Continuing our focus this month on small church music, I've been thinking of ways of leading which don't require massive musical resources.
The most obvious one is - a cappella! This means literally 'in the chapel style', because for many many years Christians sang without any form of accompaniment at all and so this became a distinctively 'chapel' style. Partly a reflection of Jewish synagogue practices (musical instruments were for the Jerusalem temple, not for your local synagogue), partly an attempt to define ourselves against our pagan neighbours, many early Christian leaders advised against using instruments at all:
Clement of Alexandria (115–c216) said to ‘no longer employ the ancient psaltery, trumpet, timbrel, or flute’, which ‘inflame desire, stir up lust, or arouse anger’ (he did make concession for the use of cithara and lyre at agape meals though because of the instruments mentioned in the Psalms).[1] John Chrysostom (347-407) knew that the Psalms mentioned musical instruments, but thought they were only given as an accommodation to Israel's ‘dull temperament’.[2]
The church now has had a bit longer to think this through, and has mostly come to the conclusion that we can have instruments without backsliding into Paganism (although electric guitars are still a bit suspect, I think). But that doesn't mean that we always have to use instruments!
Some of my fondest memories of Moore College chapel were when nobody organised an organist and so we stood in the beautiful old chapel building being led through the hymn book by Michael Jensen a cappella.
A Cappella music brings the voices out in a beautiful simplicity, making the the focus the people around you. It works well in small rooms, or in big reverberant rooms (not so much in an acoustically dry warehouse). Here's a nice example of a church which doesn't use instruments, but does use harmony and dynamics well:
- - start with songs that have a strong, well known melody. Hymns are great, but so are many contemporary tunes.
- - have somebody with a loudish voice and a good sense of pitch and time lead the crowd without a microphone. They need to give a starting note for each entry, and navigate any nasty pauses (crowds of untrained singers tend to collapse bars of rest down - so a one bar pause becomes anywhere between a millisecond and half a bar ... and everyone comes in whenever they like!)
- - as the leader, have a sense of the dynamics of each verse - particularly if you're doing a hymn! You don't want to belt out verse after verse at full blast. You can even direct half the crowd to sing one verse and the other half another. Or ladies/gents, solo/chorus... there are many possibilities.
- - start with a tuning fork to make sure you don't do the song in an impossible key! Or at the very least sing the song through in your head through all the sections to make sure the bridge isn't too high.
- - to teach a new song, distribute youtube links of the song for people to listen to. Or, for a less technological solution, sing each line antiphonally (call and response).
- The main thing is not to see a cappella as what happens when all else fails - it is a unique and legitimate art form in itself. It has many benefits over instrumental music. For instance, it opens up the possibility of harmonies in the crowd - in hymn singing we often force everybody to sing the same melody line, which makes it hard for sopranos, altos, tenors and basses to all find a range they're comfortable with. In traditional hymn singing, the tenors don't sing the same line as the basses, and everybody plays their own part. If well done, harmony can remind us (as Chrysostom puts it) of our membership of one body:
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Our tongues are the chords of the cithara which come forth as a diverse sound yet form a divine harmony. Women, men, the aged, youth, are all certainly individual persons, but they are not individuals when they sing hymns, for the Spirit, governing the voice of each, brings about one melody in all.[3]
- Some of our tunes which are worth having a go a cappella might be:
- Any others that you've tried and have worked? How did you do them?
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I'll leave you, for inspiration, with the wonderful Australian a cappella group The Idea of North. It's not congregational, but it's a beautiful hymn!![1] Clement of Alexander, ‘The Tutor of Children’, in Lawrence Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: An Anthology of Historical Sources (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2009), para 832; Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity, 73.
[2] John Chrysostom, ‘On Psalm 149’, in Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: Anthology of Historical Sources, para 1470. Likewise Nicetas of Remesiana, ‘On The Usefulness of Psalmody’, para 3197.
[3] John Chrysostom, ‘On Psalm 145’, in Johnson, Worship in the Early Church: Anthology of Historical Sources, para 1469.
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