Musical Prejudices
One goal of this collection is to provide help in overcoming our musical
prejudices. If, as Ralph Vaughan Williams argued, the choice of music for
hymns is a moral decision, or even if it is merely a decision with
moral implications, we need to be prepared to examine the choices we make
(and reject) for those implications. And there are at least two ways by
which moral issues could enter.
- God might ask us whether we had given any thought to the fitness of the
music we used, or whether it had really represented our best effort
in this the sacrifice of New Testament worship.
- If, as some church historians argue, stylistic prejudices have been
responsible for more church divisions than doctrinal differences, God will
ask us whether our insistance on a particular style came at the expense of
the unity of His people; and the way to avoid thoughtless use of a single
style is to thoughtfully explore other styles.
To help expose these prejudices, I've listed some musical prejudices that
have been expressed or practiced within "protestantism," and which the tunes
in this collection have successfully violated. I've marked those which (with
hardly any research) I have found within the traditions of churches of
Christ. Stated baldly, every one of these will be seen to be utterly without
any shred of scriptural justification.
And yet, so long as we allow them to be implicitly followed or stubbornly
asserted, we are helping survey the lines for church division, as well as
cutting ourselves off from any possible benefit from the work in the genre
of "hymn tunes" (which is of all musical genres the most difficult and most
important) of thousands of musicians more skilled than any of us.
For the record, I've also added a list of prejudices beyond the scope of
this historic treatment. These included both deliberate restrictions on these
choices, and limitations imposed by the material from which these choices
were drawn. There is a practical limit to eclecticism; it is not my
intent here to define its boundary so much as to recommend its expansion.
If we learn to overcome prejudices as they are exposed, we will be able to
overcome whichever prejudices impede the unity of the faith with whomever we meet.
Violated Prejudices
- Printed musical notation with hymns [Alexander Campbell, in early years]
- "Proper" tunes (i.e., tunes used with only one text) [Alexander Campbell,
in early years]
- Four-part harmony
- Minor keys and other musical nodes [Christian Hymns #2 and Sacred
Selections for the Church]
- Hymns with refrains
- Refrains preceded by hymn stanzas
- Hymns in 3/4 ("waltz") time
- Tunes without a regular (dance) beat [almost all of our hymnals]
- Hymns in folk music idiom [Christian Hymns #2 and Sacred
Selections for the Church]
- Old English psalm tunes
- Welsh, German, Hebrew, Asian, Russian, etc., tunes. [nearly any of
our hymnals, on one count or another]
- Florid or melismatic tunes (with more than one note per syllable)
- Repeating tunes (that repeat one or more lines from the stanza)
Prejudices not successfully Violated
- Tunes without regular poetic meter (chants) [most of our hymnals]
- Tunes with free rhythm based on the textual accents of each verse (chants)
[most of our hymnals]
- Unison congregational tunes [completely absent from nearly all our hymnals]
- Antiphonal tunes [nearly any of our hymnals]
- Tunes from Africa, the Hispanic world or American Indians, India, etc.
[nearly all of our hymnals]
- "Common" tunes (that is, tunes used for many hymns in the same meter)
[avoided in most of our hymnals]
Notes
To be fair, it should also be noted that each
of these has either some practical basis or some principled basis in some
imaginable cultural context. We need to understand the practical limits and
the basic principles, in order to come up with our list of taboos -- not to
pass on as "sacred tradition" to our descendants, but to recognize our
own musical limitations, so that we can focus on addressing our own
music-related problems.
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Copyright © 2002,2003,2004, Stephen Hutcheson
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