Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives

Mark Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315451275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Whilst Contemporary Worship Music arose out of a desire to relate the music of the church to the music of everyday life, this function can quickly be called into question by the diversity of musical lives present in contemporary society. Mark Porter examines the relationship between individuals' musical lives away from a Contemporary Worship Music environment and their diverse experiences of music within it, presenting important insights into the complex and sometimes contradictory relationships between congregants' musical lives within and outside of religious worship. Through detailed ethnographic investigation Porter challenges common evangelical ideals of musical neutrality, suggesting the importance of considering musical tastes and preferences through an ethical lens. He employs cosmopolitanism as an interpretative framework for understanding the dynamics of diverse musical communities, positioning it as a stronger alternative to common assimilationist and multiculturalist models.

1 Setting the scene

I arrive at the church around four in the afternoon, two hours before the service is due to start, ready for the band rehearsal. I am looking forward to playing saxophone again. I have spent the previous couple of terms operating the church visuals system, mixing video loops and projecting song lyrics onto the flat-screen monitors which are suspended from pillars around the church building, but the summer months, where many of the team are away from the city, provide space in the life of the church for more-flexible role taking, offering opportunities to mix up the usual routine of alternating set bands.¹ I am pleasantly surprised to be playing alongside Pete Wigley, someone who has previously had a significant musical leadership role in the church but who has stepped more into the background in recent years.

Lauren, the principal worship pastor is leading worship,² and has emailed out the set list ahead of time. Glancing down the email I notice nothing which particularly captures my attention; the list of songs is drawn mainly from a pool of repertoire which is employed fairly consistently across events within St Aldates.³ The first half hour or so of rehearsal time involves the usual routine of waiting around for everyone to arrive and waiting for the sound technician to finish wiring up the stage before the initial sound check. Pete, with whom I am sharing a music stand, has helpfully drawn up a hand-written sheet containing the chords for each of the songs. As someone who hasn’t played in a while I am grateful for this, as the current expectation that repertoire be played from memory doesn’t sit entirely well with my own need for some written reassurance of how things should go.

The drums were moved around for the morning service, so the drummer has to spend some time rearranging the kit and reconstructing the drum cage that usually surrounds them. This provides the opportunity for some debate amongst band members: there have been a number of recent complaints to the church leadership about high sound levels within the church so Lauren is keen to ensure that the drum cage is completely closed off; a position which I, as someone standing next to the kit and who isn’t a great fan of loud music, am in favour of. Adam, on bass, however, is concerned that this will lead to him losing a proper connection with the drummer as he feels the fold-back system is unable to provide an adequate replacement for the transmission of direct sound through the air. In the end Lauren allows him to open the side of the cage a little, a gesture that seems to satisfy him. A little discussion about Paul’s drum setup follows; someone compares the use of a single crash cymbal to a jazz kit, and the tighter sound of the kick and snare this week is also remarked upon by members of the band. Concerns over sound come up again when Adam is asked to turn his bass amp down – he worries that he will no longer be able to properly feel what he is doing, but as the sound is fed back through the fold-back he is reassured.

Upon seeing that I am there to play saxophone, Adam remarks how wonderful it was to play at a wedding gig the night before and to have a horn section inserting funk-stabs into the arrangements. He follows this up later with a comment about how, with the amount of gig playing he’s been doing recently and the relatively small amount of worship playing, he’s forgotten how to play worship.⁴ He nevertheless, after the usual mucking-around during the soundcheck, manages to slip back into the mold fairly effortlessly, at least from the perspective of an onlooker. Later in the evening I think I hear elements of funk coming through in his playing during the bridge of ‘You Alone Can Rescue’, something I try to encourage and pick up on with my saxophone improvisations. During the soundcheck Paul plays around on the drums, creating patterns which clearly fascinate Adam. This free experimentation is common during soundchecks, but is quickly laid aside when proper rehearsing begins. Later in the rehearsal, however, I notice a similar moment as Adam comments on his enjoyment of some of the acoustic guitar lines which Pete has been introducing into the arrangements.

Lauren is introducing a new song into the repertoire for the first time – ‘Beneath the waters/I will rise’ from Hillsong.⁵ She asks Pete what he thinks of the song and he responds by acknowledging the way in which it fills a gap in the repertoire with its talk of baptism, but suggests that he would have liked it to have a little more focus on the necessity of sharing in Christ’s suffering required in order to be raised. I find that I am drawn to some of the imagery of the song, and its connection with aspects of biblical images rarely used in Contemporary Worship Music. Alongside this, however, I find myself slightly disappointed by the predictable way in which the melody lines and chord progressions of the song seem to conform closely to the familiar patterns of the Hillsong repertoire and by the way in which interesting ideas that I feel could have been developed further seem to be hidden within what I find to be a much more generic set of lyrics.

The first song in the set leads to a certain amount of discussion about arrangements. A number of the musicians have been at the New Wine summer conference, where they played and rehearsed an arrangement which Lauren wishes to repeat here.⁶ Paul, on drums, doesn’t really see the difference between the New Wine arrangement and the regular way in which the piece would be played, but Lauren points out that it is more poppy than the usual way of playing. I’m struck by the way in which everyone seems to have a deep familiarity with the ins and outs of this song in a way that I, as someone who hasn’t played in a while, don’t.

During the rehearsal there are points where Lauren reflects self-consciously on what she is doing musically within the worship set. When the key of one of the songs requires alteration, she expresses frustration that it is moved into the key of E, not wanting the entire first set within the service to be in this same key – a tendency in her planning that she is aware of and dislikes, wishing for a greater degree of variety.⁷ The same frustration emerges when it seems that she will be starting most of the songs in the first set purely on keys and vocals – she doesn’t want to become predictable and boring to this extent and so welcomes the opportunity to allow Pete to start ‘I will exalt You’ on acoustic guitar. At one point I make a comment about something she does which departs from the structure on the set list and she observes that she is much less predictable and structured than fellow worship leader Rich, a comment that leads to a little discussion about whether this should be perceived as a positive or a negative quality. Either way, it clearly seems to be part of her musical self-conception and the way in which she sees her practice of leading musical worship.

As we finish rehearsing and make our way towards the Oak Room for a time of pre-service prayer I am struck by the choice of music put through the sound system by Will on the sound desk. The arrangement seems to break away from the soft-rock of the standard St Aldates sound into a more highly-produced pop sound-world, with greater use of synthesised sounds and stand-out melodic figurations. I mentally put this down to his personal tastes and interests and notice that the next song to come through is one which is much more familiar within the regular sound world of St Aldates. Perhaps he had used the period of time when the church was still half empty to demonstrate a little bit of his own tastes before reverting to type as people began to arrive and fill the chairs and aisles of the building.

There is a moment towards the end of the service where Charlie (the Rector) makes it clear that he wants Lauren to continue playing on her own during the prayer ministry time – I share a look with the other musicians questioning whether he really means to exclude us in this way. Adam remarks that Charlie doesn’t realise that we’re able to play quietly if we want to.

After the service I am pleasantly surprised by the number of people who compliment me on my playing – something which rarely happens when playing keys or mixing visuals. There is something about the rarity of solo instruments within the worshipping environment that seems to lead people to pick up on the elements which they feel they add to the worshipping experience, often expressed in terms of an extra lift, or a sense that the music somehow ministered to them.

Notes on a service, 19 August 2012

This service illustrates well just how much interaction of musical perspectives can occur in connection with a single event at the church.⁸ Within this space of time the different concerns of the musicians on the stage come to light in numerous ways, with thoughts and conversations that are prompted by events within the rehearsal referencing much broader issues; issues which I am aware of through interviews and conversations with some of those present. Paul’s passing comments on the similarity of different arrangements, for example, connect to a broader sense of the church’s music being in some senses too boxed-in and limited. The rehearsal time is both sacred, set apart from the outside world by prayer, location and leadership, and profane, with its focus on aspects of music, technical concerns and the back-and-forth of free conversation. It enacts songs of worship and yet doesn’t enter fully into this act.⁹ The rehearsal seems in many ways to act as a liminal space, in which musicians can bring their own quirks and favourite ways of playing, particularly in the sound-check and during pre-rehearsal banter (Wood et al 2007, p874). They can employ some of these in the process of negotiating arrangements before the service begins; but at that point they will submit to the decisions that have been made and seek to engage the congregation in worship through the agreed patterns. The space of the rehearsal allows for certain momentary explicit expressions of individuality by the different musicians on the team, but it is also an environment which is largely shaped by the broader structures and discourses of the church and worship ministry. Musicians limit their self-expression to things they know will not cause too much of a disturbance but which may nevertheless reference deeper ongoing debates and conversations held largely outside of the Sunday environment. Much remains implicit, with the scope of dialogue often limited by the particular conversational affordances which individual musical moments allow. In spending time with the team I can slowly begin to work out the deeper concerns behind particular statements or actions – ‘his attachment to folk music means that he struggles with the intensity of upbeat rock’, ‘she has a really eclectic taste so she probably finds it harder to distinguish between songs’, ‘he always drums like that because he listens to a lot of emo music’. Within the scope of the rehearsal, it is often difficult to grasp the true importance of these various negotiations to the different musicians, to appreciate how much of the discussion reflects deeper ways of being in worship, how much is simply floating on the surface of an overall contentment with and enjoyment of the musical life of the church, and how much of what they say represents an ongoing process of struggle and contestation. Nevertheless, the hints are there that there is something worth exploring.

St Aldates Church

St Aldates is a large Anglican church in the centre of Oxford. It is situated directly opposite the Tom Tower entrance to Christ Church and has a large glass reception area opening onto the busy street outside. The church operates within the charismatic evangelical tradition and would often identify more closely with other churches within this stream than it would with the rest of the Anglican Church. The church building seats between 500 and 600 people and while its origins date back to Saxon times, has been much extended over the years. It was extensively reordered around the turn of the millennium, with the seating orientation turned sidewards in order to provide a state-of-the-art auditorium style environment appropriate to the church’s contemporary service style rather than the more traditional east-facing interior that had previously been in existence.

The church parish itself has a relatively small population, mainly encompassing shops, businesses and colleges. Members of the congregation often make a deliberate choice, therefore, to come to the church from further afield, travelling in from different areas of the city as well as the surrounding villages in order to be part of something different from the offerings of their local parish churches. The church’s ministry operates on a range of geographical levels, from dispersed local pastorates meetings in members’ houses all the way through to international conferences, mission projects and training programmes designed to attract overseas applicants to come and learn from St Aldates. The church, therefore, both welcomes worshippers from a range of backgrounds and includes within itself a diverse range of smaller scale communities. The international element of the congregation is emphasized in the church’s tagline ‘A house of prayer for all nations at the heart of Oxford’, demonstrating an institutionalization of these priorities. The congregation of the church includes a large transient element: students make up a large proportion, and many are present only during term-time and for the duration of their studies. While some, therefore, are committed to making the church their long-term home and settling into the patterns of its life (and music), a large proportion of the congregation do not expect such a lengthy affiliation and will therefore not concern themselves so much with long-term priorities within the community. There is also a regular flow of overseas visitors who are staying in the city for a limited period, some as tourists, some for work and some for study, and the church is very aware of its public face opening out onto a busy Oxford street. There is a strong presence of young families within the congregation, and a large number of professionals of varying ages. While there are a number of older members, and the importance of inter-generational relationships is often spoken of from the platform, this element seems to be one that is less significant than in the past, as many who were part of previous generations of the community move on to other congregations.¹⁰

There are three regular Sunday services, at 10:30 am, 6 pm and 8:15 pm. The main elements of a service are the time of sung worship, which will last between 20 and 30 minutes, and the sermon, which will last 30 to 40. Extended musical engagement is, therefore, one of the two main components around which services are structured. Communion rotates weekly between the different services, offering the only liturgical element of any length. There is some demographic differentiation between the services which is reflected a little in service style: the morning service is aimed at families, offering a weekly children’s church alongside the main service, while the 8:15 pm (late) service operates only during term time and attracts mainly students and youth. The 10:30 am and 6 pm services are largely similar in style, although the morning service is often thought of as the more diverse due to its incorporation of children’s songs as well as occasional more traditional elements. The late service offers a very different experience, with the chairs being stripped out of the main church body and house and pillar lights being dimmed, coloured gels being offered in their place. The presentational style is much more informal and the band much louder and rockier. Each service currently has its own dedicated teams of (volunteer) musicians, meaning that a certain degree of distinctiveness is maintained.

Conversations with individuals during my period of attendance at the church have made it clear that people attend St Aldates for a wide range of reasons. Some are drawn in by (or even come to faith through) its musical life and many are drawn in by the large, vibrant church body and the opportunities for becoming part of this community. Some are drawn by particular ministries such as the regular children’s church or the international and student work, some are members because they joined in the past and remain loyal and some are drawn to the preaching or particular form of spirituality and theology which the church offers.¹¹ The prominence of musical worship within the Sunday services doesn’t necessarily mean, therefore, that this is always the primary site of identification with the church body. In occupying a large proportion of the service and in being an expected site for divine encounter and spiritual expression in which the deep aspects of a person’s life are brought before God, it is, however, an aspect of church life which (as will become clear in later chapters) is inevitably significant within the experiences of congregation members.

The current musical style of the church sits happily within the norms of the Contemporary Worship Music genre, featuring a soft-rock style using acoustic guitar, keyboard, bass, drums and vocalists.¹² Electric guitars will generally be found within the slightly heavier style of the late service and brass instruments (horn, trumpet and occasionally saxophone) are a regular part of the current morning service line-up. Although there is room for occasional departures from these norms, such as the use of organ and a greater range of instruments at Christmas services, such departures are atypical and are generally much remarked upon when they occur. The cultivation of a consistent sound and style has been an important part of the way in which recent musical leaders at St Aldates have shaped its musical life and identity.¹³ While recent efforts have been made to encourage a certain degree of diversity among set bands, a broadly uniform musical style still generally prevails.

The musical worship of St Aldates has slowly evolved over the course of the years under the supervision of a number of different worship pastors and musicians. Both repertoire and priorities have gradually evolved in response to broader church trends, in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The quest to understand diverse musical experiences
• 1. Setting the scene
• 2. Music, attachment, ethics and community
• 3. Bridging worlds through common modes of being in music
• 4. Boundaries: Communal and private, spiritual and secular
• 5. At the edges: Value transfer, judgements, discontent
• 6. Alternative musical spaces
• Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index