Sing to the Lord a New Song....

For many years I've considered myself something of a traditionalist when it came to church music.  Before I was received in the Orthodox Church I loved traditional English hymns, and old-timey standards. I was wary of more 'contemporary' praise music, often pejoratively dismissed as "Jesus is my boyfriend" appropriations of pop music and pop formulas to produce, what I thought to be theologically and artistically shallow attempts at hymnody.  When I was received into the Orthodox Church, I had the awkward experience of leaving behind my 'traditional' hymns for the prescribed music of the church.   I knew I didn't need to worry about strange ideological content or false teaching.... but I needed to thoroughly readjust to Byzantine Chant, which, at first, felt entirely foreign to me.  But with time, it became second nature.  I started chanting (and much to the chagrin of some near me, rarely stop).  I became a fierce proponent of Byzantine chant as "the music of the Church," and with that started directing all of my old suspicion toward attempts to modernize, adjust, or adapt church music in different styles.  It was so rich, so full, and so profound, why would anyone want to change it?

That has largely been my perspective, and I've dismissed voices that called Byzantine chant "too foreign" and called for American liturgical music.  But then this happened:

A friend and I were joking around in the first week of Lent, and decided to sing the traditional hymn "God is With Us" from Great Compline, in an Appalachian cadence style (with Ralph Stanley ringing in my ears).  Another friend, on a whim, recorded us, and put it up on Facebook.  It exploded! Within a few weeks it had 237 shares, over 20,000 views, and a couple demands for an album.  People across the country were suggesting that this was an example of what American Orthodox music should sound like.  On the first day, Fr. James Graham, a Melkite priest in Michigan, whom I've never met, said,  

"For 30 years--or more--I have said that Appalachian shape-note singing (or 18th C. New England anthems) should be the model for indigenous American liturgical chant in Byzantine liturgy. These seminarians from St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary evidently share that opinion and demonstrate the sound in this video clip. The adjective "awesome" is over-used and debased by that over-use, but this chanting really is awesome.”
I was terrified.   (I did not share that opinion.)  I wanted to start arguments with people for liking the video.  For years I had balked at and argued with the same suggestion, that somehow I was becoming the face of.

But then more and more posts followed.  A number of people started posting about how the song brought tears to their eyes, or made them feel deeply connected to their faith.  It was profoundly moving people, and I started to realize things might be more complicated than I had wanted them to be.

It got me to thinking.  One of the first great hymnographers was Ephraim the Syrian.  He wrote numerous, beautiful, profound, and edifying hymns, but his inspiration came from a popular style of hymns that were being used by the heretical teachers Bardaisan and Mani. Ephraim took the musical form that the people responded to, and used to in service of the church.

Music could be a profound missionary tool, and a great teacher. It would be hard to say any local church hasn't shaped their liturgical music in some way to make it their own, Certainly, Russian chant is not the same as Georgian chant or the same as any of the range of national Byzantine chants. In more recent generations the world has also seen different African missions adjusting Russian and Greek music to fit their own people's musical sensibilities.

However, not all styles of music are equally effective or appropriate for church use (I've yet to have anyone respond positively to the notion of an Orchestral Metal Liturgy). What qualities does music need to be baptized?

St. Gregory of Nyssa, when writing on the Psalms, talks about the role of music in prayer. He says,
“ […] The song woven together with divine words has a plan and order, for its melody wishes to explain the sense of its words. By employing the voice's intensity, the sense lying within the [song's] words reveals as much as it can. The song thus resembles something edible, that is, a condiment or a seasoning to sweeten the nourishment of the [psalms'] teachings.”

Our music needs both to season the divine words of our prayers to make them easier to take in, and to have a “plan and order” to reflect the sense of the words. Clearly some serious amount of work would be called for to adapt any new style of music to have the requisite “plan and order” to fit and elucidate the liturgical prayers like the traditional music systems designed around them, but difficulty is not impossibility. So if a musical system could be adapted to fit the text (and ideally reflect some of the order and teaching presented by Eight tone musics) the next question would be “seasoning” to a culture's taste. As with all seasoning, different individuals and different cultures can have different senses of taste. It's clear that “Appalachian” music has some serious resonance with a great many Americans. Especially in context where there is so much missionary potential, that resonance is hard to ignore. However, it can also be said that for a great many Americans Appalachian music can be just as, if not more foreign than Greek or Russian music. Pinpointing any one particular musical sensibility that speaks to all Americans broadly seems perhaps too broad an order. America, it seems, has managed for a long time to embrace a broad diversity of musical styles, not only between different regions, but increasingly more and more within the same regions. Perhaps a culturally responsive vision of Orthodox music in America needs to reflect some of that same diversity (without sacrificing order).

Of course these reflections may bring up a lot more questions than answers,  It may take quite some for those questions to be answered and addressed before any broad adoption of new styles might be feasible or fruitful, but in the meantime, music can still be a powerful force to engage culture outside of the liturgy....

...it may not have the “plan and order” needed for liturgy, but it could certainly still wet people's appetite.

Random Thoughts...

Several years ago, a few good friends introduced me to what is now one of my favorite games, "Cosmic Wimpout."  It is a deceptively simple game.  Five dice, six sides each, that's it.  It was hard at first to understand how they were as enthusiastic about this game as they were.  You make points by different combinations of dice rolls.  The only real strategy or input you have beside the roll of the dice is whether to stop rolling and keep the points you've built up, or continue rolling, weighing the chance of getting more points against the chance of losing everything you've built up. Each game is a series of random dice rolls, punctuated by screams and excitement because each player has to wrestle face to face with random chance and weigh the value of what they have and know against against the uncertainty of the next random roll.

But God Doesn't Play Dice....?

That notion of randomness, which we often take  as a given, ubiquitous part of the way the world works in our day to day lives, isn't so simple, so certain, or so reliable as it can feel.  The very idea of randomness, and the uncertainty that goes with it, can be a scandal for some traditional scientific world views.  If, as some would suggest, the world is just a collection of moving stuff, particles hitting particles as they drift through space, nothing should be truly random.  Everything should follow basic laws of physics, and if we knew enough information beforehand, we could calculate everything that happens next.  When I take five dice in my hand, shake them and throw them, the outcome is already set by how I moved my hands.  What we are calling random in that circumstance seems to be no more than shorthand for our lack of knowledge.  Taken further, if everything follows these basic determined rules of physical cause and effect, some would argue, our own thoughts and actions should be no different.  If everything follows these rules, our brains function should be just as determined and we couldn't really be making decisions at all, but just fixedly reacting the only way we possibly could to a given set of events.  

For a Christian, that has to be a fairly jarring consideration.   Even if the mechanics are fundamentally different, the materialist insistence that all action is already determined by previous physical causes and conditions, presents the same challenge as the early pagan belief in fate. Numerous Fathers railed against the determinism of the belief in fate, because, as Justin Martyr says, "For not like other things, as trees and quadrupeds, which cannot act by choice, did God make man: for neither would he be worthy of reward or praise did he not of himself choose the good, but were created for this end; nor, if he were evil, would he be worthy of punishment, not being evil of himself, but being able to be nothing else than what he was made." If we don't have choice or influence in our lives, how can we be morally responsible for what we do, and how is their any  hope of choosing to put on Christ and seek his kingdom.

Before the last century any insistence on free will and consciousness needed to be solely rooted in some kind of metaphysical involvement or interference in the physical world.  Some immeasurable mind had to be influencing and changing the outcome of physical neurological processes.  While we certainly would insist that God works wonders, and miraculously intervenes in our lives and the life of the world,  this perspective does little to engage Christian theological understanding in conversation with contemporary scientific outlook.  However, the advent of Quantum physics has complicated the picture and provided a few ways that we might see how human consciousness and will interacts with the physical world and the substance of our brains and bodies.

If electrons shot through a double-slitted screen they show an interference pattern on a detecting screen behind it, functioning like a wave.  However, individual electrons fired through the slit one after the other will still produce the same interference pattern, even though they've no other  electrons to interfere with.  One by one they will distribute along that pattern.

Put simply, sub-atomic particles don't act as they're expected to.  By the classical model of cause and effect there is no way to explain or determine which way the individual electron will go.  Each particle's behavior is effectively "random" with no rhyme or reason to say with certainty which direction it will go.       

To further muddy the waters, quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg put forward the principle ("Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle") that in trying to measure or observe these particles, the more accurately we determine the location of the particle, the less accurately we can determine its speed, and vice versa.  On every level, the behavior of these particles defies the expectation of classical physics and the human ability to predict, determine, or understand.           

We're left with a really interesting question of how to account for this "randomness."  While it might certainly be simply a failure of our understanding, the influence of factors as of yet unknown, some, including Heisenberg's own son Martin, have suggested that this uncertainty in the behavior of these particles might just account for the function of the human will.  The uncertainty of the behavior of these particles could be the medium through which our wills are exercised on and shape the direction of the physical particles that make up our brains and bodies.     

Ultimately, of course, we're not left with any more proof or certainty about how our will exists in the world by the increasing uncertainty of the scientific data, but that same uncertainty can reassure us that we don't need to know, and indeed cannot know all the rules and influences at play.  Far from discouraging further thought, that uncertainty can encourage us to keep striving and keep engaging, knowing that there will always be more than we can observe or determine.  We continue to roll the dice and see how it unfolds, precisely because the only way to begin to see and understand is in the experience of living itself and the fruits of the exercise of our wills, not in determined rules and causal expectations at the outset.