Kangaroo Singing

I think at this point it's safe to say I am a non-denominational Christian. I grew up Baptist, later attended a Messianic Synagogue, went to a Methodist campus ministry, partnered with a Catholic church on a yearly basis, was the music director at a Baptist church, and am currently attending an Anglican church. So now all I'm missing are the crazy snake handling churches, and I plan to continue to avoid them. Each of these places of worship had unique aspects that I enjoyed, and, equally, they all had weaknesses as well. Coming to England, I knew there was a decent chance I would end up in an Anglican church, given their ubiquity. And as I have already shared in my "Oxfordian Paradox" post, one of the things I anticipated most was the rich and unique musical heritage of the Anglican church, one example being Evensong. It's old, being originally Catholic, but also new, being fundamentally non-Catholic. But as we all know, many churches have modernized not only in technology and methods, but also in music.

By way of explanation, let me give you a bit of musical background. As an undergrad student I took two years of music theory (good idea). Unfortunately for me, who was just taking the courses for fun, music theory is considered the weed-out class for music. So on top of being fairly difficult at times, it was also scheduled at 8 in the morning every day of the week (bad idea). Nonetheless, it was wonderful, both in terms of skills acquired and friends made. But that is completely irrelevant to my story; I just thought I'd tell you.

So getting back to it, in music theory we learned "proper" technique for writing music. One of the principle tenets of writing a good melody is that it be simple. If you turn on the radio and hear some of the popular songs at the moment (or at basically any moment in history, for that matter), they will all have relatively simple melodies. This fact, of course, is to make them easy to sing. If you can't sing along to it, it simply won't become popular. Likewise, in classical music, some of the most memorable and popular tunes are unbelievably simple. The challenge is to have enough variety to make it interesting while still keeping it easy enough to sing along to.

Well, I was surprised to find that modern church music here completely ignores this rule. Normally I would be hesitant to say this is a bad thing: many of you know I am prone to mocking the ridiculous simplicity and repetitiveness of certain popular Christian songs (one in particular that I despise says the word "Jesus" over thirty times in a row with the exact same tune each time, except every fourth "Jesus" - woo hoo). And while I don't necessarily mind the apparent English approach to praise songs, I do find it comical. Let me give you a run down of one of these songs.

The words are printed in the bulletin without any music, so I have no idea how the tune goes (it's too bad no one uses hymnals anymore; they often include better bass lines than I could naturally think of). The singers are up on stage, the music starts, and we're off! Things are going well for about four words; the melody rises one step higher per word. Then, out of nowhere, SQUEAK, the entire congregation cracks their voices straining for some absurdly high note, and then we are immediately back down to the normal pattern. We continue a few more words, and just as I am catching on to the pattern of the next line, ..... , the crowd goes silent, the melody having suddenly dropped so low that only James Earl Jones could hit it. Both extremes having been used up, I figure I am safe for the next line. How foolish of me. Right at the start of the next line: SQUEAK,.....,SQUEAK and then into a usual pattern. To put it mildly, it is completely impossible to follow.

In case you find my words obscure, here is a visual interpretation:
"praise the LORD all ye People - YES praise THE LOOOOOord HALleluJAH!!!!!"

This week at service, one song was so crazy that my wife and I couldn't help laughing every time we came to one of the random jumps. My theory is that they want to give you a feeling of accomplishment when you have finally learned to predict the awkward jumping. Either that or they think we are all kangaroos.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, for all ye music majors out there, the songs seldom end on the tonic, and I mean seldom. That's another big no-no for making singable melodies.

So that's pretty much it. Generally, I like to find some sort of application or moral or something to end my stories, but I don't think there is one. Sometimes, there's just a story, nothing else. But to indulge you, I tried. My best attempt produced this, and with it I will close:

Never exile your criminals to a big unexplored island; they will end up having cooler wild animals than you do, you'll get jealous, and your culture will reflect your jealousy for time immemorial.

I mean, really, how cool are kangaroos? Not to mention platypi. Australia rocks.