A Man Taps Out a Psalm or Two

I grew up in a church that took the psalms seriously. We used a combined hymnal and psalter and each Sunday sang liberally from both halves. It was a great concern of the church leadership that the congregation become familiar with the entire book of Psalms, but it was slow going. Teaching anything to a church takes a while. Teaching them to sing is a years-long process.

As Alastair Roberts says in the video below, Christians need a fuller and less abbreviated relationship with the psalms, since the psalms, sung in their entirety, teach us how to navigate the peaks and valleys of life.

It’s a grand idea, but how does it work in practice? How does a music minister go about teaching the entirety of Psalm 68 to a congregation? A repetitive, metrical version would be easy to learn, but wouldn’t communicate the various sections of the psalm. A through-composed version, which includes the whole psalm in a more or less literal translation, is tougher to learn and almost impossible for a large congregation to sing well. How about good old chanting? Rare indeed is the 21st-century parishioner who doesn’t need a significant amount of coaching to handle a chant.

The question is how to translate Alastair’s (very good) theological point into an actionable plan for pastors and musicians. Answering that question – or, at least, approaching an answer – is one of the reasons I decided to start a yearly music colloquium called Psalm Tap. (Big props to Jarrod Richey for getting this off the ground.) Psalm Tap is where pastors, musicians, and interested laypeople will discuss the nuts and bolts of teaching and composing church music, with a particular focus on the psalms.

Psalm-singing will be a big focus at the colloquium, but other topics are on the table, such as whether we should use books or bulletins for music, what kinds of instruments are appropriate in worship, and how a church can pay for their high aesthetic vision. I anticipate strong opinions and good fun.

The colloquium is free. If you’re in Louisiana in late June, please join us.

UPDATE: Thanks to some health issues, I won’t be attending the colloquium this year. But don’t let that stop you from going. ‘Twill be a grand old time regardless.

A Man and a Hymnal

Some of the folks on the CREC music email list are discussing the pros and cons of physical psalters and hymnbooks. I decided to weigh in…

Growing up in Moscow, I got used to singing out of the Cantus Christi. My copy (of the venerable blue variety) got so worn over the years that its spine is currently being held together by duct tape. I understand the practical advantages of singing from a bulletin or even a projector screen during worship, but my experience demonstrates some of the advantages of using a hymnal over time, both in worship and in casual settings.

For one thing, there’s the fact that over time the physical hymnal became a familiar object. Even when I didn’t remember page numbers, I remembered generally where in the book a particular hymn or psalm was because I knew what the two halves of the book felt like in my hands when I was singing that one. (Now that I think of it, hymns near the middle of the book may have been more popular simply because the book was easier to hold when it was open to that position.) I even remember the location of certain hymns because of the communion wine stains on the edge of the page.

Another benefit of having a common physical hymnal was that any gathering of church members could grab a few copies and have an impromptu psalm/hymn sing. Having sung all the same stuff for years, we knew what we knew and what we liked. It was a treat when we had a group skilled enough to sing one of the fugue tunes (e.g., ‘Tis By Thy Strength), and when we didn’t, we knew that there were simpler crowd-pleasers available. Whether hanging out in the park or in a friend’s living room, we always had the option of singing together. One hymn would remind someone of another favorite and we could all flip to that page and give it the old college try. It was even better if half the group knew the hymn and the other half didn’t, since that gave you the chance to learn a new tune. I always hoped that eventually I’d know every song in the Cantus. The physical book gave me something to shoot for.

Lastly (for now), a physical book gives you the magical ability to browse. Digital editions are great for finding something when you know what you’re looking for, but if you’re hanging out at the piano on a Sunday afternoon, plinking away, you definitely want a physical hymnal to flip through.

A Man Proposes a Test

I’m working on my laptop at the card table we have set up in our dining room, which wiggles whenever I hit the space bar, and my three-year-old daughter asks what I’m doing. Well, I say, I’m writing a story. Tell me the story, she says, and I crack my mental knuckles, ready to wow her with the complex urban fantasy I’m weaving.

I struggle. Quickly I realize that mythology doesn’t interest her. She wants to hear about the main character (a twelve-year-old girl). What is she like? What is she doing? What happens to her? What is she trying to do and what stands in her way? My daughter wants me to put the story in terms she can understand. And it hits me: I can’t answer the most basic questions about my story.

From now on, I plan to hold all of my stories to what I’ll call the three-year-old test. If I can’t put my story in a form that interests a three-year-old, I don’t understand it yet.

Why a Man Cannot Define Beauty

[W]hen we observe, as we must allow, that art is no better at one age than at another, but only different; that it is subject to modification, but certainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationary quality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and unattainable, a positive norm of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, but in each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to it. It is the moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and impossible exactly to locate, yet revealed by the light it throws on distant portions of the sky.

Edmund Gosse, “On Fluctuations of Taste”