Two Recent Experiences
Music has long been an integral part of human life. Skillfully wrought pieces encourage us to contemplate the transcendent and the beautiful. However, our cultural experience of music has undergone a significant change, particularly in the last century. Two recent, very different encounters with music have reminded me of this.
The first was my attending a recent performance of the Paul Brock Band, one of Ireland’s leading traditional music ensembles. The audience was delighted by traditional Irish jigs, reels, and folk songs played on the accordion, banjo, fiddle, piano, and mandolin. It was an extra treat to hear traditional Irish lilting (the singing of wordless syllables to a traditional melody) and to see the traditional Irish step dance performed by the band’s lone female.
If you’ve been reading the HSF lately, you, dear reader, know that I am particularly proud of my Appalachian heritage. This music, the grandfather of the traditional mountain music and bluegrass so dear to my heart, stirred something deep within me. To listen to the same tunes that have been passed down from generation to generation and to see a dancer perform the same steps that people stepped hundreds of years ago is somehow both sobering and inspiring. Furthermore, being part of an audience that spontaneously clapped along and joyfully embraced the music they heard reminded me of the beauty that tradition handed down and shared in community can offer us.
Even as I sat there, I was thinking about the way that the culture of music in Western society has changed. The shift first occurred in classical music. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, chaos and noise came to replace melody and beauty. In many ways, this development is no surprise, given that the vast majority of modern high art of all sorts throws off tradition, instead prioritizing personal expression, self-actualization, and subjective viewer response.
These emphases have, of course, affected the actual artistic products themselves, causing them to become increasingly similar to their popular culture counterparts. Because of the increasing absurdity of the high art scene and its near indistinguishableness from popular culture, popular culture has, for the most part, co-opted the place that high art once filled in society. Ken Myers, in his helpful and informative book All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, has noted that this shift allowed popular music to step in and reclaim melody when classical music had abandoned it. Pop music reintroduced song and has become American culture’s dominant form of music ever since [1].
This brings me to the second musical experience that inspired these musings. Like many other Americans, I watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade last week. As usual, the floats featured several popular singers or bands “performing” their music [2]. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly all of the female artists dressed and sounded very similar, making it difficult to distinguish between them. The songs were heavily auto-tuned, and the musical accompaniment sounded most often as if a computer program had produced it instead of real human beings with actual musical instruments. No wonder the songs sounded almost identical; in fact, they quickly became boring.
These performances were quite the contrast to the interesting music skillfully performed by the Paul Brock Band. Instead of witnessing a retrieval or a recalling of a long-standing musical tradition, the pop music that surrounds us as we shop, eat, drive, or watch Thanksgiving day parades is disposable and more concerned with style than substance. Though several artists (mostly out of the mainstream) are producing beautiful and skillful and lovely music, popular music, by and large, is incapable of inspiring the same awe that traditional music inspired. Usually, it is made only for the cultural moment in which it is produced, primarily to appeal to the eighteen-to-thirty-year-old demographic. It tends to wear out quickly and to be soon replaced by the next new sound. When it does produce something like awe, which is probably mere thrill, it does so by effects or style rather than by skill.
Individual Preference Is King, or King Me
The decline of music culture is largely due to the individualism inherent in our cultural zeitgeist. Now, instead of using standards of beauty, excellence, and skill to determine the quality of our music, we tend to deem music as good or bad based our own consumer preferences. Of course, this holds true not only of our music and its production but also of our visual, performing, and film art. We would dare not say that universal, transcendent standards ought to inform our judgment of art. Instead, we emphasize the idea that “my taste is not your taste but both are equally valid” to the degree that we have essentially lost the ability to make value judgments at all.
Furthermore, our experience of music is much more individualistic than it once was. Now, we primarily listen to music on our own: in the car, on our devices, in buds in our ears, or through giant headphones on our heads. Rarely do we enjoy music in community.
This individualized approach to music is certainly in contrast to the music experience of many generations who have come before us. People enjoyed music together. Perhaps they sat on the porch after a long day of working in the field or mine and played music together. Perhaps the celebration of the end of the harvest was an occasion for the playing of music and the joyful traditional dancing of the community. Perhaps people in society attended the concert at the local hall in town to hear the works of Bach or Handel or Mozart or Schubert performed. In each case, music was shared and enjoyed together [3].
Blatant individualism is also seen in the lyrics of most modern songs. Lyrics tend to focus on the singer’s feelings or experiences. I’m certainly not implying by this observation that there is no room for individual expression of feeling; I’m simply observing that most popular songs are about the individual. The singer tells his girl what he wants from her, how he feels about her, or what his own personal aspirations are.
Traditional music, on the other hand, would recount personal experiences, but more often than not, these recollections were in the context of the larger community. Or, lyrics would often be a means of passing down community legends or tales. Or, they would be a way of emphasizing shared experiences. Mothers would sing songs to their children that their mothers had sung to them.
Finally, the way we interact with music tends to be more self-focused than it once was. Indeed, we tend to use music, to simply consume it, more than people in the past have done. It seems that fewer people play instruments, though all of us can work an iPod. Indeed, imbibing music is certainly easier than learning how to produce it ourselves to share with others. Furthermore, for those moderns who would learn how to play an instrument, their primary motivation is often to achieve personal fame.
Conclusion
Please understand that I am not calling us to get rid of our Spotify accounts or to enjoy music only in a more traditional context. I also realize that I am painting with a broad brush. I am simply pointing out our enthroning of the individual in our music culture specifically. We prefer the easy-to-listen-to, seemingly uncomplicated world of digital sounds to the thought and attention required by other forms of music. I think we ought to be aware of this tendency.
Furthermore, we must recognize the influence that our cultural approach to music has had on the church and on our use of music in worship. I will explore this idea more fully in a forthcoming essay, but for now we must grapple with the music culture at large before focusing in on the church. Once we recognize potentially troublesome issues with music in society, we will be better equipped to recognize and avoid similar tendencies in worship.
We can also be more intentional about our music consumption and seek to add more substance and beauty to our listening diets. Once we experience some of the beauty we have abandoned, perhaps we can do more to recall the traditions of the past and to support those musicians who are doing this good work. We do this out of our understanding of both God’s standards (seen especially in Philippians 4:8) and of His tendency to work through history and tradition to give us common grace and delight.
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[1]See Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).
[2]Of course, I realize that it would be difficult to perform without the assistance of backing tracks in the parade, but I still must acknowledge that this performance is not live.
[3]Though I don’t have the space to explore this idea more fully, I do believe we can recall this sort of tradition in some small ways. Perhaps the most readily accessible step we can take is to add music that has stood the test of time to our music line-ups. Of course that would include classical music as well as folk tunes and, I think, new music produced by contemporary artists working within a musical tradition (Nickel Creek, for instance).
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