In studies of religion and mediation, music-making has too often been neglected. The editors of the Congregational Music Studies Series commissioned Singing a New Song to address this gap and to open new avenues of enquiry that exploring music, religion and media together afford. By focusing on congregational music-making in the current moment, the studies in this volume provide a richly textured and timely perspective on how music-making and mediation are caught up in changing economic conditions, altered modes of sociality and the advent of new communications technologies. With the help of mobile phones, Internet media and more affordable means of transportation, congregational songs can cross boundaries of region, nation and denomination more rapidly than ever before. The various meanings, uses and influence of these congregational song repertoires cannot be understood without an exploration of these musics’ local roots and global routes, both of which are increasingly dependent on processes of digital and electronic mediation.
This volume also considers the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in changing forms of musical mediation for the academic study of congregational music-making. Scholars must increasingly deal with church music that is not contained within the pages of a hymnal (as if it ever was!) and music-making that is not easily separable from dance, drama, audio-visual spectacle or other performance genres. While oral transmission and print media still play important roles in congregational music’s circulation, digital recording technology enables rapid transmission along with the potential for close reproduction of the songwriter’s or performer’s original version. Over the last quarter century, powerful recording industries have arisen with influential mega-churches or as subsidiaries of ‘secular’ corporations, and their musical offerings now resonate from the Amazon Basin to the Australian Outback.
To take account of the roles of media and music in these cultural shifts, the editors and contributors to this volume have interpreted their original research through the lenses of numerous theoretical approaches, including media ecology, linguistic theory, the anthropology of media and various music studies approaches. In doing so, they have provided us with a host of valuable ways to understand the complex interweaving of music, media and religious culture. These chapters have underscored the paramount importance of congregational music as media and mediated practice in the lives of Christian congregations. Music is unique – even irreplaceable – in its ability to mediate feeling and belief, and to provide the connective tissue between differing spheres of life. And they have shown how exploring musical practices as processes and products of mediation can help us better understand the social, psychological, embodied and spiritual dimensions of human existence.
In reflecting on the contributions of this volume to the field of Congregational Music Studies1 more specifically, I believe its significance lies in how it clarifies our understanding of three interrelated processes within present-day Christian congregations: it shows us how congregational music is mediated, what congregational music mediates, and how congregational music itself mediates. Throughout this volume, we have seen, first, how congregational music is mediated in the twenty-first century. The authors provide thick descriptions of the rich variety of different media forms people use to create, disseminate and experience congregational music, including live performance, audio and video recordings shared through social media, photocopied scores, downloaded chord charts and often a complex mixture of all of these. Further, they have shown how changes to the way congregational music circulates and is re-presented to congregations can sometimes serve as a catalyst for other changes, for example, how music sounds, how music-making is socially organized and what it means to participants. Clearly, these extra-musical media are not only necessary for transporting music from one place to another; they are constitutive of congregational music’s very practice. Whether a congregation’s musical media comprises printed hymnals or digitally projected slides, live musicians or musical recordings, these media insinuate themselves into the very substance of the worshipping environment.
The volume’s second area of contribution is to a rich understanding of the congregational music as media. Music is shown to do far more than act simply as a carrier for verbal ‘content’. Rather, musical practices can carry with them certain socially ascribed meanings, including theologies, beliefs and values. Through the affordances offered by their connection to other spheres (for example, in invoking popular music or folk music performance styles), music can cultivate specific ways to understand and build community. And congregational music-making is more than a vehicle for meaning; it is also a force that acts on – even helps to construct – the worshipping body. As Tia DeNora reminds us:
Music is not merely a ’meaningful’ or ‘communicative’ medium. It does much more than convey signification through non-verbal means. At the level of daily life, music has power … it may influence how people compose their bodies, how they conduct themselves, how they experience the passage of time, how they feel about themselves, about others, about situations. (2000, 17)
From the experience of salvation to the experience of belonging and participating in a larger community, congregational music facilitates powerful, embodied experiences of transcendence of one’s immediate surroundings and intimacy with God and other worshippers.
Finally, this book has broadened our understanding of the many and overlapping ways congregational music conveys meaning and affect. Sound itself is an important means of conveyance, whether on the microlevel through the way musicians choose chords or melodies, or through the affordances of genre or style more generally. Bodily movements and gestures associated with or required to make sounds are sources of significance, as is the persona of the musical leader as interpreted through visual and sonic cues. The architectural environment of musical performance also brings with it a range of associations that can be either denied or embraced in the creation of affective space. Several of the volume’s chapters also drew attention to extra-musical aspects of performance (for example, images, the spoken word and written texts) that work together to forge congregational music-making into a complex multimedia whole. Each of these aspects bring with them a different range of possibilities for creating meaning and affect and may exist in complex relationships with music, whether complementary, contradictory or a mixture of both.
This volume’s many contributions to understanding congregational music both as a process and product of mediation are each solidly grounded by in-depth research into ‘real-life’ situations. In bringing this book’s discussion to a close, I propose to take us on a quick detour from the real into the realm of the imagined. This imaginative journey will suggest a further avenue of enquiry into musical mediation by taking us into a fictitious account of a congregation whose worship practices were transformed – perhaps not for the better – by a new musical technology for leading congregational singing.
In the autumn of 2006, the online Christian satirical newsletter LarkNews published an article entitled ‘Animatronic Band Takes Guesswork out of Worship’. The story chronicles what happens when a fictitious church in suburban Texas replaces its church musicians with a ten-piece animatronic band. It recounts that when the church’s music director resigned, the pastor decided to replace the church’s entire music programme with The Deluxe Animatronic Church System, a new product line from a manufacturer of theme park animatrons. In a faux interview, the pastor lists several factors that led to his decision. Economic reasons come to the fore: after all, the entire band of animatrons could be purchased for three years of a music director’s annual salary and would be around for years longer. And animatrons would provide a welcome low-maintenance relationship as, in the pastor’s experience, ‘real worship leaders … can be moody and flaky.’ Plus, it solved the problem of finding one person to coordinate music of the church’s three weekly services, which each used a different musical style to suit the preferences of differing age demographics. ‘It’s tough to find [a worship leader] that matches your church,’ the pastor confesses.
The story goes on to report that, though the congregation was at first sceptical, they grew to love having the animatrons lead their congregational music; in fact, ‘many now say they’ve reached new heights of worship with the pre-programmed band.’ One older congregation member muses, ‘I thought I’d miss the human element, but these machines are so real. And I appreciate the consistency.’ The Deluxe Animatronic Church System offers considerable flexibility on both song style and order. It comes equipped with a hundred different musical styles and gives churches the ability either to pre-program the song list or to have the church’s sound engineer ‘stitch together songs of different emotional intensities, responding to the mood of the crowd’. Church members responded particularly well when the church leadership opted for interchangeable ‘head kits’ featuring the likenesses of celebrity Christian recording artists who licensed their images and voices for use with the animatrons. After an hour of ‘mosh-pit worship’ led by an animatronic version of British worship leader Martin Smith from the band Delirious?, one teenager exudes, ‘It’s so real! … It’s Martin Smith’s voice and everything!’
Through the lens of an example as telling as it is ludicrous, the LarkNews article provides a perceptive commentary on anxieties related to congregational music as media and as mediated practice in early twenty-first century North America. The story hypothesizes a new kind of musical mediation comprised of a novel combination of two contemporary technologies: commercial audio recordings of worship songs and mechanized performers who bring them to life (in a manner of speaking) in a local congregational setting. The article demonstrates well the complex media ecology of the local church setting, imagining which avenues of belief, participation and experience this new way to mediate congregational song would open up and which it would close down.
The article airs common evangelical fears that contemporary congregational worship amounts to little more than commercially driven entertainment. It is helpful to put this anxiety in context: beginning in the early part of the 2000s decade, pop-rock-style music for congregational worship had become the most profitable arm of the Nashville-based Christian recording industry.2 Touring celebrity ‘worship bands’ led crowds of thousands in ‘worship concerts’ where powerful ‘worship experiences’ are available – for the price of admission. ‘Worship albums’ were churned out by the hundreds and marketed as an indispensable resource for private devotion. Many churches scrambled to keep up with musical trends and parade of hit songs, while navigating internal disagreements as to whether the new styles and songs were appropriate for their local body. Inserted into this context, the LarkNews article offers a caricature of these mass spectacles localized within a church setting. The animatron’s replaceable head kits lampoon the slavish emulation of celebrity worship leaders and songwriters. And the pastor and congregation are not spared – their desires and expectations fuel the literal dehumanization of the congregation’s musical leadership. The pastor is relieved to find a practical solution to ‘real’ musicians (who are, after all, a headache), and the imaginary congregation is highly satisfied with the mechanical band, which has inspired them to reach ‘new heights of worship’. The teenage participant’s mosh-pit experience reinforced the connection between powerful worship and the presence (even if virtual) of musical celebrity.
Within its critique of the commercialism enabled by new forms of media, the article invokes questions both theological (what is the meaning and purpose of congregational worship?) and ethical (how should human beings relate to one another?). The animatronic performers are not only conveyers of musical or textual ‘content’, they are also mediators of expectations and ideals which actively shape participants’ understanding of what congregational worship is and should be. At several points, the article plays upon what Anna Nekola describes in this volume’s introduction as the artificial/authentic binary. The reader’s instinctive reaction to animatrons as unquestionably ‘artificial’ is played against the church members’ acceptance of them as unquestionably ‘real’. The animatrons feel authentic to the congregation members because their performance so successfully produces the ideal ‘worship experience’, where conformity to a certain sonic ideal is a prerequisite for divine connection. The mechanical musicians, who look and sound like the latest stars and can be programmed to perform any song flawlessly in any style, are a delivery system – the Perfect Mediators – for an experience both powerful and pleasurable. Guaranteeing the consistency of this experience is placed above all other goods, including human collaboration and participation in musical leadership.
The account of the media environment in the article’s fictitious church points us back to an observation made by many of the chapters in this volume: that music and media are essential to the process of ‘world making’ (Meyer 2003), which is an inescapably ethical process. What kind of ‘world’ is the animatronic band helping to make for the congregation that has adopted it? The answer implicit in the LarkNews article is that the ‘world’ of congregational worship looks remarkably like the world outside it: defined by a consumerist quest for a packaged experience and a concern for the bottom line. The article goes to great lengths to portray how well the set-up seems to work for this fictitious church. Everyone ends up a satisfied customer: the pastor conserves the church’s resources and is free from the hassle of dealing with ‘flaky’ musicians, while congregation members receive a powerful personal experience of divine-human connection mediated through the mechanical likenesses of their favourite stars.
The mechanical musical and media transformation has met this fictional congregation’s perceived needs very effectively, but at what cost? LarkNews has imagined a perfectly functional musical world while suggesting an unsettling ethical question: is it the right kind of world? The article presents a church that has sacrificed human connection on the altar of convenience, economic incentive and aesthetic perfection. Its mechanized short cuts allow the congregation to sidestep hard conversations by cutting out the messiness of human interaction, and with it, the potential for transformation.
‘What kind of world should we make through our music?’ is not the kind of question that can be answered in the abstract; it is ultimately a question for carefully contextualized theologies and locally situated ethics. For many religious individuals, music helps enact a world in line with a set of ethical ideals at odds with the broken systems and unequal relationships of the present reality. Music-making can provide a physical, embodied means of transcending the barriers between real and the ideal, the now and the not yet. The act of music-making within a religious congregation has transformative, generative power. Music can mediate to a worshipping community the experience of a world beyond the now – connecting the situated real and the imagined ideal. It can help participants experience an alternate reality that exists only in their collective imaginations of the future. Suzel Reily has shown that participatory music-making enables ‘the creation of a morally grounded visionary social world’ (2002, 4). She calls music’s role in this mediated process ‘enchantment’: music ‘creates a highly charged experiential realm in which devotees gain a momentary glimpse of the harmonious order that could reign in society, provided everyone agreed to adhere to the moral precepts outlined in religious discourse’ (2002, 3). In theological terms, music can mediate the eschaton, bringing the world of the possible, of the ideal so dearly desired, into present reality. And by offering a concrete, if fleeting, experience of the possible, it can provide insight for bringing that imagined future into the present.
But, it seems, the process can also work in reverse: music-making can also solidify the vision (or perhaps audation) of the future around a specific present reality. In the LarkNews article, the congregation imagines the ideal – the eschatological ‘not yet’ – as not being substantially different from the way society operates ‘now’. In my own work, I have found evangelical college students’ understandings of heaven – the ideal reality to which all earthly action is oriented – to be profoundly shaped by their experience at mass worship events (Ingalls 2011). Conference participants are told to ‘look around and imagine heaven’, and that ‘this is what heaven is going to be like’. Perhaps experiences like these support the persistently popular North American evangelical notion (though of course not supported by official theologies) that the sole activity of the afterlife is ‘worship’, which, in context, means singing along in an eternal pop-rock style musical concert.
It is as a congregation member and musical leader, then, that I end this reflection on worship and world-making, offering up some final questions for others who seek actively to encourage the life and health of the communities they study. What kind of world should we create through our music? What values and practices should congregational music mediate? What kind of musical practices encourage the making of a ‘world’ where inhabitants can experience individual agency and community? Where people are given space to develop and use their unique abilities for the good of others? Where people can be equipped to work through personal issues as well as large-scale structural problems that afflict their communities and societies? Answering these questions as a community is a challenge both formidable and crucially necessary, requiring the courage of convictions, a spirit of cooperation and open channels of communication. Speaking as a practitioner, I believe the robust, nuanced understandings of music and/as media that are presented in these pages can point towards meaningful solutions in particular local settings. The perspectives provided here can help congregations move beyond a utilitarian understanding of music and media to consider the kind of Divine and human connections being formed through their music-making. And as reflection informs action, both can be brought in line with congregations’ highest ideals and can encourage human flourishing for those within and outside Christian communities of faith.
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ingalls, Monique. 2011. ‘Singing Heaven Down to Earth: Spiritual Journeys, Eschatological Sounds, and Community Formation in Evangelical Conference Worship’. Ethnomusicology 55 (2): 255–79.
Ingalls, Monique, Anna Nekola and Andrew Mall. 2013. ‘Christian Popular Music, U.S.A.’. In The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, eds J.R. Watson and Emma Hornby. Canterbury Press online publication. http://www.hymnology.org.uk/.
LarkNews. 2006. ‘Animatronic Band Takes Guesswork Out of Worship’. LarkNews.com. http://www.larknews.com/archives/250.
Meyer, Birgit. 2003. ‘Material Mediations and Religious Practices of World-Making’. In Religion Across Media: From Early Antiquity to Late Modernity, ed. Knut Lundby, 1–19. New York: Peter Lang.
Nekola, Anna E. 2009. ‘Between This World and the Next: The Musical “Worship Wars” and Evangelical Ideology in the United States, 1960–2005’. PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Porter, Mark. 2014. ‘The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies’. Ecclesial Practices 1 (2): 149–66.
Reily, Suzel. 2002. Voices of the Magi: Enchanted Journeys in Southeast Brazil. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
1 See Mark Porter’s (2014) discussion of the development of Congregational Music Studies as a field.
2 For a more in-depth exploration of the relationship of congregational worship music to the Christian popular music industry in the 1990s and 2000s decades, see Ingalls, Nekola and Mall (2013). For discussion of the role of music within the evangelical ‘worship wars’, see Nekola (2009).