Indelible Grace
T. David Gordon
Intro
Since the appearance of my little monograph Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop
Culture Re-Wrote the Hymnal (P&R, 2010), I have been frequently asked my opinion about the
project of those artists, such as Indelible Grace,1 who are writing contemporary musical settings
for the lyrics of traditional hymns. Since the number of those inquiries continues to grow, I have
decided to give the matter some considered thought and to make my thoughts on the matter
public. In what follows, I arrange my thoughts in three categories: Areas of Hearty Agreement,
Areas of Less-than-Hearty Agreement, and What I Wish Indelible Grace Would Do.
As a matter of introduction, I should make two other clarifications. First, I am not
commenting here about the actual quality of Indelible Grace’s achievements to date; I have not
had opportunity to work through every piece of music they have written, to render an aesthetic or
theological judgment. It is not my purpose here to comment on Indelible Grace’s competence in
the project, but rather to comment on the project itself.2 My only comment regarding their
competence is that the almost-universal testimony of those familiar with their work has been
favorable, and I can only assume that such a favorable testimony is well-merited. In other
words, if I had the time or inclination to evaluate their achievements to date, I have every reason
to believe that I would join my voice to those other laudatory voices. Second, my evaluation of
Indelible Grace’s project is based upon the description of that project on their website,
<http://www.igracemusic.com/about/index.htm >. The project itself may have a “life of its
1
Others would include Red Mountain, Sovereign Grace Music, Reformed Praise, et al.
2
I’ll permit myself an exception or two later, as an Afterword.
1
own,” in some senses, too varied and flexible to be fully captured by any theoretical statement.
Further, websites have certain liabilities; they aren’t the best place to engage in significant
philosophical statements. So it is entirely possible that my reply is blinkered, to some degree,
since I am replying only to the statement itself, which may or may not be an entirely accurate
representation of the project.
I. Areas of Hearty Agreement
In three areas, I find myself to be in very hearty agreement with Indelible Grace.
First, Indelible Grace takes the question seriously. Often, in conversations about singing
praise in church, I have encountered people who suggest that singing praise to God is “just” or
“merely” a matter of taste. For instance, Pastor Tchividjian of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church
has said it is wrong “when we separate people according to something as trivial as musical
preferences…,” suggesting that musical preferences are “trivial.”3 Indelible Grace and I, on the
other hand, do not regard the question of how best to sing praise to God as a trivial matter at all.
Indelible Grace’s stated goal is “to enrich our worship,” a goal that is far from trivial. Indelible
Grace rightly says “We believe worship is formative, and that it does matter what we think.”
Music itself is far from trivial. In Genesis, by the eighth generation recorded, Moses
noted that specialization was taking place in agriculture, industry, and music: “Adah bore Jabal;
Pastor Tchividjian’s comments can be found at
<http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tullian/2010/08/22/we-are-one/>. One’s own musical
preferences for what one listens to in one’s own leisure time are surely not the kind of thing over
which Christians should divide. But in theory, every liturgical question is important. No human
event is more significant (less “trivial”) than the event of meeting God in worship; therefore,
each of the constituent parts thereof is also significant. The truth in the old saying--de gustibus
non est disputandum (roughly, matters of taste are not to be contended)--resided only in the
private arena of private taste, such as what food one selects from the menu at a restaurant.
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2
he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal;
he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal-cain; he was the
forger of all instruments of bronze and iron” (Gen. 4:20-22). Music, according to the biblical
testimony, was as highly regarded as tool-making and agriculture, and as worthy of comment.
To the best of our current knowledge, both of the biblical accounts and those of the
archaeologists, musical instruments were among the first (if not the first) implements humans
ever crafted. Cultural anthropologists have not yet found cultures without music, and
sociologists as significant as Max Weber have written about the sociology of music.4 And, if
music is profoundly significant to human civilizations in general, it is even more significant
when it is consecrated to the sacred purpose of singing praise to God. Indelible Grace and I,
therefore, forge a very significant alliance at this moment in history by our counter-cultural (and
therefore counter-intuitive) belief that music, especially sacred music, is an extremely significant
human endeavor, with the profoundest consequences.
A second area of hearty agreement is this: Indelible Grace wishes to remain in contact
with the historic church catholic. Neither Indelible Grace nor I are anti-traditional; we affirm our
belief in the church universal: “We believe that we are impoverished if we cut off our ties with
the saints of the past…” Indelible Grace and I recognize that our brothers and sisters in the freechurch movement are pious and sincere Christians; but we respectfully believe they are sincerely
The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, translated and edited by Don Martindale,
Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth (Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). Also cf.
Augustus Delafield Zanzig, Music in American Life, Present & Future (London: Oxford
University Press, 1932); Alphons Silbermann, The Sociology of Music translated by Corbet
Stewart (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963); and Wayne D. Bowman, Philosophical
Perspectives on Music (Oxford: University Press, 1998). Very recently, Daniel J. Levitin’s
second book on the neurology of music appeared, entitled The World in Six Songs: How the
Musical Brain Created Human Nature (New York: Dutton, 2010).
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mistaken in suggesting that there is nothing particularly gained by employing the worship-forms
(whether prayers, hymns or creeds) that have been widely employed throughout the church’s
history. To the contrary, we applaud the efforts of individuals such as John Calvin, whose
Strasbourg liturgy was entitled “A Form of Prayers According to the Pattern of the Ancient
Church.”
A third area of agreement between myself and Indelible Grace is lyrical humility.
Indelible Grace realizes that it would be almost arrogant for any generation of the church to
believe it could create a body of hymn-lyrics better than the best lyrics of the previous two
millenia of gifted Christian artists. Therefore, Indelible Grace does not create new lyrics from
scratch; it sets to new musical settings the lyrics of the best hymns through the history of the
church. One could only wish that all proponents of Contemporary Worship Music demonstrated
the humility demonstrated by the artists associated with Indelible Grace.
II. Areas of Less-than-Hearty Agreement
As heartfelt as my agreements with Indelible Grace are, there are several areas where we
are not yet in entire agreement.
Our first disagreement is historical: Indelible Grace professes to be continuing a tradition
that I believe is utterly unprecedented in church history. Their project is motivated by their
belief that, in setting the lyrics of traditional hymns to new musical settings, they are merely
doing what has always been done before:
Our hope is to help the church recover the tradition of putting old hymns to new music for
each generation… But actually, this is not really a “new” movement at all! Up until the
beginning of the 20th century, it was common for people to compose new music for each
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generation for many of the hymns that they loved” (italics mine).
The element of truth in Indelible Grace’s statement is the recognition that, in previous
generations, some (but by no means all) hymns were not associated with a particular musical
setting, and were freely set to more than one.5 But Indelible Grace’s statement is actually an
exaggeration of the historical record. Since the “lyrics” of some hymns existed as poetry before
they were set to music (notably some of Cowper’s verse), there were some hymns whose lyrics
originally were not lyrics at all; they were Christian verse that existed without any musical
setting; and therefore no particular musical setting could claim any special relation to such lyrics.
But there were other hymns whose lyrics were true lyrics; lyrics that were originally set to a
particular musical setting that was regarded as particularly apt. Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress”
was set to a tune Luther himself composed.6 When Felix Mendelsohn wrote his fifth symphony
(in honor of the 300 anniversary of Luther’s Augsburg Confession), the fourth movement
consisted of a development of Luther’s hymn tune Ein Feste Burg. If the hymn lyrics had been
disassociated from their musical setting, such a tribute would have been impossible.
Mendelsohn not only knew the tune; he knew that his audience would recognize it also. It
exaggerates the actual facts of the matter to suggest that hymn lyrics and hymn tunes were only
arbitrarily associated with each other. Some hymn lyrics were put to more than one good
musical setting, and therefore were comparatively free to move from one to another. Other
hymn lyrics, however, have exhibited the opposite tendency, and until very recently been
Frances Havergal’s “Take My Life and Let it Be” has been set to at least eight melodies,
several of which are quite apt, including the well-known Hendon by Henri Malan, the less-wellknown Hollingside by John B. Dykes, St. Bees (with a lovely tenor line) also by Dykes, and two
tunes written by an obscure composer named Mozart.
5
6
The tune that we know as Ein Feste Burg may have been adapted, rather than created by,
Luther, but he manifestly selected this as the tune to which he desired this hymn to be set.
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associated with a particular musical setting.
Similarly, it is an exaggeration to suggest that anyone, prior to 1975 or so, believed that
hymn lyrics had to be set to “new music for each generation.” If we were to take any hymnal
from the early twentieth century, for instance, and then look at a hymnal from the same tradition
a century later, among the hymn lyrics that we would find in each, we would probably find fewer
than a dozen that had been set to a new musical setting within that century. That is, until very
recently, no one sensed (or expressed) any need to set lyrics to new tunes; to the contrary, from
the available literature on the matter, different musical settings were created in an effort to
provide a more apt musical setting to a hymn. A good example of this would be Ralph Vaughan
Williams’s Sine Nomine tune (1908) for W. W. How’s “For All Thy Saints” (yes, it was
originally “thy” not “the”). Williams did not believe that we needed a “new” musical setting to
replace the Sarum tune by which the hymn was known in his generation; rather, he believed that
a more triumphant/celebratory musical setting was more appropriate to the lyrics. In fact, if
both tunes were played on a piano to an audience that had never heard either, and if the audience
were asked whether one tune were written before the other or whether they were contemporary, I
doubt the audience’s reply would show any pattern at all. Some would regard them as
contemporary with each other, and some might very well believe that Sarum was the newer
melody. That is, Sine Nomine was not and is not especially “new-sounding,” nor was it intended
to be so. A hymn can be set to a different musical setting without that musical setting necessarily
being new or new-sounding.7
A second area in which I do not concur with Indelible Grace is that their project is
implicitly contemporaneous. What I mentioned above as an exaggeration in historical evaluation
7
And I would agree entirely with Indelible Grace if the issue were merely the ongoing
consideration of possibly finding better musical settings for the lyrics of hymns.
6
reflects a principial commitment where we honestly disagree. Consider Indelible Grace’s
statement:
We believe that we are impoverished if we cut off our ties with the saints of the past, and
that we fail to be faithful to God in our own moment of history if we don’t attempt to
praise Him in forms that are authentic to who we are.
Note the second part of this: “we fail to be faithful to God in our own moment of history…”
This sensibility of contemporaneity, this sense that “our moment of history” is itself significantly
different from or disassociated from other moments in history is itself a contemporary conceit;
other generations did not use such language in the prefaces to their hymnals.8 Generations that
wrote and/or sang “O God, our Help in ages past, our hope for years to come” articulated a belief
in a continuity from one human generation to another, a divine continuity of judgment and grace
that undergirded the vicissitudes of creaturely existence. Further, they perceived change not as
something to be embraced per se, but to be regretted: “Change and decay in all around I see; O
Thou who changest not, abide with me.”9 Indelible Grace believes there is some virtue in setting
8
For a fuller discussion of contemporaneity as an unChristian value, and the cultural sources of
this value, cf. my Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Re-Wrote the Hymnal
(P&R: 2010), chapter eight.
9
Prof. C. John Sommerville explains why the idea that change is ordinary or good per se is subChristian. Cf. his How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Age.
Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999. In the Psalms alone, the adjective “new” is used
favorably six times (33:3, 40:3, 96:1, 98:1, 144:9, 149:1), and neutrally “new moon” once (81:3).
The adjective “old” is used favorably 13 times (25:6, 44:1, 55:19, 74:2, 12, 77:5,11, 89:19,49,
93:2, 102:25, 119:52, 143:5) and neutrally, ordinarily “old age” six times (37:25, 71:9, 18, 78:2,
92:14, 148:12). Further, the most common favorable use of “new” is in the expression “new
song,” which would have refered to hymnic celebrations of new acts of deliverance, not “songs
that sound new,” since, from our knowledge of the music employed, it was highly stylized (did
not change much) and was closer to what we would call chant. “Old,” by contrast, refers to
God’s mercy and steadfastness “from of old,” the deeds or wonders he performed from “of old,”
and his own having been enthroned “of old.”
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hymn lyrics to new (or new-sounding) musical settings; my aesthetic theory is different. In any
blended artform such as lyrical music, I believe the goal should be aptness; we should attempt to
provide a musical setting that is well-suited to the lyrics, so that there is a kind of convergence,
psychologically, between the musical “message” and the lyrical “message.” But if an apt setting
has already been provided, there is no particular reason to set it to a different setting, merely
because that setting is new.10
Especially unfortunate, in my opinion, is the moral/ethical language employed here: “we
fail to be faithful to God in our own moment of history if we don’t attempt to praise Him in
forms that are authentic to who we are.” This is the kind of language that carries more rhetorical
weight than it does philosophical clarity. The late Canadian hymnwriter E. Margaret Clarkson
(1915-2008) wrote many fine hymns in her lifetime; she was surely not unfaithful either to God,
the church, or her/our generation as a hymnwriter, even though, to my knowledge, she did not set
a single hymn to a contemporary or contemporary-sounding tune. No one with the slightest
knowledge of her thoughtful poems and books, her edifying hymns, or her devout life could
possibly suggest that she failed to be faithful either to the many students she taught or to her
culture more broadly. Surely none of the good people at Indelible Grace would suggest that
Margaret Clarkson was unfaithful; but the language of their statement does say so.
I’m not aware of any biblical or theological reason to suggest that being “authentic to
who we are” is a good liturgical principle (we are authentically sinful at this moment; should our
worship be sinful?), but it is also a bit of a rubber nose. I could suggest (indeed I would suggest)
that part of who we authentically are is part of a multi-generational church; and that, if
10
To the contrary, this would just have the result that congregational participation would likely
be poor, because hymns would constantly find themselves in unfamiliar/unknown musical
settings.
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authenticity to who we are were a good liturgical principle, it would be as much an argument for
using worship forms that have stood the test of time as it would be for using new forms. But one
would be very hard-pressed, on aesthetic grounds, to demonstrate that artists have a duty to
create art that looks or sounds new; to the contrary, their duty is to create art that is good, in
terms of the formal properties of their particular disciplines. Indeed, if they produce art that is
good, it will likely have a timelessness to it that will cause subsequent generations to appreciate
it. Michelangelo’s David was not good art because it looked contemporary (in fact, Israel’s king
was neither garbed in Italian Renaissance clothing nor in late first millenium B.C. clothing; he
was entirely unclothed); it was good art because it was good, and subsequent generations have
probably appreciated it as much as Michelangelo’s own generation did. Johannes Brahms (18331897) scoured used-bookstores to find musical scores by Buxtehude (c.1639-1707) and Bach in
an effort to discover musical forms that were timeless; he was not likely to find anything new (or
new-sounding) in a used-bookstore; and he was not likely to find anything new in the scores of
Buxtehude, who had died well over a century before Brahms was born.
A third area where we do not share a common perspective is that Indelible Grace asks
“how,” whereas I ask “why.” Indelible Grace’s project is an effort to determine how they can set
historical lyrics to contemporary-sounding musical settings; whereas I have been asking “why”
we should feel compelled to do this. Why can’t Johnny sing hymns? Why does this generation,
for the first time in human history, find itself so incapable of making an emotional and
psychological connection to the music of previous generations? Why, for the first time in
ecclesiastical history, does a generation find itself incapable of employing the songs of praise
sung by previous saints? Indeed, why does this generation gratuitously assume that other
generations also felt distant from earlier music, when plainly Brahms did not regard Buxtehude
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and Bach that way? Indelible Grace assumes that this sense of isolation from our musical past is
universal, and attempts to accomodate it; I assume that it is a peculiar malady of our generation,
and attempt to challenge it as an unfortunate matter to be repaired. They regard the situation as
healthy/normal, a circumstance to which we should be “authentic”; I regard the situation as
unhealthy/abnormal, and therefore a circumstance to which we should offer charitable resistance.
God gave us eyelids; he did not give us earlids. If our culture has produced printed
material that we do not wish to be exposed to, we simply do not purchase it or read it. But if
commercial forces have surrounded us aurally with particular musical sounds, we cannot entirely
escape them, and we cannot easily escape the way those sounds shape our musical sensibilities.
Those of us reared in this culture speak English. We did not really “choose” it; rather, our
culture surrounded us, aurally, with its sounds until our neurology and sensibilities accomodated
themselves to it. In the same manner, commercial forces have bombarded us, for roughly half a
century, with “background music.” We shop to it, we wait in the dentist’s office to it, we dine in
restaurants to it, we purchase gasoline to it, we hear it as the soundtrack to film and television; it
is nearly (if not actually) as ubiquitous in our culture as is English. Because there are
commercial interests in it,11 it is a commodity; commerce is interested in producing it rapidly and
inexpensively. Inevitably, then, such music is not very demanding either on the artist or on the
audience; and pop music is therefore fairly insignificant, banal, or trivial, as an art form
11
In my book, I did not choose to address the particular commercial interests of contemporary
Christian music. It is not because I am naive; there is an enormous commercial interest at stake
in persuading Christians to jettison the history of Christian music in favor of contemporary
Christian music. I would not be at all surprised if more money exchanges hands in Nashville
over Christian music than over country music, for which Nashville was/is famous. Previous
Christian artists were required to produce music that was/is good; today’s Christian artists have
discovered that they can be commercially successful merely by producing music that sounds
contemporary.
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(compared to other forms of music).12 Since I do not regard Christianity to be insignificant or
trivial, and since I do not believe the lyrics of Christian hymns should be insignificant, banal, or
trivial, I do not ordinarily believe those lyrics can be appropriately set to musical settings that are
insignificant, banal, or trivial. So Indelible Grace asks how we can set the lyrics of traditional
hymns to such musical settings, and I ask why we should do so. Indelible Grace regards it as a
given (that our culture’s musical sensibilities have been shaped in a manner that cuts them off
from all previous human musical expression); I regard it as a tragedy. Indelible Grace
apparently regards it as a lost cause to train or educate the sensibilities of Christians to transcend
the peculiar tastes of their commercially-driven culture; I regard it as the church’s duty to attempt
to rescue as many as possible from the aesthetic and humane degradation that attends that
culture. If, as I argued in my little book, it is the very ubiquity of pop music that has degraded
our musical sensibilities, Indelible Grace contributes to the problem; not to its cure.
III. What I Wish Indelible Grace Would Do
Indelible Grace consists of many talented and dedicated Christian people. If such
talented people were to ask me (and there is no good reason why they should) what they should
do with their abilities, I would advise three things.
First, find musical settings to any hymns that are less apt and replace them with musical
settings that are more apt (rather than replace perfectly apt musical settings with settings that are,
at best, a draw). Follow the example of Ralph Vaughan Williams; if there is a good and useful
Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes (Crossway Books, 1989); Martha
Bayles, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music
(University of Chicago Press, 1996); John H. McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing: The
Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care (Gotham, 2003). David
Denby, Great Books (New York: Touchstone, 1996). Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the
Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms our Lives. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.
12
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hymn whose musical score can be improved upon, improve upon it. In undertaking such an
endeavor, it may be most profitable to begin with those hymns whose lyrics were originally verse
(and therefore independent of any musical setting), and then move to the ones that were
originally and deliberately put to a particular musical setting.
Second, translate existing hymns from other languages into metrical English. Already,
our English hymnals benefit from the presence of many hymns that were originally composed in
Greek, Latin, or German. There are other good hymns awaiting translation. Paul Gerhardt
(1607-76), who collaborated with Johann Crüger in Berlin for many years, wrote many fine
hymns, and also translated such Latin hymns as Bernard of Clairvaux’s “O Sacred Head, Now
Wounded.” The entire collection of his 123 hymns, Geistliche Andachten, was published in
1666-67, and a first attempt at their translation into English, Paul Gerhardt’s Spiritual Songs,
was done by John Kelly in 1867; but Kelly’s work does not set them to musical settings. Charles
Wesley translated his Jesus, Thy Boundless Love to Me and Commit Thou All Thy Griefs, and
some English-speakers are also familiar with his If God Himself Be For Me, or the evensong All
My Heart This Night Rejoices. To put these (and many other) hymns to musical settings in
English would be a great gift to the church.
Third, devote yourselves to teaching others how to appreciate music that antedates them.
Hymns are not difficult to learn. When I pastored, some previously-unchurched individuals
heard and believed the gospel and joined the church. Hymns were entirely strange to them.
Within a few months, they got the hang of the Doxology and Gloria Patri, and after a while
became increasingly familiar with singing hymns. Within a few years (sometimes sooner) they
were singing as vigorously as any. When we were children, on a trip in the car with our parents,
we sometimes sang folk songs or hymns. Even before we could read, and long before we could
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read music, we had learned these hymns (and often their harmonies); so this music is literally
easy enough that a child can do it (if the hapless child’s sensibilities have not been taken captive
by pop music and its predictable musical properties).
Would it not be a better use of all of our energies if we expended a little effort on the
learning curve of singing hymns, rather than abandon our rich hymnic heritage for everyone to
start again from scratch and learn new material? I’m a son of the church, and have worshiped all
my life, often morning and evening, and in several different ecclesiastical settings (Baptist,
Assemblies of God, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Anglican--each of which for more than two
years). Yet I’ve recently attended some churches where I could not sing a word of praise in the
entire service. Not one song was recognizable, and the musical score was not printed in the
bulletin (I sight-read, and could have participated had the score been available). Why should 55
years of liturgical learning curve come to nothing? Why should years of learning to read music
and to sing in church choirs, and why should all those years of morning-and-evening worship in
four different expressions of the Christian tradition leave me (and others like me) as much a
stranger in the house of God as a recent convert?
Concluding Thought
I would like to conclude by returning to my previously-stated agreements with Indelible
Grace. I find it very encouraging in the present moment to know that there is a consortium of
musical artists who take the matter seriously. I am delighted that there are others who, like me,
believe that what we sing to God shapes us profoundly. I am also encouraged by the humility of
artists who recognize that they could hardly, in a single generation, produce lyrics as good as
those produced by nineteen centuries of other gifted artists. On the other hand, I regard
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contemporaneity as a sub-Christian value; and therefore not a neutral idiom into which anything
can be translated or transposed. We simply cannot sing “God of our Fathers” to a musical setting
none of our fathers would recognize without losing something important in the process.
At a minimum, Indelible Grace is half right; the respect they demonstrate for the church
catholic and the lyrics produced by a rich history of gifted hymnwriters is to be applauded. The
disrespect, however, displayed towards the musical settings produced by the same gifted
hymnwriters suggests that, unlike Michelangelo, those hymnwriters either did not or could not
create musical art that was similarly timeless. I suppose I must either agree with Indelible Grace
that musical settings cannot be as timeless as lyrics; or I must agree with Felix Mendelsohn, that
Luther’s Ein Feste Burg is every bit as durative as his Augsburg Confession; that the 300th
anniverary of the one can be celebrated with the other. I’ll side with Mendelsohn, and with his
culture, a culture enriched by both the language and the music of previous generations.
Afterward: A Musical-Critical Comment
I have deliberately avoided/evaded listening to Indelible Grace music for some time.
When I heard that some consortium was encouraging the lyrics of traditional hymns, I just
wanted to leave it at that, grateful that someone has not abandoned Christian hymnody
altogether. But people keep asking what I think about their work, so I’ve listened to a little, and
found it to be what I might have expected. Here are a few thoughts.
I’ve only listened to a small per centage of Indelible Grace music (what’s available on the
website), so my observations may be skewed. But I haven’t yet heard a musical setting designed
for a chorus/congregation. All that I’ve heard sounds like performance music, and the
performance music of a small group at that (singers routinely slide into pitches or add grace
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notes, neither of which a chorus can do together). Sure, a congregation could sing along with it,
the way Birminghamians sing along to “Sweet Home Alabama” at a Skynnard concert; but
“Sweet Home Alabama” is not choral music, and I haven’t yet heard any Indelible Grace music
that is. So, if their goal is genuinely to produce music to aid in Christian corporate worship, I
would urge them to learn to write choral music. If their goal is to produce commercial music13
that some people listen to as performance music in their leisure time, they have succeeded ably.
I’ve noticed this tendency in most Contemporary Worship Music. The music is designed
to be performed by a small group (like the commercially-successful material in our generation).
When this music is employed in worship, we don’t really sound like a chorus of 200 voices; we
sound like 200 soloists who happen to be singing the same solo simultaneously. Each voice
slides into the concluding pitches of various phrases at is own pace;14 each voice throws in
whatever grace notes it wants whenever it wants. No wonder so many people close their eyes;
perhaps they’re shutting out the distraction of the other solos so they can concentrate on singing
their own. Here are a few samples of the kinds of comments I would probably make if I were
13
On the web page where I sampled their music, the image of each of their albums had two
buttons imposed on them; one said “Listen” (which I did), and the other said “Buy.”
<http://www.igracemusic.com/music/index.htm >
14
Matthew Perryman Jones has very few pure notes; almost all of his slide from somewhere to
somewhere else, e.g. the opening two phrases of his “How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds” or
“Jesus I Come.” Whether you tire of/cringe at this (as I do) or not, it is impossible for a chorus
to time this together. I don’t regard sliding into pitches as an illegitimate musical device per se
(it is but one form of melisma); but it is a rather clichéd way to create-and-resolve tension that
has now been overused by pop musicians to create musical interest in music that otherwise has
little. True melisma stretches a single syllable over a number of notes, as was the case in
Gregorian chant, a good example of which would be the hymn “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.”
More important liturgically, it is impossible for a chorus of voices to time this sliding into
pitches properly. The music reviewer Michael Katzif has referred to the abuse of melisma as
“the Gospel Gargle” and “Detroit Disease,” so I am not the only one sensitive to its abuse. Cf.
his interview with NPR on January 11, 2007, at
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6791133>.
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more familiar with Indelible Grace’s music.
Dan Haseltine’s setting of “For All the Saints” would perhaps be an apt setting for a
hymn of trust, or possibly a passion hymn, but “Thou was their rock” just doesn’t sound rocky
enough when placed in such a softspoken musical setting (you won’t see any Chevy truck
commercials to this setting!). Similarly, “O may thy soldiers” doesn’t sound at all martial in this
setting; it is remarkably testosterone-free. If I were about to lead soldiers into combat (“O may
thy soldiers…fight…”), this is not the kind of music that would summons a charge; it is gentle
enough to be employed to put a child to sleep, so it will hardly work to rouse soldiers to battle.15
Sandra McCracken’s musical setting to George Matheson’s “O Love That Wilt Not Let
Me Go” does not resolve; while the other three settings to which the hymn was known (Saint
Margaret, Hampstead, and Wyke) do resolve.16 I’m not a big proponent of this hymn in
corporate worship anyway, because it is so intensely personal; perhaps it should have remained
as autobiographical poetry. But a significant component of musical form is resolution (theorists
such as Leonard Bernstein considered the creation and resolution of tension to be the essence of
music, as part of what universally defines music as such), and something is missing, musically, if
we must repeat portions or all of the last stanza several times, hunting around for a way to end a
15
I used to sing hymns to put my daughters to sleep when they were young, so I do not object to
good Christian music being employed for that purpose. But a martial hymn (in which the
“church militant” sings on behalf of the church triumphant) should sound martial. One could
easily imagine one of the four branches of the armed services using a tune such as Ralph
Vaughan Williams’s Sine Nomine as the tune for their service hymn; one cannot imagine their
choosing Haseltine’s.
16
She is not at all alone here. Much (if not most) of the contemporary worship music does not
resolve; and the worship leaders in most churches recognize this, at least implicitly, because they
frequently repeat portions or all of the last stanza several times, feeling around for some way to
bring the piece to an end. Those of us whose sensibilities were shaped by music that resolves
find this to be very unsettling. If a photograph were taken of my psyche when this kind of music
appears in church, it would look like Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
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piece of music that doesn’t end. I also believe McCracken’s setting is too light (almost flighty)
to suit the anguished lyrics (and Matheson’s anguished personal circumstances, as a blind man
whose sister/guide had that very day married and therefore left him without companionship and
literal guidance). That McCracken’s setting is also something of an irritating “earworm” is
probably the result of the other two characteristics.
Generally, what I find in Indelible Grace is the lyrics of traditional hymns set to
contemporary small-group performance music, the kind that some people enjoy listening to in
their leisure time, which is probably what Indelible Grace is attempting to do. What I do not find
is contemporary choral musical settings, musical settings appropriate to that special brand of
choral music that we once called congregational singing.
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