Are you like me in that you find that certain choral pieces sung by a great Anglican/Episcopal cathedral choir to be sublimely beautiful? If you’ve been involved in your parish’s music program, have you also found that such attainments have not been feasible at your church? If you live in a city or large suburban area, you might have some options and can choose to attend a church with a big budget for its organ, organist, choir director, and paid singers. Unpaid singers in such choirs may be auditioned, which means that some might be rejected.
Maybe you attend a congregation that looks longingly toward the high art of cathedrals but doesn’t have the human, instrumental, and financial resources to attain it. The experience of music in such congregations can be frustrating, embarrassing, or even painful. But maybe you attend a congregation that isn’t interested in attaining high art. Musical preferences are not uniform in the Episcopal Church. In the last three Episcopal churches where I have served as music minister, one of the most popular hymns has been “I Am the Bread of Life.” In these parishes, it has been more important to help people sing what they enjoy than to impose a monolithic vision of what they are supposed to enjoy.
As I approach retirement, I am reflecting on my 44-odd years as a church organist and sometime choir director, and on how music-making at church has been about doing what’s possible with the resources that we have. My first organist-choir director position had me playing an electric organ that sounded more like the Emenee chord organ at the five-and-dime of my childhood than like a pipe organ, and directing a choir that consisted of one person per part except for the basses, who were a man who didn’t read music and the rector; I was the tenor. There was no question of holding auditions; any concerns about quality had to take a back seat to enabling everyone who wanted to make music for their church. Continuing this practice in later positions has meant that, more than once, I’ve directed choirs in which there has been a member who couldn’t sing on pitch.
My next position was paid, and we had a pipe organ, children’s choir, and a larger adult choir for our late morning service. We also had an earlier folk Mass, for which my guitar playing was called (there’s nothing like playing and rehearsing every week to sharpen one’s skills). We were finding that many parishioners, including children, were responding to this music enthusiastically. I think some parishioners didn’t like it, but they could attend the later service with traditional music or an early-morning service with no music. The finances of the church were such that the nave was minimally heated during the winter, which made for some cold practicing during those Michigan winters.
During our years in Bolivia, my wife and I were active in an Anglican congregation that had no church building, let alone an organ of any sort. The instrument of choice was the guitar, which was more indigenous to the culture, portable, cheap to maintain, and relatively inexpensive to buy. I got to play with some really good guitarists. I learned the songs that were making the rounds of Bolivian churches, learned some new ones from tapes and different people, and began writing songs that fused Andean folk music with rock, a fusion that paralleled the cultural fusion that was happening there, particularly in young people.
Modern Episcopal missionaries will tell you that it’s more important to adapt the forms of Christianity to suit the culture where one lives rather than insist on accoutrements (crosses, candles, robes, altar hangings, etc.), music, or flower arrangements. Everything is secondary to the substance, the beautiful message of God’s love for all.
You might not be surprised to hear that, coming back to the Episcopal Church in the States, I experienced what is called reverse culture shock. Having lived in a Third World country for three and a half years, I couldn’t see our Episcopal buildings and organs without thinking of the money spent on them. The money that some churches spend on flowers would go a long way to feeding the street kids I knew in Bolivia. My missionary mindset has caused me to wonder if the Episcopal Church is doing its best to adapt to a changing American culture, which is increasingly multicultural. To do nothing or too little would seem to be insensitive at best or deaf to the call of the Holy Spirit at worst.
I realize that Episcopalians’ widespread respect for tradition might be an obstacle to meaningful change, and, if we are to have dialogue about this, I have no stones to throw. I’ve been playing whatever instruments churches have, including pipe organs that cost $500 or more to tune. But I’ve been underspending my budgets, cutting costs where I can (including by being frugal with the HVAC and learning to do a little organ tuning) and using music to raise money for charities. I’ve been learning and supporting the culture of each congregation where I’ve served with one subtle nudge: I have been determined to respect and empower every voice in the congregation, from traditionalists to newcomers who might not find much meaning in our traditions, and to find an Episcopal way to be culturally diverse.
Our multiple hymnals are a good place to start with diversity. The Living Church is a good source of ideas, with its articles (see Neal Michell’s article “Making Music Singable” and Jonathan Mitchican’s review of Autism and Worship) and notices about lectures, workshops, and conferences (check out Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission and Virginia Seminary’s Episcopal Latino Ministry Competency course). Some, like the Episcopal Office of Indigenous Ministries, are looking at the way the Episcopal Church has been incarnated in American indigenous cultures, at which traditions are transcultural (supracultural?) and which can be adapted to—or jettisoned by—a culture.
One “Episcopal” idea I’ve had, because we are a sacramental church that regularly deals with symbols, is to broaden our palette of symbols and sacraments. I know this is akin to heresy for traditionalists, but I believe that the most important sacrament is what I call the sacrament of community: that we can and should experience God through people (1 John 4 makes this clear), and our music should enable it. As I think about my retirement from church music, I dedicate myself to community, which doesn’t depend on my employment or any denominational structure—only that I be available to whatever form it takes, whether it’s by meeting in a living room, as we did in Bolivia, or connecting with souls at a singalong or luxuriating in a cathedral’s choral Evensong.
David Palmer is a music teacher, performer, and composer living in Northern Virginia.