Music

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Music

American religious music has undergone an extraordinary transformation in the late twentieth century. Most of the major religious communities have made important changes in their music cultures since 1965. Virtually all of the mainline Protestant denominations have issued controversial new hymnals, while the Catholic church has endured the failure of an ambitious liturgical reform and then turned to traditional Protestant hymnody and new Pentecostal praise music to find effective songs for worship. American Jews have embraced the renewal of traditional synagogue music as well as a revival of Sephardic and klezmer musics. Native American nations have shared their music traditions with outsiders, while New Age movements have given music a central place in their beliefs and rituals. And while the number of religious works by major composers has continued a century-long decline, anthems for local choirs appear at unprecedented rates and concert hall performances of classical sacred works have never been more popular.

External forces have also shaped religious music, none more profoundly than its commodification and popularization through the mass-marketing of recordings and music videos. The multibillion-dollar gospel music industry offers the best illustration of how religious music has carved out its own commercial niche in American popular culture. This rapidly changing, market-driven quality is not new to American religious music. These processes of internal and external change are not new. A strong historical case can be made that American sacred music has constantly changed to meet the consumption patterns of the nation's unruly mass religious movements. These populist qualities have been especially prominent in the music culture of evangelicalism, America's largest Protestant movement since the eighteenth century.

While the development of American religious music since 1965 is precedented in important ways, it has also displayed important new patterns of growth and meaning, of which four are the most notable: denominational controversies over lyrical content and musical form in worship music, the renewal of music as a category of religious belief, the emergence of paraliturgical musics, and commodification with a concomittant blurring of sacred and secular musical styles. Taken together, these trends comprise a fair if not exhaustive picture of religious music in contemporary America.

Controversies About Worship Music

Most of the major liberal Protestant denominations have published new hymnals since the mid-1980s, including The Hymnal, 1982 (Episcopal Church, 1985), The United Methodist Hymnal (1989), The Presbyterian Hymnal (Presbyterian Church U.S.A., 1990), With One Voice (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1995), and The New Century Hymnal (United Church of Christ, 1995). Each of these hymnals has to some degree employed the principle of inclusive language in selecting and editing hymn texts. The inclusive language principle, a justice claim of liberation and feminist theology, mandates the removal of all expressions of gender, race, and class preference, as well as military metaphors, from the texts of scripture, liturgy, and sacred music.

Inclusive language has generated arguably the greatest explosion of new Protestant hymn and praise texts since World War I, some of it fine religious poetry indeed. While influential among theologians, poets, denominational leaders, and hymnal editors, however, inclusive language has proven controversial among the laity of even mainline denominations. Thousands successfully protested in 1986 when the editors of The United Methodist Hymnal proposed to exclude Sabine Baring-Gould's famous 1864 hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers." The New Century Hymnal, which extended the inclusive language principle to the revision of the classic hymns of Anglo-American Protestantism, has provoked ongoing controversy in the United Church of Christ despite the denomination's pioneer endorsement of inclusivity in 1972. The other new hymnals have encountered similar resistance, suggesting that for liberal Protestants worship music may be the aspect of their religious culture most resistant to change. For at least a minority of this progressive theological and social vanguard, traditional hymns carry an irreducible element of historical identity and religious significance without which they feel spiritually disoriented. On the other hand, denominational leaders, hymnal editors, and perhaps a majority of the laity see the new inclusive hymnody as the completion of a generation-long liberationist reform of the faith.

An analogous conflict between traditional and reforming ideas of worship music engulfed the American Catholic church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Vatican II produced the most comprehensive reform of Catholicism since the Council of Trent answered the Protestant Reformation in 1562–1563. Among its most important results was Sancrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963), an epic document that mandated vernacular translations of the mass and endorsed the inclusion of popular musical forms into worship. In the United States liturgical reform produced the folk mass, which featured unison hymns, responses, and guitar accompaniments composed in the style of the folk-music revival of the mid-1960s. Designed to attract youth to a renovated celebration of the Eucharist, the folk mass enjoyed initial success but quickly receded into anachronism as rock overwhelmed the folk revival in the popular musical taste of the 1970s. Many older Catholics, meanwhile, lamented the loss of the Latin Mass and resisted the folk mass and the imperatives of Vatican II's liturgical reform.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Charismatic Renewal, a massive resurgence of popular piety characterized by personal experience of the Holy Spirit, gripped the American Catholic church. The Charismatic Renewal inspired new praise songs, simple refrains musically related to the folk-mass style and popular folk-rock, and encouraged Catholic appropriation of evangelical Protestant and Pentecostal gospel hymns. Two popular hymn collections in the late 1980s marked the establishment of the new musical style. Glory and Praise (1987) brought the most widely used folksongs, praise songs, and Protestant hymns to urban and suburban parishes. The pilgrimage and praise songs of Flor y Canto (1989), the first major Spanish-language Catholic hymnal published in the United States, signaled the musical emergence of Hispanic-American Catholics among whose ranks the Charismatic Renewal had flourished with particular intensity. At the end of the twentieth century, Vatican II's imperative of liturgical music reform has been fulfilled in the American Catholic church, albeit in an unlikely way. Though hardly without conflict, the process of change has produced a distinctive, if not musically distinguished, body of singable and effective worship music written by and for American Catholics.

Music as a Category of Religious Belief and Practice

While music has always played an important role in the worship of the Christian West, its inherent power to move the human emotions and appetites has consistently been mistrusted by theologians. Other religious traditions understand sacred music quite differently. Several of these—including Greco-Roman, Hindu, Native American, and Wiccan—have enjoyed significant growth in late twentieth-century America. Elements from each of these traditions, moreover, have mingled together in the emergence of New Age spirituality, a wide and diffuse movement that has flourished on the east and west coasts during the 1980s and 1990s. The appearance of these non-Christian traditions has brought a wave of new speculation about the sacred powers of music and a new focus on the practice of chanting and toning.

Renewed beliefs about music's sacrality take many forms. Wiccans chant and howl to invoke the presence of the Earth Goddess; Native Americans sing and dance to unite with the ancestors and spirit beings. The most original contribution to American religious beliefs about music, however, has come from New Age spirituality in the form of three related assertions: that musical tone is an integral element of both the physical and spiritual worlds, that tone therefore can produce spiritual effects in the human body, and that when understood and used properly these effects can attune the human being to its most integrated, healthful, and spiritual state.

The first of these claims derives from the experiments of Greek philosopher Pythagoras (ca. 515–495 b.c.e.), who discovered that the tones of the musical scale can be produced from simple fractional proportions of a vibrating string. Pythagoras concluded that these mathematical ratios revealed the universe to be grounded in harmonia, the divine balance and proportion of being itself. Later Pythagoreans assigned specific emotional or spiritual qualities to different scales and chords. New Age thinkers reappropriated Pythagorean ideas and added new findings from acoustic, electromagnetic, light, and atomic theory to propose that the universe is constituted by mathematically ordered vibrations and that musical tone makes this cosmic order uniquely available to human beings.

New Age ideas about music's relation to the human soul and body come largely from a quite different source, the yogic traditions of Hinduism. The body is understood to contain seven spiritual centers associated with neural centers of the spinal chord and brain called chakras. These centers have specific powers which rise from the sexual at the base of the spine to the transcendental at the top of the skull. In yoga traditions like kundalini, meditation is combined with tone chanting to stimulate the chakras and release their spiritual potencies. At peak meditative moments, practitioners experience an integrating synthesis of these spiritual energies that produces enlightenment. These ancient Indic beliefs have provided New Age theorists with a model of body and soul that links music's cosmological and physical reality to the transformation of emotional and spiritual states.

From these appropriations of classical religions and contemporary science, New Age leaders prescribed the chanting of traditional sacred words or syllables and the toning of nontextual musical pitches as fundamental ritual practices for spiritual healing and enlightenment. Soon a rich variety of New Age listening, chant, and toning practices appeared, many of them theoretically grounded in a combination of Pythagorean and Hindu traditions. New Age artists including keyboardist Steve Halperin, pianist George Winston, saxophonist Paul Horn, and flutist Carlos Nakai gained great popularity during the 1980s with their recordings of New Age music characterized by slow melodic and harmonic movement and the employment of modal scales. By the late 1990s, New Age thinkers and artists had created an eclectic new theory of sacred sound, the basic premise of which is that by hearing or producing certain tones in a meditative state, the human body and soul can experience their proper balance and thereby gain physical health and spiritual integration into the cosmic harmony of being.

The Emergence of Paraliturgical Music

While there has been significant development of musical thought and practice in the major religious communities in the United States, the late twentieth century has been a time when sacred music has increasingly been composed and performed outside an explicitly liturgical context. One of the most prominent paraliturgical phenomena is the displacement of sacred music from the church to the concert hall, a process that began in Europe with the sacred oratorios of Handel and Haydn and the huge masses and choral seetings of Beethoven, Berlioz, Verdi, and Brahms. In the contemporary United States, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, John Adams, and others have composed successful large-scale settings of religious poetry, but their achievement pales before the immense recent popularity in the United States of the turn-of-the-century symphonies of the Austrian Gustav Mahler or the more recent 1976 Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by the Pole Henryk Górecki, massive late-Romantic or (Górecki) neo-Romantic works suffused with religious poetry and emotional spirituality. For many contemporary urban Americans, the concert hall has become the place where they hear their most meaningful religious music performed.

For even more Americans, the gospel concert has become the definitive paraliturgical setting. From its origins in the gospel hymns of the 1870s and gospel blues of the 1920s, gospel music has always been performed outside Sunday worship at revivals, song services, and choir and quartet competitions. But on the strength of a massive revival from 1974 through the 1980s, gospel music began to replace traditional hymnody as the sacred music of choice among millions of America's evangelicals and pentecostals. Some gospel music performers have become better known than television evangelists, and their concerts attract thousands to praise, pray, and testify to their faith. A good marker of gospel's recent growth is the annual Dove Awards ceremony sponsored since 1969 in Nashville by the Gospel Music Association. The first ceremony was a small local affair in which a dozen awards were presented. Thirty years later the Dove Awards take place at the immense new Grand Ole Opry auditorium, broadcasts live for three hours on the TNN cable television network, and presents accolades in more than fifty technical, production, and performance categories. Gospel music is the most popular form of religious music in contemporary America, and although it retains many evangelical beliefs and sentiments, it has become increasingly independent of traditional liturgical norms since the 1960s.

Further removed from formal liturgy is music written for secular contexts that holds religious meaning for hearers. Three examples illustrate this more peripheral form of paraliturgical music: jazz, Native American powwows, and the revival of klezmer and Sephardic music among American Jews. Religious themes have played a persistent role in American jazz since its emergence around 1900. Duke Ellington's Sacred Concert (1934) and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (1964) rank among the most noted jazz works with sacred themes, but countless jazz compositions have made musical or conceptual reference to religious beliefs and practices, especially to Christian, Islamic, and African traditions. Performed in the most secular of contexts, such jazz performances nonetheless convey powerful ideas of transcendence and sacred emotions to many listeners.

Powwows occupy an important paraliturgical locus for Native Americans. Distinguished from ceremonial rituals performed for the tribal community only, powwows are public social occasions for dancing, feasting, and games. Yet for powwow singers and dancers, their textually simple but melodically complex and rhythmically driving songs carry a powerful spiritual meaning best described by them as simply "being Indian." Since the early 1970s, powwows have taken on an important new dimension through the participation of many different nations at large—intertribal events including the Denver March Powwow, the Red Earth Powwow at Oklahoma City, and the Gathering of Nations Powwow at Albuquerque. On these occasions, singers and dancers compete and share their tribal cultures while a growing number of non-Indian Americans attend to engage in the spiritual and cultural traditions of Native America.

Since the Three Day War of 1967, American Jews have experienced a powerful renewal of paraliturgical musics from their historic diaspora, especially the communities dispersed by persecutions of the Sephardim in fifteenth-century Spain and of central European Ashkenazim in the Holocaust. During the 1970s, groups like Boston's Voice of the Turtle began performing folksongs and women's music collected from exiled Sephardic communities of the eastern Mediterranean, while other ensembles including Lev Liberman's band The Klezmorim and Hankus Netzsky's Kelzmer Conservatory Band created concerts from the traditional klezmer repertory of wedding, birthday, and Bar Mitzvah music from rural Ashkenazic villages of pre-Nazi and pre-Soviet Europe. Through their lyrics in Ladino and Yiddish and their Old World instrumentation, these musics powerfully evoke the everyday and celebrative worlds of medieval and early modern Judaism that have largely been lost to contemporary American Jews. At increasingly popular Sephardic and klezmer concerts, urban Jewish audiences during the 1980s and 1990s have experienced a potent identification with their Judaic heritage quite apart from the synagogue service.

Commodification and Stylistic Change

As religious music in contemporary America has moved beyond the confines of traditional liturgical form, it has encountered powerful external new influences from the secular music industry. Two of these influences, commodification and stylistic change, have had the greatest impact. Protestant hymnal and tune-book editors created a substantial music publishing enterprise during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the advent of radio, television, sound recordings, and music video has in recent decades transformed religious music into a multibillion-dollar performance and recording industry. The most fully developed sector of this industry is gospel music, whose production nexus at Nashville is indistinguishable from pop music centers in New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit. Gospel has in fact become a subset of the secular music business, with a Top Forty list and regular coverage presented alongside those for Pop, Rock, Hip-Hop, and Classical in Billboard, the industry's weekly journal. Commodification has also penetrated to the most basic level of religious music performance in America, rendering it as much a commercial activity as a sacred act. With the development of cheap techniques for producing audio compact discs, almost any sacred music ensemble or soloist, however humble, can provide recordings for their audiences, and a rapidly increasing number of them do.

The adoption of production and marketing methods from the secular music industry has perhaps inevitably led religious music to appropriate secular music styles. Gospel music again supplies the best illustration of this trend. For its first century, gospel music adhered to the stylistic limits of white gospel hymns and black gospel blues. During the 1950s and 1960s, African-American gospel artists led by Sam Cook and Aretha Franklin first successfully crossed over into the pop market, powerfully influencing the development of the rhythm and blues and soul styles. Since then the direction of musical influence has reversed, with virtually every new youth music style since the 1970s finding translation into gospel form. Gospel no longer connotes a single musical style; it simply means the use of lyrics which deliver some aspect of the evangelical message regardless of musical setting. Especially controversial has been the use of popular music styles associated with sex and violence, like heavy metal and rap, with gospel lyrics. Yet gospel performers in these styles, as well as rock, hip-hop, and world beat have enjoyed significant success. While the more traditional pop ballad style of Amy Grant and Steven Curtis Chapman continues to attract the largest audience, in the late twentieth century, gospel music and Christian music in general has become more stylistically diverse and more influenced by secular musical trends than at any time in American history.