Examining contemporary congregational song - beyond sung theology (original) (raw)
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...
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.
Religions, 2023
“Performing” and “performance” are potentially contentious words within the context of contemporary Christian worship. However, performative elements are explicit in the lyrics of contemporary congregational songs (CCS), and in video recordings of CCS, through the actions of those on stage and in the congregation, as well as in the broader context of staging, lighting, projection, production, and video editing. However, to date, there is only a handful of scholarly works that explore performing in contemporary worship or contemporary worship as performance and most of them are ethnomusicological. This paper seeks to address notions of performing and performance through a broader lens of the most-sung CCS globally, examined through the disciplinary fields of performance studies, musicology, media studies and theology. It involves a two-fold complementary textual analysis of the most-sung CCS lyrics and the most-watched ‘live worship’ videos of those songs on YouTube. In so doing, this study identifies how the Christian music industry at large officially portrays and languages performance in worship songs and also identifies how performative elements are enacted in the live worship videos released. These analyses are finally synthesized to identify how performing and performance are understood and actively portrayed to and by the contemporary church.
2013
This short piece introduces the book _Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity, and Experience_. Collected from presentations during the first biennial Christian Congregational Music conference (congregationalmusic.org), this book explores the role of congregational music in Christian religious experience, examining how musicians and worshippers perform, identify with and experience belief through musical praxis. Contributors from a broad range of fields, including music studies, theology, literature, and cultural anthropology, present interdisciplinary perspectives on a variety of congregational musical styles - from African American gospel music, to evangelical praise and worship music, to Mennonite hymnody - within contemporary Europe and North America. In addressing the interconnected themes of performance, identity and experience, the volume explores several topics of interest to a broader humanities and social sciences readership, including the influence of globalization and mass mediation on congregational music style and performance; the use of congregational music to shape multifaceted identities; the role of mass mediated congregational music in shaping transnational communities; and the function of music in embodying and imparting religious belief and knowledge.
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.
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 ...
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.
Dialog-a Journal of Theology, 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.
Church music as cultural and inter-cultural music
The presence of at least two prominent streams of church music within the DRC is evident – this is also true of most other Protestant and Reformed churches. There is tension between the ‘old music’ and the ‘new music’; traditional church music and contemporary church music; the official repertoire of church music and the utilized repertoire of songs. Liturgical singing often includes various free songs (songs outside the official hymnal). Songs from various traditions are cut and pasted or copied and merged into liturgy through a process of bricolage. Within bricolage liturgy there is a growing tendency towards bricolage liturgical singing. A brief overview of the history of church music illustrates the complexities regarding church music. The official song of the temple was often complimented by the ecstatic song of individuals. The more formal and official song of the church often stood in contrast to the song and music that were played and sung in houses and elsewhere. Christian believers in different eras expressed themselves in different forms and genres of music. The Bible does not support a blueprint for church music. There is no Biblical church music, mainly because no ‘melodies’ could be preserved (cf. Mowinckel 2004:9). The latter is further complicated by the culture-bound nature of Biblical music and songs. The Biblical data mostly provides snapshots of instances where God’s people utilized music and singing in their interaction with the Almighty and covenantal God. Certain principles and guidelines for church music could be drawn from these, although the danger of fundamentalism, relativism and subjectivism remains. A study of liturgy illustrates the important role of music and singing within the dialogue of the liturgy. Recent studies emphasize that church music could function as a ritual symbol within a specific cultural or sub-cultural community. As such church music is closely related to the culture (or sub-culture) of a given community and can never be evaluated apart from that culture. Within a postmodern culture, church music will be greatly influenced and coloured by the values and attitudes of postmodernism. The latter have major implications for musical styles, genres, repertoires and the sanctification of church music. Within postmodernism the borders between sacred and secular are not so clear, neither between sacred (liturgical) music and secular music. Within Western culture and postmodernism there is a growing need for an inculturated and an inter-culturated song, expressing the smaller narrative(s) of the local congregation in idioms, language, metaphors and styles true to the local culture. Church music is closely related to the spirituality of the local congregation. The dominant type of spirituality will necessarily have a sound influence on the musical genres, accompaniments, styles and repertoire of the local congregation. The growing phenomenon of popular spirituality has definite implications for church music. At least three circles of spiritualities must find expression in the song of the local congregation, namely an ecumenical spirituality, a denominational spirituality and a congregational spirituality. Where the official song (Liedboek van die Kerk) gives expression to the denominational or Reformed spirituality as well as the meta-narrative, the free song often gives expression to the congregational spirituality as well as the smaller narrative. It is argued that the freely chosen song is an important means of expressing the spirituality of the local congregation (culture). In this sense, it does not threaten the official church song but compliments it. These two could stand in a positive and creative tension. Regarding liturgical singing, the DRC is presently moving from a societas through a phase of communitas to a new societas. It is impossible to predict the outcome of this process. As Burger (1995:31) indicates, a communitas-phase releases a lot of new energy that could be of great value to the church. Church music, as folk music and cultural music, will have to be faithful to the culture and spirituality of God’s people living in the twenty first century within a given context. The age-old tradition must continue hand in hand with a new song. Vos (2009:5) summarizes accurately: “However, each generation of believers must interpret the ancient sources and traditions of the Church anew, within the demands of their time, without being unfaithful to the traditions in which a definitive liturgy exists”.
The Songs We Sing: A Textual Analysis of Popular Congregational Songs of the 20th and 21st Century
Ecclesial Practices , 2019
Contemporary worship songs have been the subject of criticism over their lyrical quality. Objective assessment of the veracity of the criticisms has been difficult to achieve. This research seeks to address this issue by performing a textual analysis of the most popular hymns of the 19th and 20th centuries and contemporary popular worship songs and comparing the results. The research concludes that although there are differences in the lyrical content they are not crucial and that both contemporary worship songs and traditional hymns should find a home in congregational song.
The developing field of Christian congregational music studies
Whilst Christian congregational music has long been an object of reflection and study it has often been pushed towards the margins of the various disciplines that it inhabits. In this article I survey some of the challenges such study has faced before suggesting that recent disciplinary developments have served to prepare the ground for increased study of Christian congregational music. I suggest that ethnomusicology, in particular, has played an important role in motivating recent enquiry across a range of disciplines although not without facing a number of further challenges itself. I suggest that a field of Christian congregational music studies is beginning to emerge and finish by outlin- ing recent contributions to scholarship from a range of perspectives.
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.
Musicking as Liturgical Speech Acts: An Examination of Contemporary Worship Music Practices
Studia Liturgica, 2021
This article examines the genre of Contemporary Worship Music (CWM) within worship contexts in terms of its formative and purposeful nature. In CWM settings, the worship leader plays a particular role in the selection and facilitation of CWM repertoire to be led by praise bands. Through the leader's consideration of the message of the CWM lyrics, and the relational nature of CWM practices, a worship leader's pedagogical decisions are integral to contributing to a space of dialogue for worship musicians. Drawing on previous literature addressing liturgical language in worship, I analyze the CWM context as a particular case where liturgical language shapes musicians’ spiritual formation. This examination of CWM practices includes an analysis of musicians’ engagement in relational musicking and meeting through I-Thou encounters. I therefore explore both the need for worship leaders to consider the multitudinous theological implications of their actions, as well as the way music...
Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide, 2018
This is the introduction to the book _Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide_ (Routledge, 2018). In it, we propose the term ‘musical localization’ as a useful umbrella category to describe the processes by which Christian communities worldwide adapt, adopt, perform, and share congregational music. We first describe the related terms inculturation and indigenization, assessing their strengths and weaknesses. We then describe aspects of a methodological and theoretical approach common to each of the volume’s musical ethnographies and outline how the book’s chapters work together to flesh out four discrete but interrelated aspects of musical localization. Finally, through a self-reflexive discussion of how the co-editors selected our introductory musical example, we put forward several questions suggested by our work on musical localization that can benefit scholarly reflection on Christian congregational music.
Christian song in a global church: The role of musical structure in community formation
International Journal of Community Music, 2009
While recognizing the importance of musical style in congregational singing, this article suggests that the underlying structure of the people's song influences how they receive theology and the relationship of song to ritual action. The author, after introducing sequential, cyclic and refrain structures, defines the characteristics of each and proposes ways that each structure may enliven a ritual and enable community building.
Ambivalent fame: Insights from the most sung composers of contemporary congregational songs
A poietic perspective (Nattiez, 1990) of contemporary congregational songs (CCS) is that of the composers, producers, and those involved in the production of CCS, and the broader cultural milieu in which the songs incubate. This paper undertakes poietic analysis of six popularly sung composers of CCS in the Anglophone world; Matt Crocker, Mia Fieldes, Ben Fielding, Tim Hughes, Matt Redman, and Darlene Zschech. While often interviewed by the popular press, these writers/performers are rarely personally engaged by academia. This paper draws on personal interviews with each writer to explore their perceptions of song writing for congregations, their writing practices, experiences, intentions, and their reflections on the individual songs that have been appropriated by churches world-wide. This paper argues that poietic agents have a complex and ambivalent relationship with the songs they write, the industry that supports them, and esthesic (ibid.) engagement with their songs. Tensions will be explored between artistic pursuits and congregational limitations, between personal preferences and public consumption, between local and international platforms, and between industry and internal production expectations. While many studies have focussed on Christians’ engagement with CCS, and some on the analysis of songs themselves, this paper presents a unique counterpoint to the CCS discourse.