MUSICAL GENRE AND LITURGICAL SPIRITUALITY

BY APRIL STACE VEGA

Introduction

In March 2011, Christianity Today dedicated an issue to

exploring issues surrounding music used in worship services.

In the Editor’s Note for that month, Mark Galli apologized

for the lack of articles in the issue about contemporary

worship music:

As often happens when discussing church music in the pages of Christianity Today, the articles display a bias for traditional music. This is unfortunate, because we at CT happen to also like contemporary worship music. We stroveto find an article or conduct an interview that would givemore space to exploring the gift of contemporary music, butwe came up empty. I’ll be frank: When it comes to contemporary Christian music, I have yet to find authors whoare able to probe its uniqueness with the same depth and insight as those who relish traditional music.1

Galli’s critique of the available scholarship is not

unfounded. There is a lack of available scholarship on

contemporary Christian worship music (CWM) that does more 1 Mark Galli, “The End of Worship Wars: But we’re still learning from one another,” in Christianity Today (March 2011), 5.

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than offer implicit or explicit critique of the music. The

critiques generally fall into one or more of the following

categories: the lack of solid doctrine in the lyrics, the

consumeristic attitude evident in the lyrics and in the

style of the worship itself, the simplicity of the harmonic

structure of the music, the repetitiveness of the music, or

the overall complaint that the CCM “industry” as a whole has

been so completely secularized that it should have no place

in Christian worship. The only positive rallying point, if

it can be described as such, is an (often grudging)

admission that people seem to “like it.”2 This being the

case, scholarly treatment of the so-called “worship wars”

between traditional and contemporary music tends to be

either on the offensive towards contemporary worship music

(hereafter CWM), or, occasionally, on the defensive, citing

either its popularity as an appropriate justification for

its existence or claiming that the music is not functionally

all that different from hymnody after all.3 While all of 2 Ibid., 5.3 For example, see Gesa F. Hartje, "Keeping in tune with thetimes: praise & worship music as today's evangelical hymnodyin North America," in Dialog 48, no. 4 (December 1, 2009),

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these approaches have something to offer, I suggest that

what is at stake in disagreements over styles of music in

worship, both “on the ground” and in the academy, are

competing models of liturgical spirituality.

Liturgical spirituality, as defined by Mary Collins, is

“a communal spirituality enfleshed through the bodies of the

many individual Christians who make up every local ecclesial

body.”4 It is communal and ethical. Through worship

services, an ecclesial body expresses and enacts a

particular perspective about God, the world, and the

relationship between the two. Over time, the images (visual,

auditory, and otherwise) made available in liturgy play an

important role in the development of a corporate identity.5

What a community does in its liturgical gatherings

discloses, over time, a particular model of liturgical

spirituality.

373.4 Mary Collins, “Liturgical Spirituality: Communal and Ethical,” in Currents In Theology And Mission 26, no. 4 (August 1, 1999), 274.5 Margaret Mary Kelleher, “Liturgy and the Christian Imagination,” Worship 66 no. 2 (March, 1992), 131.

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Conflicts over liturgical music must be understood as

more than clashes over personal preference and style. In

this article, I suggest musical genre as a starting place

for this. In the first part of this article, I use the work

of Simon Frith and Timothy Rommen to explore how conceiving

of the traditional and contemporary worship styles as

musical genres can shed light on the spiritual/ethical

dimensions of the disagreement. In the second part of the

paper, I suggest some first steps in using this approach,

demonstrating how it might be used, for example, in studying

the conflict between contemporary and traditional worship

music.

PART ONE: Method and Approach

I approach this topic from a perspective informed by

the approach of ethnomusicology, which was defined by Alan

P. Merriam as “the study of music in culture.”6 With such a

definition in mind, I am approaching the clash between

traditional and contemporary worship music with the

following assumptions: First, I am approaching music as a 6 Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

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collaborative, cultural phenomenon that is intertwined with

other activities and concerns within a society.7 My focus is

how people decide what makes certain music “good” or

“appropriate” for worship, how the music fits into the web

of life (specifically, liturgical spirituality) and how

different styles of music are organized conceptually by

those who interact with it.8 From this perspective, “music

listening can only occur within music cultures,” because in

order for people to hear certain combinations of sounds as

music, one must know something about the conventional

meanings of musical elements.9 Conceiving of music in this

way means that on an individual level, every listener of

music has been in some sense musically socialized, a process

which is affected by factors such as social status,

education, and the mass media, among others, as well as

individual personality structures.10

7 Ibid., 63.8 Ibid., 63.9 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 109-110.10 Helmut Rosing, “Listening Behaviour and Musical Preference in the Age of 'Transmitted Music,’” in Popular Music, Vol. 4, Performers and Audiences (1984), 123.

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The second assumption derives from Merriam’s definition

of ethnomusicology. I view music as a collaborative,

relational process wherein the music derives its meaning

from the social context in which it is embedded,11 as

opposed to a view of music as a medium through which

messages are communicated from sender(s) to receiver(s).12

The third assumption is as follows: If I approach music

as a cultural and collaborative phenomenon, and the process

of interpretation of music involves a more complex process

than a sender-receiver model based on lyrics, then it

follows that this approach will not be centered on a content

analysis of the lyrics of the worship music under

consideration. While such an approach may be useful in

highlighting, for example, the meaning that the text had to 11 Frith, Performing Rites, 63.12 See Martin, Peter J. “Music, Identity and Social Control,” in Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music, edited by Steven Brown and Ulrik Volgsten, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 61. Martin describes the sender-receiver model of musical communication as follows: “[T]he words of a song are treated as a “text” independentlyof the music (which is then ignored), and both are decontextualized. It is further assumed that this ‘text’ hasan unambiguous ‘meaning,’ and that this meaning is effectively and unproblematically communicated to those who listen to the song.”

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the person who wrote it, it may say little about what its

meaning is in any given social setting.

Given these three assumptions about the nature of music

in general, my approach to studying music in the context of

Christian worship rests on the assumption that sacred music

is a substantive, not derivative, element of religious

culture. Therefore, disputes over styles of church music are

never “just” about the music.13 To change the liturgical

music means to change, among other things, the model of

liturgical spirituality.

I would also like to be clear about what I am not doing

in this article. I am not attempting to defend or indict one

style or the other, or to discredit those who decry

weaknesses in the style of contemporary (or traditional)

worship. As someone with a significant background in both

styles, it is my personal belief that having some clarity on

what is actually at stake in these arguments would serve the

Church by generating mutual understanding. At the very

13 Stephen A. Marini, Sacred Song in America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 318.

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least, the conceptual model I propose in this paper will, I

hope, serve as a more solid starting place for those who

wish to cast normative judgments and so will render those

judgments more useful. In this article, I suggest a way of

understanding the models of liturgical spirituality that are

being negotiated within the larger disagreement over musical

style, not in order to privilege one style over the other,

but with the hope that such a study will help bridge gaps of

misunderstanding.

Approach: Musical Genre

The clash between so-called “traditional” and

“contemporary” liturgical music cannot be understood without

understanding musical genres as social constructions that

can be fluid over time. Musical genres emerge to define

similarities and recurrences that people in a community

emphasize in identifying and defining musical events.14

14 Franco Fabbri "Browsing music spaces: Categories and the musical mind." In Collected Work: Critical essays in popular musicology (2007), 56. RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, EBSCOhost (accessed February 20, 2012).

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Thus, genres exist both at a personal level (as cognitive

types) and as “socialized nuclear content.”15

The rules that define a genre can be related to any of

the phenomena or “codes” of any given music event, such as

rules of behavior, etiquettes, ways of using the body,

etc.16 Genres, like the music itself, are cultural

collaborations. Frith, a sociomusicologist, places the

various sorts of “rules” that may define a genre under five

headings: Formal and technical rules, semiotic rules,

behavioral rules, social and ideological rules, and

commercial and juridical rules.17 Understanding the rules of

any given genre of music is necessary to understand what is

being communicated by the music. He clarifies this point as

follows:

[T]o understand what’s at stake in arguments about musical value, we have to begin with the discourses which give the value terms their meaning. Musical disputes are not about the music “in itself” but about how to place it, what it is about the music that is to be assessed. After all, we can only hear music as valuable when we know whatto listen to and how to listen for it. Our reception of music, our expectations from it, are not inherent in the 15 Ibid., 56.16 Ibid., 56.17 Frith, Performing Rites, 91.

music itself-which is one reason why so much musicological analysis of popular music misses the point: its object of study, the discursive text it constructs, is not the text to which anyone else listens.18

Frith asserts that much of the musicological analysis of

popular music “misses the point” because scholars, unaware

of the genre “discourse” of which any given music is a part,

interpret and study a “text” in the music that is not, in

fact, the text that actual listeners, as participants in the

discourse, listen to. Before anything can be understood

about any given musical conflict, then, one must understand

the genre in which each music belongs, and the criteria of

each genre that are used to evaluate the quality of music in

each of the conflicting musical parties. If we apply this to

studies and critiques of liturgical music, then in order for

a scholar who writes about the use of music in worship to

make (useful) value judgments on a specific style or type of

worship music (or even a particular hymn or song), s/he must

first be aware of the genre in which the style of music is

located and must be cognizant of the rules of the genre

which determine what to listen for, and how to listen for 18 Ibid., 26.

it. For example, casting a negative judgment on CWM on the

basis that it does not live up to the same criteria that

determines a good hymn simply does not tell us anything

except that any given CWM song is not a hymn, and vice

versa.

Although there is certainly still a need to make

normative theological judgments about the theological value

of liturgical music, if we take seriously the call not to

decontextualize the words from the music or the song from

its genre conventions, it follows that a theology may

actually be quite difficult to discern from song lyrics

alone. In short, making a genre distinction moves us from

the question of “What does this song mean?” to “What does

this song mean to these people?” or “What meaning do these

people ascribe to this song and the act of singing it?” A

more nuanced study of the musical event is required, a study

which considers the role of music in the culture, the

history of the musical genre itself, and ethnographic

inquiry.

Frith argues that musical genres should be treated

comparatively, “tracing contrasting solutions to shared

problems.”19 He suggests that questions should revolve

around issues such as how “skill” is defined in different

musical genres, how the skills are learned and taught, and

how lines are drawn between “amateurs” and

“professionals.”20 I suggest that issues such as these are

related to models of liturgical spirituality being

negotiated within the larger American evangelical context.

The issues Frith articulates, such as how “skill” is defined

or how lines are drawn between amateurs and professionals

are embodiments of the discourse surrounding the tension

over issues such as the use of technology and tradition, the

relation of the church to the world, competing images of

God, and others. These are all issues pertinent to the

shared project of expressing ad embodying a particular

liturgical spirituality or ecclesial identity. The varying

musical genres do not provide the same answers, but the

questions (problems) they address may be similar. To learn

more of the nature of the questions/problems, it is 19 Ibid., 42-43.20 Ibid., 43.

necessary to understand that musical genre functions not

only as a cultural/aesthetic discourse, but as an ethical

one as well. For that, we now turn to the work of Timothy

Rommen.

Genre as ethical discourse

When a new genre of music arises in a culture, a “value

system” is often attached to it.21 Liturgical music, as one

might imagine, is hardly exempt from this pattern. Studies

of the controversy surrounding the development of the Sacred

Harp hymnody in America and shape-note notation in the

British American colonies, for example, note that

disagreements over ecclesial models and the relationship of

European culture to the emerging culture of the colonies

were inextricably woven into the conflict over musical

style.22 The music of Pentecostal churches and the gospel

music of African-American churches were interwoven with

debates about African-American identity and the role of the

21 John Bealle, Public Worship, Private Faith: Sacred Harp and American Folksong. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 8-29.22 Ibid., 27-33

church within the community.23 New musical genres arise as

an integral part of a value system, not merely as a

reflection or expression of a detached ethical discourse. In

Frith’s words, “Music doesn’t represent values but lives

them.”24

The assertion that genres of music have a “value system”

attached to them is the starting point for Rommen’s study of

music in the association of churches known as Full Gospel

Trinidad. Rommen asserts that every musical value judgment

exists as a part of social event, that is, an argument.25 He

prefers “style” to “genre” in order to keep his analytical

tool (method), dubbed “the ethics of style,” open to other

non-musical forms of expression.26 Rommen makes use of

Frith’s work on genre but asserts that in the context of the

music of Full Gospel Trinidad, the aesthetic dimensions of

23 Mellonee V. Burnim, “Conflict and Controversy in Black Religious Music” in Readings in African American Church Music and Worship, ed. James Abbington (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2001), 481-491.24 Frith, Performing Rites, 272.25 Ibid., 94-95.26 Timothy Rommen, Mek Some Noise: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad. (Berkeley: University of California Press; Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College, 2007).

music take a backseat to the ethical dimensions of the style

(genre) as people make value judgments on the music used in

liturgy. He argues that, in the context of Full Gospel

Trinidad, ethical matters take precedence as people choose

whether to identify themselves with certain genres or styles

of worship music. He proposes that ethics and identity are

at the heart of the conflict over musical style.

In Rommen’s, conflict rages in the churches of the Full

Gospel Trinidad church association over the use of a

particular style of religious music. This style originated

in Trinidad and is known as “Gospelypso.” The accepted,

“traditional” music of the church, is comprised mainly of

hymns and North American contemporary praise music (CWM).27

Hymns and CWM are welcome in church services throughout the

association. Gospelypso, however beloved by the youth in the

association, is not welcome in many churches, and its usage

results in conflicts within congregations and between

churches. Despite Rommen’s observation that much of

Gospelypso does not actually sound very different from the

27 Ibid., 91.

rest of the music that is actually played in worship

services, the music is excluded on an ethical basis: it is

perceived as being too “worldly,” or represents a compromise

with the “carnival” culture of Trinidad, or is too closely

aligned with one or another Christian group that is not part

of the Full Gospel association of churches. The music itself

is not actually very aesthetically different. In fact,

Rommen explains, the style had existed unnamed for a time

before being named. Gospelypso thus emerged as a

manifestation of one proposed solution in an ethical

conflict. What was at stake was nothing less than the

affirmation of a fully-Trinidadian sacred music.28

The “ethics of style” highlights the importance of the

ideological nature of the musical conflict in Full Gospel

Trinidad. Rommen describes this as follows:

...[I]t is clear that musical style is put to use in order to achieve certain goals and that these goals are informed by overarching ethical concerns – by individuals’

poetics of conviction. In the process of performance, then, the music becomes charged with the depth of life, touching upon issues related to politics, gender,

ethnicity, and a host of other community-specific as

28 Ibid., 50.

well as extracommunal concerns.29

The ethics of style is an approach that focuses

attention on “the process by which style becomes the vehicle

for a multifaceted discourse about value and meaning, and

also about identity formation.”30 Rommen finds this approach

most fruitful when musical style is contested, because

“controversy regarding musical style brings to the surface

discourse involving a range of possible ethical

positions.”31 In short, when communities are involved in a

process of negotiation, identity becomes a more salient

concern, and this makes the ethics of style more visible to

an observer. It brings the core issues of a debate to the

forefront.

Rommen suggests that individuals and church communities

decide whether or not a particular song is appropriate for

use in church using criteria that are first ethical, then

aesthetic. It is more important for a song to come from the

right genre (e.g. from North American CWM than from native

29 Ibid., 35-36.30 Ibid., 44.31 Ibid., 45.

Gospelypso artists) than for the song to sound good. How

ethical and aesthetic considerations are intertwined in the

tensions between CWM and “traditional” music is an important

consideration to keep in mind for future study. Rommen’s

view of musical genre/style highlights the ethical component

in a way that clarifies how a musical genre/style can in

fact function as an ethical discourse and how a debate over

musical style can be, simultaneously, an argument over

ethics.

Rommen also makes an important connection between these

ethical discourses and identity. When a musical style (and

the value system it embodies) moves into a new context, it

carries with it associations and discursive formations from

its previous contexts. Thus, musical style

is continuously hailing subjects (imagine yourself like this) while simultaneously being disciplined by the power of competing discourses (you don’t want tobe like that.) There can be no doubt, therefore, that the styles in circulation in the Full Gospel community of Trinidad configure a series of potential identifications that force certain ethical consequences if accepted.32

People who hear the competing styles must decide for

32 Ibid., 38.

themselves whether the identifications that musical style

instantiates are harmful or useful to their identity

maintenance, or who they wish to imagine themselves to be.

In the context of Full Gospel Trinidad, performing or

listening to Gospelypso is not only a statement of one’s

position within the larger discourse, “but also an

identification with other discursive formations (calypso,

for example) and a restatement of the other subject

positions that are held vis-à-vis the style. Hearing a

Gospelypso performance invariably calls to mind the fact

that the listener must orient herself in relationship to the

discourse surrounding it.”33 Rommen suggests that music

provides an “expressive mode” through which contrasting and

competing visions of the Full Gospel Trinidad community

could be articulated. People who choose to listen and

identify with Gospelypso concern themselves with the local

church and what an indigenous Full Gospel Trinidad voice

might sound like. Those who turn to North American Gospel

music and hymns identify more with the idea of a global

33 Ibid., 44-45.

church than with national identity. Both styles, Rommen

argues, presented to the Full Gospel Trinidad community a

solution to questions of identity, and both styles continue

to attract fans today.34

Ultimately, Rommen hints that by using this approach to

study church music, one can clarify what the genre/style of

music used in a church says about a community’s liturgical

spirituality, although, as an ethnomusicologist, he does not

use that language. The link between ethics and identity is

key to understanding this.

[T]he ethics of style is interchangeable with the ethicsof selves. For the ethics of style is a reflective andcyclical process expressed in action through the poetics

of conviction. The pioneering Gospelypso artists were, after all, searching for an appropriate expression of the ethics of themselves. Once they performed themselves asGospelypso, they opened up a new avenue for this type of self- expression to others, and this avenue is now open tonew artists as well as fans... The ethics of style is thus,also, in an important sense about coming to terms with

the ethics of community – and this as instantiated by individual congregations, through larger associations, andin the imagined forms of global Christianity.35

Rommen describes the prevailing “spirituality” (his

term) in Full Gospel Trinidad as “Gnostic,” that is, one 34 Ibid., 51.35 Ibid., 168.

which sees the physical and spiritual world as very

separate. He postulates that CWM from North America is

successful in the Trinidadian context specifically because

it is not “real” in the same way that indigenous music like

Gospelypso is: CWM comes from another place, and the people

of Full Gospel Trinidad do not have to deal with the

industry behind it the same way they have to deal with, for

example, seeing Gospelypso artists selling their recordings

in local stores. CWM permeates worship services throughout

Trinidad, but remains, as a non-indigenous music,

“fundamentally other.”36 Gospelypso, on the other hand, is

“implicated in the messiness of everyday life and is, as

such, much more difficult to incorporate into the pristine

landscape of Gnostic spirituality toward which the

Trinidadian Full Gospel community aspires.”37

These complex issues of liturgical spirituality, ethics

and identity would, of course, be completely different in

the American context. However, I suggest that a method such

as Rommen’s would yield fruitful results in ascertaining the36 Ibid., 66.37 Ibid., 66.

value systems implicit in the competing styles of music in

American evangelical churches. What associations do

worshippers align themselves with by choosing the

“contemporary” over the “traditional” service at their local

church? What liturgical spiritualities are modeled, taking

into account these associations and discursive formations?

The example of Gospelypso cannot, of course, be understood

as a model for every conflict over church music, but the

heart of Rommen’s argument – that the two styles provide

differing solutions to a shared problem or set of problems –

is applicable in the American evangelical context as well.

The “shared problem” I am referring to in this paper is the

enactment of a particular liturgical spirituality. For

example, just as fans of Gospelypso music implicitly

prioritize the local manifestations of the church over the

dominant, Full Gospel model of a global and non-Trinidadian

church, perhaps “fans” of CWM and hymns are also implicitly

engaged in negotiating ecclesial models.

Summary

Musical genres are cultural collaborations, names that

emerge in a culture to define similarities and recurrences

that a community emphasizes in identifying and defining

musical elements. They are defined by sets of rules and

exist both at a personal level and as social constructions.

One cannot interpret any music, including liturgical music,

without knowledge of these rules. We do not know what

liturgical participants are hearing, singing or doing unless

we understand the value terms of the genre. Theology

expressed in liturgical music is expressed through the

particular genre rules and context of the musical event, and

so theological interpretation and judgment must understand

the genre conventions.

Genres exist also as ethical discourses within a

culture. When new musical genres arise, they typically are

embodiments of a value system. New musical genres arise as

part of an ethical discourse. Timothy Rommen’s study of Full

Gospel Trinidad highlights how the ethics of style are

brought to the forefront in disagreements over musical

style, particularly when a new music is challenging a

dominant or established music (e.g., Gospelypso challenging

the music used during worship in Full Gospel Trinidad.) In

the context of CWM and traditional American hymnody, models

of liturgical spirituality are being contested.

PART TWO: Can the “worship wars” be understood in terms of

musical genre and liturgical spirituality?

Music, History, and Identity

The first place to begin with any study of liturgical

music would be to ascertain how music is transmitted and

perceived in the culture wherein the liturgy under

consideration resides. This step is particularly important

given the context of the “worship wars,” as the last one

hundred years has seen great change in how music exists in

American society. Frith gives a macro-level overview of how

music has been perceived and used socially in Western

cultures as follows: First, in the “folk stage,” music was

only available via performance. It was either marked off

from the everyday by ritual and ceremony or it was

integrated into mundane social practices so that it becomes

part of their meaning. In the second stage, the “art stage,”

music began to be stored through notation. It was still

available via performance, of course, but also had a sort of

“imaginary existence” against which any individual

performance could be measured. In the third (and current)

stage, the “pop stage,” music is stored and can be retrieved

via various digital media. Music can now be heard anywhere

at any time, and is a commodity, despite the fact that the

“old values” of presence and intensity of performance

remain.38 Each stage represents a fundamental change in how

people interact with music and how music is woven into

everyday life. These changes can no more be “left at the

door of the sanctuary” than the language or gender roles

that are implicit and explicit in any culture. The

transmission of music via recording technology and the

effect it has had on how people understand and experience

music must be taken into consideration when studying

conflicts over liturgical music.

Prior to recording technology, one could only listen

to music in a communal and live setting. Mark Katz

emphasizes the role that recording technology has had in

38 Frith, Performing Rites, 226-227.

changing the way that music is involved in identity

formation and maintenance. He identifies six ways that

recording technology has changed how people use and perceive

music: tangibility, portability, invisibility,

repeatability, temporality, and manipulability.39

Portability and manipulability in particular are connected

to identity processes.

Portability. Prior to the age of recorded music, music

was bound to its particular social context; church music,

for example, was necessarily such because it was only played

and sung in church. However, with the advent of recorded

sound, all music is more or less portable, and therefore all

music can be removed from its original setting, losing its

identity in space and time.40 On the flip side, as music

ceased to be identified necessarily with a particular time

and place, listeners gained the ability to determine not

only what they listened to, but also when, where, and with

39 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 14-47.40 Ibid., 14.

whom they listened.41 Recorded music gave birth to the

practice of solitary music listening, and, as Tia Denora

notes, gave people the ability to choose music that reflects

and registers tenable self-images.42 While music undoubtedly

had a role to play in social identity prior to recorded

music, the role it plays in identity formation and

expression in contemporary American society is particularly

potent due to this “portability” that Katz identifies.

Manipulability. Musicians have created entirely new

sounds, works, genres and performance traditions with the

ability to manipulate sound through the various recording

technologies that have come into being since the beginning

of the twentieth century.43 Furthermore just as recording

technology has changed the way performers and composers are

able to manipulate music, it has also given more power to

the listener to manipulate the music s/he chooses to hear.44

As Katz explains, “While there have always been composer-

performers – artists who interpret their own works – with 41 Ibid., 17.42 DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 73.43 Katz, Capturing Sound, 41-47.44 Ibid., 47.

recording we can conceive of listener-performers and

listener-composers. Recording... shapes the very way in

which we think about music: what it is, can, and should be.”45

With recorded music, listeners are given control over the

order in which their music plays, the volume at which it

plays, and in some instances, can even determine the

acoustic “mix” of levels. The listener is given an active

role, and this, as Frith notes, means that music has come to

be intimately tied to personal identity:

We express ourselves through our deployment of other people’s music And in this respect music is more like clothes than any other art form – not just in the sense of

the significance of the fashion, but also in the sense that the music we “wear” is as much shaped by our own desires, our own purposes, our own bodies, as by the

intentions of bodies or desires of the people who firstmade it.46

The advances in recording technology has meant that

music functions in a way that is more intimately tied into

personal identity than it was prior to the development of

the technology.

45 Ibid., 47.46 Frith, Performing Rites, 237.

Tia Denora’s ethnographic study about how music is used

in “everyday life” highlights how music “makes available

ways of feeling, being, moving and thinking... it animates

us... it keeps us ‘awake.’”47 The music one chooses to

listen to at any given point can be seen as a resource of

emotion, a way to influence ones own inner life.

Furthermore, music helps us to locate ourselves in ourselves.

That is to say, music is a part of the formation of

identity, both reflecting and forming our perception of

ourselves. Denora argues,

Thus, in turning to different musics and the meaningfulparticles that ‘reflect’ and register self-identity that provide a template of self, individuals are also choosing

music that produces self-images that are tenable, that seem doable, habitable. Respondents seem to access the music of ‘who they are’ through an elective affinity, through a feeling for what seems comfortable and what is exemplary.”48

What one chooses to listen to, then, reflects both who one

is and who one hopes to be. Listening to music not only

helps us access desired states and make sense of social

47 Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 157.48 Ibid., 73.

situations, but it helps us access and make sense of

ourselves.

While music still has a communal and social function,

the majority of the music people hear is not heard performed

by live musicians and is not perceived as a “group

activity.” Music has, in an important sense, become an

expression and experience of personal identity in a way that

was unthinkable prior to the advent of recording technology,

and to overlook this point in a study of liturgical music is

to miss something crucial. Indeed, it is to misunderstand

the culture in which the liturgy is embedded.

Contemporary Worship Music

Following Rommen’s approach, we must next consider the

history of the music in question. CWM is a subset of a

larger genre of music, typically called Contemporary

Christian Music (CCM), which has its roots in the Jesus

People of the 1960s. This grassroots music, which later

became an industry, stemmed from the willingness of young

evangelicals to blend religious lyrics with popular musical

style.49 They also embraced recording and amplification

technology, a point that is often overlooked in treatments

of the music. The Jesus People musicians argued that

although their music might sound the same as what was on the

radio, the “message” was different and, therefore,

acceptable.50 While this musical genre certainly had its

roots in American evangelicalism, the music of “contemporary

worship” is now ubiquitous in American religious culture.51

52 Nor, as I noted in the first part of this paper, is the 49 David Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 17.50 William Romanowski, “Evangelicals and Popular Music: The Contemporary Christian Music Industry,” in Religion and Popular Culture in America, eds. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 110.51 Mark Allan Powell, "Contemporary Christian Music: A New Research Area in American Religious Studies," in American Theological Library Association Summary of Proceedings 58, (January 1, 2004), 129. Powell argues that contemporary Christian music serves as a window into American evangelicalism because it has replaced televangelists as the “primary media connectionbetween pop culture and pop religion.”52 Eric Gormly, “Evangelizing Through Appropriation: Toward a Cultural Theory on the Growth of Contemporary Christian Music,” Journal of Media and Religion 2 no. 4 (2003), 257. Gormly argues that the emergence of this music has created a

influence of this music limited to the American context;

Rommen has described how this music has become a point of

unity among the diverse churches of Full Gospel Trinidad.53

Contemporary Christian music, and its sub-category of CWM

music (the music used for worship in churches) has become a

trans-denominational phenomenon.

Despite this great popularity, however, much tension

surrounds the emergence of CWM, both “on the ground” and in

the academy. The critiques have been theological, pastoral,

and aesthetic. Initial theological concerns focus on the

lack of diverse themes in the lyrics and the focus on

ambiguous language.54 Pastoral concerns follow because there

is a broad awareness that this shallow music “shapes the

faith.”55 Aesthetic concerns focus on the “simplicity” of

cultural presence for American evangelicalism, and that “on a deep cultural level, the influence of evangelicalism may be far greater on the broader culture than the other way around.”53 Rommen, Mek Some Noise.54 Jay R. Howard and John M. Streck, Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 27.55 Ibid., 28. Frith would certainly contest that music “shapes” the faith, or that it shapes anything.

33

the melodies and harmonic structure.56 While, as Howard and

Streck indicate, the churches that use CWM are growing

quickly, the music and the informal style of worship that

developed around it became the basis for what became known

as the “worship wars” in evangelical churches, a debate

about whether worship should be “traditional,”

“contemporary,” or “blended.”57 Critics deride CWM for being

“shallow and glib expressions of Christian worship,”58

claiming that the “language of Praise and Worship music is

limited to a certain range of human experience of God.”59

Defenders of CWM stress the popularity of the music,

claiming that the use of contemporary forms of music

demonstrates to church-goers that the church cares about

them and is able to speak to their culture.60 While many

proponents of contemporary worship acknowledge that CWM

56 Hartje, “Keeping In Tune,” 366.57 Ibid., 365.58 Andrew Donaldson, “CCM Artists and Hymn Recordings,” The Hymn 57, no. 4 (Autumn 2006), 29.59 Robin Knowles Wallace, “Praise and Worship Music: Lookingat Language,” The Hymn 55, no. 3 (July 2004), 28.60 Robert Wuthnow, All in Sync: How Music and Art Are Revitalizing American Religion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 165.

34

music has far to go, they often blame the quality issues on

that fact that CWM is simply a new genre and does not have

the 500+ years history that Christian hymnody has had to

mine the musical treasures from the vast number of composed

hymns.61 It has also been argued, in response to criticism

of theologically shallow lyrics, that contemporary music is

generally more concerned with providing a “sacred

experience” instead of a way to sing doctrine and is an

expression of current American spiritual trends in which

experience is preferred to doctrine.62 While the worship

wars still rage on in some quarters, CWM has shown an

ability to transcend denominational divisions, even being

found now far outside of the evangelical churches, as

churches attempt to relate to younger generations and to

attract new people to their services.63 Scholarly acceptance

of the music, however, has been muted. Two examples follow:

Writing in The Christian Century in June 1997, Marva Dawn

offered the following observation of contemporary worship:

61 Hartje, “Keeping In Tune,” 370.62 Wuthnow, All In Sync, 238.63 Stowe, No Sympathy, 8.

35

Songs used in worship should be assessed for the propriety of their words and for their music and coherence. Sometimes liturgies or songs are unsuitable because they trivialize God. More often, worship elements are inappropriate because they suffer from vain or shallow repetitions, the poetry is bad, the phrasing is unclear or the doctrine is muddled...64

William Romanowski charges in his 2000 article

“Evangelicals and Popular Music: The Contemporary Christian

Music Industry,” that the marriage between CCM and the

secular music industry had enormous consequences for

American evangelicalism:

[...] from the very beginning, the effort to create a demand for evangelical rock music committed the Christian music industry to the goals and strategies of the

commercial marketplace – industrial growth, increased market share and greater profits. This, in turn, encouraged the popularization and dilution of the

evangelical message necessary to build a large mass market.65

As was alluded to in the Christianity Today quote from Mark

Galli at the beginning of this paper, there are indeed signs

of some kind of “truce” between the defenders of CWM and the

proponents of traditional worship. For example, Andrew

64 Marva Dawn, "Beyond the worship wars: Judging style and substance," in Christian Century 114, no. 18 [June 4, 1997], 551.65 Romanowski, “Evangelicals and Popular Music,” 108.

36

Donaldson has identified three ways in which artists

incorporate hymn melodies and texts into their music: by

writing songs that quote classic hymn lines (musically or

lyrically, or both,) by performing classic hymn texts with

their own original melodies, or by singing classic hymn

texts with their well-established musical pairing in a

“contemporary” style (e.g. with bass, guitar, and drums.)66

Gesa Hartje has taken a different tactic in declaring a

truce, redefining CWM as merely another emerging hymnody,

arguing that it is actually not so different after all from

the traditional hymns.67

However, it is clear that CWM and “traditional”

hymnody, though both kinds of liturgical music, each adhere

to different genre “rules” and therefore must be studied and

interpreted according to those rules. Consider, for example,

how hymns and CWM might differ in the “behavioral rules”

referred to earlier in this paper which include, among other

things, the social image projected by the musicians. In CWM,

66 Andrew Donaldson, “CCM Artists and Hymn Recordings,” in The Hymn 57, no. 3 (Autumn 2006), 26.67 Hartje, Keeping In Tune,” 366.

37

the musicians are typically facing the congregation and

exhibit greater motion with their bodies as they clap, move

or even merely tap their foot to the beat of the song.

Musicians may dress in casual or professional clothes and

singers frequently speak to the congregation in an

improvised manner in between songs. In churches where

hymnody is dominant, the choir may be dressed in identical

liturgical robes, is often facing the front/center of the

space (so that their side is to the congregation) and often

do not move very much during the course of the music. There

is generally no improvisation or speaking to the

congregation during the music within this genre.68 It is

clear that each liturgical music genre has more to it than

merely the sound of the music. All of these details are part

of the embodied liturgical-musical spirituality of a

congregation

68 It should be noted that I am referring here to evangelical churches in America that are predominantly white. The situation is often entirely different in African-American and Latino churches, although of course they too have their own genre distinctions within their respective traditions.

38

This is not to say, of course, that

theological/ethical/spiritual judgments cannot be rendered

on liturgical music. However, it is to say that these

theological judgments are not useful for the Church unless

they are based in what meaning is actually ascribed to and

experienced by the people singing it. An example of an

appropriate approach to song lyrics is suggested in a recent

article about African-American music in the Lutheran

Church.69 The authors suggest that, in the context of the

African-American community and in the history of the

struggle for freedom from oppression, the first person

language of many African-American songs and spirituals,

which is often interpreted as individualistic by those who

are not participants in that genre discourse, is actually

understood and experienced as a “communal I” by those who

sing together in worship.70 Since the same criticism is

often leveled against the first-person lyrics so prevalent 69 Joseph A. Donnella, John Nunes, and Karen M. Ward, “Worship and Culture: An African American Lutheran Perspective,” In Readings in African American Church Music and Worship,ed. James Abbington (Chicago: GIA Publications, 2001), 249-257.70 Ibid., 253.

39

in CWM, a study of this aspect of the song lyrics that takes

into account the history of CWM, how first person language

functions in popular music, and ethnographic study of how

the lyrics are actually experienced and interpreted by

worshippers might yield some interesting results. Then, and

only then, would normative judgments of liturgical music be

of great value for the Church.

Conclusion

In the introduction to this paper, I defined liturgical

spirituality as Mary Collins does, as “a communal

spirituality enfleshed through the bodies of the many

individual Christians who make up every local ecclesial

body.”71 I surmised that what is at stake in the “worship

wars” between CWM and traditional music is not just

aesthetic stylistic preference, but instead competing models

of liturgical spirituality. This is not to say that

aesthetic judgment is not a component of whether one prefers

the music of rock bands to the music of choirs. However,

71 Mary Collins, “Liturgical Spirituality: Communal and Ethical,” in Currents In Theology And Mission 26, no. 4 (August 1, 1999), 274.

40

what I have suggested in this paper is that by aligning

oneself (or one’s church community) with one musical style

or another, one is necessarily also expressing something

meaningful regarding liturgical spirituality. Consider, for

example, the question of the role of technology in church.

Congregations who use CWM often make use of projection

screens instead of hymnals (often with lyrics only, no

musical notation) and use microphones and amplification

systems to provide substantial volume instead of relying on

the organ or large choirs to fill the acoustic space. There

is no physical reason why the songs could not be printed in

hymnals or why traditional services could not use screens to

project the lyrics of their hymns, but most choose not to do

so. What is being implicitly agreed to with the use of

technology that is not agreed to by most traditional-style

worship services?

Consider also the role of the musicians in CWM versus

traditional worship. In CWM, the basic unit of sound

production is typically that of a rock band, i.e., guitars,

bass guitar, drums, keyboard, and vocalist(s). In

41

traditional worship, the basic unit is typically the choir

accompanied by an organ or piano. In a rock band, the burden

of responsibility on each musician to know their part is

extremely large and arrangements of the music are often

created collaboratively, with each musician voicing his/her

own opinion of what should happen in the music. In a choir

setting, the conductor is usually the sole person in charge

of making decisions regarding interpretation, and the job of

a good choir is to realize that intention. We have, then, a

musical collaboration versus a musical hierarchy. Both can

create beautiful music and both can move congregations. But

is there any reason why choirs cannot be collaborative and

rock bands cannot be run as a hierarchy? Of course, the

answer is no, and that is why one will find at any given

church a variance on these models. Some choirs are run more

like rock bands, and some rock bands are at the mercy of

whatever the music director decides is appropriate. These

different models of music production, I suggest, are

manifestations of any given church’s liturgical

spirituality, and people align themselves with models that

42

they find tenable and ethically acceptable. In order to

understand the models that are being presented, the music

must be understood in the culture, in its historical

context, and it must be explored ethnographically. In order

to understand what liturgical music “means,” whether

traditional, contemporary, or any other style, careful

listening must precede judgment.

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