The Hymn I Did Not Like

The survey came to me from the denomination, as surveys so often do.  We're Presbyterian, after all, and we're all about that data, 'bout that data, 'bout that data.

It was exploring the intent of my little church to switch up hymnals, to move from the "blue" hymnals that were brand-spankin' new way back when in the 1990s.  Now, we've got a choose-your-own-color jobbie that's been recently hatched, and they're eager to get it out there.

Some folks, the people who grump about everything, will search eagerly for the hymns that are missing.  Outrage!  My favorite one is MISSING!  Heresy!   But there is, as Jesus once purportedly said in that utterly uncanonical movie, no pleasing some people.

As I wrote when I first encountered "Glory To God," it's a perfectly lovely little collection of sacred music.

Old gospel standards, classic Reformed hymns, Taize music, and a sampling of the better contemporary Christian music?  Excellent.  When I went through it looking for stuff I'd happily have my tiny church sing--because I'd like to sing it myself--I found well over a hundred songs I knew and liked.  That's plenty of Jesus-song to go around.

But when the survey asked me to comment, I realized there was not space there for me to rant about my one issue with it.

There was just one section of the hymnal that bugged me.  Really, genuinely pushed my buttons.  It's deeply heretical, representing a worldview that may never, ever, ever been part of any collection of Presbyterian sacred music before.  It possibly represents an unacceptable conforming of our sacred musical tradition to the blight of modern culture, and if left unchecked, it will potentially corrupt the very soul of the faith.

Alright, sure, that's more than a bit hyperbolic, but I'm trying to generate the requisite sense of net-rage umbrage here.

I am talking, of course, about the page after page of copyright information, permissions, and licensing legalese at the end of the collection.

This--whether in the context of hymns or Christian Contemporary Music--rubbed me a little wrong.  Worrying about copyright on songs of praise to the Creator of the Universe just seems off to my soul.  Attribution?  Sure.  Absolutely.

But ownership?  It seems dissonant, as if any Christian would ever be within their purpose as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth if they sued other followers of Jesus to prevent them from singing and sharing sacred songs.  And here, a whole section, dedicated to the idea of ownership over sacredness.

Grump grump grump, I went.

It got me to wondering: is this new?  I mean, really new?  That I've got a bug in my bonnet about it doesn't mean it's a real thing.  Is this one of those things we do now because the church is increasingly steeped in the values of the marketplace?  Is this yet another manifestation of the ever spreading blight of profit-driven AmeriChrist, Inc.?  Or am I just reading things in?

So I asked my church.  Not the people.  The church building itself.

My church remembers things, it does.  It's an old space, filled with memories of what the church has been.

I have bookshelves in my office, ones that contain hymnals that run waaay back.  Not all the way back to the 1847 founding of the church, but a ways.  So I looked in each of those, to see what they had to say.  I started with the familiar  The Presbyterian Hymnal, deep blue from 1990, which we're using now.  No such section, although there's a wee paragraph in tiny text at the beginning, and little tiny "permissions" text at the bottom of each page.  Copyright is there.

Ratchet it back to The Hymnbook, dating from  1955, back when we were the Presbyterian Church in the United States and the United Presbyterian Church in the USA.  It's paradoxically Red in that Red Scare era.

But not communist, evidently, because there's the copyright notice, comrade.  Same deal as the 1990 hymnal, just a note in a wee font, and a tiny little blurp of text with each hymn where needed.

Then, back to the deep-green-blue of The Hymnal of 1933, which...wait.  Huh.  Just like the brand spankin' new hymnal of 2015, there's a section in it, a couple of pages long, acknowledging permissions from dozens of individuals and publishers.  Well, golly.

But my tiny church was a "Southern" church, in keeping with the very Southern town in which it was founded, so we've also got the deep blue and bold-Gothic-lettered The Presbyterian Hymnal rising out of the Southern church from 1927, plus a dozen or more copies of the words-only mini-editions.  That gets by with one short paragraph on p. II, and some brief attributions.

But wait! There's more!

My office is in an 1827 building, so there are older music books still, ones used by my church in the late 19th and very early 20th century.

There it is, Gospel Hymns No.s 5 & 6, plus several pocket-sized versions, dating back to 1892.  There's a little note, handwritten in a neat cursive pencil, in the front of one.

"Please do not remove from the Presbyterian Sunday School," it says.

The date: September 19, 1902.  113 years ago.

There, on the same page, there's copyright notice, three lines long, small print.

And older still, from 1880, A Selection of Spiritual Songs for the Sunday-School, the cover faded and worn from use.  It's battered and coming apart, and two of the three copies in my office have no remaining copyright pages.  But there, on a worn-away front page in the most complete copy, an announcement:

"THE PUBLISHERS deem it necessary to call attention the the fact that a large part of the tunes and musical arrangements of this book are owned by them..."   And so on, and so forth.

So this has been around for a while, evidently.  The "copyright song" is an older hymn than I thought, one of the few that have carried through the over a century and a half of my church-memory.

It's been the case ever since publishers have printed sacred books as a business, meaning all the way back deep into the modern and industrial era.  Not all the way back, of course.  The Gutenberg Bible makes no mention of it, but then again, Gutenberg did kind of have a corner on the market.

Perhaps my reaction is a strange function of my own newness, of being part of an era when music is everywhere and accessible.  Music itself, almost anything you can imagine, is just a quick skip over to Youtube away.  And sheet music/arrangements?  Those can be found too, right there on the interwebs.

Or perhaps it's that I also spend so much mental time back in the first few centuries of the church, when the passing along of sacred song and story was entirely separate from commerce.  I doubt the original author of that little hymn that the Apostle Paul republished in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians was too put out about lack of attribution.

In that peculiar fusion of the ancient and the net-age, the idea of ownership still jars strangely against both the ease with which we now share and the fierce, unfettered energies of the early church.

But the songs still get shared, I suppose.  Which is what counts.

The Sweet Song of Chaos

For the last few months, I've been listening to just one playlist as I bustle about in our car, shuttling kids from one place to another.   Just one.

It's on an old iPhone, one that's had the sim card removed and every app and image deleted.  In their place, just audio files, thousands and thousands of songs.  I renamed it "Daddy's Tunebrick," turning it a single function device that only exists to store and listen to music without the bother of having calls or texts interrupt my listening pleasure.  

Hey...that sounds like a great idea for a product!  I wonder if anyone at Apple is thinking about such a thing.  Hmmm.

Anyhoo, my Tunebrick has one playlist at the moment.  That playlist is the whole of my music collection.  All of it, every single sound file I possess, set to random play.

Which means, as I drive along, I never know exactly what is coming up next.  If I'm not in the mood for what entropy serves up, I just punch the steering wheel control with my thumb, and we're on to the next thing.  It's not always music.  

Sometimes it's sound effect MP3s, gunshots and explosions that my son downloaded for use in videos.  Sometimes it's the Hebrew teacher who prepared my boys for their bar mitzvahs, teaching and singing her way through a piece of a torah-reading.  It's random. Really and truly random.

Like last night, as I drove my younger son back from his drum lesson.

We clicked through a couple of things, and then listened to a random mp3 from a sound-pack of faux movie trailer voiceovers.  "THERE WAS JUST ONE MAN," intoned the announcer in a rumbling basso, at which we laughed.  We then segued into Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb.  We sang along to that, he and I, as Floyd is his favorite band in the entire universe.  After we'd finished with that, entropy served up the theme song to The Love Boat.

We sang along to that, too, because it's just a bucket of delicious seventies cheese, and when that was done, the universe decided to pitch us Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C Sharp Minor.

"I love this way of listening to things," my son said.  "It's like it's a game whenever we're in the car.  You never know what's coming next."

Just like life, I thought, in a Forrest-Gumpy sort of way.  Just like life.

The Reason We Sing

I was wandering the halls of my son's school this last weekend, as I awaited what was to be the first in a series of performances by my teens.  The little guy...not so little, at 13...had managed to snag the lead role in his eighth grade play, a Roman comedy by Plautus.  Actually rather funny, as it turned out, and he did a great job with it.

It had been an American Suburban Parent afternoon, as I picked up my older son from an all-day rehearsal for District Chorus, and then drove him an hour-and-a-half across the worst traffic in America to swim team regionals, only to then turn right back around to make my younger son's play.

But as I meandered around his middle school, stretching my legs after three-and-a-half hours of kid-shuttling, I came across a sign.  "Music," it said.

Only the word was cast out across a series of other subjects, with the "M" in music being the "M" in math.

The implicit subtext: Music exists here because it helps us perform better academically.  This is a more and more common refrain, as a focus on testing and metrics drives things like art and music, dance and drama out of our educational system.  They are primarily useful, assuming they have utility at all, as a way to neurologically reinforce the important skills that we need to program into our children.

The next day, at my older son's chorus concert, before what was a strikingly beautiful performance, one of the choir directors talked about the importance of music for brain development in adolescents. There was nodding in the auditorium full of parents, and in my mind's ear echoed the words of several dozen conversations with other parents of teenagers.  Their brains are still developing, we say to one another.  The bucket of crazy we're encountering now is just reflective of neurological rewiring, we sigh.  If music helps with that developmental process, then it has value.

Maybe.  Drama teachers and music teachers are hard pressed these days.  Even in Fairfax County, one of the richest counties in the United States, the arts are being cut back to make room for more testing protocols and more administratalia.

And it strikes me, in all of this, that we're increasingly missing the point of both music and being human.

Music has value in and of itself.  It is not subordinate, or a supporting player.  In terms of our humanity, when we assume that the primary value of any activity is its contribution to our productivity, we fail to understand the goal of productivity in the first place.

Oh, we need to work.  Sure.  But once we've gotten a roof over our head and food in our bellies, we do not work so that we can work.  We work so that we can sing, and laugh together, and take time to share our delight in this little flicker of life that we have been given.

Music isn't a bit player, useful primarily because it prepares us for the workplace.

It's the point.

The Strange Songs God Sings To Us

I had a really solid conversation with someone who's planning on joining my little church this last Sunday.  It was technically the opening theological portion of my new member's class, but, er, I don't tend to approach that quite as systematically as other Jesus folks.   Fifteen weeks of theology before you're empowered to tag along for the ride?  Ack.  For some reason, I don't remember Jesus inflicting that on his disciples.  "Set down your nets and follow me, for now I will make you sit through twenty hours of coursework" just doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

I figure, you come, you connect, and when you hear the Gospel and want to join in the sharing of it, you're in.  You've got a lifetime to learn and grow.

My classes area bit more free-range than most, particularly if it's a one on one or just a couple of folks, which it tends to be in a small church.

So our conversation about the Trinity ended up touching briefly on music, and how odd it was that such a universal human thing could be so divisive.  Human beings tend to be musical creatures, and our love of song leaps across the boundaries of culture into every corner of every moment of our history.

It unites us as a deep commonality, or at least that's the idea.  But in actuality, it divides us. We sing, but we sing different songs.  And Lord, but does that bug us when it comes to sharing or being open to other forms.  The "music wars" in churches are legendary, as advocates of traditional music butt heads with those who like "contemporary" music.  Then there are those secular songs we sing in our societies, as wildly distinct as hip hop and country, as modern classical and pop.

I'll confess that I have my own preferences, which tend to be eclectic and wildly variant. I don't like consumerist treacle, I don't like selfishness, misogyny or the willfully simplistic.  But I try to be open, and I try to tolerate other musical styles and find what grace there is to be found in them.  I also can't help thinking how peculiar our arguments over song must seem for God.  Particularly those arguments had by faithful folk of every ilk.

The cultural differences between us, the ones that drive our musical aesthetics, these can't even begin to compare with the depth of the existential chasm that separates us from our Maker.  And as God sings to us, those songs aren't just the ones that we know and love.  Yes, God knows our tunes, and uses them.  But the repertoire of the Numinous goes deep.

There are songs God sings that use words we don't even understand, in languages and forms that are alien to our culture and to our sensibility.  We have to be careful, in our particularity, that we do not close ourselves off to those peculiar tunes.

Dusty Hymns and Songs We've Forgotten

There's a new hymnal recently out for we Prez-bee-teer-yans, one I've heard the rumblings of for a couple of years now.  Within my own teeny tiny church, folks have been asking when and whether we might be making that shift.

Honestly, I don't know.  The whole idea of hymnals in this era continues to strike me as a tiny bit strange and a tich archaic.  I mean, shoot, I love so many of the old hymns, but the hymn as a modern musical form?  Hum.

More new hymns?  I just, shoot, I don't know.  In the now obsolete "blue" hymnal, I almost invariably steer away from the hymns that draw their provenance from the early 1980s.   While I'm typically down with their theology, the lyrics feel like First Church of Portlandia earnest progressivism, and the "new tunes" tend towards lnoodly, indistinct abstraction.

I'll reserve judgment about the new new stuff until a copy lands in my hands, though.

I was musing about our pursuit of new music and the place of the old during the last week, when I had a conversation with my thirteen year old about forgotten songs.  Because even as the old hymns fall away in a wash of Christian Contemporary Music, other music is also fading.

As we drove to his drum class, he connected his iPod to our car radio, then scanned through the artists.  He'd been comparing playlists with his friends at school, particularly one he'd just put together of some of his favorite artists.  He's the fruit of my loins, and that means he's a bit of a mutant, so the playlist in question was entitled "'Nam,"

'Nam?  Shoot.  I was five years old when Saigon fell.  Such an old soul, he can be.  But list was appropriately named, a compilation of his favorite artists from the 1960s and 1970s.

None of my friends knew any of these musicians, he said, a bit put out.  They'd never even heard of them.  He panned down the list of names that bear no meaning for his peers.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.  Creedence Clearwater Revival.  Janis Joplin.  Jimi Hendrix. Meaningless.  You could be making those names up, and his friends wouldn't know the difference.

Not even Hendrix, I asked?  Nope.  And then, as if to drive the dagger deeper, he said, and none of them had ever even heard of Pink Floyd.  It's music that is receding, an increasingly distant ship's smoke on the horizon.

That may change as they grow older, and their base of knowledge expands.  I mean, shoot, I'm not sure I'd ever heard any CCR when I was 13 beyond ads for KTEL compilations.  But then again, it may not.  Those tunes may fade into obscurity.

As human beings have learned to store and keep music, and recordings have become part of our collective memory, the volume of our musical memory just keeps expanding.  Even if you've got complex tastes and an appreciation for the sounds of other generations, there's only so much we can know.

And so we move on, and we forget.  Sometimes, that's for the best.  But sometimes, it means we lose track of our context, and drift away from stories and songs better not forgotten.

Dust in the wind, I suppose.

Echoes, Teaching, and Memory

As I got ready to take the little guy to his drum lesson this evening, he insisted that I download a bunch of Pink Floyd onto my iPhone.  He's been on a hardcore classic rock kick lately, with Zeppelin and Floyd being the rock of choice.  It's history to him, as far back in the past as Count Basie or the Ink Spots are to me.  But good music is good music, and that he is twelve going on thirty doesn't hurt his taste.

And so on the way to the lesson, as we navigated across the snarls of country-worst Beltway rushhour traffic, the sounds of Pink Floyd's Meddle filled the car.

The little guy sat back, soaking it in.   "This is an amazing album," he said.  Then he reclined the bucket seat, and promptly went right to sleep.   In-transit naps seem to be a genetic trait both boys have inherited from their mom.  It's a useful skillset.

This left me in the car, as what was side two of the Meddle record/cassette kicked in.  Back in the analog era, those grooves in vinyl or magnetic variances on a tape would yield Echoes, a twenty-plus-minute drifting bit of sweet psychedelic mind-butter.

As I listened, and as he twitched slightly in his sleep, I was struck by just how long it had been since I last heard that song.  I don't think I've listened to that album since before I got married.  

Twenty years, at least.  Twenty two, more like.

Every note, every change, every word of the lyrics was familiar.  Not a one was surprising, or out of place.  And as much of my life has passed since I last listened to it as had passed when I last heard it.  The last time this music played for me, the Internet wasn't a thing we knew about.  Cell phones weren't common or even viewed as necessary.  I was thin.

Yet my mind received the music like an old and familiar friend, a peculiar assemblage of neurons lighting up in recognition in encounter with the song.

Music is like that.  As are stories.  They linger with us, folding their harmonies and progressions into our minds in a way that simple data cannot.  They become deep memory, and they weave themselves into our identity in ways that are both subtle and inescapable.

Which is why both musicality and storytelling are so key to teaching anything of value.

Family Values and DRM

Over the last few days, as I've downloaded music using the handful of iTunes gift cards that were left over from Christmas, Hanukkah, and my birthday, I've found myself wondering something.

I enjoy music, of all kinds.  But something else I enjoy is sharing said music with my kids.  Their nanos and Touches are filled with music that belongs to me.   I've purchased it, and if it is cool/appropriate, shared it with them.  If I encounter something that I appreciate, I want to pass appreciation for that thing to my kids.  When I download the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack for my own listening pleasure, it immediately populates their players.   It's the fun part of parenting teens and tweens, the part that involves you rocking out together in the van while on the way to drums/swimming/tutoring.

They do the same thing in return, connecting Dad with those things that the younglings are thinking and/or watching.  How else would I have learned of Nyancat, or watched the Epic Rap Battles of History?

Yet I am aware, as my older son grows even taller and high school looms on the horizon, that my boys are growing up.  Soon, Lord willing, they'll be leaving the nest.  That's just how life goes.

And when they do, what then happens to my ability to share with them?   I have no intent of stopping, of course.  But if most of the music is on the family account...hmmm.  I suppose, as things go to Cloud, that they could just continue to snag what they want from wherever they may end up.   This was less of an issue back when I was a lad, and the physical media I owned was the physical media I owned.  It was utterly distinct, physically different, from the collection of music that still rests on silent vinyl in my parent's house.

Everything I own also belongs to my children, and to the grandchildren that will eventually hopefully come.  And to their children, to the thousandth generation, as they say.  But as we go a generation deep into the digital era, I find myself wondering whether DRM and copyright will be used by corporations to trump genetics and inheritance.

I wonder if we'll reach a point where that becomes an issue, when corporations will look at fathers and sons who share a love for the same music, and attempt to prevent us from sharing music and joy across generations.  Will I be able to pass music to my grandchildren, the flesh of my flesh?  Will I be able to have them access my library, without fearing that the RIAA will come knocking at my door, lawyers snarling?

Interesting times, as they say.

With A Stranger's Ears

As I sat in DC rush-hour traffic on my way back from a visit with a church member yesterday, I found some comfort in listening to one of my more centering iTunes playlists.

Like most folks, I have a variety of lists, each of which serves a different purpose.  For working out, I tend to listen to one of two playlists.  "Wide Rhinestone Lapel" is a collection of 70's disco greats, and makes for great driving cardio background.   "Pomp and Bombast" is a collection of blaring loud overblown martial soundtrack music, the perfect ubermensch aural backdrop for chest presses and squats.

But there are others, for other moments.  "Mighty Dorkus" is a collection of the most delightfully overblown music for those times I'm feeling goofy.  "Mr. Wistful" is for when I'm up for a good cathartic emo wallow.  "Nicotine Cloud" is a collection of less-accessible Tom Waits works, which I mostly use to discipline the children.   "You stop pestering your brother NOW, or I'm putting on Frank's Wild Years again!"

In dense traffic, I make a point of staying away from my "Redneck Rampage" playlist of honky-tonk and southern rock.   Instead, I drop into a playlist called "Golden Radiance," most of which is music that reminds me that Jesus Christ isn't just something I say loudly when someone cuts me off.

Yesterday, I noticed something about much of that music.   A significant minority of that list comes from encounters with Jesus music outside of worship, and in the soundtracks of edgier cinema.  Three of the songs, for example, are drawn from Cohen brothers movies.   From "O Brother, Where Art Thou," there's the sublime Down to the River To Pray.  From the recent and quite solid True Grit, I have a pair of songs, both of which were used to reinforce mis en scene, and which play off the old American hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."

Now, the Cohen brothers, well, they ain't Jesus folk.  In a recent interview, it was clear that they also weren't really practicing Jewish folk, either.   As with so many folks, it was Bar Mitzvah and out for them, pretty much.  

But the aesthetic sensibility they bring to their film-making seems to also give them something of a knack for identifying that which is most sacred or most evocative.  Perhaps it's something in their blood, some genetically ingrained temple-keeper way of knowing that gives them an instinct for the sacred.  Once a Cohen, always a Cohen.

But it may also just be 'cause they know the good when they hear it.

This, I would suggest, is a powerful measure of the value of a piece of Christian music.   If it's musical and aesthetic purchase does not extend beyond the doors of the sanctuary and the hearts of the already-faithful, then it's probably not the best vessel through which to connect to folks who aren't already inside the doors.