Exploring the Well

Wandering the savage garden...

Music and Performance in Worship

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I’ve been a member of a number of worship bands. I think none of them have been successful engagements for me, to varying degrees, and it’s taken me a while to really work out why.

I thought for a long time that it’s about my ability to really commit to the bands, to be part of them on a weekly basis, and I still think this is a lot of it. When I couldn’t say “Yes, I’ll be there” every week, I ended up being a guest musician, a stand-in, and that really doesn’t help a band gel.

Of course, the next question is: is gelling necessary? To some degree, yes: the band has to trust its component members. The guitarist doesn’t need to be wondering if the bass player’s going to be hitting the note, or when, and inconsistent membership creates an opportunity for, well, a lack of trust.

But I think the biggest problem is still me, not my attendance or consistency. It’s a differentiation in how worship music is played, what it is, why it is, and how I see worship in music. It’s a juxtaposition that I don’t think is innately reconcilable in the context of most churches – maybe all churches, really.

The culture of the church would have to change in order to create a music ministry to which I could meaningfully contribute.

Worship music is, by and large, a cover band’s domain. You’re playing someone else’s songs – Hillsong’s, or Shane and Shane’s, or Phil Wickham’s, for example – and generally you’re trying to play them in a way that’s representative of what the congregation is expecting to hear, so they can participate in worship. You’re leading worship, after all.

What’s more, those musicians – for whom I hold a lot of respect, honestly – design their songs for that environment. They’re not pushing the limits very often. They’ll introduce a key change here and there for emotive reasons (“This is the section that’s resolving all the energy we’ve built up, so we’re going from G to A!”) or occasionally a grace note or chord so that the song stands out from a musical perspective. (Shane and Shane are really good at this.)

The result is that most worship music of a given era sounds… very similar. Derivative, really. There’s nothing wrong with this, because familiarity helps the congregation participate in worship.

I have a hard time connecting with this. I’ve tried writing Christian worship songs, and it sounds very much like what it actually is: an artist trying to write something that sounds like something else. Not only do I find most Christian worship music derivative and repetitive, but my own Christian worship music is derivative and repetitive, except moreso.

I despise my attempts in this area. I recognize experience is a factor there, but I feel that it’s dead in its origin, and I don’t think there’s a spark there to light into flame.

When I play worship music, I feel like it’s important for me to not only lead the congregation in worship – which is the main point of the worship band, after all – but to worship as well. If I’m not participating in the act of worship, I’m not even a conduit – I’m a puppet, miming notes for others to follow.

So when I play, i find myself fighting the desire to play to the utmost of my ability: not to flash, necessarily (I’m not an especially flashy player) but to feel to motion of the music, to amplify it, to play it as well as I am able to according to what I feel the music desires.

I want to play it as if I were playing it before the Holy One. It’s not just miming notes for others to follow, but for me to play.

So the result is that I play… harder, perhaps (not in a “ROCK ON!!!!!” sense, but more intensely) than most of my bandmates, and I have to work intently on playing less than I feel I can and should, in order to fit in and to fulfill the limited goals of a worship band: I play down to the audience, as opposed to up to The Lord.

I don’t resent this. I understand the goals of a worship band, and I also understand that my skills and approach may not be the same as the skills and approaches of the other band members.

But it means that for me, playing in the worship band is a slog, and an unfulfilling one, and I keep thinking that leaks into the performance as well. Because I don’t feel fulfilled in playing worship music in a church, I am unable to serve the congregation in the manner I intend.

To me, music in church should be as it was for David, leaping and dancing before the Ark: the Bible records his wife Michal scolding him for his unrestrained joy (2 Sam 6:16-23). I get Michal’s point – but I feel like I imagine David did, with Michal saying “Show some restraint, be respectable before your fellow man,” when David’s desire was to show his commitment to God and his joy at a victory God had granted him.

So what’s the conclusion here? I think that I’m willing to play to help a band, but I think they’re not especially well-served by this, nor am I. I think my long-term goal is to play the music God has planted in my heart for those who wish to hear it – which may mean just the Lord and me, and I’m fine with that – and let worship bands do what they do better than I do.

Art and Noise

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I’ve been thinking more about the role of art and self-control (as referenced by Self-Control and Art, if you can imagine.)

I thought to myself, “I wonder if this can be illustrated somehow?” and the answer, of course, was “yes.” As an artist and musician, there’re countless ways to illustrate such a concept.

Since I’m primarily a musician, I thought of cranking up a MiniMoog and recording a sine wave (as an example of “full control”) – such a sine wave would be a horribly dull sound. Then I’d introduce other things, like perhaps a LFO that affected the note or the wave (creating warbles or beats), with the variations eventually degenerating into pure noise.

That’d work, but to really illustrate the point I’d need to introduce some other toys into the mix, and by the end of it you’d have a soundtrack that evoked Wolfram Alpha’s music generator.

The problem with that is that Wolfram Alpha is exactly contrary to the point I’d like to focus on: Wolfram Alpha generates music that sounds random and is certainly complex, but is actually deterministic in nature – it’s fully and tightly controlled, and can sometimes sound beautiful, but it’s not art.

So then I got the idea that I’d use something a little more visual – which would be more appropriate for the web, in any event.

That means I got to play with a tool I’ve used only in passing: gnuplot.

So let’s see what we get, trying to illustrate self control and art as a mixture.

It’s not going to be perfect – and I wouldn’t call it beautiful (or, really, “art”) but it certainly gives a better idea than just a rough explanation.

First, let’s look at total control. Here we have a rather ingenious graph, which plots y as a function of the square root of the absolute value of x. (In gnuplot, the command was plot sqrt(abs(x)).)

Now, is this “beautiful?” Well, it’s certainly sort of… regular. It has some aspect of beauty, especially to mathematicians.

Now let’s look at something where the control is less managed – or, well, not managed at all:

This was created with a gnuplot command of plot rand(0) which means there’s no correlation whatsoever between… anything. It’s a line where the vertical point is entirely random.

This is “irregular.” It may qualify as “beauty” to some, especially those who find beauty in randomness.

But it’s not “art” either.

Let’s try one more, and with this one, let’s use some imagination:

Here we have a bit of a mix between the two original processes. The gnuplot command was plot rand(0)/sqrt(abs(x)); this means we’re following our original (“controlled”) formula, except adding a bit of a jagged edge to it. (And inverting it, to boot.)

Now we have something… unique, at the very least. And if you wanted to see something in it – the Tower of Barad-dûr, for example – you could see it as a tower reigning supreme over a mountain range.

It may not be good art, but I’d dare say it’s more artistic and meaningful than the random noise image, and more meaningful also than the “fully controlled” image.

The use of control gives it structure and the ability to have meaning.

Self-Control and Art

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Michael Moorcock (who wrote the Elric books) counterbalanced Law and Chaos in his books. In Elric’s universe, Law was total order, and was in itself complete stasis. In the world of Law, nothing changed.

In the world of Chaos, on the other hand, nothing was predictable (except unpredictability, I suppose.) Everything was corrupted; black was white, straight lines were bent, a circle had an ending, triangles had four sides, and so forth and so on.

Mankind, in the Elric universe, was caught in the middle of a cycle of Law and Chaos, being a representative of a balance: the act of creation was of a chaotic mode, constricted and restrained by Law to give it constant form and meaning.

I can’t say that Moorcock’s representation is anything more than entertaining fiction (which it is), and I can’t imagine Moorcock himself would see it as anything more than that, but the concept is actually pretty valid.

Sunday, our pastor was speaking on Galatians 5:16-24, which talks about walking in the Spirit and not gratifying the desires of the flesh, and how those two are opposed and held in tension.

The critical verses were verses 22 and 23:

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

With Elric in mind, self-control stuck out to me.

We’re created in the image of God, to be able to create, yet we’re required to be controlled.

The process of creating art is to introduce structure to something new, such that the new thing gains meaning through the structure – or to introduce something new to a structure such that the structure is redefined.

The challenge is to create art that isn’t unbalanced, art that’s not so constrained by the structure that it loses any new meaning it might have had, or art that’s so unconstrained that any meaning it has is lost.

Born

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We are born with a shotgun to our heads
Born to die,
Live to kill,
Heal to harm,
Constrained to will
We think that hatred's only fair.

We die to self to be forgot
Remember woe
Forget all peace
See the ills
Blind to sin
We remember only things of little worth.