14 December 1999

A QUESTION OF STYLE: WORSHIP SONGS VS. THE ORGAN

This was a contribution to a discussion about modern church music on piporg-l.

Many modern worship songs are written by musicians who were not classically trained - or if they were, it doesn't show. These songs have a fundamental musical structure and syntax very different from that which has informed several centuries of classical music.

This becomes very clear when you attempt to play them on the organ. You realise that they are largely melody-led; the harmonic support is very much an also-ran and a rhythmic filler. The bass is either extremely static or, if it moves, appears to follow no natural melodic contour.

The net result is that this music often lies very awkwardly on the organ. The King of Instruments, as we know, excels in counterpoint. Not necessarily fugues etc.; but music which is conceived as a whole and in which all the musical lines contribute to that whole. This is as true for romantic music as for renaissance, baroque and classical.

In those organ works which are melody-led (everything from Lemare's famous Andantino to Bach's chorale-preludes 'O Mensch, Bewein' and the melismatic 'Liebster Jesu') the bass line is always coherent, and indeed singable; the accompanying parts usually have a melodic interest of their own, or some redeeming feature which makes them more than just aural cement.

Now contrast this with the modern worship song (at least as I know it). There is no strongly laid out bass part, the like of which underpins all manner of hymn tunes. The left hand is reduced to futilely strumming away at tonic triads or added seventh chords, while the right hand carries the jitterbug melody with as much rhythmic panache as it can.

The organ as we know it is an instrument conceived in response to the demands of composers and musicians; who through all the superficial changes of musical style, have nonetheless carried on an unbroken living tradition in which the fundamental values of musical structure are always present.

The romantic composers studied strict species counterpoint as did their baroque predecessors.

The new musical language of the worship song comes from a different line of evolution. It is based on the folk idioms which were transformed into blues, pop and rock. These fields too, on their own terms, have musically coherent as well as musically illiterate products. It is unfortunate that in the desire to be 'contemporary' and 'relevant', the churches have often lit upon second-rate, worn out idioms which any self-respecting aficianado of popular music would scorn.

Questions of musical value aside, it soon becomes clear that worship songs are perfectly suited to the musical resources which, consciously or unconsciously, their composers took as a model. There is the often florid, breathless treble line, suitable for an impassioned blues or rock singer. There is the chugga-chug harmonic filling for the guitars. There is the often erratic bass line - but everyone knows that the bass guitarist is usually the weakest player in the band, so what does it matter?

This musical texture is, as many of us have discovered, less than ideally suited to the organ. Oh yes, we have our repertoire pieces which are notable for the very prominence of their rhythmic/harmonic chugga-chug (example: the manual parts of the Widor Toccata). We also have works more static than the most moribund of pop songs (example: 'Desseins Eternels' from Messiaen's 'La Nativité'). But perhaps these numbers (and they are the exceptions in the repertoire) are so successful because their musical means were employed quite deliberately, with an ear for a particular effect, and not as the nuts and bolts of the general musical language.

I love good rock, pop and blues music; and I enjoy those occasions on which Christian pop is perfomed (by the appropriate forces) well and with conviction. But in the local parish church, sung by the long-suffering congregation?