what kind of songs may be sung in worship is perhaps one of the most controversial matters facing churches today. For this reason, participants on all sides of contemporary worship debates look to two parallel NT passages as fodder for their views: Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16. Of particular note in interpretations of these passages are the three musical terms Paul employs: ψαλμοῖς (psalmois), ὕμνοις (hymnois), and ᾠδαῖς (ōdais). What these terms exactly mean has been a matter of disagreement since the church fathers, and worship warriors frequently use dogmatic, and often unsupported , assertions concerning their meaning to defend their arguments. The purpose of this paper is to examine popular and scholarly discussions of the terms in these passages to determine, if possible, their exact meaning and what implications for contemporary practice may be drawn therefrom. The grammatical construction of the phrases in both Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 are nearly identical, 2 and thus I will treat discussions of the meaning of these terms without distinction between the two appearances. I will survey only recent treatments of these texts for two reasons. First, recent discussions will reflect the most current scholarship in biblical studies. Second, contemporary scholars will take into account and interact with any relevant older scholarship, so there is little need to specifically explore the older treatments. By examining the arguments for the predominant views of the meaning of these terms, I will show that ψαλμοῖς, ὕμνοις, and ᾠδαῖς in Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 should not be taken as clearly defined categories of congregational song but should rather be seen as overlapping near synonyms.