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There is a great deal of suspicion of emotional manipulation. Sometimes I think that suspicion is justified. A friend told me a story about a church where the keyboard was hooked up to an electric shock machine, and just at the right moment the keyboard player would hit the button and people in the front row would be brought to their knees by the ‘electrifying’ power of the sermon.

But sometimes I wonder whether we are oversensitive to the power of music on our emotions, as if being moved emotionally by a song is less ‘worthy’ of us than to be moved intellectually by a sermon.

Consider the tension felt by the great father of the faith, Augustine. His conversion story was marked by an emotional musical encounter:

“I wept at your [God’s] hymns and canticles, deeply moved by the voices of your sweetly singing church. Those voices flowed into my ears, and the truth was poured out in my heart, whence a feeling of piety surged up and my tears ran down. And these things were good for me.”¹

Yet at the same time, the Platonism which Augustine’s culture had subscribed to made him suspicious of such animal attraction merely based on music:

“the gratification of my flesh – to which I ought not to surrender my mind to be enervated – frequently leads my astray ... when it happens to me that the song moves me more than the thing which is sung, I confess that I have sinned blamefully and then prefer not to hear the singer.²

For similar reasons, another thinker, Athanasius, decided that it would be better not to sing at all. For him it was important that the Psalms were recited not ‘from a desire for pleasing sound’, but as a more spiritual ‘manifestation of harmony among the thoughts of the soul’.³ Augustine, to his credit, didn’t go that far. But he did look down on the role of music, saying it merely enabled a ‘weaker soul’ to ‘be elevated to an attitude of devotion’.⁴

But I don’t think it is an admission of weakness in our soul to recognise that we are embodied: our thoughts and actions are influenced by what we eat, whether we have slept enough recently, and whether our brain chemicals are balanced. To recognise that music can have a non-rational effect on our souls is simply to recognise that we are human. Rather than be afraid of any emotional effect, we should seek out music which draws us closer to God and honours Jesus. Provided there is no deception, and the emotional power of the music is anchored in the truth, and we aren’t trying to substitute for the Spirit’s work in changing hearts, I can’t see the danger. If ‘manipulation’ means simply helping me to feel the weight of Jesus’ glory then please, go ahead: some days I could do with a bit of musical manipulation.

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The most interesting thing about early church singing is that almost without exception no instruments were used. They almost certainly sang – the bible talks about their singing in Acts 16:25 and 1 Corinthians 14:26 – but they didn’t use any instruments.

This is strange, because in Judaism there was singing with all sorts of instruments (See Ps 33, Ps 150). Two things influenced this almost total rejection of instruments:

First, Jewish practice by the time of the church had become centred on synagogues. Unlike the temple, which at its peak had probably hosted some pretty impressive instrumental worship, synagogues had much more stripped back unaccompanied singing with a focus on teaching the scriptures. Jewish Christians would have been used to this.

Second, instruments reminded Christians of something they deeply feared: Paganism. That’s why Clement of Alexandria (who lived AD115 to about 216) told Christians to ‘no longer employ the ancient psaltery, trumpet, timbrel, or flute’, which ‘inflame desire, stir up lust, or arouse anger.’¹ The only exception he allowed was for some instruments (cithara and lyre) at Christian agape meals. Likewise John Chrysostom (347-407) decided that it was only because of Old Testament people’s ‘dull temperament’ that God allowed instruments: as a concession, not an ideal.² Instruments reminded the early Christians of pagan worship of idols; they were so keen to distance themselves from it that they deprived themselves of something the Bible clearly celebrates.

Musicians use the term ‘a cappella’ to refer to unaccompanied singing. This literally means (in Italian) ‘in the chapel style’, because of the way Christians sang together for hundreds of years.

The lesson for us here is a simple one: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. In distinguishing ourselves from the world, and the practices we disagree with, we need to be careful not to sell ourselves short, and deprive ourselves of something great.

That said, there is nothing wrong with great unaccompanied singing. But it is a good lesson to be aware of how we tend to hold art forms guilty by association. I’ve heard people say that we can’t use a certain style of music because it is ‘pagan’. I’ve heard church services criticised for being ‘too much like a rock concert’. No doubt there are things about pagan music and rock concerts we want to reject, but I suspect we often do so too quickly, without doing the hard work of filtering through what is good, bad and indifferent.

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I'm going through some of my grandfather's old papers at the moment for a history project (which involves researching our heritage through primary sources), and I've come across some gold nuggets on hymns. Check out these thoughts:

- 'Not all rhyming verses set to music are hymns, even if printed in a hymn book. Some hardly deserve any place at all in corporate worship. But mark well those which exalt God and his Christ in direct praise and adoration. This is the kind of hymn the Christians of Pliny's day addressed to Christ at day-break.'

- 'the selection of hymns, in general, needs to be undertaken with regard for the place in the service where they come. We sing far too many hymns Three is a maximum for most services. It is too easy to destroy coherence in a service, and to distract from what has just been said or read, by an ill-chosen hymn. There is a place for hymns of recitation, declaring the mighty deeds of God, and hymns expressive of trust and hope and of mutual exhortation. Butt heir selection requires sensitivity and skill. Only the minister who orders the other details of the service can really select the hymns. The responsibility cannot be delegated to organists.' [grandpa was an organist, and a minister, so I guess he can say that!]

These quotes are from the 70s -- when liturgical reform was at its peak in the Anglican Church of Australia. Do you think we've gone backwards or forwards in the planning of our average services? I know at my church the organist does choose the hymns (her name is Nola and in her day she was a monster pianist). But she chooses them with such care and skill that I've often finished preaching a sermon, then found a hymn placed straight after it that says better than I have everything I wanted to say! Is that your experience?

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A dear friend asked me today whether I could put together some thoughts on positioning the band off the stage (lowering the altitude) in order to stop people giving them too much attention.  

I’m aware that at many churches there has been a push to shove the band off stage – out of sight, out of the limelight, thus reminding the crowd (and, I suspect more pointedly) the musicians that it’s not about them. I think this comes from a beautiful desire for equality in the gathering – not wanting to exalt guitar playing members of the band above punters in the pews. In my time as a church musician I’ve been moved to the side of stage, moved to the back of the stage, moved behind the stage, moved below the stage, moved to the side of the crowd, and (even!) moved to the back of the auditorium. ‘It’s not a rock concert!’ was the rationale. Sure. I guess that’s true.

I’ve always dutifully complied with these requests from those over me in the Lord, and if you’re a musician and you’re told to go, and you can’t gently persuade your leaders otherwise, then there is no question: you should go. However I think the idea is practically and pastorally misguided, for a couple of reasons.

Pastoral Reasons:

First, out of sight means the band is unable to lead the congregation effectively. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the preacher should preach from behind the crowd, for the simple reason that people look to the people up front for leadership and communication, something which is hard to do without the possibility of eye contact. It’s no different in music – through body language, verbal cues, attitude, and movement every member of the band who stands up front is a leader. The choices are lead well or lead badly; not leading is not an option.

Paul encourages the Corinthians to imitate him, and to learn from him via Timothy of his good way of life. (1 Cor 4:16-17). Therefore if you love your church then put good role models on stage!

Second, if the attitude of the musicians is a problem (i.e. if they really are getting a big head because they’re up the front) then you should address their attitude. Spend the time actually pastoring your musicians, rather than trying to train them like you would a puppy (‘outside! Outside!’). If they are egotistical maniacs, then you’ll need more than a stage layout to fix that. You don’t solve the problem of an egotistical preacher, bible reader or prayer by making them preach in funny positions. If leading singing is a word ministry (and I hope our message is getting through on this...it is!) then Godly character should be a pre-requisite for service.

(But it’s worth adding that in my experience musicians are rarely the egotistical stage-hogging maniacs that non-musicians project onto them – more often I find they are perfectionistic, sensitive, depressive personality types, who are easily wounded by criticism and tragically often have a low sense of self worth. But you don’t know that unless you actually bother to know them and care for them as people.)

If after getting to know your musicians you're still worried about their vainglory, then (rather than trying to make an upfront job into a behind the scenes job), why not give them a truly behind the scenes job (like cleaning, filing music, doing sound, etc)?

Practical reasons:

Third, messing about with stage layout creates a challenging musical environment which is beyond most of us. Teaching musicians to communicate with each other through eye contact and signals is hard enough without shoving them all into awkward positions. A number of times in church band training we’ve helped the rhythm section lock in more tightly simply by fixing their positioning on stage, only to be told that when Sunday comes they’ll have to go back to square one.

Fourth, messing about with stage layout is a disaster for acoustics. Unless you have a state of the art foldback system and you’re playing in a football stadium, chances are most of the sound is being generated by acoustic instruments and on-stage amps, with reinforcement from the PA for the vocals and piano and acoustic guitar. Strewn all over the room, the sound is coming from multiple sources, with uneven balance, making it impossible to create a good mix for the crowd. You might as well give up trying to teach musicians to manage their on stage volume to create a good stage sound, because you’ve made the stage environment so unnecessarily complicated. 

So please if you think you have an attitude problem in your crowd, or (worse) in your band, leave the altitude alone - and focus on the attitude. Good leading, from a humble heart, in full view of everyone will build up your church far more than bad leading, from a proud heart, somewhere to the side of stage. But whatever you do, whether in full view or out of sight, do it all for the glory of God (1Cor 10:31).

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Okay, work with me here on this analogy. I recently got my bath fixed which is great news for everybody. I'm reminded that there's an art to running a bath - not too hot, not too cold. The temptation when you realise that the bath is going to be too cold is to slam on the hot water, but of course that just makes the opposite problem. Getting the optimal temperature requires small adjustments, not over-reactions.

By analogy, it seems that improving worship music is an exercise in balance. Usually when something goes wrong in church, it's not that people have set out trying to be destructive. It's usually that we were trying to improve in another area, and just got things out of balance. Perhaps we wanted to bring in new songs to keep our repertoire from being stale, but brought in too many too quickly and now people can't sing along. Perhaps we wanted to raise the quality of our music to the Glory of God. But instead we put too heavy a load on our already busy musicians. It's all about balance. 

But so often when we realise something is wrong, we express it in terms of absolute criticisms, not relative criticisms.

Karl Barth, one of my favourite German theologians, writes about this in relation to the subjective/objective question in worship. He describes how people responded to the overly subjective wishy washy hymns which started dominating in some protestant circles in the 17th century. They criticised 'I-hymns' as being overly subjective, and insisted on 'we-hymns' or 'he-hymns'. They made absolute their criticism. But as Barth writes 'it is obvious from the presence of the I-Psalms in the Bible...[that this] can only be a relative and not an absolute criticism. It cannot try to eliminate or suppress altogether either the I-hymns or the I-piety' (Church Dogmatics, IV.63.I p755). You can't eliminate 'I' from our worship, because the wonder of the gospel is that what God did he did for me.

I think there are many areas of contemporary thinking about church life that need us to be more relative and less absolute - in many areas it's a question of balance, not blanket statements.

So the challenge (for me) is to try to approach disagreements about how to do church music as if we're running a bath. If I think that a church service is getting too cold, before turning off the tap completely I need to ask whether the way I intend on going is going to get too hot if we're not careful. This helps too when taking criticism - normally when someone raises a criticism they are not just being nasty - there is so longing or desire behind their complaint. If they hate contemporary music, then what is it about hymns that they love - perhaps I can learn to share their love as well, and we can run a more balanced bath?

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I mentioned in the last post that some songs are easier to arrange for small churches (with fewer musicians, etc) - so what do I look for?

My church has a bunch of different services, some of which are very small. Occasionally it has just been me (Andy) playing piano on my own with no song leaders and 10-15 people in the crowd. Here is what I look for:

-- Choose songs which are, well, good songs: this should be obvious, but all the things which apply to any church apply here - but in an acoustic environment the quality of the song is totally exposed, as there isn't a strong band or songleader to gloss over a deficient song. Pick a song which teaches great truths, in inspiring and memorable ways, with a melody which is very singable and matches the emotional content of the song.

-- Look for melodies with strong rhythms: In this context, the melody needs to drive itself along as much as possible. It's not good having a melody which is so complicated that everybody sings it differently. Nor do you want a melody which is rhythmically so simple that it relies on the accompaniment to create interest.

-- Syncopation is great, as long as it's groovy: If the rhythm is syncopated that's fine, as long as the pattern is a regular groove - think of the old youth group camp favourite 'Ancient of Days' - it's highly syncopated but the pattern is so regular that everyone can get it, and it actually adds a great rhythm to the song which means you don't need drums or strumming guitar to make it exciting.

-- Look for songs which use pitch well: Some of the best songwriters can create a sense of building tension simply by how the shape of the melody rises and falls in pitch: i.e. the song starts lower and builds while getting higher (but not too high). If you don't have lots of instruments to build excitement, let the song do the work for you!

-- Watch out for big spaces: Some songs have gaps in them which rely on instrumentation to fill in the void... this doesn't always work with a small church.

-- Grab the chords but don't feel the need to take the instrumental parts: When you take a song and put it in a new context you are re-interpreting the music into a new creation. So leave behind the CD version if it's not going to work with your room! Take the chords and the melody and the words and play them in a style that you think will work for you. The riffs might not be appropriate, but strumming through the chords on acoustic guitar might take the song in a whole new direction. 

-- Think about the style of music which belongs in your style of room: Different secular artists play in different rooms, according to the type of music. More delicate and thoughtful artists tend to avoid 50,000 seater arenas. If you are in a small room with a handful of people, think about what types of music will work there and perform the songs in that style... indie folk, jazz, acoustic pop...whatever! Compare these two rooms and the music which is being made for them:

-- Don't try to be what you're not: If God wanted you to have a fourteen piece rock band he would have put you in a stadium. If he wanted you to have more guitarists than you have already, he would have given them to you. As it is, you currently have everything which he thinks you need. So rather than trying to create the awesome rock show to rival the latest worship CD you've bought, focus on creating a mood which is right for the room you're actually serving in. If it's an intimate crowd, then intimate music is appropriate - less jumping up and down, more delighting in this precious gathering of God's people.

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Many of the places where we go to do music training have the same problem - how to make congregational singing work well in a small church.

Small churches have a big passion for singing about Jesus, but not always the music resources to make it happen.

We're conscious that often people who put out worship CDs put forward a sound which can be intimidatingly complex -- I remember at one training event in regional NSW I was playing some worship pastors tracks from a new CD and one of them said 'it's a great song, but we can't do it at our church, we don't have two guitarists!'

It seems that we need to do better to show how a song which is recorded with many instruments can be played with much simpler arrangements. After all, most of our songs begin life on an acoustic guitar or piano in a lounge room - that's how we begin writing a song!

In fact, this doesn't have to be a disappointing compromise - simple, acoustic music can be spine-tinglingly beautiful!

Some songs work better than others acoustically, but here are a couple of ours I can think of (and have recordings of acoustically). Some of these were recorded as part of an EMU music project a few of us were involved in called 'Songs for Little Rooms'.

Garage Hymnal - Fairest Lord Jesus from Hope Media Ltd on Vimeo.

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A little warning - this is going to be a tiny bit of a rant. You see, I was at the wedding of a dear friend yesterday in a Sydney church. It was a wonderful service. The songs were well chosen and the service superbly led. The preaching was clear and biblical. The decorations were beautiful. The crowd was happy to be there, and happy the rain had held off. A wonderful celebration, which nothing could have spoiled.

But during the vows, we did have to put up with some pretty woeful sound. "I Jack*...[feedback]...in the presence of God [squeal] take you Jill [static then squeal] to be my wife [low roar then shreak]...". In fact, it was so bad that the always good humoured groom mentioned it later in his speech (through a much better microphone) at the reception when he reflected on the "vows we made to each other through that dodgy microphone". 

 The poor sound guy was struggling the whole time to make it work without feeding back, but the system (cheap, underpowered, badly installed) was always against him. There was nothing we could do but laugh about it.

 Can somebody explain to me why we have to have such terrible sound at so many of our churches? If church meetings about at least partly about hearing God's word, then it seems a little silly to skimp on the very equipment which makes things (like vows, or a bible reading, or the words of a song) audible to lots of people at the same time.

 I don't think it's an isolated problem. There must be something going wrong in terms of process for so many churches (with apparently the resources to pay for carpets, hall redevelopments, rectory upgrades and central heating) to end up with sound systems which plainly are not up to the task.  What is going wrong, time and time again?

•  - Is it a problem of process? (Perhaps a well meaning but unqualified parishioner taking control of the system and not allowing outside help?)
•  - Is it a problem of the right consultants or suppliers? (I hear too many stories of companies with excess stock of a particular device offloading it at way too high prices to gullible churches)
•  - Is it a problem of the brief? (I worked on one project where the system designer wanted to spend most of the money on choir mics...for a church that didn't have a choir)
• - Is it a problem of values? (I heard one minister describe how it used to be a source of pride for his church that they had a bad sound system - because it proved just how focussed on the scriptures they were, not the flashy show!!!)

 On the flipside, I wonder - has anybody's church managed to get decent sound for their gatherings without taking out a second mortgage on the rectory?

 Over to you, blogosphere....

AJ

 

*- not his real name, of course.

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I am grateful to my new cyber-friend Greg who posted a thoughtful comment on our blog about the sound levels at Twist.

At risk of sounding like I'm dismissing his (very valid) opinion about the ideal sound level, I thought an extended explanation of my thoughts on the issue might be helpful for other people dealing with difficult rooms..

At the outset, I should say that I am always sad when we work hard to serve a group of people, and yet produce only discomfort (even if only for one person). This, unfortunately, is a reality of any ministry, particularly in music ministry where so many subjective and objective factors come into play.  Here are a few things I'd like to keep in mind.

1. The room is very important
My initial response was that "the volume of any music will be determined by how well the room absorbs or reflects
sound energy." Greg helpfully queried why we can't just lower the stage volume by turning down our amplifiers.

The stage volume I'm referring to is the noise made by the performers on stage before any sound reinforcement happens (i.e. with the main speakers turned off). In contemporary music, it involves both amplified and un-amplified elements (drum kit, voices, acoustic piano, and guitar amps), which is why it is complex.

If you hit a cymbal in a given room, that energy has to go somewhere. In a room with a 1.8 second reverb time (like Angel place) that energy will not be diffused very quickly, and the sound on stage is going to be pretty loud everywhere, particularly as high frequencies tend to be less diffused by materials like wood and glass. Angel place is designed for chamber music, so even an unamplified violin will be clearly audible up the back. But bring in contemporary music, and the general sound pressures in the room are going to be on the higher side of the "ideal" range. Stage amplified elements (like the vocals) need to be raised to find clarity (or your singers won't be able to sing in tune, and nobody will be able to hear the words).

As Greg points out, the performer has some control over the dynamics - this is why I thank God for our drummer's (Sassy's) sensitive and controlled playing. He has been playing drums professionally for over 20 years, in stage productions from the Lion King, to Mary Poppins. For this reason I think we can safely exclude "performance factors" as needing attention.

The bottom line is, to go much quieter overall you'll need to pick a different style of music and instrumentation- solo piano accompaniment would be closer to Greg's ideal I imagine, whereas a pipe organ would probably be too loud as well (a solid sounding of the 16ft fundamental would blast us well out of the water!)

2. Hearing loss and music
But a more serious concern Greg raised was about whether the sound levels at Twist could cause hearing loss. Greg is rightly concerned about this. As professional musicians we are all very alive to this hazard of the industry (I like my ears!). This is why our crew all carry SPL meters. There is a sliding scale of acceptable sound pressures based on how long you spend listening to something - you can listen to 85decibels for eight hours a day, but you can only handle 130-140 decibels for a few seconds. You should not listen to anything over 140 decibels for any length of time (which is why you wear ear plugs at the firing range).
 
I don't have any readings handy I can show you, except to say that our band's audio is overseen by Richard Fenton who, aside from playing guitar for us, studied a masters of acoustics at Sydney Uni and oversees sound at the Sydney Opera House. He does not think anyone was at risk of hearing loss. I'm happy to defer to his professional opinion on that.

3. Genre and subjectivity
The biggest issue in sound levels, however, is that not everybody hears things the same. Many people I've met who will complain about a drum kit at 85dB will be perfectly happy singing to an organ at 95dB. Personal preferences are inevitably involved.

Then there are the varieties of age and abilities to factor in - people with hearing loss often struggle to separate out sound elements. My Dad reminded me on the weekend that "background noise is for people with dementia like stairs are for people in wheelchairs". We need to be conscious of the people who we are trying to serve - and doing that is going to require us to recognise that the "ideal" sound level is different for every crowd. I'm not sure how we address that in a room full of different people. I certainly don't think we're going to get it right all the time.

In short

The implications of all this is that "it's complex". Greg may well be right, for a certain crowd the ideal volume may be much lower than we achieved at Twist. But if we decided that Greg was right, and that we wanted to tweak the volume to suit those who prefer a quieter balance, it's not enough just to "turn down the amps". We would have to pack up and go home. Which I'm of course happy to do. But Twist asked us to come serve. So we did. And the feedback is that the vast majority of conference delegates were glad that we did.

 

(Ironically, the last feedback we got from an event on sound levels was at the Entertainment Centre, where a number of people complained we were too soft! It's hard to get an even spread across a big space, and it is entirely possible to get two entirely conflicting reports from the same gig!)

Thanks for your contribution to the discussion Greg - I'm sorry if I sound defensive! I really am happy to accept your complaint and agree to disagree. However, given this is a music blog, and many musicians field similar complaints, I felt an extended response might help other people think about the constraints on musicians in these circumstances.
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Does your church have song leaders, or worship leaders?

Maybe there's no difference - a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, right? (Although I think Romeo and Juliet discovered the opposite in the end, didn't they?)

One of the things I enjoyed very much about seeing Bob lead worship at Twist was to see how a seasoned worship leader can pastor a room of people through the songs. He was not just leading a melody - he was exhorting and edifying us, helping us to let the word about Christ dwell in us richly. It was clear that song leading, for him, meant leading people in acceptable worship of God through Jesus in the Spirit. Worship is more than singing, but singing is not less than worship.

As a band you had to be on your toes - Bob would at various moments repeat a line or a whole chorus if he felt that we needed to focus on it its truth more.

The way he transitioned between songs, both musically and with his words, set us up to engage with God on a right and helpful level every time.  

More than anything, his passion for Jesus and love for the gathering of God's people was inspiring and contagious. There was never a sense that the time of worship was about Bob Kauflin - rather the focus was always on Jesus.

I wonder - what is the best worship leading you've seen, and why was it so effective? Say something about this post