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.