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Worship, Music & MinistryA Journal of the United Church of Christ Musicians Association

Fall 2014VOL. XIII, NO. 1

United Church of Christ Musicians Association, Inc.P.O. Box 370361, West Hartford, CT 06137-0631WWW.UCCMA.ORG

2 Editor’sNote PeterStickney

3 ExpandingtheMusicalPalette BrianParks

15 Arise,Proclaim! AnthemcomposedbyMarkA.Miller

23 TakingYourChoironTour:PartTwo JimLarrabee

27 ChurchMusicasSomæstheticPraxis ChristophSchlütter

31 AdviceonManagingaHymnCompetition RickSeaholm

34 AdventandChristmasLiteraturefortheDiverseMusician Dr.PeterStickney

35 InfantHoly,InfantLowly DanceChoreographybyMarciaL.Miller

36 SideDishesfor“HymnandSermon”Sandwich RebeccaandPaulSchnell

Contents

TheUnitedChurchofChristMusiciansAssocation,Inc.isaself-supportingassociationof,byandformusiciansservingUCCchurchesacrosstheUnitedStates.

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Worship, Music & Ministry is a publication of the United Church of Christ Musicians Association, Inc. and is issued three times a year. The journal is distributed to members of UCCMA as a benefit of membership. All correspondence concerning membership in UCCMA, changes of address and other inquiries should be addressed to the United Church of Christ Musicians Association, P.O. Box 370631, West Hartford, CT 06137-0631. Submissions to the journal should be sent to Peter Stickney, P.O. Box 237, Newfield, ME 04056. E-mail: peter@firstparishsaco.org. Information about the United Church of Christ Musicians Association is available at www.uccma.org.

Copyright © 2014 by the United Church of Christ Musicians Association, Inc.

Editor’s NoteDear Mighty Musicians,

It is with great joy and enthusiasm that our Fall 2014 issue of Worship, Music and Ministry is sent to press. Our collective intent is that your diverse music ministries will benefit from the practical ideas, thoughts and insights offered in this issue.

I am pleased that this journal features a free advent octavo for UCCMA members to use in their ministry of music. For convenience, it has been printed on the centerfold pages, which you can simply lift out intact by opening the staples. (If you would like an additional percussion and brass part just email me.)

In our first article, Brian Parks uses the word “musics” in the plural in an effort to debunk the notion that our area of discipline is monolithic. He is not the first to use the plural and he urges us to try it out.

Marcia L. Miller has gifted us with a sacred dance created on an Advent/Christmas song that is accessible and lovely. Rick Seaholm invites us to use the Advent hymn that is part of his article on hymn competitions. And, as always, this journal is filled with helpful information and thoughts to ponder.

At our July board meeting in Chicago, it was decided that I stay on as editor. I do hope you will send your ideas for articles — especially technology, praise music, handbells and art — to me for consideration in future journals. Also, I trust that you will start planning for our wonderful conference that takes place next summer, July 12-15, 2015, in the Chicago area.

As always, it is our hope that the plethora of musical topics and tools will help you in your ministry.

Many Blessings,Peter Stickneypeter@firstparishsaco.org

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The impulse to write this article comes out of a response to what I perceive to be a too-broad dichoto-

mization of church service musics as either “traditional” or “contemporary.” As a musician, I come as much out of the world of experimental music and free jazz as I do from strict Western classical training. So when I was first asked about doing a contemporary church service, I thought it meant that I should pick music by “contemporary composers,” meaning people such as Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, and Milton Babbitt. My mind did not jump to Chris Tomlin and Praise Teams generally. Such was my naiveté when I began working as the organist and choir director at Higganum Congregational Church in 2008. However, I continued to note a broad distinction between the traditional and contempo-rary, and that divide has been taken up in recent scholarly investigations. Many scholars have made new evangelical musics the focus of their research (see Evans 2006; Ingalls 2008), and Deborah Justice has asked significant questions in examining the co-presence of so-called Traditional and Contemporary separate services in the same church (Justice 2010, 2012). As an outsider – my childhood religious training was Reformed Juda-ism – I could not help notice the many different musical endeavors that were being left out of this debate. Further, I wondered about the folding-in of other musical types, such as global and ver-nacular musics, and whether that process was enacted fairly.

This article, then, is an attempt to understand that vast terrain of music outside of these rigidified “traditional/contemporary” poles. This article is both descriptive and prescriptive. I describe my years of engagement as a fully active music director in Congregational churches, my interventions therein, and my epiphanies regarding what functions best. The prescriptive element comes out of those conclusions I have drawn from these experiences; I make some sugges-tions as to possible deployments of these

overlooked musics, and I draw where I can from the corpus of related church music. As I have found out, the chasm between the poles is not so deep as I once thought, and many composers have made many attempts to bring unconventional techniques to church musics. To begin, I foreground the discussion with a question that invariably surfaces.

Indeed, it is one of the most inveter-ate, unanswerable questions facing the ecclesial musician: Should current vernacular music be heard in the cur-rent church service? There is a certain logic to it, of course; Geoffrey Beaumont defended his notorious “Twentieth-Century Folk Mass” (1955) by claiming that the apostolic liturgical music would have used the “normal music of the day.” Ergo, we should do so now. Theologian Erik Routley debunked that claim imme-diately (see Ogasapian 2006: ‘Conflict and Diversity’), by refuting the idea that early ritual musics were at all concerned with appealing to cultural trends. But certainly, ministers, parishioners, and musicians can’t help but think about it. In an era where there is so much doom and gloom foreseen regarding the plight of “serious” church music1, it is an alterna-tive the mind quickly goes to. At this year’s biennial meeting of the American Guild of Organists in Boston, the AGO’s executive director James Thomashower implored us all to learn and play music from Disney’s Frozen. Calling it “crack for children,” he invoked its use as a way of defrosting children’s attitudes towards the pipe organ. The proclamation was met with the soft murmuring that massed organists are very good at doing. I have two young children myself, and they have neither heard nor seen any media from the movie Frozen, although my daugh-ter’s classmates sing it enough that she has picked up that it exists. Truly, I do not want her to be “tricked” into liking music, and I believe that the reason the songs are popular are simply due to repetitious exposure. My daughter sings “He trusted in God” from Messiah quite perfectly due to such repetitious exposure, and

Expanding the Musical PaletteCareful Integration of Algorithmic, Cross-Cultural, and Vernacular Musics into Flexible-Liturgical Church Services

by Brian Parks

Brian Parks, MA, AAGO is the minister

of music at the First Church of Christ,

Congregational, UCC in Suffield,

Connecticut and is an artist-in-residence

at the Montessori School of Greater

Hartford. He also teaches harpsichord

in the Department of Music at Wesleyan

University, Middletown, CT.

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I imagine that the nation’s kids would become equally addicted to Handel if Dis-ney wished them to. But ultimately, the sneaky truth resurfaces: popular music is something people know, profess to like, and is something most musicians outside of academia must reckon with.2

I give the above foregrounding partly to demonstrate how complex it is to bring new musics into any church situation. But in this article, I mean to give some reasons for integrating into the church service three musical paradigms from the last fifty years: indeterminate and algorithmic musics, coming out of the Cage school; cross-cultural musics, with a dose of ethnomusicological perspective; and vernacular musics, which surely don’t need me as their ambassador. As far as the latter category goes, I will discuss my own method for service integration and my apologia for it. I include vernacular musics because the reader will see that I deploy the same reasoning and the same execution for all of the above musical types. I will give workable definitions of these musics, show scores when useful, and discuss implementation and, to the extent possible, consequences.

One plight of the church musician is the relative loneliness of the position when it comes to ethnographic research. I touch upon this problem in my second masters thesis (Parks 2013), and while I recognize the necessary auto-ethnographic com-ponent, I do not consider this a liability. I do not pretend that the efforts I have made at these churches are conclusive or have far-reaching implications for your own practice or for ecclesial musicians generally. Rather, they indicate one such interpolation of a musical environment. I do bring in other such instances of atypi-cal church music when possible. The fun reality of this paradigm is that the more specific a church musician is in his or her writing about his or her experience, the more readers tend to identify with them. I remember the real delight I felt in finding anthropologist Charlotte Fris-bie’s summation of the plight of what for her was an everpresent side profession (Frisbie 2010).

This paper is drawn from my six years of church musicking as a music director (or “Minister of Music”) at Congregational churches in Connecticut. My training includes the taking of advanced degrees in both experimental composition and ethnomusicology, both from Wesleyan

University in Middletown, CT. For both Masters theses, I discuss the below meth-ods for music integration in churches; the second thesis deals more directly with this challenge. It should not be avoided that my faith formation is Jewish. I have never been baptized, to semi-quote from a sermon given by another Jewish church musician, Carrie Cherone, a singer at Old South Church (Boston, MA). I am giving the reader an easy out: I write very much as an outsider to the tradition; you can shrug and say, “well, he isn’t a Christian, so how can he know?”

I am also drawing from some scholarly experiences that bear mention: I talked about these concepts and played exam-ples at a scholarly gathering in Oxford University called “Christian Congrega-tional Music: Local and Global Perspec-tives” (August 2013); I also acted as a discussant at a roundtable format at the New England Chapter for the Society of Ethnomusicology (Bowdoin College, April 2013). The discussion was entitled The Role of Sacred Music, Sound, Text, and Syllables to Instill a Sacred Experience. Finally, I presented much of the content in this article at the 2014 biennial conven-tion of the American Guild of Organists, already mentioned below. I am grateful to the conveners of these conferences for the chance to think through these issues and to discuss them with invested parties.

Part IA. Defining and Sonifying Algorithmic and Indeterminate Musics “Another philosophical point is more complicated, because it touches on ideal reality, which touches on religion. If numbers existed before music, perhaps before anything, then mathematical con-cepts are eternal, and music that comes from numbers is somehow connected with the infinite.”

-Tom Johnson“Found Mathematical Objects” (2001)

Me (talking to Janet Danielson):Do you write sacred music?Janet Danielson: All my music is sacred.

-in conversation at Ripon College Cud-desdon, Oxford University, August 2013

Algorithmic music is rule-based music.3 A round is a straightforward example of a rule-based music where the piece’s contents are not through-composed, but rather unfold from a small amount

of information with clear instructions. I have also heard algorithmic music called system music and process music, and the composer Tom Johnson (b. 1940) more famously coined it as “minimal music” (Johnson 1989). These are the monikers given to my own pieces and those of its most famous progenitors such as John-son, Philip Glass (b. 1937), Alvin Lucier (b. 1931), and Steve Reich (b. 1936), among others. Composers who deploy algorithms may use them for diverse pur-poses, such as determining the form of a piece, its rate of change, its materials, its duration, or any other parameter that can be placed under rule. For our purposes, I will broadly outline three categories of algorithmic music. For each example, I will provide a score or score excerpt from original compositions (the exception being William Albright’s “Father, We Thank Thee”) that I have realized in church services at Higganum Congregational Church, First Church of Christ, Congre-gational (Suffield CT), or both. After this section, I include all of the figures at once for ease of reference, as well as a table which links the scores to audio tracks available online which accompany this article.

Category 1. Algorithms that the com-poser transcribes into a piece’s elements.

Here, most everything in a piece is fixed, because it is the composer who is follow-ing the rules. For my piece, permuta-tions on laudate dominum for SATB chorus, each voice part is given a six-note series, one for each syllable in the phrase ‘laudate dominum,’ that spans an ambit of four diatonic pitches. Per piece sec-tion, each voice part repeats each note/syllable in their sequence either one, two, three, or four times, with the other voices taking the other number repetitions. After they have completed a cycle, the voice parts switch numbers of repetition, keeping the same note/syllable relations. I proceed through the piece until every voice part has done every number once, and then it stops (see Figure 1, excerpts from the score). In Tom Johnson’s The Chord Catalog, all of the 8,178 chords within one octave are played in order (all the two-note chords, all the three-note chords, all the four-note chords, etc., up to the one 13-note chord). He gives the scheme for how to proceed through this gamut. There are many such examples, and sometimes indeterminate processes more akin to categories 2 and 3 below can

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be made into fixed scores that align with category 1. An example of this is John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD, wherein the matrices Mozart deployed for his salon dice games were run through a computer program to produce discrete scores for individual harpsichord players.

Category 2. Algorithms that give inter-preters a limited range of choices, often based off of textually-given rules.

This can also be referred to as “inde-terminate music.” Indeterminacy is straightforward: neither performers nor listeners will play or hear the same exact piece twice; if many parameters are indeterminate, the piece can sound virtu-ally unrecognizable from performance to performance. Christian Wolff ’s for 1, 2, or 3 people is a good example from this category. It is a piece with rigorous (all graphic) instructions, but the rigor lies mostly in the players’ being attuned to their environment so that they respond diligently to the sonic cues they hear their colleagues making. His textual piece, Stones, was one such piece that I borrowed from heavily (as I admit in the score) to create a piece for congregational performance as a musical prelude during Lent 2013 (see Figure 2).

For the June 1st 2014 service in Suffield, my teenage bell choir performed inde-terminate canon for handbell ringers (see Figure 3). This piece grew out of an improvisational game I often do with young singers. We stand in a circle and throw a ball from one person to another. The ball works well, because it keeps a reflective motion in the circle, instead of just being handed off one to another. After we throw the ball for a while, we determine a consistent route from person to person. Then, we remove the ball and do it with sound. A person starts a sound, and the person to whom he would “throw” it repeats the sound and sends it along. From there, the starter can initiate new sounds or keep sending the same sound, and so some counterpoint unfolds from this repeat-fired canon.

Here, we did the same thing in the com-fortable facing rectangle of the handbell rehearsal room (a loft high above the left side above the chancel where we play for regular services). Instead of imitat-ing tones, the performers need merely to keep the route going from person to person and play anything in front of them. The performers are limited by

their array of three or four handbells, and the duration is quite circumscribed by my indication to limit the initiator to a certain number of impulses (which means that all participants will play the same number of impulses). In our prelude for church, I told my starter ringer to only initiate ten impulses, so the piece only last 38 seconds. Nonetheless, it sounds different every time, and it even gives a tribute to dodecaphonic music, in that there is no particular tonality the piece describes other than equality throughout a three-octave chromatic set. Finally, I include non-deterministic amen (for two or more voices) (see Figure 4), which requires some intense practice for the divisions of singers to practice pitch matching across octaves. This piece has been performed multiple times at both Higganum Congregational Church, First Church in Suffield and in concert-settings in sacralized concert spaces at Wesleyan University (Memorial Chapel, February 2013; Beckham Hall, April 2014). For Pentecost Sunday 2013 at First Church, the choir used the syllables “Ve-ni Cre-a-tor Spi-ri-tus” instead of “A-men” to move through the piece.

Category 3. Algorithms that allow for the co-presence of strict adherence to nota-tion and flexibility of interpretation.

Although this may seem it has only a neg-ligible difference from the above category, I invoke it so as to differentiate it from those pieces that intentionally prob-lematize repetitious performances, and I especially use it here because church musicians may find this to be a happy medium. I would argue that the famous ars combinatoria pieces of Mozart and Stadler, in which the composers published elaborate matrices indicating rules for possible paths of procession through small musical phrases, are precursors to such pieces (see Ratner 1970; Lorrain 2003). To restate what I write above in Category 1, the Mozart processes, while giving performers the power of the dice to determine their own realization each time, is a precursor for absolutely-notated pieces (Category 1) in the 20th century, such as John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD, where computer programs running Mozartian matrices produced through-composed scores, divided amongst six harpsichordists (to be played in simultaneity). From the 20th century canon, pieces such as Terry Riley’s In C give performers 53 different “melodic

patterns” (Riley 1964) to be played in sequence. The patterns are straightfor-ward and he allows that a large number of musicians may participate on different instruments. Crucially for our purposes, he gives specific notes and rhythms. William Albright’s “Father, We Thank Thee” is a hymn eminently reproducible by church ensembles, and the piece has a very interesting history: it was the “win-ner” of sorts after a call by conveners of the conference “Music in the Church: A Long View” held by the Schola Cantorum at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City. Actually, he wrote two pieces for the conference, the other being “An Alleluia Super-Round for eight or more singers (similar or mixed voices) and instruments (optional),” a piece which theologian Erik Routley holds up as the apex of the musical fulfillment of Pauline hermeneutics (see Routley 1978: 27). However, “Father, We Thank Thee” was written to fulfill a call that four active composers write a singable hymn, suit-able for inclusion in the hymnal Ecumeni-cal Praise (now out of print).4 Albright’s hymn is eminently feasible to sing, and is included in the influential Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church in America. How-ever, its full title reveals its fullest concep-tion: “Father, We Thank Thee: A song of thanksgiving for unison choir, soloist or congregation, with piano or organ accom-paniment and optional instruments.” (See Figure 5) Note here the many ways that Albright, the music director of a mainline church in Ann Arbor (notwithstanding his professorship and international renown), takes into account the variable forces of most churches. When it comes to the notes, there is some rigor: the hymn-tune must be followed so that a congregation or unison choir can do so. But besides giving an open instrumental option, he gives musical notes so that the musicians are able to have some grounding amidst the variability. For versions I have done, I have taken the spirit of the piece and entrusted child handbell ringers to ring as they see fit the tone row given by Albright. In the score reproduced below, these indeterminate elements are listed under “Optional Instrumental Ostinato.”

Part IB. Remarks and Recommendations I use the third category above to dem-onstrate the on-the-ground realities of church musicking in the 21st-century,

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especially in churches of flexible liturgy. There are many angles of inquiry that comprise the New York school of Cage and his ilk (Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Tom Johnson), as well as his friends and compatriots in more far-flung parts of America (James Tenney, Lou Harrison, Larry Polansky, etc.). The angles I have found most rewarding to church settings include game processes and pieces that clearly delineate freedom within restraints. With younger church musicians, the game processes can reveal useful pieces – by playing games or assigning game-like roles in a choral warmup, for instance, a very useful prelude or offertory might just come about. With more experienced musicians, giving something concrete – some conventionally-notated pattern – and indicating options of repetition or of activation can bridge that gap between the risky and the attainable.

There are other composers and piece types worthy of mention here: Larry Polansky is not only an avid composer of rounds with well over one hundred to his credit, but an avid compiler of others’ rounds. Rounds abound in some hymnals as well. They certainly bring a spirit of collaboration and mindfulness to rehears-als, and I rarely regret employing them in services.

Alvin Lucier has not written abundantly for the organ, but his pieces are often sonified and heard in large church spaces due to the acoustical preoccupation he shares with architects. His piece for organ, Hands, lies a bit outside of any of the categories above, but I have found it to be very effective in church services. In the piece, the organist simply sustains three chromatic notes on the pedals (or elsewhere) that align with accessible facade pipes. Then, members of the church stand in front of those pipes and manipulate the wind coming out of the mouth with their hands. They can bend and detune the pitches, thereby causing beating patterns to emerge not otherwise gotten from the instrument. The score is eminently simple (see Figure 6), and I include it with the compilation of scores that follow this section.

Finally, I will describe one other musical event of particular resonance. Before I begin, I must mention that I first experi-enced a piece of this type when a col-league of mine presented work by Pauline Oliveros. However, I cannot find a copy

of that score. I do not pretend to have made this piece up, and I am grateful to Oliveros for not only this experience but for her writing on music and her composi-tions generally.

On April 28 2013, our church celebrated its Music Appreciation Sunday. We have since dispensed with this event type, instead folding it into a church-wide cel-ebration service that recognizes a greater number of the contributive groups that comprise worship. But on that day, we had a lot of music, and I gave the sermon. At the end of my sermon, I asked the congregation to join me in an experiment: I asked them to sing an “Amen” with me; first I partitioned the congregation into four groups, determined by where they were sitting left-to-right across the nave. I then gave them this instruction: to sing, in alternation, the syllables “Ah-” and “-men” with each exhalation, giving themselves plenty of time in between to inhale. I would walk through the con-gregation and give each discrete group a pitch upon which to do that. Once they “had” the pitch in their heads and could reproduce it with each exhalation, they were to close their eyes. I then went on to the next group, providing a new pitch. I did this until all four groups were singing “Amens” at four different pitches, and at innumerable different rates of speed. I did not go into the idea of octave equiva-lency (i.e. pitch class); I let them intuit that. I also let them know ahead of time that we would not do it forever – when my spouse pulled the zymbelstern in the organ, that would indicate the terminal point for the experiment.

That piece best fits category 3 – the direc-tions and materials are fairly strict, but the individual is not required to follow a particular timeline. While I do not have a score for it, I do include the live instruc-tions given during the sermon as well as the realization that occurred on the Band-camp site that accompanies this article. All of the original pieces included in this section of the paper are included on that site, and I invite interested readers to hear these rough but useful artifacts from these pieces’ inclusions in services.

As far as the epigraphs are concerned that head this section: Tom Johnson is a churchgoer, one of the few believers from his circle of intellectual New York composers. But he does not begrudge them their agnosticism or atheism, and I believe this statement is partially a

way of unifying those who pursue similar aims in musical creation. In contrast to Pauline theology, Tom is not so concerned with the ontology of belief, but rather in the divinity of the materials themselves. In the same essay that I quote above, he discusses both Greek iconography and crystallographic groups in Islamic art. He is struck by the similarities between his own meta-project to sonify mathematical objects, the reality that the Greek iconic figure is looking at you (not you looking at it), and Islamic mathematicians’ tiling of polygons. For the latter, he noted that these mathematician-artisans:

believed the geometry they were finding was somehow sacred. God is everywhere. God is making this order, making this geometry, and finding it and looking at it will help us to free us from our earthly ties. It was clear that that they felt that they were only find-ing these patterns, they would never have claimed to be creating them, and like the icon painter, they never signed their work either. (Johnson 2001: 18, emphases in original)

As for Professor Danielson’s response to me (in the other epigraph), it requires no explanation.

Figures, Scores, and Recordings for Parts IA & IBThe scores as referred to above, in order of appearance:

Figure 1: excerpts from permutations on ‘laudate dominum’ © 2012 Brian Parks, specifically the indices where the voice parts switch to a new state of repetition and order; the score’s pages align with the following timestamps on the record-ing: Page 1 (Score) – 0:02; Page 7 (Score) – 2:29; Page 13 (Score) – 4:45; Page 19 (Score) – 6:54

Figure 2: score, as printed in Bulletin, for thirty sounds for the thirtieth day of Lent, for Congregation and their objects from home, for the service on 17 March 2013

Figure 3: score for indeterminate canon for handbell ringers, presented during the prelude by the Campanelli Handbell Choir (6th-12th graders), 1 June 2014

Figure 4: score for non-deterministic Amen for two or more singers

Figure 5: score for William Albright’s “Father, We Thank Thee”

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Figure 6: score for Alvin Lucier’s Hands for organ and one or more assistants

From the Bandcamp site(brianparks.bandcamp.com):

permutations on ‘laudate dominum’ (Category 1, Figure 1)non-deterministic Amen(Category 2, Figure 4)indeterminate canon for handbell ringers (Category 2, Figure 3)Congregational Amen to end a sermon (just the Amen) (Category 3)Congregational Amen to end a sermon (with preparatory instructions given dur-ing sermon)mensural alleluia (Pentecost 2013)(Category 1)non-deterministic ‘veni creator spiritus’ (Category 2)thirty sounds on the thirtieth day of Lent (Category 3, Figure 2))

Part II. Cross-Cultural Musics There are many published hymns which claim African roots. Drilling into those claims to verify authenticity is far beyond the scope of this paper. Speaking as a practitioner of some of the world’s musics with practical expertise (not cultural expertise) in Ghanaian drumming and singing, I can say that most musical realizations of sheet music purporting an African origin exhibit blatant misap-propriation. Using “world” percussion to play ostinati is also a form of exoticism that undermines the integrity of both church and cross-cultural musics. I do not hold only Christianity to this standard. A few years ago, I attended a Shabbat service whose musical accompaniment was a motley assemblage of acoustic guitarist, clarinetist, a female and male vocalist, and a Jembe player. The Jembe, purchased by its drummer from a music shop, had no function I could discern other than inserting a bit of world other-ness into the ensemble. In other words,

it did none of the things that a Jembe traditionally does (see Charry 1996 for a comprehensive detailing as to those func-tions). That is also misappropriation.

Instead of bending these traditions to the circumscribed function of a lyrical setting, another option is simply to present these musics as well and honestly as one can. This is, after all, what we attempt to do when we teach anthems to our choirs or learn and perform works by Bach and Buxtehude. Admittedly, there is a lot of borrowing, excerpting, and approximat-ing of seminal Western-music works (how many times can Beethoven’s 9th symphony be respun to serve nefari-ous reductive purposes, I ask you?). It is disrespectful, though, to actuate that repurposing without some direct encoun-ter with the exploited culture in question. I also recognize that this can be debated – to what degree have we gained the right to manipulate the “Hallelujah” chorus or

Figure 1.Excerpts from permutations on ‘laudate dominum’ © 2012 Brian Parks

continued on page 12

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Figure 2.

Congregational Prelude as the score appeared in the day’s bulletin;example of indeterminate algorithmic music (Category 2)

thirty sounds for the thirtieth day of Lent to be played by the congregation of First Church, Suffield

17 March 2013

make thirty sounds with the small resonant objects that you have on your person. if you do not have objects specific to this purpose, make do with what objects you do have or borrow an object or two from someone near you. this piece is influenced by the composer Christian Wolff, who says in his score for Stones (1969), “Make sounds with stones, draw sounds out of stones, using a num-ber of sizes and kinds and colours, for the most part discretely; sometimes in rapid sequences...Do not break anything.”

if you lose count along the way, make the best guess as to how far along you were and resume counting until you reach thirty. while making and attending to your sounds, attend to the corpo-rate sound-scape as well.

the piece ends when every person has made thirty sounds.

brian parksminister of music

first church of christ, suffield

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Figure 3.

Prelude presented by the Campanelli Handbell Choir (6th-12th graders) for service on 1 June 2014

indeterminate canon for handbell ringers(for two or more players)

materials: mallets on handbells*

- A circuit is assigned that passes through each member of the ensemble once and only once.

- Once the person before you strikes their bell, you follow by striking any bell in your typical arsenal at your own pace.

- The starter activates a cycle each time he or she strikes a bell, and when he or she no longer initiates, the piece eventually ends.

NB: The director may want to indicate how many iterations through the cycle will constitute the piece, so that the starter has a goal in mind and can count to something.

*Regularly-rung handbells are a perfectly viable option, but the teenaged ensemble that I worked with on this piece enjoyed using their mallets. Certainly, a fun option is for the starter to independently choose or alternate mallets or handbells as the piece unfolds, and therefore the cycles themselves will vary timbrally.

© Brian Parks 2014Suffield Connecticut

Figure 4.

Non-Deterministic Amen (for at least two singers)

The piece consists of two syllables: “Ah-” and “-men.”

The group at large is divided into two or more comparably sized subgroups, with each subgroup organizing themselves as a line.* Each subgroup assigns two people as the “bookends.” These two must be comfortable choosing pitches on their own; they stand at the ends of each line. One of them will start. This person will also initiate the ending.

Whomever starts chooses a note in her head and sings it on “Ah.” All starters begin more or less simultaneously. The next person in line, once comfortable that he can reproduce the pitch class (meaning that pitch in any octave), also sings “Ah.”

This continues all the way down the line; once a singer starts, she sings continuously, taking breaths and resounding the note in a leisurely way. When the other bookend is ready (after having sung the “Ah” for a while), she stops, imagines a new pitch and sounds that pitch on “men.”

The adjacent person (still singing “Ah”) continues singing “Ah” while listening to the new pitch on “men.” When he has an idea of what that pitch is, he stops singing, imagines the new pitch or pitch class, and sings it on “men.” He only sings when absolutely sure of the new note.

This continues down the line, the “Ah” incrementally turning into a “men.” The original “Ah” starter will then sing “men” for a while before stopping and reinitiating the “Ah” on a new pitch.

The process is replicated as many times as desired.

When the starter wishes to initiate the ending, she still must sing “men” for a while. When ready, she starts the silence by not singing anything in an obvious way. The silence should travel at the same pace that the group has generally described throughout the piece. Meaning, each singer must consciously imagine and identify the silence before stopping their “men.” The corporate subgroup should make the disappearance of sound as deliberate as possible, per group.

When all groups have finished, the piece is over.

NB: There is room here for specificity per performance, site, and group. For example, the group may decide to sing “-men” with both the “m”sound and the “n”sound audible each time. Or, they may decide to only resound the “-eh” part of it with no consonants except for the first sonification (for the “meh”) and the last (for the “en”). The most important thing is that once a non-end person begins singing their note and syllable, he sings that note and syllable until something new appears right next to him. There should be no cessation of sound that betrays anticipatory listening to the change going on further down the line.

© Brian ParksSpring 2011/rev. 2013

11

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the 9th Symphony? But I would simply say that before cherry-picking from the aspects of African, Indian, or other non- Western music that we think will please our constituency, we must take on some real training with it.

To that end, I have only played music in church as I have had it taught to me by native scholars and performers. Here, I do not perceive an intellectual or moral problem. Much of the music I have enacted in service are processional, gathering, or deferential musics – the latter category referring to a tribute to elders or an expression of gratitude for a good harvest. Because I do not have the necessary knowledge to claim expertise of the cultures’ deeper meanings and nuances, I do not project any spurious tie-in to Christian ethics or theology when presenting these musics. I con-sider these musics representative of the social-communal presence of churches; they serve to wake people up and strike a new awareness of what is out there in the musical world. Therefore, I would rather hear that musical world as it is, rather than as an ill-fitting costume for Ameri-can Christian language and rhetoric. To put it even more simply, sometimes music in church is just meant to be beautiful and to transport. We sometimes play organ music that has no sacred origin (notwith-standing the organ’s alchemic knack to sacralize what it sonifies). We often play jingoistic music in church whose ties to scripture and apostolic theology are spu-rious at best. But they work because they have a wider cultural function; so too does cross-cultural musicking have its place in the church. It needs no more apologia or recasting than these other musics; let them be.

Part III. Vernacular (read: Pop) Musics After all this, I will finally address the “Contemporary” pole as I described it in the beginning. As with cross-cultural musics, I understand the impulse to bend a musical style to fit a Christian agenda. But as with cross-cultural musics, it comes off as cloying and misappropria-tive. Certainly, artists do write Contem-porary Christian Music with the express intention of giving a particular aesthetic sheen to a particular theological message. I doubt its catholic effectiveness. Rather,

Figure 6.

Hands by Alvin Lucier for organ with one or more assistants

Choose 3 or more adjacent semitones anywhere on the organ keyboard. Sustain them throughout the performance by any means.

Any number of assistants lower and raise the pitches of the sustained tones by wav-ing their hands across the mouths of the sounding pipes. They freely vary the speed of their waving, listening for audible beats that are produced by the closeness of the tunings. They may wave in parallel or contrary motion, crossing tones and reaching unisons.

The assistants may climb up on ladders to reach the mouths of the sounding pipes.

HANDS was written for Ron Ebrecht and first performed by him on April 20, 1995 in Memorial Chapel, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.

popular music catalyzes an oceanic emotional state – connection to a past common culture. The nostalgia and love of particular hymns is not dissimilar from the trigger phenomenon that accompa-nies the memory recall of popular music amongst groups of comparably-aged subjects (see Eerola and 2013; Lowis and Hughes 1997; Bartlett and Snelus 1980).

When I receive my weekly shipment of catalogs from various music publication houses, the preponderance of the adver-tised musics deploy popular or vernacular music tropes – rock band instrumenta-tion, backbeat rhythms, and pop chord progressions. These musical elements are entangled with a variety of lyrical types, including iconic texts: benedictions, the Lord’s Prayer, doxological refrains, hymn-texts, etc. The converse also exists in abundance: a variety of hymn-tunes are overlaid in a single song, often to new religious poetry. While I will not launch into a paroxysm against or in favor of the text settings, I will comment that the borrowing or repurposing of popular music devices is not much different from the borrowing of “ethnic” music devices. Why not then present popular musics as they actually are? In separate editions of Conntact, the Connecticut Conference’s UCC quarterly newsletter, two articles took up the phenomenon of unsanitized pop musics being played and heard in churches (Page 2012; Triblets 2011). Drew Page, Conntact’s media assistant, brought up many of the issues I raise here, includ-ing the deployment of Korean drumming in Storrs Korean Church UCC. Mostly, he focuses in on the unfiltered realization of a Michael Jackson song at the Con-gregational church in Willimantic (CT).

Likewise, in Valerie Triblets’s article (in which she describes forming a rock-ish band at the Rocky Hill Congregational Church), she objects to the idea that only intentionally religious music is worthy of inclusion in church. She says, “...I’ve long held the belief that any music that sincerely shares and expresses the human condition is prayerful and brings us closer to God” (Triblets 2011: 4). The key word there, of course, is “any.” In Table I (page 14), I list the different pop songs, artists, and musical delivery mechanisms that I have explored in my capacity as music director at both Higganum and Suffield. Again, this is not an explicitly prescrip-tive chart. It may merely illustrate the long leash that my church handlers give me at these sites; or, it may reflect Ms. Triblets’s assertion that the emotions con-veyed by popular musics resonate effec-tively in liturgical settings, irrespective of their club, street, or Top-40 origins.

My most recent foray into this realm of popular music negotiation was an arrangement I made of a hugely popu-lar song, “Brave,” by the singer Sara Bareilles. Frankly, I cannot stand this song, but it was one of the favorite songs of the lone graduating senior, Jill Jenkins, from our teenaged handbell choir (the Campanelli Ringers). So I arranged it for the ensemble. When I told the children’s choir, they were thrilled with the choice, and they wanted to do a “flash mob”-style dance to accompany the event. Indeed, during the second “verse” (there was no singing while the bells started), the children rose out of the pews and began to make their way up to the chancel. They arrived there for the chorus. With great fanfare, they sang the chorus while

continued from page 7

13

Endnotes1 In one such example (among very many), David Vogels writes “[i]f current trends continue, the traditional field of classical music is on its way to extinction” (Vogels 2013: 56).

2 In Chosen Voices, ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin takes up the parallel debate which took place amongst hazzanim in the Jewish cantorial tradition throughout the mid-20th century (1989:215-8). See also Parks 2013: ‘Case Studies’ for an eth-nographic depiction of a single church’s management of the issue.

3 Admittedly, all music has rules. We have rules that assign durations to certain shapes and pitches to certain spaces and lines in a heightened staff. But in algo-rithmic music, the algorithm provides rules that manifest in the piece’s contents.

4 The other composers were Charles Wuorinen, Ian Hamilton, and Ned Rorem. Thanks are due to composer Dan Lock-lair, who first told me about this conflagra-tion of composers and sacred musicians during a summer composition seminar he taught at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music. Dr. Locklair was kind enough to provide me with a thorough recounting of this event upon request (Locklair 2014: email communication).

ReferencesBartlett, J. C., & Snelus, P. 1980. Lifespan memory for popular songs. The American Journal of Psychology, 551-560.

Charry, Eric. 1996. “A Guide to the Jembe.” Percussive Notes 34.2: 66-72.

Eerola, T., & Vuoskoski, J. K. 2013. A review of music and emotion studies: approaches, emotion models, and stimuli. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30.3: 307-340.

Evans, Mark. Open up the Doors: Music in the Modern Church. London, Oakvlle: Equinox, 2006.

Frisbie, Charlotte. 2010. “You’re also a Church Organist? Whatever For?” in Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts ed. Robin Elliott and Ernest Gordon. Toronto: Wilfred Laurier UP.

Ingalls, Monique Marie. “Awesome in this place: Sound, Space, and Identity in Contemporary North American Evan-gelical Worship.” Ph.D. diss, University of Pennsylvania, 2008. URL: http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3328582

Johnson, Tom. 1989. The Voice of New Music: New York City, 1972-1982: A Collec-tion of Articles Originally Published in the Village Voice. Eindhoven: Apollohuis.

Johnson, Tom. 2001. “Found Mathemati-cal Objects.” MUMAX Seminar. IRCAM. Paris, France.

Justice, Deborah. 2010. “Public, Private; Contemporary, Traditional: Intersecting Dichotomies and Contested Agency in Mainline Protestant Worship Music.” Folk-lore Forum. URL: http://folkloreforum.net/2010/04/19/public-private-contempo-rary-traditionalintersecting-dichoto-miesand- contested-agency-in-mainline-protestant-worship-music/. accessed online July 25, 2014.

_____________. 2012. Sonic Change, Social Change, Sacred Change: Music and the Reconfiguration of American Christianity. Phd Diss., Indiana University.

Locklair, Dan. 2014. Email Communica-tion with Brian Parks.

Lorrain, Denis. 2003. “Realizations of 18th-Century Musical Games: Mozart and Stadler.” Computer Music Multi-disciplinary Research 2003. Montpellier, France.

Lowis, Michael J. and Jenny Hughes. 1997. “A Comparison of the Effects of Sacred and Secular Music on Elderly People.” The journal of psychology, Interdisciplinary and Applied 131.1: 45-55.

Ogasapian, John. 2007. Church Music in America, 1620-2000. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.

Parks, Brian James. 2013. “Musics of a Village Church: a View From the Organ Bench at Higganum Congregational” Mas-ters Theses. Paper 51. Wesleyan University.

Ratner, Leonard G. 1970. “Ars combi-natoria: Chance and Choice in Eigh-teenth-Century Music.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Music: A Tribute to K. Geiringer on his 70th Birthday. Allen & Unwin, London.

Routley, Erik. 1978. Church Music and the Christian Faith. Carol Stream, Illinois: Agape.

Slobin, Mark. 1989. Chosen Voices: the story of the American cantorate. Univer-sity of Illinois Press.

Vogels, David. 2013. “The State of Classical Music in America.” The American Organ-ist 47(1): 56-7.

dancing in unison to steps choreographed by my atheist, Vaganova-trained ballet-dancing wife, for a real unification of faith traditions. Afterwards, they held up hand-made posters that read, “Jill, be brave!” Even my Bach-loving, algorith-mic-obsessed heart melted a little at that.

Part IV. Final Thoughts The contents presented here throw into relief only a small portion of the strange practice that is church music programming in the 21st century. I have attempted to show that it is misleading to so severely bifurcate the far-flung musi-cal goings-on of the Mainline Protestant or flex-liturgical churches in our midst. Every church has varied musical forces that span the size, number, and qual-ity of instruments, the dimensions of their spaces, the available subventive resources, and the aesthetic-cultural attitudes of their primary movers. Previ-ously, I have referred to this complex state of being as the aesthetic ecology of a church (Parks 2013:xxxiii), and employed musicians must reconcile these myriad elements at their disposal on a weekly basis. The suppleness of that state means that music does not have to rigidly align with either the traditional or contempo-rary cultural bind. In fact, the useless-ness of those two monikers becomes quite obvious when we realize how loaded and thorny each of them really are. The Oxford English Dictionary gives four broad definitions of the adjective “tra-ditional” and seven for “contemporary.” Therefore, ascribing narrow musical con-notations to those two words – i.e., hym-nody as belonging to the traditional, or syncopated rhythms as belonging to the contemporary – is mere enervation. As researchers, there is more to be unlocked: if and how marginal compositional prac-tices were embraced or deployed in past centuries, just as the post-war compos-ers enumerated here integrated novel techniques into liturgical practice. As practitioners, we can take solace in know-ing that our toolkit is ever-changing and ever-widening; if we desire to innovate but do not wish to imitate Billy Joel or Creed, there are fresher paths up the new musical mountain.

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Song Artist I associate with the song Instrumentation

Wild Horses The Rolling Stones Organ

All My Love Led Zeppelin Organ

Don’t Worry, Baby The Beach Boys Organ

I Want to Dance with Somebody Whitney Houston Organ (played 12 February 2012, the

day after the pop singer’s death)

Teach Your Children Well Crosby, Stills, and Nash singing and self-accompanying on

guitar

I Want to Know What Love Is Foreigner Organ

Imagine John Lennon Organ with congregational singing

Here Comes the Sun The Beatles Organ

Have You Ever Seen the Rain? Credence Clearwater Revival Organ

You’ve Got A Friend James Taylor singing and self-accompanying on

guitar

Blackbird The Beatles Organ, Guitar, Piano

Will You Love me Tomorrow? The Shirelles Organ

Forget Daniel Clay Harpsichord and Voice (Janet, my

spouse singing)

Isn’t She Lovely? Stevie Wonder Piano and voice (me), and Tenor

Saxophone (Stew Gillmor playing)

A Soft Seduction David Byrne Organ

Strangers The Kinks Guitar, Janet and me singing

Galileo Indigo Girls Guitar, Janet singing

Let it Be The Beatles Organ with Congregation

Where You Lead Carole King Organ with Congregation

In My Life The Beatles Singing and Playing Guitar

Walk the Line Johnny Cash Singing and Playing Guitar

Stand By Me Ben E. King Choir with Organ Accompaniment

War Bob Marley Soloist and Choir with guitar

accompaniment

Overjoyed Stevie Wonder Organ

Lament J.J. Johnson Trumpet, Clarinet, Piano, Drums

Where the Streets Have No Name U2 Organ

I’m Saving All My Love Whitney Houston Organ

Bridge Over Troubled Water Simon & Garfunkel Organ

The Sunny Side of the Street McHugh/Fields Piano

Our love is here to stay Gershwin/Gershwin Organ

“Laura Palmer’s Theme”

from Twin Peaks

Angelo Badalamenti Organ

Brave Sara Bareilles

Youth Handbell Choir, with Children’s

Choir singing and dancing in imitation

of a flash mob

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Table I. Songs from popular culture, presented in Connecticut Congregational church services, 2008-2014