Music in the Church Today

New and significant developments are taking place in church music today. To evaluate some of the trends, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, brought together three authorities for a candid panel discussion of the relation of sacred music to the local church. Participants were the Rev. Dr. Leonard Ellinwood of Washington Cathedral, author of A History of American Church Music; Mr. Tedd Smith, RCA recording artist and pianist-organist for the Billy Graham Crusades; and Mr. Stephen H. Prussing, director of music, New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, D. C. Dr. Sherwood E. Wirt, editorial associate, served as moderator. Questions were proposed by the participants themselves in advance of the interview.—ED.

WIRT: Let’s begin with a practical question: How strict should a musical director be in choosing members for his choir?

ELLINWOOD: In the modest parish church with a few hundred members, and a potential volunteer choir of 20 or 30 voices, I think he should be very strict.

SMITH: First of all, each choir member should know the Lord about whom he is singing, if he is really to sing to His glory.

ELLINWOOD: Yes. We look upon the ministry of music as a real vocation, not as a social affair. Our aim is to worship through song and to lead the congregation in worship. If two or three members are so weak that they have to be drilled by rote, they hold the others back and detract from the whole.

PRUSSING: My experience is that people who sing badly at rehearsals seem to hold back enough during performance so that their voices are not too audible. This is in a choir of 50 to 70 members. I believe that choir is as much for the singers’ benefit as it is for the congregation’s.

WIRT: Isn’t this “hard on the music,” as Dr. Ellinwood suggests?

PRUSSING: We still go after Bach and Mozart and Schubert. The poor voices go right along with us as far as they can, dropping into the background and so becoming lost in the whole effect.

SMITH: Those in the church who have good voices, but who shy away from the choir because they lack musical training, should be encouraged to learn how to read music in the choir repertoire by attending a director’s class before the regular choir rehearsal. In fact, a large part of the existing choir can profit from this same training.

WIRT: How can a director get desirable voices into his choir, and undesirable voices out of it?

ELLINWOOD: Well, people have dropped out after our choir has rehearsed for two and one-half hours without stopping. They just didn’t want to work that hard. If a person is detrimental to the choir, he ought to face up to this situation and do something about it.

SMITH: The director must have discipline and the respect of his choir. Sometimes he just has to have the courage to go to an individual privately and be honest with him.

PRUSSING: The funny thing is that I have done this with people. I have been honest with them, saying that their voices were sharp or flat or too loud, and were throwing their section off. You can tell them right to their faces and they still don’t understand because when they are in the act of singing they don’t really know it.

ELLINWOOD: I have seen the same problem from another view point: the choir director who has outlived his potential. The whole choir wants to get rid of the director, but they love him at the same time.

WIRT: The task of the director and choir, you have said, is to lead the congregation in worship. What does this involve?

ELLINWOOD: There is an open leadership in the hymns as the choir literally leads the worshipers along. There is also a silent leadership that is nonetheless real, when the congregation listens to special music. In our church more than half of the hour of worship is in the hands of the musicians.

PRUSSING: I feel that the way to a true spirit of worship is through the heart. Music softens the hard person and cloaks him with the garb of worship.

ELLINWOOD: And brings a man out of himself upward toward our Lord.

SMITH: But so much music today appeals more to the intellect than to the heart. Musicians gear their music to other musicians’ ears, and the person in the pew is left out. We give the average worshiper credit for too high a musical intelligence.

WIRT: Should a choir sing music it does not respect, in trying to communicate a Christian sentiment to the congregation?

PRUSSING: We have done this on a number of occasions. Someone in the church has written a piece, in the spirit of the amateur, and the choir sings it with all its awkward and even corny parts. But strange to say it has reached the congregation and made it aware of its worship.

WIRT: How did the choir react?

PRUSSING: Some said they would put up with it, and others were really in love with the piece.

WIRT: What do you think of the “Lorenz” type of anthem music? Is it to be considered beneath the average congregation?

ELLINWOOD: We would not use it in one of our larger choirs or congregations, but in some humbler missions with limited resources it is very useful.

SMITH: The music used depends primarily on the standards adopted by the individual Church, and also perhaps by the denomination.

ELLINWOOD: I am sure there should be standards in the church. I don’t think the denomination would necessarily make a difference.

WIRT: Are our present standards meeting the spiritual and cultural needs of the churches?

SMITH: On the whole, no. Music in our churches today is either too highbrow or it has swung to the other extreme. A lot of it is going completely over the heads of the people because they do not know what is being sung by the choir. They may listen and say the music is beautiful, but so often the message is completely unintelligible and unless the words of the anthem are printed in the bulletin, the person in the pew never does know what the choir is trying to communicate.

On the other hand, in some churches where only the Gospel song is used, there is a desperate need for a better balance in the church music. If you mention singing sacred classics, many in the congregation throw their hands up in horror. The people need to be educated to a better-balanced music program.

PRUSSING: Whether we sing a Negro spiritual, a Gospel song, a Bach chorale, or a Mozart mass movement, I have found that if the choir itself has studied the music and is much taken with it and loves it, the choir is able to communicate and project meaning through its singing.

ELLINWOOD: If the congregation has the words of the hymn or anthem before it, in the order of service, the communication is that much easier.

PRUSSING: There is another reason for printing the words. Many church bulletins are so full of announcements that there is room for little else. But visitors to a church like to take something away with them, and the words of their choir anthem may be the only poetic and memorable thing for them to cherish.

ELLINWOOD: But choirs themselves can easily destroy the words unless you keep right after them to enunciate clearly. Some churches of course, have poor acoustical situations.

WIRT: What do you do when you sing traditional church music in a strange tongue—a Gregorian chant, or the Agnus Dei? How do you communicate?

PRUSSING: I think a choir can project the great feeling of music—say, Schubert’s Mass in A flat—whether or not the congregation can specifically understand the words. After all, they do know a few of the phrases.

ELLINWOOD: We use a good deal of Latin, but we make it a point to have a printed translation.

WIRT: Mr. Smith has suggested that our music lacks balance. Do you agree?

SMITH: It would probably be more true of our evangelistic churches.

WIRT: But considering the richness and variety of the Church’s musical tradition, is there not a tendency to groove our churches into a particular musical style?

ELLINWOOD: It’s a mistake to stick exclusively to any one period. Yet it does seem to me that if you have a heritage you ought to hang onto it.

PRUSSING: The temperament of the choir and congregation at any one time will help determine this.

SMITH: I would like sometime to see a choir just take an ordinary hymn, something with deep truth, and sing it in straight four-part harmony; using it in place of the anthem.

ELLINWOOD: Are you familiar with the hymn anthems that have developed lately? Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance, did a wonderful setting of Old Hundredth with trumpets in which the entire congregation sings in unison, while the choir takes a four-part setting in one stanza, the soprano takes a descant in another, and so on.

WIRT: What are your impressions of congregational singing today?

ELLINWOOD: I believe that the congregations in the Protestant denominations are singing better than they ever have.

WIRT: I would like to ask Mr. Smith if he felt that the singing at the Graham Crusades in Britain and Australia, where the great traditional hymns and Welsh tunes were used, was more inspiring than in our American Crusades.

SMITH: Very definitely. Here you hear mostly unison singing, but when we struck the first chord in those countries, they began to sing in four-part harmony—and it was thrilling to hear.

WIRT: You mentioned the trumpets in Vaughan Williams’ work. Just what is the role of musical instruments in the church service?

ELLINWOOD: Well, Eastern Orthodoxy to this day forbids the use of any instrument; all singing is unaccompanied. In Calvinistic, colonial New England only the Episcopal churches dared to have an organ. But the other churches were using flute, the oboe, the clarinet, the bassoon, and the cello. They even called the cello the church fiddle, but would not permit the violin in church because it was the dancing master’s fiddle. Yet the Psalmist says to praise Him with timbrels and dancing! Every so often I get a call from an outlying church wondering if it would be all right to use extra instruments during the Easter service. They feel the organ is the sacred instrument, and yet if you read our Psalms, what are you to believe? As for using some other instrument for a solo, it is in the evangelistic tradition, is it not? I remember Rodeheaver’s trombone well in the Billy Sunday services.

SMITH: Of course evangelistic meetings are different from Sunday morning worship services. But in any case the majority of people who use instruments in churches are doing so for the glory of God, and I think that God honors their ministry and, furthermore, that it is in good taste.

ELLINWOOD: I agree with you wholeheartedly and look back with great pleasure on the use of instruments in many situations. I think that even the electric organ has its own proper place in a small church. But I can’t see a violin or instrumental solo with no connotation of text. We have profited in the present generation by increased use of choral preludes based on hymns and played on the organ, before and after the service. They are meaningful to a congregation as a fantasy is not.

PRUSSING: The choral preludes of Bach were based on chorales well known to the Germans, but not familiar to us. Therefore they become a kind of fantasy. This brings up the question, what makes music sacred? It has always seemed to me that a composer’s symphony is as sacred as his mass, because he draws upon his highest self to create both. If you play a violin solo in church, it could be offered up as something worshipful. It wouldn’t be a secular subject then; it would be a sacred sonata. Mozart wrote church sonatas. (Laughter.)

ELLINWOOD: Mozart’s church sonatas were written mostly to entertain the congregation while the priest was saying mass at the altar.

WIRT: Isn’t it true that much of what we call sacred music was adapted originally from secular tunes?

PRUSSING: True. O Sacred Head Now Wounded was originally a song of unrequited love.

ELLINWOOD: But wait a moment. Mendl in The Divine Quest in Music traces spiritual elements in absolute music and in operas from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present time. In Wagner, Beethoven, Liszt, and other composers whose works we classify as basically secular, he points out the presence of the divine.

WIRT: Then in some of the secular composers a divine gift is already present?

ELLINWOOD: Oh yes, it must be.

PRUSSING: If they were great men, it certainly was.

ELLINWOOD: There is considerable difference of opinion as to how far we should go in using “secular” tunes as hymn melodies. For instance, many Protestant hymnals today use the hymn melody from Finlandia or from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Perhaps it could be done successfully, but I believe that so long as the worshipers think of Finlandia when they are singing, it’s not good.

PRUSSING: I recall during a Christmas hour the organist at our church was playing Green Sleeves as a Christmas carol and our minister, who is from Scotland, called between services and said, “Will you please ask the organist not to play that bawdy street tune?”

WIRT: When our organist would lapse into Lemare’s Romance which carries the theme of Moonlight and Roses, it would really throw me off my sermon. What about using jazz in our churches?

PRUSSING: I enjoy jazz, but I have never connected it with our church service and I don’t think it would communicate to the average church member. Even Father Beaumont in his famous “jazz mass” composed mostly familiar sounds of beguines and waltzes, rather than downright jazz.

ELLINWOOD: To take a dance band piece and to say that it would be our morning anthem would be as absurd as to read from Boccaccio for one of the lessons.

PRUSSING: If someone is going to write jazz church music and have it be meaningful, he is going to have to be so full of this particular culture that it comes out of him naturally, as his way of worship, just as George Gershwin, who grew up with popular songs, could write concertos and operas in that idiom. He communicated to us so convincingly because he wasn’t trying to paste something on top. This was the man himself, and he expressed what he was.

ELLINWOOD: Like the juggler of Notre Dame.

WIRT: May I ask another question? What is your spiritual evaluation of the Gospel song?

SMITH: Gospel music is real heart music. I have studied it extensively and played it for many years. There are, of course, different types of Gospel music, but when a composer has experienced the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ in his own life and is able to communicate it through the Gospel song, I have seen it bring others to that same knowledge time and again.

ELLINWOOD: Do you feel that there has been any significant creative work in the idiom in the past 30 or 40 years—since Charles Gabriel?

SMITH: We have many fine Gospel hymn writers today, but I don’t sense much permanence in their work. Unfortunately, too much of the music falls into the pattern of the popular song. The tune is sung everywhere for six months and then shelved.

ELLINWOOD: San key, Gabriel, Stebbins, and Fanny Crosby had a distinct idiom and contribution, but I haven’t seen any comparable new material.

SMITH: I feel the Gospel-chorus type of song is used too much as a basis for composing Gospel music today. The result is a sing-song effect, short-lived, and never rising very high.

PRUSSING: The Gospel songs that we have used as anthems have been the old ones, southern tunes that we have discovered, or new settings to old tunes, like Virgil Thompson’s setting of My Shepherd Will Supply My Need.

ELLINWOOD: We have used that as an anthem.

PRUSSING: John Powell of Richmond, Virginia, has written some beautiful settings to the old Gospel songs, and we have enjoyed them because they express God’s dignity and beauty.

WIRT: You do not feel, then, that the Gospel song is a “blot on the musical landscape?”

SMITH: Hardly.

ELLINWOOD: By no means. You would be surprised to find how many Gospel hymns are scattered through the Episcopal hymnbook.

PRUSSING: A true Gospel hymn has the Gospel in it. Many commercialized Gospel songs do not have the Gospel.

SMITH: It has always bothered me to listen to Gospel choruses where the name of God or Jesus is never mentioned. We are told that.… “He’s my Lover,” or “He’s the One I Adore,” but “He” could be anybody.

WIRT: Why are no great evangelical hymns being written today?

SMITH: There may be some being written, but I question whether many will last through the years.

ELLINWOOD: I disagree. Do you know, And Have the Bright Immensities Received Our Risen Lord, by Howard Chandler Robbins? There is a hymn for the atomic age, and as evangelical as Charles Wesley.

PRUSSING: Lee Hastings Bristol of Bristol-Meyers has written some very lovely hymns in odd times like 5/4, and folklike.

SMITH: I suppose it is a matter of getting them before the people. Songs we don’t attach too much importance to today could become a vital part of the Church 20 years from now.

ELLINWOOD: Baring-Gould’s Onward Christian Soldiers in his own day had nothing of the popularity it attained a generation later.

WIRT: Perhaps God right now is endowing some artist composer with a great gift that will express the spiritual hunger of our own time.

ELLINWOOD: This has been a pleasant surprise to us all. We have found three musicians with quite diverse backgrounds and traditions, yet with unanimity of thought and purpose. We are agreed that serious musicians everywhere, whether in evangelistic meetings or in lofty cathedrals, are united in seeking to praise God with the best means possible, and to lead their fellow men to a better knowledge of and a closer walk with our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

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