Treasure 82: Do We Become What We Sing?

Treasure 82: Do We Become What We Sing? The Role of the Music of Congregational Song in Congregational Spiritual Formation[1] by Kenneth R. Hull An Article from Bulletin 288, Summer 2016

The original title of this paper was, ‘We are what we sing.’ It was intended as a play on the well-known adage, ‘You are what you eat.’ The point of the saying ‘You are what you eat’ is that our bodies are at least in part the product of what we put into them. The way we nourish our bodies, or malnourish, or undernourish them, has a direct impact on what they become. In a similar way, many church musicians believe that it makes a significant and even crucial difference what we sing, that what we sing together in worship shapes who we become as believers. Musicians know that music can affect us at our deepest levels, and some believe that worshippers are formed differently depending on their liturgical musical diet.[2] How we nourish our faith musically determines at least in part what kind of Christians we become.

However, this process, whether dietary or spiritual, takes place over time. So, ‘We become what we sing’ seemed more appropriate. Also, the certainty of the bald assertion that ‘we become what we sing’ seemed unwarranted. Hence a title in the form of a question: ‘Do we become what we sing?’ My purpose today is to explore the question of the role of music in faith formation with an openness to what emerges from that exploration.

Of course, the impact of music on worshippers takes place within a network of contexts which affect how the music is received, and which may play their own formative role. The music histories of individual worshippers and of the congregation as a whole, the liturgical event, the building, the social and cultural contexts, all of these and more may make their imprint. In focusing today on music, I am not implying that music is the only formative dimension of corporate worship. But I do believe that it has the potential to be one of the most powerful, situated as it is near the heart of the liturgical experience within all of these other contexts.

The rather awkward subtitle, ‘The role of the music of congregational song in congregational spiritual formation,’ is an attempt to further clarify my intention. I am not primarily interested in the words we sing in worship, important though they are, but in music. It is generally agreed that in the marriage of text and tune that make up congregational song, music is the dominant partner. A strong tune can redeem a weak text, but the reverse is not true. A poor tune will drag whatever words it sets down with it. Such is the power of music. The capacity of sung words to affect the hearer is governed by the music. The character of the music not only controls whether the text speaks clearly, but also shapes how the words are understood. Different musical settings of the same text will evoke different readings or understandings of that text. For example, ‘Amazing grace’ sung to its customary tune, NEW BRITAIN, creates a different reading of the text from the same words sung to ANTIOCH or THE THIRD TUNE.[3]

An even longer title for this talk would have added yet another phrase, ‘An approach to the question of musical style.’ Once we acknowledge the power of different tunes to modify how we receive the texts they set, and embrace the notion that the music we sing and hear in worship may have the power to shape who we become over time, musical style must become a part of the conversation. In fact, I want to propose that these two questions, ‘What is the formative role of congregational song?’ and ‘What is the importance of musical style in congregational song?’, can be brought together with fruitful results, each question providing an approach to better answering the other. Along the way, I will also consider: 1) how the experience of subjectivity afforded by music may have a formative impact, 2) the co-operative role of the listener-performer in allowing this formative effect to take place, 3) the ambivalent character of the meaning that arises from personal and congregational associations, and 4) how acknowledging the formative potential of congregational song might lead church musicians and pastors to develop congregational repertoires differently.

Personal Experiences of the Formative Power of Congregational Song

Having set out the questions I want to address today, let me begin by offering two illustrations from my own experience as a young worshipper of how I believe congregational song contributed to my formation in faith. I begin with my own experience not because I think these encounters with congregational song should have any special significance for anyone other than myself, but because I hope they will help to ground the theoretical discussion that follows, and to clarify what I mean when I speak of music as a means of formation.

The first congregational singing that really energized and delighted me was the ‘Canticle of the Three Children’, the ‘Benedicite’ — in a version set to music by Toronto organist and composer, Albert Ham. (See Example 1.) It is not perhaps the greatest music, but it gave me a sense of the cosmic sweep of creation, of God in creation and creation in God. The inclusive catalogue of the created order, including the large and the small, the natural and man-made, is reflected musically in its modulations phrase by phrase. There was pleasure in the movement back and forth between the changing specifics of the first three phrases and the return to the unvarying refrain in the fourth, and also in the varying lengths of the lines as the reciting tones of the chant stretched and contracted to accommodate them. I especially looked forward to the line with just a one-syllable noun, ‘O ye Wells,’ so at odds with the multi-syllabic lists that fell on the reciting tone most of the time.

The repetition, the call and response, the alternation between the changing and the unchanging in the text — these all invited a sense of play. Singing this chant moved me outside of myself, and the listing of the elements of creation great and small evoked in me a sense of the presence of the one God in the diversity of creation.

The way I responded to singing the ‘Benedicite’ was probably not shared by everyone. My spirit resonated to the cosmic canvas being painted, to the intimations of transcendence which were evoked for me by the scope of the text, yet grounded in the particulars of creation. Singing the Benedicite in this way was a formative experience for me. It was repeated, not weekly, but at intervals in the worship life of the congregation I belonged to.

Figure 1 ‘Benedicite’

In that congregation, hymns were learned and sung from words- only books, — a practice that is now widely discouraged, I think unfortunately. Words-only books allow for easier understanding of the text. They also allow musical improvisation, as I soon discovered, moving between singing the melody, as we almost all did, in unison with everyone else, and expressing my own individual sense of where I fit in, exploring musical possibilities, making mistakes within the security of a corporate music-making which was not going to be derailed by my explorations.

Another experience I recall vividly was my first encounter with Samuel Crossman’s poem ‘My song is love unknown,’ sung to John Ireland’s tune. (See Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised, 1950) I was nineteen or twenty, attending a Maundy Thursday service, sitting near a back corner of a church I was visiting on my own. The effect on me of singing these words and this tune for the first time was electric. No doubt the circumstances contributed to the intensity of my experience: the muted lighting, the ceremonial stripping of the altar, the narrative trajectory of the liturgy.

Crossman’s poetry is masterful, and distinctive in structure. The metrical contrast between the two groups of lines, four lines of six syllables followed by four lines of four, provides the occasion for the poet to shift poetic voice or to juxtapose contrasting actions and attitudes. In his splendid and indispensable book, The English Hymn, J. R. Watson characterizes this text as a ‘narrative with commentary’ in which ‘[the] singer/speaker has two voices, one a narrative voice which addresses a listener — ‘My song is love unknown’ — the other a reflexive voice, that turns inwards — ‘O who am I?’[4] The poet makes the first four-syllable line, at the metrical shift, the pivot of these contrasts: ‘O who am I?, ‘Then ‘Crucify’!,’ ‘Sweet injuries!,’ Yet cheerful he,’ ‘This is my Friend.’

The brilliance of Ireland’s tune lies partly in the way it reflects this duality of voice and structure. It is a tune intended for unison singing, each text line except lines 5 and 6 being set to a distinctive rhythm. It remains in the home key for most of its first half, the harmonies particularly underlining the sense of the first stanza: the deceptive cadence at the end of the first line, painting the word ‘unknown’; the tune reaching its peak and the span between melody and bass line opening up as love is ‘to the loveless shown’, the gentle subsidence onto a tonicized dominant chord accompanying the words ‘that they might lovely be’.

Then comes the surprise. Having feinted towards the sharp side of the home key, Ireland drops directly into the flat-side subdominant to underscore the shift of voice and sudden awareness of unworthiness in the words, ‘O who am I?’ For most of the stanzas, the move to the sharp-side key accompanies the exterior focused narrative parts of the text, and the flat side echoes the shift to a reflective inferiority.

I was unprepared for the effect that this hymn would have on me. Singing the words ‘O who am I?’ for the first time felt like a thrust to the heart, and I was rendered emotionally open and vulnerable in a way I could not have anticipated. The gentle sweep of the tune, the plays on the word ‘love,’ perhaps even the picture of transformation painted by the first four lines of the first stanza, had set me up for the impact of the fifth line.

It was the music that did the principal work of creating this impact. The shift in key was disorienting; it created a kind of interior shift in me which I experienced directly through the agency of the music. As each stanza came and went, the same experiential ‘shape’ was recreated to different but similarly penetrating words.

I should like to make two observations about these formative experiences before we move on. Firstly, the effect of the music on me was direct, not mediated by any analytical awareness of what was occurring. In the case of ‘My song is love unknown,’ I was just openly attentive to and participating in the hymn. I was surprised by the sudden harmonic shift at the words ‘O who am I?’, but I could not have explained what was happening or why it was having the particular effect on me that it did. Secondly, while these two examples illustrate how I believe the shape of the music itself exerts a potentially formative effect, they are in one way not typical of the way music forms over time. I chose them because their intensity caused them to remain vivid in my memory, and therefore allowed me to analyse how closely linked the particulars of the music were to my response to it. But most experience of congregational song, week by week, is not so memorable. If music truly forms us over time, it must do so also in our more routine experiences of it. The musical mechanism would be the same even though the immediate impact is less powerful.

Musical Subjectivity and Congregational Song

What is it about music that gives it the power to move and even transform us? To answer this question completely, even if such a thing were possible, would require travelling along many disciplinary avenues, including music perception and cognition, semiotics, philosophical aesthetics, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, music theory, theology, and more. For present purposes, I will draw primarily on the work of Naomi Cumming, the British born Australian music theorist, philosopher and semiotician, whose unexpected death at age 39 in 1999 cut short a career of remarkable accomplishment.

Cumming’s work refined, revised, and extended the work of various scholarly predecessors, notable among them Suzanne Langer, a mid-twentieth-century philosopher of the arts.[5] Langer argued that we respond to music because it evokes or resonates directly with the texture and patterns of our felt inner life. We recognize in the rhythms, timbres, harmonies and tempos of music, whether consciously or not, our interior experience of what it is to be human. We recognize in music our own experiences of feeling, not just of emotion, but of sensation, intuition, reflection, and so on. Music sounds like what life feels like. This capacity of music to connect directly with our sense of inferiority also means, Langer argues, that music can teach us to recognize and process feeling experiences that we have not had before outside of the music. Music can be a training ground for how to attend to and understand our interior life.

Naomi Cumming’s work also views music as resonating directly with our sense of our interior selves. She developed an understanding of music as creating an experience of ‘subjectivity’ with which we can identify directly. Cumming’s work focuses on explaining how it is that when we listen to music we tend to hear and identify with it as if it were an encounter with a personal, subjective other. She holds with Gadamer that works of art have the power to change the person who experiences them, and that ‘there is a ‘subjectivity’ in the work itself, with which the listener may become actively engaged, not following his or her own impulses but guided by those of the work.’[6] Cumming finds an explanation for how such a subjectivity might ‘actually inhere in a musical work’ by looking at various aspects, such as timbre, gesture, and other modalities of apparent agency, and concludes that the subject heard in a musical work ‘is formed through the active participation of the listener’ in response to engagement with these various musical elements. The absence of an actually present subject behind the music while it is being experienced allows the listener to ‘imaginatively place himself or herself in that position, becoming identified with the music’s enunciation.’[7]

This process helps to explain how there can be a shared experience of the subjective among multiple listeners, and that this experience is not purely private or arbitrary, but governed by the particulars of the music itself. Although a listener may also impose personal associations on the music, the sense of a subject which the listener encounters, inviting identification, is something heard in the music itself. The conclusion Cumming draws is that’[musical subjectivities] inhere in the text of the music itself, as it is performed, inviting the listener’s engagement in a manner that transforms his or her own subjectivity….The music forms the listener’s experience,…[creating] a knowledge of something that has been formerly unknown, something that asks to be integrated into the mind of the hearer.’[8]

From Cumming’s point of view, then, my experience of ‘My song is love unknown’ to John Ireland’s music is to be understood not only as a feeling response being guided by the fabric of the music, but also of my allowing the subjectivity embodied in the performance of the music to become my own. The character, shape, and texture of the subjectivity presented by the music directly forms my own subjectivity in my encounter with the music.

Cumming developed this understanding of the shaping power of music on the engaged listener with reference to the classical concert repertoire. How might this understanding be applied to congregational song? What differences between congregational song and concert music would need to be taken into account? Here are five preliminary suggestions:

  1. Few hymns rise to the status of great works of art, but some are masterful examples in miniature of the composer’s craft.
  2. As participants in the performance of congregational song and not just listeners, worshippers identify not only imaginatively but also bodily with the musical performance.
  3. Worshippers sing hymns and songs with the explicit intention of identifying directly with the words and music. They intend to experience the words of congregational song not as the words of another person, but as their own.
  4. Worshippers sing congregational song in a personal, social and liturgical context seeking to encounter the divine, and even to be transformed by that encounter.
  5. Congregational singing can be a spiritual practice, a disciplined weekly activity which is capable of forming and reinforcing patterns of experience over time.

Given these differences between the concert experience and the experience of congregational song within a liturgical setting, it seems that the formative power encountered in congregational song could be even greater than in the concert hall, because of bodily participation in the performance, the explicit intention to be transformed by divine encounter, and the disciplined repetition of the practice.

Subjectivity, Formation and Musical Style

How then can church musicians and pastors best take the formative potential of congregational song into account in their weekly selection of congregational repertoire? A close analysis of the musical subjectivity inherent in each hymn and song being considered for use would be ideal, but also probably impractically cumbersome. But since 1) formation takes place over time, and 2) hymn tunes of a particular style share numerous features in common, (Shared features are what allows us to speak of a style in the first place.) it should be possible to apply this approach not just to individual tunes, but also to groups of tunes in the same style. Hymn tune styles are also often broadly associated with particular kinds of texts and not with others. By coming to understand how differing musical styles are likely to form us over time, that is, what are the characteristics of the subjectivities that they tend to embody, we may produce a practical tool that provides guidance in developing congregational repertoires overtime.

Questions about musical style in congregational song have been the subject of discussion for a long time. Let me offer a brief summary of the current state of the conversation as I understand it. The conversation has largely moved beyond the idea that some styles of music are intrinsically appropriate for worship while others are not. It is now widely accepted that the perceived sacredness of a musical style has more to do with context and intention than it does with the musical style itself. That view still leaves unanswered the big question of when and how to make use of the wide range of music available to us.

The criterion of taste has been invoked in attempts to answer it. However, it seems to me that to try to address the question of musical style in terms of taste risks minimizing or even trivializing the question. To call something a ‘matter of taste’ is generally taken to imply that it is not a matter of substance, that it is beyond the scope of rational discussion. To say ‘There’s no accounting for taste’ is to shut down conversation, not to engage in it.

Craft has also been explored as a criterion for dealing with the question of style. The level of craftsmanship has been invoked as a means of discernment within the various styles of music. Excellence in whatever style is always better than shoddiness. But this criterion has a tendency to shift the question away from the issue of style

rather than to engage with it directly. The same is largely true of approaches that focus on ‘liturgical appropriateness’ as a tool for discernment. It is important to make judgements about liturgical appropriateness in selecting congregational hymns and songs, but this criterion also evades rather than engages with the question of musical style.

Balance sounds at first like a helpful criterion. It has the virtue of addressing the potentially competing claims of differing styles by providing a principle for allowing a diversity of styles to be employed, and it resonates with the metaphor of the repertoire of congregational song as a diet, and maintaining a balanced diet is an axiom of good nutrition. Yet the criterion of balance leaves at least a couple of issues unresolved. It does not say what a balanced diet looks like. — What constitutes balance may be different from one congregation to the next. Also, a balanced diet may be the right thing for the healthy organism, but for particular purposes such as building muscle mass, controlling blood sugar levels, or preventing cancer or heart disease, balance may be less what is needed, than an informed emphasis on some types of food and avoidance of others. In order to achieve this aim, we would need to understand how each group of foods operates within the body.

As with types of food, the principle that differing musical styles have the potential to bring something distinctive and valuable to worship can be embraced as axiomatic. However, we must go beyond that to try to understand what those distinctive contributions might be, so that we can make informed decisions about the appropriateness of particular musical styles in particular congregational contexts and for particular purposes. This, I propose, is the best way to get to the root of the question of musical style.

To illustrate what I mean, I want to make a brief case study of the genre of hymn tune known as the ‘English Public School Hymn Tune’.

The English Public School Hymn: A Case Study

The English Public School hymn tune was first described as a distinct type in an article by Leonard Blake that appeared in the Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland in 1950.[9] The public school tune flourished during the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the public schools, as its name suggests. The best examples have found a place in the repertoire of the wider church. Notable are W.H. Ferguson’s WOLVERCOTE (for the text ‘O Jesus, I have promised’); THORNBURY by Basil Harwood (for ‘Your hand, O God, has guided’ and others); WOODLANDS by Walter Greatorex, which was given a new lease on life when paired with ‘Tell out my soul’ in the 1970s; and John Ireland’s LOVE UNKNOWN, the tune we considered earlier. While most of these tunes were composed by musicians working as organists and choir directors in various public schools, they are defined not by their place of origin, but by musical characteristics they hold in common.

The style of the public school tune evolved in part as a reaction to the perceived sentimentality and inwardness of many Victorian tunes, and in part as a response to the ethos and opportunities afforded by the public school context, where boys and young men gathered several times a week for worship. The preface to the 1919 edition of The Public School Hymn Book, in which these tunes first appeared in number, speaks of the importance of attaining higher standards of musical excellence in hymn tunes, because ‘sincere and noble music has a very powerful influence on character.’ The preface continues:

Convinced as we are that hymn tunes have a vital influence on the sense of worship and on the development of character, we have tried to find tunes that will achieve that high aim. Not every tune can combine all the most desirable features; but, speaking generally, the tunes in this collection will be found to possess broad melodies, strong harmonies, dignity, vigour, and sincerity.[10]

The archetypal example of the public school tune is probably WOLVERCOTE, most often paired with ‘O Jesus, I have promised.’ (See Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised, 1950). The melodic breadth of the public school tune is one of its most consistent features. Such tunes have been called ‘bold and adventurous’ as well as ‘energetic and purposeful.’[11] They are often march-like, a feature frequently reflected in the military imagery of their texts, as here, especially in the first two stanzas. Boldness and energy are projected by large, rising intervals. The strength of the melodies is reinforced by the unison singing for which most of these tunes were designed.

The public school tune is also longer than most nineteenth century tunes. Metres are frequently doubles, setting eight lines of text. Where the metre is not a double, it may be unusual or irregular. In cases where the metre is only four lines long, the text setting often assigns two or more notes to a syllable, creating a sense of breadth in that way.

The length of these tunes allows for greater harmonic adventurousness as well, a feature which can reinforce the sense of bold movement found in the melody. Perhaps most importantly, these tunes often modulate strikingly to relatively distant keys, especially at the beginning of the second half of the tune. The effect of these modulations has been described by Erik Routley as ranging from ‘romantic’ or ‘dramatic’ to ‘hair-raising’ and ‘alarming’ in the most extreme examples.[12]We observed this kind of effect in LOVE UNKOWN. In WOLVERCOTE, it occurs at the words, ‘I shall not fear the battle’. Having tonicized the dominant (E major) at the end of the previous phrase, the tune shifts into C major, b III of the home key.

The texts of public school tunes also tend to share features in common. Over half of them are expressions of personal commitment to Jesus, mostly in the character of militant determination, while some have a more intimate emotional character. ‘O Jesus, I have promised’ is an example of the first of these, ‘My song is love unknown’ an example of the second. Surveying the texts that accompany the two dozen or so of these tunes found in the 1919 and 1949 editions of The Public School Hymn Book readily shows this, where we find such first lines as ‘O Jesus, I have promised,’ ‘Lift up your heads, ye golden gates,’ ‘Soldiers of Christ, arise,’ ‘Trumpet of God, sound high,’ ‘From glory to glory advancing,’ ‘Stand up, stand up for Jesus,’ ‘My song is love unknown,’ and ‘O Jesus, strong and pure and true.’

Compare the impact of WOLVERCOTE on the poetry of ‘O Jesus, I have promised’ with that of the late nineteenth century Methodist tune, ANGEL’S STORY, still used as the tune for these words in some parts of the church. (See Example 2.) Its two parts both begin in the tonic, the third line almost identical to the first. The two- bar rhythmic pattern that begins the tune is repeated throughout, the ending adapted in alternate lines to accommodate the 7.6.7.6.D metre. So, the basic unit of movement here is two bars long, compared with four bars in WOLVERCOTE

Figure 2 ‘ANGEL’s STORY’

The harmonic rhythm of ANGEL’S STORY is slower, harmonies changing approximately once per bar, compared to every quarter- note in WOLVERCOTE. This means that the melody notes of ANGEL’S STORY seem to carry less weight than those of WOLVERCOTE. This feature combined with the dotted quarters and half notes that appear on the downbeats of every bar of ANGEL’S STORY places much more weight on the downbeat than on the remaining beats in the bar. This contrasts with WOLVERCOTE, in which each quarter-note has enough weight to support the march character of the music and the sense of determination that it implies.

The melodic units of ANGEL’S SONG usually begin with leaps which are followed by downwards steps. Leaps are predominantly onto the seventh of the chord, which demands downwards stepwise resolution. Because they arrive on the weakest note of the chord and demand immediate resolution, they convey less a sense of determination than of something like longing or petition. But because of the prolonged downbeat, the static harmonic sense, and the fact that the dissonant downbeat is often repeated before resolving, there is no sense of urgency about resolving dissonance, but rather an enjoyment of the longing. These leaps to the seventh have a parallel in the weak- beat cadences, again with prolonged seventh or second inversion triads which further soften the cadence. Because the harmonic vocabulary of the tune is fairly restricted and the harmonic rhythm slow and regular, there is no real tension or uncertainty about how or when these dissonances will resolve themselves.

The beginning of the fifth line of text, ‘I shall not fear the battle,’ is a moment of strength and surprise in WOLVERCOTE. In ANGEL’S SONG the downbeat on ‘shall’ is approached by decorative chromatic passing tone, making for a weaker painting of the word. In WOLVERCOTE, ‘shall’ becomes an expression of deep determination; in ANGEL’S SONG this moment is marked by a return to the home base of the tonic and the beginning of the tune. (Compare this effect with what it would have been if the downbeat had been approached by a leap, say from D.) Comparing the effect of these two tunes on their text for their formative potential, we might note that WOLVERCOTE has a bold and determined and even adventurous energy. In relation to its text, it conveys a call to action, and views the world in terms of opposition, resistance, struggle and victory. It paints a picture of faith experienced in obedience to a call for an active response. It also associates that response with a certain sense of thrill. By contrast, ANGEL’S STORY paints a more domestic picture. The tune is more repetitive, its harmonic palette narrower. The military language seems more metaphorical, the tasks to which the singer expects to respond more routine. It allows for a more reflective experience of the text, rather than the intensity provided by WOLVERCOTE.

The Jesus of WOLVERCOTE seems like an admired and inspiring leader to whom the listener-singer might pledge allegiance. ANGEL’S STORY provides a more intimate sense of relationship, and perhaps a sense of dependency, rather than the independent spirit suggested by WOLVERCOTE.

Music and Formation: The Role of the Listener-Performer

The argument so far has centred on the properties of music in general and of particular hymn tunes and styles. In trying to understand how congregational music might form people over time, however, we need to go beyond looking at the music itself. Equally important is how listeners and performers engage with the music, because to a considerable extent listeners can choose how to respond to the music they encounter.

In psychological terms, a musical performance may be thought of as a type of affordance. Music offers or invites a certain type of response, which people may choose to engage in or not. Psychologist James Gibson, who introduced the concept of affordance in the 1960’s, used the example of a chair as an illustration.[13] A chair affords the experience of sitting. It is designed so that sitting is facilitated; if you had never seen a chair before, an exploration of its structure would soon make the possibility of sitting on it apparent. You might choose to chop up the chair to use as firewood. (A wooden chair also affords this response.) But this is a response that is also afforded by other wooden objects that do not afford sitting. Sitting is the response best afforded by a chair. Following this line of thinking, what my analysis of English public school hymn tunes in general, and the tune WOLVERCOTE in particular, is trying to do is to describe the kind of experience or response that is best afforded by its particular distinctive characteristics.

Nevertheless, listeners are free to respond to music in a variety of ways. Psychologist of music, John Sloboda, has outlined some of the responses to music that listeners may choose:[14]

  1. Ignore the music, and remain focused on their own inner thoughts and feelings.
  2. Attend to personal associations the music may have for them. Music can be a powerful reminder of people and places from the past, and we may allow the music to serve as a gateway to re-experiencing or reflecting on these memories.
  3. Engage with the music analytically, noting patterns and relationships in it. We form and recognize such patterns through a process that psychologists call ‘representation’. This process allows us to recognize similarities between parallel musical phrases, or to recognize that two musical performances separated in time are renditions of the same piece of music.
  4. Engage with the music in an open, attentive way that Sloboda calls’non-judgemental contemplation.’ This way of engaging sets aside the making of what he calls ‘verbally-based activities leading to verbal judgements.’ We allow ourselves to experience the music on its own terms, and to allow the responses which arise as a result to take place. Research suggests that ‘[v] ariations in emotional experience are not caused so much by idiosyncratic ways of representing the music, as by contextual factors…and by the individual’s own interpretation of the emotional response.’[15] That is, there is a distinction to be made between the affective experience afforded by the music and how we choose to feel about that experience.
  5. Attend to how the music is affecting one’s relationship with other individuals who are a part of the same musical event. Am I blending my voice with my neighbour? Are we sharing a similar experience? This way of attending to music can play a role in strengthening community and understanding ourselves as part of a larger whole.

It is number 4, Sloboda’s ‘non-judgemental contemplation’ that offers the richest possibilities for understanding how music might form congregations over time, and that accounts best for my own early experiences with the ‘Benedicite’ and ‘My song is love unknown.’

There are obstacles to be overcome in order for music to function in this way in the congregation, however. The most significant of these may be the power of music to evoke personal and collective associations. Sloboda writes:

For true contemplation it is necessary mentally to instruct oneself to forget where the music comes from, to forget one’s associations to it, to forget whether one likes it or not, and simply let it work its effect. There is a strong element in worship of quieting one’s own inner voices to ‘let God speak’. This is often expressed as a subjugation of one’s own will and inclinations to God’s. Precisely because music does have such strong personal associations, but also of its own nature evokes emotional responses which may be quite at variance with one’s personal predispositions towards it, there is a clear sense in which the contemplation of music embodies the particular challenge to ‘self’ that marks out contemplative worship.[16]

Associative meaning: a ‘mixed blessing’

What happens when a hymn or song is used in a congregation’s worship repeatedly over time? The answer to this question depends on a number of factors. One of these factors is the inherent strength or weakness of the music itself, what I call its musical ‘profile’. In the congregation where I grew up, as the collection was taken forward, we always sang the words, ‘All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee’ to a generic, psalm tone-like bit of chant. Despite its anodyne character, weekly use of this musical snippet created a strong association with this moment in the liturgy. There would have been resistance to changing this music, not because of any quality of the music itself but because changing it would have disturbed an established routine.

More positively, there can be the experience of returning periodically to a piece of music that retains its freshness over time, that wears an ever deepening groove or pattern in the liturgical life of the congregation. For me, singing the Benedicite a few times a year was like this, and I expect that most of us can think of numerous hymns and songs that have functioned similarly in our own liturgical experience.

What about those more dramatically transformative or ‘mountain top’ experiences that are sometimes catalysed by song? I would put my Maundy Thursday experience with ‘My song is love unknown’ in this category, and again, most of us can probably identify some similar moments of intense engagement with congregational song. These sorts of experience carry the same potential difficulty or temptation as other kinds of spiritual ‘peak experiences’: the desire to recreate the experience rather than to receive it as a gift to be integrated into the larger life of faith. Even the simple memory of having had such an experience can make it difficult to stay focused in the present, to experience the song in the present moment rather than to try to relive the past. It may require conscious awareness and effort to integrate such experiences rather than allow them to become distractions, channels of grace rather than idols. If the meaning arising from association can be so integrated, it can still be a positive dimension of how the hymn is experienced in the present.

But it can also happen that the impact of personal or collective associations or other dimensions of the context in which the performance occurs renders the music powerless to speak on its own terms. In my home church, the hymn ‘O God, our help in ages past’ sung to William Croft’s ST ANNE was for several generations associated so strongly with funerals that it became unusable on any other occasions.

In cases like this, the associations arising from previous experience work so strongly against the music actually being heard for itself in its present context that they effectively ‘drown out’ the expressive and formative potential intrinsic to the music. The same kind of overwhelming associations can occur at the congregational or individual level.

It has been argued that knowingly selecting music for its associative rather than intrinsic meaning is liturgically legitimate. But it has to be asked whether the purpose of music in the liturgy is to invoke and reinforce an identity anchored in the past, or to meet and form people where they are in the present. If worship is to be a place of encounter with the living God, in which the Spirit forms us more fully into the people we believe God desires us to be, then music needs to be able to speak on its own terms, and not in terms of past experience, however positive that experience may have been.

As Sloboda shows, engaging with associations is only one of the affordances of music, — though an especially powerful one, — that may prevent music from speaking through its intrinsic character as music. For music to exercise its formative potential, it is necessary for worshippers to cultivate a willingness and an ability to engage music in the manner that Sloboda calls ‘non-judgemental contemplation’ — not ignoring the music, or yielding to personal taste, or dwelling on the feelings evoked by past experiences of the music, but attending to it as to a person we would like to know better. For some, this may require instruction and practice.

Congregational Repertoire as a Resource for Formation

If church musicians are custodians of a treasury of tools that are able to shape who our congregations become, how should they approach their task of selecting congregational music differently from how they may be doing so now?

Among the church musicians I know, the primary approach to choosing hymns for the Sunday service is text-based, with reference either to the scripture readings for the day or to the theme of the service or sermon. I took the same approach for most of my years as a parish musician. There is a strength in this way of working, since it can unify the worship service around a particular focus. However, a text-based approach is unlikely to take full advantage of the formative potential of hymns and songs. Since the texts of hymns we select are experienced through the filter of music, the hymns may not be connecting to the message of the readings in the same way or as effectively as planned. Hymns may even be affording theological messages through the music that distorts or contradicts the theology being expounded through readings and sermon.

I suggest that church musicians need to develop a working sense of how the music of various styles can shape the spirituality of their congregations as at least a part of their approach to repertoire development. Please understand that I am not talking about choosing music of particular styles because people like them, or because some are more ‘sacred’ than others. lam suggesting that we develop ways of understanding the various styles of congregational song as offering a range of distinctive pastoral resources for supporting congregations to grow more fully and more deeply into the image of Christ. If we accept that the music of congregational song has formative power, then musical style must be elevated to at least one of the primary considerations.

Do we become what we sing?

As I come to the end of my time today, lam aware that all of the areas I have touched on need a fuller exploration than I have been able to give them, and that others have not been raised. How does the formative power of music interact with other potentially formative dimensions of worship, such as liturgical and architectural context? How does the prevailing culture, and especially the dominant musical culture, shape or limit our ability to respond to music of differing types and styles? What is the role of the Spirit in formation? The rapidly growing body of empirical psychological research into music perception and cognition must also be taken into account for a more complete understanding of the place of music in formation.

My purpose today has been less to offer conclusions than to invite conversation. We have not arrived at a clear or simple answer to the question that we began with, ‘Do we become what we sing?’ If pressed for an answer, I would have to say, ‘Yes, probably, more than we realize, but less than we might.’ If music is indeed the powerful formative influence on faith that it seems to be, then understanding that influence better is a matter of importance for all who love and engage with congregational song.

© Kenneth R. Hull, 2015. All rights reserved.

[1] A transcript of a Lecture given at the Cambridge 2015 International Hymn Conference.

[2] Saliers, D., and Westermeyer, P., have been notable proponents of this view. See for example Saliers, D.E., ‘Liturgical musical formation’, in: Leaver, R.A., and Zimmerman, J.A., (eds.), Liturgy and Music: Lifetime Learning, Collegeville 1998, pp. 384-394; Saliers, ‘Sound spirituality: on the formative expressive power of music for Christian spirituality’, in: Dreyer, E.A., (ed.), Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality, Baltimore 2005, pp. 334-340; Westermeyer, P., ‘Choosing music: choices for holiness’, in: CrossAccent 12/3 (2004), pp. 4-11; Westermeyer, ‘Discernment’, in: CrossAccent 19/1 (2011), pp. 5-16.

[3] Hull, K.R., ‘Text, music and meaning in congregational song’, in: The Hymn 53:1 (January 2002), pp. 14-25.

[4] Watson, J.R., The English Hymn. A Critical and Historical Study, Oxford 1997, pp. 87, 89.

[5] Langer, S.K., Philosophy in a New Key. A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, Cambridge, MA 1942). See also Naomi Cumming’s discussion of Langer in Cumming, The Sonic Self. Musical Subjectivity and Signification, Bloomington, IN 2000, pp. 216-224.

[6] Cumming, N., ‘The subjectivities of ‘Erbarme dich’, in: Music Analysis 16/1 (March 1997), p. 7.

[7] Ibid., p. 15.

[8] Ibid., p. 17.

[9] Blake, L., The Public School hymn-tune, in: Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2/12 (October 1950), pp. 180-185.

[10] The Public School Hymn Book with Tunes, edited by a Committee of the Headmasters’ Conference, London: Novello, 1919, p.iii.

[11] Blake, op. cit., p. 182; Routley, E., The Music of Christian Hymns, Chicago 1981, p. 149.

[12] Routley, op. cit., p. 149.

[13] Sloboda, J., Music and worship: a psychologist’s perspective’, in: Astley, J., Hone, T., and Savage, M., (eds.), Creative Chords. Studies in Music, Theology and Christian Formation, Leominster UK 2000, p. 112.

[14] Ibid., pp. 111-112.

[15] Ibid., p. 122.

[16] Ibid., p. 123.

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