I have transcribed two voices and the viola, but that third harmony just doesn’t want to come. I don’t mind listening to it over and over, though.

That’s one of the things I love about my job — when I get songs stuck in my head now, they’re uplifting and spiritually deepening.

Wasn’t that awful? Wait, what was awful? The fact that there’s a commonly used style, which can be made fun of? That’s true of any religious service — it’s called “liturgy”. What’s awful is to think about sitting through 90 minutes of something like that without any more content than that.

The video reminds me of a comedy routine I heard a long time ago (and can’t remember any other details about), where a couple are arguing by describing the type of comment they would hurl at each other, rather than saying the actual words. Along the lines of

She: “Acid comment about time he’s spent watching sports.”
He: “Avoid responding by bringing up recent shoe shopping.”
She: “Angry rebuttal!”
He: “Ill-considered insult!”

It’s funny to hear them speak analytically about their argument, but it wouldn’t be funny if they were really saying those ugly things to each other. If you put a meaningful message into that video’s worship template, one that touches you or encourages you or heals you, would you have the same reaction? What if those songs were your favorites from “Singing the Journey”? Or if the sermon lifted a cloud from your heart. Is it still funny? No, it’s a worship service, then.

The moral of the story, I guess, is for us worship musicians to hold in our minds that it’s the content that’s important; the container is much less so. When we choose music for worship, it should have a lot more depth than just “this is the song that everyone knows”.

(Cartoon by Christian Musician and parodist Bim Ingersoll.)

Our worship service is designed to help people experience greater wholeness and integration in their lives, to take down some of those barriers between the sacred and the profane that divide our lives and diminish our energies.

One Sunday, a woman visiting with her nine-year-old son told me they’d definitely be returning. They would come back for several reasons, she said, but most particularly she was struck by her son’s excitement over our energized music. He recognized a tune we were singing as something he had heard on the radio and exclaimed, “Mom, they’re singing a real song!” (p. 19)

(from Ken Beldon, “Devotion” in The Growing Church: Keys to Congregational Vitality, Thom Belote, ed. (Boston: Skinner House, 2010)

This gets at the essence of “contemporary style” worship: there’s no secret language or mysterious rituals standing between the worshiper and the direct experience of group worship. John Wycliffe and Martin Luther were thinking the same thing when they translated the Bible into their native languages. Why shouldn’t that process continue?

And in a sermon last year, Rev. John Buehrens poked some fun at “typical Unitarian Universalists”, claiming that they think “Since I’m one of the wisest and most discerning people I know, this church must have been just about perfect when I found it. Therefore, it shouldn’t change, or that would reflect poorly on my judgment.”

So, there’s an argument for and an argument against moving into the 21st century with our worship. You are invited to cheer them on, or to knock down the straw man, in the comments.

Granted, it was louder when we started doing this, by virtue of having a drum kit on stage. You must have drums and bass for the music to work. Drums have a certain minimum volume, so that sets the volume level for everything else.

To get that under control, we hunted around found a reasonably-priced used Roland electronic drum kit. The drummer loves playing it, the sound guy loves mixing around it, and those with sensitive hearing or who just don’t like loud sounds have one less thing to worry about.

But — surprise! — it turns out that our cherished 7-foot Steinway is as loud as the drums used to be, even with the lid down. So, we have a new instrument that sets the minimum volume level. Most players can dial it back, but there are some who just have to squeeze all the roar out of it. For those, I’m investigating jamming a wedge into the soft-pedal.

Anyway, I should have called this blog “Liberal Religion Gets Modern”, or “Liberal Religion Gets Happy”, or used some other adjective to describe what we do, but they seemed to imply that all other UUs are troglodytes or grouches, which is not what I think, so it’ll have to stay “loud”. But take that as metaphorical. We’re no louder than the Steinway, which is to say no louder than the choir.

Our Senior Minister clearly explains the rationale behind this in her blog:
iMinister

Our worship staff (with assorted spouses and friends) went to some local mega-churches to scope out what they did and how it worked. The ministers and I have spent a lot of time and attention to find what works best for UUs — for the flow and balance of worship — in the mega-church services and in our own, and have settled on a much-simplified contemporary order of service that can also be used in our traditional services.

Just to re-emphasize an important point: contemporary worship is not just sticking some Jesus-rock songs into your usual liturgy. It entails approaching people’s needs and comfort zones in new ways. The whole “look and feel” of your worship changes, not just the music!

The really important thing here is that the ministers understand what contemporary worship is all about, why it’s vital to UUism, and are totally on board with making changes in that direction. We as musicians — even the music ministers among us — don’t usually have the authority or influence to make this kind of change happen alone. But we can educate our colleagues in the pulpit*, assist them or guide them, and learn along with them. It’s been an amazing journey for us, so far!

But if you don’t have one … what do you do when you have to include “Doxology” or it’ll be the End of the World as We Know It? Some guitarists will start to sweat at this point.

A couple of years back, our choir director/pianist got sick, and I got a frantic call from the minister at 3:oo on Saturday afternoon: “Can you play for the traditional services tomorrow?” Of course I said yes, and then I joined in the panic as I looked at the order of service.

But, I was able to get “Doxology”, “Spirit of Life” and “I Walk the Unfrequented Road” into decent shape by the next morning. Since then, I’ve had other occasions to play these and similar hymns and have found that they actually work well on guitar, if they’re arranged properly.

Writing up my method for doing this has been on my to-do list for several months now, but my indolence has been rewarded by the appearance of an instructional video from Gibson Guitars, which covers much the same ground. So, I commend it to you.

There are some differences in method we will have to take into account. First, we can’t “fix” the key to be guitar-friendly. Hymns are pitched so everyone in the congregation can sing them, which means the melodies lie more or less in the range of middle C to e at the top of the treble clef. You may be able to move from the key of F (one flat) to E (four sharps, a royal hassle for pianists but the guitar’s natural key) without anyone noticing much, but look carefully at the vocal range and don’t try to move outside the C-to-e range, or be prepared for pain.

That said, if you’re stuck with uncomfortably high notes (Doxology, for example), be prepared to shift positions, say from playing D at the second fret to the barre form on the tenth fret. One thing that I have found indispensable is to lay out the melody using different chord inversions to get the correct note on the top. Maybe this is so obvious it didn’t bear mention, but it’s what I finally settled on after a bit of trial and error. In a nutshell, if you can play the E, C and A barre chords in any position, you can get the root, third or fifth tone, respectively, on the top string. The other notes of the scale are easy to reach from there. Similarly, look for the Em and Am forms that put you in the right position on the fretboard. Though the open Cm chord isn’t really usable, the four-note Dm (identical to a first-fret Bmaj7) will usually fill in nicely between the Am and Em forms.

And don’t be afraid to fill in single-note runs between chords in the melody, even if you’re playing solo. Piano arrangements do it, so why can’t we guitarists? You might even try just playing the melody as a single-note line, then adding in chords until it sounds full enough.

Hymns arranged this way for guitar are surprisingly effective, especially when accompanying congregational singing. And sometimes (I’m thinking of our arena-rock arrangement of “Wake Now My Senses”) just playing a song the first time on guitar will conjure up a stylistic setting that will keep the melody (so everyone can sing it) while giving it a fresh sound.

And to being in a spiritual community, which is what a really good musical ensemble experience should be.

Now that you’ve watched that, here’s a discussion topic: Maestro Hazelwood certainly has rigorous criteria for who plays in his orchestra. As Ronald Reagan put it, “Trust, but verify”. Do you audition prospective members for your choir or ensemble, or are they open to anyone? If they’re open, how to you establish that trust? And what is the trust based on, musical ability or bringing spiritual gifts?

Should Worship Be Entertaining? by Debra Dean Murphy, in Sojourners Magazine’s God’s Politics blog.

The executive summary is this: the author, who teaches religion at West Virginia Wesleyan College, makes an eloquent argument for worship that sounds, to my ear, pretty monastic. The worship she describes seems closely related to Quaker meetings, or Buddhist sitting meditation, or Benedictine offices. Quiet, ritualized, and not much connected with the rest of the world as it is today. That’s an important refuge, for some.

The commenters seem largely dissatisfied with the implications that this is the only way to worship, and that worship that includes anything from current culture is inherently suspect and unworthy.

It was not always thus. Martin Luther used a drinking song for “A Mighty Fortress” — “why should the devil have all the good music?”, he asked.

I do understand the concept of worship as setting an ideal and attempting to approach it. And I understand how ritual connects the worshiper to the faith community and all those who have performed it before. Those things are important and must be continued.

On the other hand, I find a lot of the things that go on in a traditionally structured worship to be filler material, slightly comforting by virtue of familiarity, but without much spiritual depth beyond that ritual connection to the past. I had lunch today with someone who finds those (Catholic, in this case) rituals deeply moving. I find them, often, tedious.

Some people (like me) do not want their religious practice to be set apart from the rest of their lives, but rather to be continuous with it. I want to experience the transcendental through the joy and ecstasy of music, rather than the rote repetition of a hymn that doesn’t move me to any emotion deeper than recognition.

And this, I believe, is why we have — why we must have! — different styles of worship. The important thing is not the repetition itself, but that the music (words, etc) engage congregants on an intellectual and emotional level. For some, the repetition is enough to do that; for others, it merely postpones the parts that are engaging.

“Sometimes I’m right, but I can be wrong. My own beliefs are in my song. … Different strokes for different folks”.

Our senior minister, Rev. Christine Robinson, wrote a book called The Twittered Tao, which I recommend to you. Here’s today’s tweet, apropos of changing worship styles:

Honor a thing before you
demand change. There’s less
resistance that way. Flexibility
and gentleness are effective.