Tag: Music

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Stubbing My Toe on the Stumbling Block of Tradition

By Amy Spiegel

I love tradition. If ever we do anything the same way twice (the same holiday routine, the same vacation spot, the same meal two Saturdays in a row), I immediately want to canonize it and say that we have to do it the same way every year. When Christmas time rolls around, I try to find as many ways as humanly possible to “create” tradition while Jim huddles in a corner somewhere, waiting out the storm of my enthusiasm. We have to listen to the same Christmas CD while putting up the tree, eat the same foods, use the same ornaments, etc. This also applies to my church-going routine. If I could convince my family to attend a church that played only hymns from the first century A.D. sung in Latin, I would do it. I am greatly comforted by the knowledge that if I am in error, I can blame some guy with a funny name who died thousands of years ago who may or may not have shaken the hand of our Lord and Savior. Sadly there are no such churches in our area so we have settled on a reformed church with one foot solidly planted in traditional worship and maybe a big toe and a few smaller appendages dabbling in the territory of the more contemporary.

Anyhoo, when we are visiting my greatly esteemed parents, we have occasion to visit their church. It is a good church and the preaching is excellent but the worship style is definitely a stretch for my traditional tastes. On a recent visit, I was struggling with both the style and content of a string of choruses, when a realization hit me like a censer between the eyes. (According to Wikipedia a censer is a small metal or stone dish used for burning incense which in the Roman Catholic Church is suspended on chains.) The reason I object to so many of the modern choruses is what I perceive to be an overemphasis on our emotional response to God. It isn’t that I am against emotion in general. (Just ask my kids, who enjoy forcing me to read “The Giving Tree” or “The Story of the Three Trees” just to watch me blubber like a whale on hormones at the end of each.) I love classic hymns because they tend to focus our attention on God’s attributes and his saving works, and my pigheaded self-centeredness needs all the refocusing it can get. But what I hadn’t realized was that although there are certainly some doctrinally justifiable objections to a number of choruses making the rounds these days, I was not responding based on such reason. I was responding with my emotions. I don’t like that style and it doesn’t make me feel like I am worshiping God.

I believe that there are some objective standards by which we can evaluate sacred music. (Like, for starters, could we have an actual melody that most of us can sing? And is it mandatory to repeat the chorus fourteen times? Just a thought. Not that I am bitter or anything.) But I do believe that there is a lot of room for diversity here, and we (okay, I) need to be careful that worship is what it is meant to be—an expression of our obedience to God, not an expression of how we are feeling at the moment. And if I like to worship in the traditional (read: correct) ways and you like to worship in the contemporary (read: slightly less correct but perfectly within the bounds of orthodoxy) ways, then that’s okay. Yes, we should hold one another accountable to standards of excellence in both content and form. But within those standards there is a great deal of room for diversity, just as there is a great deal of diversity within the body as a whole. After all, we are a body of many parts, not just one big toe.

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Popular Music and Survival of the Fittest

By Jim Spiegel

Long before I ever became an academician I loved rock n’ roll-from the crunch and sizzle of Jimmy Page guitar riff to the soul-soothing wail of Aretha Franklin.  But most of all, I loved the songs themselves, from love ballads to R&B grooves to punk rock political anthems.  And I’ve spent decades building my music catalogue, both to enjoy the music and to get a better grasp on the evolution of this art form.

It wasn’t long ago that to call rock music an “art form” was a howler.  And it has only been very recently that study of the popular arts generally has become a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry.  Happily, today there are several academic journals devoted entirely to the subject, and even the most prestigious aesthetics journals routinely feature treatments of rock music.  Finally scholars have realized what should have been obvious all along.  The study of popular culture is important because it provides us with insights in a wide range of subjects: art, anthropology, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, and philosophy, to name a few.  And study of the history of popular culture is significant for the same reason that any historical inquiry is significant.  It provides us with a better understanding of human nature and society.

Perhaps the reason some have doubted the significance of rock music as an art form is that, frankly, much of it is bad.  And, indeed, radio stations play mostly tripe all day long.  They always have, even in rock’s “golden age.”  But something like this has been true of all art in every age.  Much of the music made in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries was no doubt very bad, but that music has been deservedly lost to time while the best has survived-as it always has, standing the test of time precisely because it is the best.  What we call “classical” music is simply the best music of bygone eras.  And, yes, some music from our era will survive for centuries as well.  They are not royal courtiers anymore, but include film soundtrack composers (e.g. John Williams and Danny Elfman), singer-songwriters (e.g. Bob Dylan and Morrissey), and rock bands (e.g., the Beatles and Radiohead).

Students of popular music face a challenge that students of classical music do not.  History has yet to weed out the weak specimens among the songs of our time, so we must do the extra work to discern which songs will likely stand the test of time because of their merits.  As in the biological world, it comes down to survival of the fittest.  And contemporary music critics are sometimes no more able to predict which songs will last than a biologist is able to predict the future evolutionary path of organisms.  As Bob Dylan has said, “You have to stand on your tiptoes to see the future.”

But the sheer difficulty of the task should not discourage us.  There are, after all, some basic aesthetic standards when it comes to assessing rock music, just as there are for any art genre.  And we have already seen some “natural selection” of rock songs already, if we go back to the 1950s, 60s, and even the 70s.  There are songs that we already call “classics,” from Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

In future posts, I will discuss a variety of popular musical artists and songs, some of which have risen to the level of “classic” and some which I suspect will do so in time.  I will also offer some of my own “best of” lists.  The first of these will be the twenty best albums of the rock era, which I will post in just a few days.  So stay tuned, rock fans.