It has gotten to the point where, if they will not provide me the music, I refuse to sing. I have little love for the revivalist tradition (where the theology is often bad, also!) or CCM. These traditions were usually written by folks who knew what music was. I have found the best traditions of hymnody to be the English Anglican tradition, the German Lutheran tradition, the Genevan Psalter, the Scottish Psalter, and the earlier American hymns. Now, there are rare exceptions within the CCM movement, and there are also plenty of bad hymns. It's a performance, not worship, and it's usually done poorly. I have almost never seen CCM even performed well (and I use the word 'performance' on purpose). They don't usually give the music to the people, only the words, so the congregation cannot learn the music. It winds up being a solo sung (usually poorly!) by the song leader up in the front, wailing away on his guitar with no one else participating.

Congregations cannot do that kind of syncopation very well.

Furthermore, it is not conducive to congregational singing. And it all looks the same, with the very same chord structure for practically every song. The phrases have zero arch, and much in the way of repeated notes (many hymns do this, too, especially in the revivalist hymn tradition, which was never meant to be kept for posterity!). Instead, the structure is very much a moment by moment tension and release, more like jazz. Unfortunately, most CCM does not have anything close to this kind of structure. These phrases, or musical sentences, are then concatenated together to form a far larger arch shape that extends the entire length of the piece or song or hymn. It has a rising action, a point of some sort of height (whether dynamically, or pitch, or rhythmic, or chordal, some point of highest tension), and a resolution, which is usually much shorter than the buildup. The beauty of a musical phrase is in an arch shape. In fact, the parallel of music to language is rather intense: notes=letters, chords=words, phrases=clauses, periods of music=sentences, sections=paragraphs, you get the picture. This last I will stake myself on, for this reason: music is structured according to phrases. The same is true of CCM: it is neither contemporary (all 70's music), nor Christian (in most cases there are a few Scripture songs in CCM), nor music. It's just like Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: it is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Here my deal with Contemporary Christian Music. What do you make of the issue of popular tunes and Christian worship?

Lane, you have better training than any of us. His introduction of the Psalter into common usage was a great stride forward. It was my understanding that the medieval church was rather non-participatory and that Calvin helped stimulate the singing of the laity by his insistence that good singing was part of worship and the birthright of the whole congregation. When I was in high school (back when we only had one President from Illinois who was born in a log cabin and rose to become the messiah of the world) they were singing 'Amazing Grace' to the tune of 'The House of the Rising Sun' (about a house of 'ill repute').

However, didn't some of the 19th century Gospel music draw on the idioms of Stephen Foster for its inspiration? My knowledge of musicology stops at e-g-b-d-f and f-a-c-e. I'm still waiting for someone to set the words, 'as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a sinner from purgatory springs' to the tune of 'Shine Jesus Shine.' Man, you guys love destroying all of the urban myths!

The bartunes band