The Music Exchange

I’m having to change my mind about something at the moment, which is always uncomfortable, but I’m encouraged that at least I’m not as stuck in the mud as I often think I appear.

I wrote an article last year moaning that many of today’s songwriters write songs more for an audience than a congregation. Their songs sound good on CD, YouTube or MP3, but are often difficult to sing by congregations and even more difficult to play by musicians. Even I get intimidated by some songs that take up three or more pages of sheet music, and have so much syncopation that it’s difficult to tell what are notes and what are bits of squashed daddy long-legs.

Old-school

I’m old-school in the way I look at songs musically. If it looks simple on the page and has an easy tune to pick up without being simplistic, then I’ll give it a go and it’ll usually be picked up by the congregation. I don’t listen to MP3s or CDs of the latest Christian songs, partly because I don’t listen to much music anyway, but also because I’m wary that a CD can ‘sell’ a song to you by making it sound easier to sing than it actually is.

What’s making me think, however, is that a couple of weeks ago at St. Helen’s we sang one of these songs which I thought would go badly, but which actually went very well. It was then that I realised that many of the congregation (unlike me) had been listening to the song on their MP3 players, so were able to pick the song up very quickly. One in the eye for me.

I still have a problem with encouraging congregations to sing these songs though, because it’s only the younger generation that learn songs in this way. This means that you’ve got to have a congregation full of younger people who listen to these songs on their MP3 players, while old-schoolers like me (and much older-schoolers, of course) get frozen out. The more serious problem is that non-believing guests at our meetings will feel out of the loop, because they certainly won’t be in the habit of listening to Christian songs on their MP3s (unless they listen to the Corrs or the latest efforts of Take That — in which case they’d be half way there). There’s also an issue with money: admittedly, the cost of producing songs on CD or MP3 is getting cheaper, but it’s still a huge drain on time and resources, which arguably could be used on much more useful gospel projects.

Where I’ve got to come unstuck from the mud is realising that we can’t go back in time. The way songs are being written, disseminated and learnt is changing, so if we want to sing contemporary songs (and I’m not suggesting that singing contemporary songs is compulsory for a church’s survival), then we need to accept it and adapt.

How difficult?

This brings me to the issue of how difficult many modern songs are to play. Guitarists find the songs much easier to play than keyboard players, because the songs are more rhythm-based than melody-based: they can listen to the MP3 and simply copy the rhythm. They don’t even need the music. However, if that same rhythm is written out as sheet music for a pianist, then it’s a case of ‘Who killed the daddy long-legs?’. Maybe this is guitarists’ revenge on the old hymn writers for not writing in chord symbols.

What’s the answer?

The answer is not to stick our heads in the sand and hope the trend blows over — people have much easier access to music these days, and it will only get easier. Neither is the answer to say, ‘We need more guitarists and fewer pianists’! However, now that modern hymn books include chord symbols (making them playable by both pianists and guitarists) it would be good to see contemporary MP3-learnt songs that can be transcribed simply onto one page, with not one daddy long-legs being hurt. If the music is simple, then any musician can play it (even me on the piano). Then we’re free to add as many frills as are seen fit. However, if the music is written with all the frills, then it’s harder to simplify when you can’t read the music in the first place. I realise that this solution is more aimed at the songwriters than us lowly church musicians, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

My problem is that, though I know I need to change my attitude towards this new way of learning songs, I don’t know what I’m changing it to yet. I think that means that I sit on the fence until someone pushes me off or the fence falls down.

Richard Simpkin

© Evangelicals Now - April 2009
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