Christian music: Sweet-singing or something else?
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This is the feastday of St. Romanus the Melodist — also sometimes called St. Romanus the Sweet-singer — so it’s a fitting time to pass along an essay that highlights a problem every Orthodox music-maker and music-lover should consider, IMHO.This short essay, titled “Ecclesiastical Music,” comes from “Patristic Theology” by Protopresbyter John S. Romanides, and it reminded me of a problem I have with a lot of “Christian” music — Protestant, mostly, but also Catholic and Orthodox occasionally — and wondered if I was the only one. I could state the issue my way, but it may be a better idea to lead off with Fr. John’s informed assessment. (I’ll boldface the kicker quote, for lazy readers):
Let’s say a few words about the music that is appropriate for Church use. The aim of Church music is to evoke compunction or praise, but not romantic sentimentality. But in Western tradition under the Franks of the Middle Ages, it became the norm to blur the distinction between love songs and religious songs. If you listen to Protestants or Roman Catholics chanting in church, you will immediately realize that they are in fact singing in church. They are not chanting at all. Their hymns are sung with an erotic undertone.
When Roman Catholics sing hymns to the Virgin Mary, the text is not alone in being erotic; even the music is erotic. It is as if they were flirting with the Virgin Mary. It is as if they were flirting with Christ. The melody that one hears is sentimental, and so is the music. They try to evoke sentimental religiosity in their members by playing with their emotions.
I remember reading a brief article in “Touchstone” where the author told of listening to a woman soloist at an evangelical church. She was dressed in something a little too form-fitting to be Sunday attire, was singing a very melodically-sensuous song in a very lovelorn way … and he couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable that this seemed more erotic than spiritual.
And Fr. John is being even more forthright: “… it is as if they were flirting with the Virgin Mary. It is as if they were flirting with Christ.” That’s just it. Protestant church songs — you couldn’t call a lot of them ‘hymns’ anymore — seem to be about emotional manipulation. It’s as if they believe that inciting the passions is okay as long as you’re doing it for a good cause.
But is it? Perhaps they thought they could lift up the secular, but they may have lost much more than they know. At least, they have if Fr. John is correct about what it has already led to, and what it still may lead to:
Given the sentimental nature of their tradition, sober-minded individuals in America and Europe are not churchgoers, because they do not find such sentimentality convincing. Those serious-minded people who do go to Church do so because they are sentimental and inconsistent in their investigation into all fields of inquiry. Under such conditions, a consistent European or American is naturally an atheist and will not become Roman Catholic or Protestant. These are hard words, but that is how matters stand. After all, a sober-minded scholar can never accept the foundations of Roman Catholic or Protestant theology. This difficulty, together with sentimentality in their worship, completely alienates some very serious-minded circles from the Roman Catholic and Protestant world. This is why their churches are empty.
I am afraid that the Orthodox Church will suffer the same fate, if She allows pietism, sentimentality and rationalism to take over Orthodox theology, because I believe that the crisis that the Church is going through today will be her last Afterwards, there will not be anything left standing to be shaken or to undergo a crisis.
We all know the somewhat depressing numbers of the flagging church attendance in America and the rising numbers of young people (particularly young men) who identify themselves as atheists. There’s something that rings true in Fr. John’s premise that the scholarly-minded in our society instinctively reject the Christian culture they see because they don’t care for emotionalism.
And what about that warning for the Orthodox Church, which is still largely unknown in American culture? Fr. John wrote this essay in 1983. Do we have a problem?
I don’t want to assume that the answer is yes. After all, I have also complained about Orthodox music that goes to the other extreme, emphasizing the “passionless” guideline to the point of being so bloodless and antiseptic that it might as well be sung by robots. That doesn’t seem to me to be the antidote for the smarmy romantic stuff coming from the Christian station.
So another matter where either extreme is problematic. That’s a problem in itself, because humans aren’t inclined toward moderation. We tend to overdo things, particularly where something as personal and evocative as music is concerned.
More questions than answers coming from me. Just wondering how it seems to others.
Related posts:
- The Sweet-singer
- The scary Mary prayer
- Congregational singing: Can I get an AMEN?
- More about Christian percentages
- The Byzantine pace
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7 Responses and Counting...
I’ve been reading a blog recently by a man who made the decision to attend 52 different houses of worship (because some aren’t Christian) in 52 weeks. He’s very Evangelical, perhaps even Emergent (I admit, my arms aren’t totally around those terms) and he keeps harping on how often he’s finding hymns sung and enjoyed and loved by parishes. I find that such an odd thing to harp on, but your comments on this help me to clarify this, thank you.
I love that St. Romanos is called the Sweet Singer, or sweet mouthed in some traditions. Holy St. Romanos, pray to God for us. And thank you for being a church singer.
ehhhhh…I’ve heard those kinds of critiques before, but I’ll tell you, there are some Lenten melodies that just melt me. No one really listens to “badly done” Orthodox chant just for the words and “spirituality of the Church” in it. A bad choir or chanter doing a poor setting of a hymn is distracting in spite of what is being sung. One person’s “smarmy sentimentalism” is another’s dearly beloved soul piercing beauty. I’m not one of those who believes that “Byzantine chant and the Greek 8 tones” dropped out of heaven as a template for passionless Church music. From the beginning the Church has adapted to cultural musical sensibilities. While I don’t think we will ever have “8 punkrock tones” I also don’t think America will wholly adopt Byzantine (Arab? Greek? Romanian? etc.) or Russian (Znameny? Obichod? Kievan? Georgian?) as its official melodies. The reason all that stuff sounds “passionless” to us is because it is foreign to us, I think. Do you think Romanos wrote hymns in musical forms that no one liked in his day just to make it “passionless”? I think not…he wrote what sounded good to his culture, that’s why they call him a “Melodist” not a “Jazzist”. Something beautiful can be sung beautifully without it becoming a “production number”. The passionlessness is in the performance, not the notation… IMHO.
I dunno s-p. There is quite a difference between Gregorian chant and guitar mass. Or even spend a month praying evensong with some “high” Anglicans (whatever that means these days). I’m not saying our akathists aren’t sappy. But I would say that overall the hymns since the “renaissance” in the West contain a fair amount of saccharine. The ancient Western forms are breathtaking when done well, but not in a romantic way. I think you have confused “passionless” with “ugly.”
Passionless. Hmm. During the Bridegroom Matins when I sing, “Lord I have called to you, hear me. … Let my prayers arise like incense…” I’m really into it. I feel every word. It may very well be my favorite Orthodox music. That to me is not passionless.
When I sing “The Love of Christ” I can really feel it and belt it our when listening to it in my car:
How long (how long)
How wide (how wide)
Is the love of Christ
How deep (how deep)
How high (how high)
Is the love of Christ
It would take ten thousand lifetimes
To comprehend, a love with no beginning
A love that knows no end
More than any heart could measure or ever hold
His love could fill the oceans
’Til they overflowed
Higher than the mountains
Deeper than the ocean
Farther than the reach of the sky
Wider than the heavens
Longer than forever
Greater is the love of Christ
I could go on and on with contemporary Christian music that really makes me focus on the goodness of God like Praise You in this Storm, Shout to the Lord. And then there is the old evangelical hymn Trust and Obey that I have on my iPod sung acapella by the Martins.
You know that the music has touched your soul when you can’t get it out of your mind. It is the music that helps us to learn the words. I probably never could have learned “It is truly meet to call you blessed O Birthgiver of God” without the music. I wish someone would set Psalm 50 to music (although I sort of shudder to think what that music might be).
I agree that some of the “Christian” music is sappy and sentimental. You won’t catch me singing “You light up my life…” You are right that there is a blur between what praises God and what seems to be a teeny-bopper love song — and the latter is to be avoided.
I love a lot of contemporary Christian music. Some of it is called Praise and Worship and some of it really does express praise and worship. I like the messages I find in them. I like to sing them in my car and with others at times. I used to love to sing them in church before I became Orthodox. But now I think they have a time and place and a worship service in a church is not it.
Perhaps the writer is thinking about the musical beat, the tempo (which is sometimes quite fast — Redeemed How I love to proclaim it, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb comes to mind immediately) as contrasted to our music which is more subdued. Even the songs of gladness like the Hymn to the Theotokos during the Pascha season (Shine New Jerusalem!) are slower and more “Orthodox” in sound.
I can’t help but wonder which has more effect on a person: the words or the music. Certainly discordant music would hinder hearing the words at all. But would I happily sing “Shout to the Lord all the earth let us sing, power and majesty praise to the King. Mountains fall down and the seas will roar at your name. I sing for joy at the works of your hands, forever I’ll love you forever I’ll stand. Nothing compares to the promise I have in You.” to Grechanino or Bortniansky? Could I sing the Great Doxology to a tune by Mercy Me or Casting Crowns?
Anam Cara & s-p:
I’m not throwing all Protestant praise music under the bus. As Anam has said, there’s some of it that conveys the qualities of God — His providence, love, might, etc. — in a way that’s uplifting and builds up the soul. There’s also an awful lot of music that puts the focus on the personal emotional response to God (“*I* love the Lord..” “*I* sing his praise …” I feel this, I feel that.) Those are a harder sell for me, unless they take their text from Scripture.
But just as with Orthodox music, it depends a lot on how the singer(s) (and musicians and so on, if there are any) do what they do. It’s important not to go overboard either with too much or too little emotion. The musically-inclined can make those decisions. I just haven’t heard many Prots express a need for balance, and I haven’t heard many Orthodox consider that they don’t want to copy other Christian music trends without weighing it out first.
Lastly, I’m aware that there’s an enormous amount of subjectivity in music. My example of someone who “got it right” could be someone else’s example of some kind of excess.
I’m late arriving, I know, but his made me think of a pretty funny quote I heard once, while still an Episcopalian: “A praise song is to a hymn as a Hallmark card is to Shakespeare.”
Anam Cara,
I know I’m really late at posting this, but in Bridegroom Matins the main theme is rousing our souls from spiritual slumber/sloth (in greek: acacia). The opposite of sloth in this service is spiritual sobriety, hence passionlessness (in greek: apatheia). The problem with “contemporary” (a poor word choice if I’ve ever seen one) Christian music is that it invites us to a spiritual gluttony/drunkeness. For instance, the song you posted (“The Love of Christ”) does not retell the story of Christ’s love (as we see in Bridegroom Matins, for instance, the creed or our Eucharistic Prayers) but instead it describes the emotional feeling of Christ’s love (notice that doctrinally, the song could be sung by an atheist or muslim). The first promotes spiritual sobriety, the second a spiritual hedonism.
Perhaps an excellent modern example is the re-purposing of the great ancient Western hymn “Be Thou My Vision.” Although the hymn originally tells the story of Christ as singular vision obtained through long, hard ascesis (namely, the renouncing of the world and joining a monastic order), the modern evangelical retelling of this hymn is a sort of ecstatic vision achieved only by lowering one’s inhibitions and entirely without spiritual struggle. The original meaning is passionlessness through renunciation of wealth and society. The protestant interpretation is Christ as altered state of mind; a sort of psychological religious experience. The first interpretation is Orthodox, the second anything but.