Filtering new music through old

Re:invention posited earlier that Solomon’s assertion, “there is nothing new under the sun,” can well describe worship music. Yet the sheer quantity of emerging Christian artists and their compositions might seem to suggest Solomon a liar. If Billboard annually compiles a chart of new Christian songs, how can Solomon be correct?

Maybe these hot new artists aren’t as new as we think.

In this post, we set out to accomplish two things: one, show that new is only and always a reinvention of the old, and two, propose a set of filters by which we can evaluate the corpus of Christian music to find pieces that fit our specific purposes.

1. New is old

If Solomon is correct, then music today emerges from music of yesterday (or 500 years ago), just as music 500 years ago was itself a reinvention of its predecessors. When we take this lineage all the way back to its point of origin, we find the original source that musicians for millennia have been reinventing.

The seminal point of all reinvention is the source itself. The Creator. God. In his wisdom and grace, God chose to make accessible to humans his precise words through which he intended us to know his will. These words which make up the Bible are the  starting point for all creativity that honors the Creator.

Musicians set these source words to music and arrange them in poetry. They translate, embellish, and rephrase. But in the end, it’s all just a reinvention of the source.

For that reason, the church  does well to not abandon its history when considering music. For in an abandonment of what has been done, the church is, in effect, abandoning resources that God has provided with which to bless the church. Disregarding the new would be like the body disregarding the thumb.  Disregarding the old would be like the thumb disregarding the body. Rather, creative pioneers in the church help themselves and the church when they embrace the resources God has gifted to the church. And to embrace them not as a regiment, but as inspiration.

2. Filtering the corpus

Every song ever written to reflect the source is part of the general  corpus  of the church’s music. Present in this corpus is everything from Away in a Manger to Exodus 15’s recording of Moses’ song upon passing through the Red Sea to Carrie Underwood’s Something in the Water . Some pieces are direct renditions of Scripture in song, while others employ a bit more interpretation. Some of the music in this corpus is good, some of it bad.

Therefore we must filter it. Whether an individual is planning worship, listening to the radio, putting together a Christmas playlist, or selecting songs for kids, the discerning musician will search the corpus through a series of filters to find music apt for his use.

The following filters are those that re:invention will use as its rules for evaluating music here on out. We’ve compiled them for our purposes (i.e., to discover inventive music worth our attention), but they certainly are general enough that one might adapt them to serve as a general evaluative tool for worship music as well.

Broadly speaking, there are 3 filters:

1. Orthodoxy
2. Meaning
3. Cultural intelligibility

The order of the filters implies importance. Orthodoxy is and must be the first filter through which one passes a song. If a song does not pass this filter, while it may have notable musical quality, it is not appropriate for use in a church setting. The orthodoxy filter asks the question: “Does this song (written to reflect the Word)  accurately reflect the Word?  Essentially, filter number one is a comparison to the source.

The second filter, Meaning, asks: “does the song mean something to the people who are using it?”  This filter keeps us from singing “What Child Is This?” on Easter Sunday.

The third filter, Cultural Intelligibility, is the most complex. It bridges the gap between intended meaning and perceived meaning. One must understand the listener and the song well in order to determine whether or not it will be intelligible (and therefore reflect the source) to the people using it. To help determine the cultural intelligibility of a song, it is helpful to subdivide whichever piece of music into three parts: text, melody, and setting. Each of these three  divisions then passes through its own filters.

For a text:

• Doctrinal accuracy
• Clear language
• Poetic form
• Cultural intelligibility

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For a melody:

• Appropriateness to text
• Originality
• Cultural intelligibility

For a setting:

• Appropriateness to text
• Distinctive qualities
• Cultural intelligibility

These filters exist as a mechanism by which we can measure how well a song works in its intended use. The outcome of these filters will thus necessarily vary usage by usage.

If these filters seem abstract, we’ll make them concrete in re:invention’s next post as we begin to pass some songs through them. We’d love to hear if you have filters you’ve been using as you choose music for worship, and what you think about ours.