Let's Dance - Christianity Today

Soon after the Anglican diocese of New Westminster in Canada openly used a public liturgical service of blessing for a same-sex union in defiance of the statement of the Primates of the Anglican Communion, the Province of Nigeria excommunicated the Canadian diocese, noting in passing that whereas that diocese had but 5,000 members, the Province of Nigeria has 17 million Anglicans and perhaps is more representative of majority Anglican views than is the bishop of New Westminster. This event is an important reminder to the Euro-North American churches that they no longer represent the vast majority of world Christians. We are in the era of global Christianity, in which the older Western churches need to listen to the growing and vibrant churches of Africa, Asia, and South America. In his timely book on worship music from around the globe, Michael Hawn not only shows us the richness of cultural diversity (where “diversity” is not merely a fashionable slogan) but also shows how sung prayer may function to bring unity out of diversity, a unity that revels in the glorious multiplicity of God’s creation.

Hawn, associate professor of church music at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas, has spent much of his time not just in library research but in visiting and working with church musicians around the world. Highlighted in this book are Pablo Sosa (Argentina), I-to Loh (Taiwan), David Dargie (South Africa) and Patrick Matsikenyiri (Zimbabwe), and John Bell (Scotland). Hawn also discusses what he calls “the office of musical enlivener,” taking as his example the Mennonite musician, Mary Oyer.

Hawn suggests that his book offers a “third way” in the worship wars that are roiling congregations in North America and Great Britain. Typically this conflict is framed as a choice between a “traditional” liturgy (reflecting the consensus which emerged among mainline Protestant churches after Vatican II) and “contemporary” worship (though often this is in fact a perpetuation of the 19th-century camp meeting/revival style, re-imaged using high-tech sound and video equipment). Instead, Hawn proposes a “spectrum-oriented” understanding of worship practice, with the full range of global Christian music as the frame of reference. In worship, Hawn believes, strangers and aliens become full citizens with the saints through music. Many will warm to his statement that “Welcoming strangers and aliens in worship requires an intentional process,” but it should not be forgotten that all worshipers are “resident aliens” who here have no abiding city.

What does each of his selected musicians distinctively bring to the table? Pablo Sosa grew up in the Methodist church in Argentina. Before Vatican II and the interest in ecumenism, it was not always easy to be Protestant in an overwhelmingly Catholic culture. Sosa studied in Buenos Aires, at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, and Union Seminary, New York. This training has enabled him to serve as a pastoral musician, a contextual theologian, and an ecumenical liturgist, each role complementing the others. Many of his songs were written with specific local congregations in mind, and Hawn cites “El cielo canta alegría,” written in 1958. The carnavalito style used in this song is derived from the huayño, a kind of Argentine folk jazz. A Gloria written in 1979 for a Christmas pageant was based on the cueca, a lively partner dance. But Sosa also writes hymns—and here he draws on Spanish-language Bibles, theological and devotional books of the 16th-18th century, and Spanish mysticism. As Hawn notes, the steadily growing Latino population makes it imperative for North American churches to use such resources.

I-to Loh, from Taiwan, has collected, composed, arranged and adapted many songs through a lifetime of travel and research throughout Asia. At the center of his concern is the desire to feel fully Asian and fully Christian. Between 1982 and 1994 he taught at the Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music in Manila, which formed his base for travels to all but a few of the 22 countries represented in his celebrated Sound the Bamboo—which, as Hawn notes, arguably represents the most labor-intensive hymnal publication by one person in the 20th century. This collection, which “resounds from the soul of Asian life and existence,” presents hymns in their original languages (38 altogether) in transliteration, with English translation; melodies ornamented in the style of the country or region of origin; and instructions for instruments. Hawn gives examples from four categories: transcriptions with added texts, such as “O Give Thanks to the Lord”; harmonizations, such as “Winter Has Passed, the rain is O’er”; original music, such as “Hunger Carol”; and adaptations of existing melodies, such as “Living in Christ with People.”

From South Africa comes the music of David Dargie, a Catholic priest of Scottish descent. Dargie’s work is based on aural/oral transmission rather than notation. He was inspired by the work of Benjamin Tyamzashe (b. 1890), who composed Christian music using the traditional Xhosa techniques. (Tyamzashe was in turn influenced by the hymn composed by the first Xhosa convert to Christianity, Ntsitkana, in the early 19th century.) And much of Dargie’s “liberation hymnody” reflects the struggles in South Africa in the turbulent years of the 1960s and ’70s. Hawn gives a number of examples of his transcription, such as “Amen Siyakudisa” and “Thuma Mina.”

Hawn continues to explore African music making—perhaps the greatest influence on the global worship movement, just as it has been in the emergence of “world music” more generally—in an account of the life and work of Patrick Matsikenyiri of Zimbabwe, a Shona schoolmaster and composer. Analyzing a half-dozen of Matsikenyiri’s songs, Hawn shows how “a unified faith perspective signified by ngoma—hymn singing, drumming, healing—is a holistic fusion of living and liturgy that Africa offers world Christianity.”

Turning to a very different tradition which has also been influential on the contemporary scene, Hawn devotes a chapter to John Bell, whose music was inspired by and written for the Iona Community in Scotland. Bell, together with Graham Maule, founded the Wild Goose Worship Group (WGWG), and their first recording, “A Touching Place,” was released in 1986. Though Celtic in inspiration, and drawing on the vogue for Celtic spirituality and Celtic music, the wgwg has made a wealth of global sung prayers available to the Euro-North American Church. Hawn notes that Bell and Maule regard Victorian hymnody as sentimental and full of classism, citing the words of Mrs. Alexander’s “All Things Bright and Beautiful” and Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Mid-Winter.” The examples are perhaps poorly chosen. Certainly the wgwg’s “Justice in the Womb” is robust and forthright in comparison, but even if it does speak more directly to the unchurched of Govan, those Victorian words and tunes are sometimes the only “churchy” culture that many of the un-churched know and love—just because they are familiar in folk memory.

Having provided a very stimulating and full account of these musicians and their music, Hawn reflects on the use of sequential and cyclic musical structures in worship, suggesting that the latter, as popularized by Taizé, should play a larger part in Christian congregational worship in the United States and elsewhere in the West. Sequential music structure is typified by the English Hymn, which has a series of stanzas and tells a story. It uses many words and is eye-oriented. Cyclic structure, typified by indigenous African music, is marked by repetition or use of refrains, and is ear-oriented. But churches are not required to choose one form or the other exclusively; rather, Hawn is arguing for “singing and praying more broadly than any one cultural perspective is able to offer.”

Finally, Hawn traces the career of the Mennonite church musician and hymnal editor Mary Oyer, whose evolution from a narrow focus on the Western classical tradition to a global sensibility embodies the themes of Hawn’s project. In her work as a “musical enlivener,” engaging with other cultures, Oyer follows a demanding fourfold approach: participate in music making by studying a traditional instrument with a teacher from the given culture; engage a person from that culture in a discussion of common musical and hymnological interest; read literature from the region being studied; and read the observations and insights of anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, linguists, and theologians.

Michael Hawn has given us a stimulating book. Though primarily concerned with music, it sounds a wider note that all those engaged in developing and renewing worship need to hear. The global village that Marshall McLuhan heralded is with us; arrogant isolationism is no longer a viable option. My only criticism is that apart from Dargie, all the musicians reflect a Protestant background, which to a certain extent determines the form of their hymnology. In global worship, the haunting sounds of modern Arabic song from the Maronite Church and the enchantments of Armenian Orthodox music—to cite only two examples—would give a better ecumenical balance. That said, this is a fine book.

Bryan D. Spinks is professor of liturgical studies at Yale University Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. He is the author most recently of Sacraments, Ceremonies, and the Stuart Divines: Sacramental Theology and Liturgy in England and Scotland, 1603-1662 (Ashgate) and Baptismal Liturgy and Theology: Beyond the Jordan, forthcoming in 2004.