Gloriose rex Richarde, vota damus, tu attende, tui sumus, recognosce, mortem aufer, vitam posce. Ave, quondam rex Anglorum, nunc cohaeres angelorum; placa nobis regem tuum, qui te fecit civem suum.
Glorious king Richard, we give you [our] vows, pay heed. We are yours, recall [and] take away [our] death, request for [our] life. Hail, former king of the English, now you are united with the angels. Assuage your king, who made you his fellow-citizen.
- Antiphona ad Magnificat, ad Vesperas Sancti Richardi, regis Anglosaxonum (Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latinia Antiquae et Mediae Aetatis [BHL], Novum Supplementum, 7207b)
More about St. Richard the Pilgrim, King of Wessex, here. I realized at some point that the Greek equivalent of “Richard”, meaning “king”, is Βασίλης, Vasilis, which of course is anglicized as Basil. So, St. Basil is a perfectly acceptable Orthodox patron for a Richard, but happily, so is St. Richard.
Cappella Romana is an ensemble that’s hard to pin down. Are they an early music ensemble? Yes, sort of, but they don’t generally do Bach or Monteverdi. Are they a sacred music ensemble? Yes, but they’re not affiliated with a specific church institution (i. e., a cathedral or parish). Are they a world music ensemble? Sort of, since much of the music they sing originates in the Mediterranean, but not exactly. Are they a contemporary music ensemble? Yes, sort of, but much of the contemporary music they do is decidedly in an older tradition. Are they a pastoral, confessional affair? Of sorts, I suppose, although their membership is by no means entirely composed of Orthodox Christians. Are they a scholarly project? Well, yes, they’re kind of that too, given that the booklets tend to be article-length affairs with footnotes and bibliography. I suppose you could say that they’re an early world contemporary sacred music vocal ensemble that’s run by a musicologist.
They’ve been extraordinarily productive in terms of recorded output in the last eight years; since 2004 they’ve put out some eight discs (ten if you include the compilation for the Royal Academy’s Byzantium exhibit and their contribution to the Choral Settings of Kassiani project) that have run the gamut — medieval Byzantine chant, Russian-American liturgical settings, a long-form concert work by an American master, Western polyphony, Greek-American polyphonic liturgical music, and Christmas carols (of a sort). Their recordings also continue to get better and better; I picked up their discography in 2004 starting with the Music of Byzantium compilation of various live and recorded excerpts, followed by Lay Aside All Earthly Cares, their collection of Fr. Sergei Glagolev’s music, and then 2006′s The Fall of Constantinople, a program I had heard them perform here in Bloomington. Comparing just those three discs to each other, there’s a noticeable jump in quality, and then comparing them to recent releases such as the Peter Michaelides Divine Liturgy, it’s clear that they’ve found a groove in the studio (as well as perhaps in the editing booth) and they’re riding it now. They’re recording music nobody else is really doing, and while that means it’s hard to know what an applicable comparandum for any particular recording might be, it’s clear listening to it that they’re doing it at a very high level regardless, and the good news about the lack of comparable recordings is that it reveals the sheer richness of the Orthodox musical heritage. Arvo Pärt and Rachmaninoff are great, but there’s much, much more that you can do.
Mt. Sinai: The Frontier of Byzantium fits into this scheme by presenting music from late medieval Byzantine chant manuscripts from St. Catherine Monastery at Mt. Sinai, one of the key crossroads for Eastern Christianity. A Chalcedonian monastic outpost dating as far back as the days of Justinian in the middle of non-Chalcedonian Egypt, it is a treasure house of some of our earliest witnesses to the Christian iconographic tradition (since it was a place of refuge from the iconclasts), and its library of manuscripts in virtually every language of the Roman oikoumene is a witness to the catholicity of the Empire that produced them. The musical selections include portions of a Vespers for the monastery’s patronal feast, as well as the Service of the Three Youths in the Fiery Furnace, a quasi-liturgical drama that would have been served between Matins and Divine Liturgy on the Sunday before Christmas.
The Vespers material is interesting, particularly how Psalm 103 is treated. It is something of a mix of reconstructed Palestinian practice and present-day Greek tradition, where the first three verses are sung antiphonally, and then Koukouzelis et al.‘s setting of the Anoixantaria (the section of Ps. 103 that starts with, “Thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good…”) is interpolated with Triadika, short refrains glorifying the Trinity. It’s an approach to psalmody (in the literal sense of the word) that is generally eschewed in modern American parish practice; we tend to treat whole psalms as something to get through as quickly and as plainly as possible. Of course, just singing the Anoixantaria can take as long as 20 minutes depending on whose setting one is doing, so when parishes want to get Vespers done in half an hour or less, that’s the way it is. Elements like this emphasize how, ideally, our worship needs to be unhurried; we’re on God’s time, he’s not on our time.
The Service of the Furnace portion is lovely. It’s a real curiosity, liturgically speaking; the notes refer to it having been part of the practice of Constantinople and Thessaloniki (and subsequently Crete), and something that developed during the so-called “Byzantine ars nova“, where an artistic and spiritual flourishing was paradoxically occurring in the East at the same time as the political collapse. I’m left wanting to know more about how exactly how it developed, and why, and why it didn’t catch on elsewhere in the Orthodox world.
There are several musical textures in the Furnace section, solo to choral, syllabic to highly melismatic, and they’re all handled with beautiful musicianship and and some of the best male ensemble singing you’re ever likely to hear on a CD. One thing I’d point out is that this actually is something that has been commercially recorded before and is more or less available, even if you have to know where to look for it. Lycourgos Angelopoulos and the Greek Byzantine Choir (EBX) recorded parts of it for a Polish release called “Byzantine Hymns”, and while I have yet to actually find this for purchase anywhere, you can find their rendering of the Service of the Furnace hymnody on YouTube. Obviously there’s a bit of a difference in approach; EBX tends to have a different vocal quality all around that I would describe as a little more suntanned and weatherbeaten, and they’re singing the material the way they sing at church every Sunday. EBX also employs a children’s choir for the Three Youths themselves, which is apparently the historical practice and sounds fantastic, but I can see several reasons why that might be an undesirable layer of complexity for Cappella’s presentation.
One other thought — something that a recording like this might help to give a glimpse of is the vitality of the Christian tradition in the Middle East. St. Catherine’s Monastery is an Egyptian witness to a faithful, diverse, cosmopolitan Christianity in the Roman world, and that Christianity is still there, alive, and hanging on. Projects like this show that it is a witness that has much still to teach us.
The whole point of moving to Wenatchee in the first place was that my parents wanted to get out of Anchorage, and my dad wanted to try to set himself up as a successful small business owner in a small town. After four years in Wenatchee, he still liked the small business owner idea but was done with the small town part, and in 1984 we passed westward over the mountains and wound up in Seattle. Well, Woodinville, which back then was barely no longer rural. Dad bought a small business furniture concern called Redmond Office Supply and we built a house maybe five minutes from Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery, the house that I still remember my mother describing, on the day we moved in, as the house in which she and my dad would grow old.
Church was a question mark now that we were in something vaguely resembling a major metropolitan area. The truth is, I don’t think my mother ever had any particular love for the Augsburg Confession, and thought of it perhaps as mostly a default. My grandmother Helen (departed this life last September with her beloved husband Donald ten days previous, αἰωνία αὐτῶν ἡ μνήμη) had passed on some level of Danish-American consciousness to Mom, but nothing overwhelming, and nothing that I don’t think she got out of her system by living in Copenhagen for a year after high school. Since Dad certainly wasn’t going to church with us, there wasn’t any particular family cohesion to be maintained, so now that we lived someplace with more options, my mother wanted to explore them. I remember her taking me church-shopping several Sundays in a row; I don’t remember where, but I don’t recall that we ever went to the same place twice.
Somewhere along the way, we wound up at Overlake Christian Church, and I got saved for the first time. These were unrelated events.
This may be ancient history for some readers, but 30 years ago, kids actually would go trick or treating in a door to door fashion in neighborhoods rather than going to the mall. 1984-5 was the height of my Charlie Brown identification (which had a very interesting denouement I’ll go into later), so my recollection is that my costume in 1984 was the sheet-over-the-head ghost. Anyway, among the takings was a little card giving a phone number that you could call if you really loved Jesus and wanted to be saved. I really loved Jesus, so I asked Mom if I could call, she was thrilled to say yes, and a nice man on the other end of the line prayed with me that Jesus would come into my heart, and that was that.
Meanwhile, church shopping was going nowhere for us. At some point, my mom discovered KCIS, “The Christian Information Station”, on which Pastor Bob Moorehead’s sermons were broadcast. These connected with her well enough that one Sunday, we found ourselves in the middle of the humongous melee that was Overlake.
At the time, I believe, Overlake was the largest independent congregation in Washington state, with some ungodly huge number like 3,000 people. (Yes, I know, that seems like a small, quaint country church in present-day Evangelical terms.) They did something like three or four services a weekend, so their auditorium had around 1,000 people in it at any given moment in the course of a weekend. My recollection is that there was a huge cross on the wall with the text, “Go forth and make ye disciple of all nations…” You came in, and half an hour of lively singing to words projected on the walls was followed by some announcements, special music while an offering was taken, a 45 minute sermon, maybe communion, and then another twenty minutes to half an hour of congregational singing, usually wrapping up with an altar call. It was completely different from what I had experienced in our little Lutheran congregation back in Wenatchee, and it seemed to be exactly what my mother was looking for.
I remember asking my mom, “Does this mean we’re not Lutheran anymore?” “No, honey, we’re just Christians now,” she said.
One of the interesting things about Overlake — and to this day I don’t have a great sense about how common this is or is not for Protestant groups — was that a baptized Protestant Christian couldn’t just start going there and bam, they were a member. First you had to have a believer’s baptism — infant baptism didn’t count — then you had to go through the six-week “Basic Beliefs” class (so, yes, you had to undergo an action that, by virtue of its appellation — believer’s baptism — strongly implied belief in something, and then you had to take a class to find out what you had just professed to believe), and then you were welcomed as a member. My mother, who seemed to embrace what Overlake was all about fairly quickly, responded to an altar call one Sunday, took the class, and was welcomed as a member. I did not; I didn’t really understand why all of this was necessary — wasn’t I already baptized, and didn’t we make a big deal out of it? But there we were.
Even as a little kid, I can’t say I ever felt like a totally natural fit at Overlake. It seemed weird to me that you never sat next to the same people twice, I didn’t understand how it seemed that everybody knew the songs we were singing except me, particularly when all they projected were the words and no music? (This was also right towards the beginning of my boy alto period.) Why was all the music so incredibly different from what we had had at Grace Lutheran? Why was the music… well… stupid? Why was the sermon so long? Why couldn’t I leave to go to the bathroom? (Seriously. I got blocked at the doors by the ushers.) Who actually got to talk to Pastor Bob? Why did everything seem so centered around him? Why, if being saved was something that happened to us once, was a big point always made of saying the prayer to let Jesus into our hearts as personal savior at the end of every service?
Still, it was where we were going. Sometimes I went to the adult service with Mom, sometimes I went to the kids’ service. At the kids’ service, sometimes they showed things like the Christian anime Superbook (which went well with my love of Star Blazers), and a movie called “Music Box” that I’ve talked about before. I also remember them talking to us about evolution and AIDS, and sometimes in the adult service hearing them talk about abortion and how there were no Christians in Russia (keeping in mind that this was the mid-1980s).
Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, as I mentioned, had some interesting bits on various supernatural phenomena (including an article on demon possession that absolutely freaked me out). Among other things, there was a riveting, lengthy piece on the Shroud of Turin. I remember showing it to my mom, who said, “Well, most Christians don’t think it’s real.” In support of her answer, she gave me the book Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faithby Josh McDowell, which had roughly a 30-page section debunking the Shroud. (Curiously, I discovered about ten years ago that newer editions of the book no longer have this section. I’ve not encountered any comment or explanation as to why; it just seems to have been quietly dropped. Perhaps McDowell changed his mind. If anybody knows anything about that, I’d love to hear more.)
I’m trying to remember how old I actually was when I read McDowell’s book for the first time. Maybe eight? Nine? Anyway, much of the Shroud of Turin stuff seemed a little over my head, but a lot of the evolution/creationism material was gripping for an eight year old, particularly since we were doing a unit on Jericho at school that could serve as a bridge between the “historical” past and the “creationist” past. I was inspired to try to calculate the age of the earth counting what seemed to be the Biblical chronology backward from the historical dates we were talking about in class. I can’t remember what I came up with — a 10,000 year old earth, maybe a 15,000 year old earth. My dad pointed out that even that was far older than what most creationists seemed to want to talk about.
McDowell aside, there was a nagging question that I had that nobody could seem to quite answer for me. I was becoming aware through certain cinematic tropes and articles in — again — Strange Stories, Amazing Facts that what seemed to be the Christianity of history and the Christianity I experienced at Overlake Christian Church were two different things. Why was this? I mean, I got what seems to have been the standard fundamentalist lines about Catholicism and Mormonism being in the same category as “non-Christian cults”, and I also was starting to become aware that Christian bookstores usually had a shelf devoted to the subject of Why Catholics Were Wrong, but I didn’t understand who the Pope was supposed to be (beyond my dad saying once, “He’s an old Polish man who believes that he has a direct link to God”), and I didn’t understand the disconnect at all between past and present. The way some people talked, it sounded like we were to understand that there were no Christians between the time of the apostles and Martin Luther. Could that actually be? The way other people tried to explain it, however, it sounded like their way around it was to say that if there were Christians during those centuries when the Roman Catholic Church was all there was and they were leading everybody astray, they were saved by the grace of God and that was incidental to their being Catholic. Well, whatever the case, I had to admit to myself, even at the tender age of nine or ten, that as far as Overlake was concerned, that I didn’t understand all the hand waving and I hated the music. Regardless, since Overlake was where the real Christians were going in the Seattle area, that’s where we were going.
An anecdote that, while random-seeming, demonstrates even a small way that I felt this disconnect — in sixth and seventh grade, I was big into Piers Anthony. I’ll go into how big in a different post. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that there is a key moment in On A Pale Horse that involves the singing of the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy”, and depends on its near-universal familiarity. I had never heard of it before, I could not place it, all I knew is that for all the book implied its fame, it was never sung at Overlake. It was easily another eight or nine years before I heard it, and of course by now it has achieved “old chestnut” status, but it’s an example of the gulf between the Christian culture that Overlake promoted and “recognizable” Christian culture.
Another thread in all of this was that starting in 1986, our lives were falling apart. The really short version is that Dad’s livelihood was not coming from being a small businessman in a Seattle suburb; that was a hobby. Rather, to the extent that we were at all affluent, it was a result of Dad’s interest in a commercial building in Anchorage, and this is around the time that the price of oil collapsed, tanking Alaska’s economy. Some of this I talk about here. The house my parents built for $250,000 in 1984 was sold in 1988 for something absurd like $150,000 after more than a year on the market — and one of the tragedies there is that, had they been able to hold onto it for another few months, they would have been able to catch the rebound of the Seattle housing market which just went up and up and up and up for the next twenty years. As you can see for yourself if you check out the Zillow link I provided, the house sold again for $425k in 1994 and peaked in value in 2007 at around a million. It’s now sitting somewhere around $625k, I think. And we, the family that built it as our dream home, had to take a $100k loss. Before my parents got divorced and when I still thought I might walk away from the software industry with something worth having, I had a dream that someday I might be able to buy back that house for them — just show up on the doorstep with a blank check, ask whomever lived there, “Hey, I think I can convince you to sell,” and give them whatever they wanted. Ah well. Anyway, we lost our shirts, to say the least, and to call it a strain on our family doesn’t even begin to describe the hell that the three of us were collectively in from 1986-1993.
And when I say strain, I’m not necessarily talking in terms of subsistence. The money was what it was — the real tragedy was the irreparable damage done to relationships, some of it immediately, some of it long-term. I’m not going to go into the details of that here, although I’ve alluded to some of the permanent consequences of it here and there throughout the life of this blog. The point is, my mom was starting to discover that the emotional high she got from Overlake’s services simply did not prepare her for what the reality of the rest of her week actually was.
In the spring of 1989, I got baptized again. As I said, each service at Overlake ended with an altar call, and one Sunday, for reasons still unknown to me, I felt compelled to respond. My mom, as noted earlier, had gone through the membership process, but I never had. This was, theoretically, the first step. A nice man took me back to an office, we talked a little bit, I explained that I had been baptized when I was little, and he asked if I wanted to be baptized again. I said yes. He said the same prayer with me then that the other nice man had said with me over the phone at Halloween in 1984, so once again I was saved, and I agreed to be baptized the next Sunday.
Dad didn’t understand. “Wasn’t he already baptized?” he grumbled, but he came anyway. (Ironically, he, the grouchy atheist, has attended three out of my four reception ceremonies, thus holding the record of any of my friends or family members for such things.) I showed up early the next Sunday, I was led through the back to a changing room where I was given a white robe. During the service I was led to the baptistery — a pool built into the stage — and somebody, not Pastor Bob but a different member of the ministry team, baptized me by threefold immersion in the name of the Father… <dunk> …and of the Son… <dunk> …and of the Holy Spirit <dunk>. <applause>
That was that; when I got back to where my mom was sitting, Dad had already left to go sit in the car for the rest of the service (somehow getting past the reverse bouncers at the doors).
So, supposedly, after getting baptized, I should have gone on to take the Basic Beliefs class, and then I would have been a member of Overlake. Shortly after my second baptism, however, we stopped going to Overlake altogether.
The trouble seems to be — and this is one of the things that I might take from the problems that these “young people” are expressing about church — that churches in the present-day have thrown out so much of what made them what they were in order to be “relevant”, and are thus left with not much more than a collection of moral shibboleths and Bible verses that seem virtually impossible to take seriously in the world that they’ve accommodated in their trappings, that there’s just no “there” there anymore.
With that in mind, I give you Abp. Lazar (Puhalo) on a Canadian program called The Standard (not entirely sure when this ran):
At 1:32:
When we… reduce religion down to a moral code, or to externally appropriate behavior, then morality as a legal code like that becomes a heresy because it’s a substitute for a life in Christ, and it’s also a substitute for an inner transformation of the heart. Anything which leads us to arrogance, condescension, pride, to judge and condemn other people, is completely contrary to the teachings of Christ, therefore it’s a heresy. So morality can become a heresy as a substitute for a life in Christ, as an alternative to an inner transformation of your own heart, and as a platform from which you can judge and condemn other people… Another problem, really, is that when you moralize a social issue, you have no hope of ever solving it… we’re really putting our foot on their head and shoving them down deeper into the darkness.
I find some of Abp. Lazar’s jurisdictional history a bit, shall we say, colorful, and I would want him to clarify a few things in a setting not quite so ruled by the clock, but I do wonder if there isn’t something worth pondering here. I have heard it suggested that his view is simplistic and unscriptural; I would say that it is simple, perhaps, but I’m not sure about simplistic, and while it may be simple, it’s definitely not easy. Unscriptural… well, among other things, I am reminded of verse 1:22 of the Epistle of St. James, which my friend Hal Sabbagh has been quoting a lot lately: “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, thereby deceiving your own selves.”
Anyway, I’m not going to get into a line-by-line analysis right now, but this seemed worth throwing out there given recent discussion.
There’s something about the use of a drone that automatically puts it into the category of Something Not Us for the Western ear, at least on this side of the water. It seems to dislocate the listener either geographically or temporally, maybe both. This seems to be true whether we’re talking about Scottish bagpipes, reconstructions of medieval music, or — you guessed it — Byzantine chant; the drone itself functions as what various disciplines call a “chronotope“, something that represents, or maybe is evocative of, information about time and space. More simply, the drone calls to mind other places and other times for our ears, and if I had to make a really prosaic guess, it’s because American music by and large doesn’t use it. That’s actually more of a significant point than it presently seems; I’ll get there.
The first time I was ever exposed to music that employed a drone where I was aware it was doing so was singing the Byzantine-ish choral compositions of John Tavener in my first concert with The Tudor Choir way back in the fall of 1997. That’s a story for another time, and has an active role in a different narrative presently in progress, but what I can say for now is that that particular bass section wailing away on the drone in the amazingly resonant acoustic of St. James Cathedral in Seattle was transportive. It was so simple, so distinctive, so grounding, and so powerful.
A similar experience was to be had seven years later in Auer Hall at Indiana University, when in May of 2004 Cappella Romana performed their Fall of Constantinople program as part of the Bloomington Early Music Festival. Again — that particular group of singers on the ison, in that hall… it was something else.
As much of a sine qua non as ison seems to be for Byzantine chant on initially hearing it, however, what also seems to be the case is that it is so easy to get wrong. First of all, the so-called “Western ear” (whatever that really means) has the impulse to harmonize the melody, usually by making up a line that moves in parallel thirds, and once you’ve done that, it’s a quick hop to treating the drone as a bass line that needs to move according to the requirements of functional harmony. Follow the Bouncing Ison.
Most music in the world is modal. That means it is categorized and organized according to different kinds of scales that themselves are used for different kinds of melodies. Western music, which frankly represents a small portion of the world’s musical output, is, for the most part, not. It is tonal, which means it has whittled down the modes to two, major and minor, and has instead focused on building vertical sonorities that have particular functions based on building up of harmonic instability and subsequent resolution of that instability.
Something else Western music tends to be, at least on paper, is tuned so that all keys sound exactly the same except for the range. I had a music theory teacher who once said, “Before all of this equal-tempered nonsense, keys actually sounded like themselves and there was actually more of a musical reason to modulate [change keys].” Most modal music, however, is not tuned this way. And, really, in practice, Western music resolutely holds on to some of the old way even if we’re used to sanding off most of the corners. Singers and fretless string players have to carefully tune thirds and distinguish sevenths from leading tones, for example.
Quick demonstration of the difference — here’s the Christmas carol “What Child Is This”, a melody using a minor scale and arranged for choir using rules of tonal harmony:
Now, here’s the original melody, “Greensleeves,” using the Dorian mode rather than our typical minor (that is, Aeolian) scale: I had a devil of a time actually finding a decent version of Greensleeves on YouTube, so this probably isn’t as clear of a demonstration as I’d like it to be, but hopefully some of the difference of character comes through.
To begin with, Byzantine chant is modal and not tonal. For purposes of liturgical organization, there are eight modes; in actual musical terms, however, depending on how you count them, that number is probably doubled. This is why harmonizing it ultimately doesn’t work, and why the automatic tendency some people with very decent ears have, to place the ison on whatever the lowest note is that they perceive can function as the root of a major or minor scale, is not only wrong, but robs this particular musical idiom of its proper character.
A somewhat more subtle point is why the ison needs to not move in parallel to the melody as though as it’s a bass line, and that’s because it’s not a bass line.
Let me say that again for emphasis: it is not a bass line. Therefore, it doesn’t need to, and in fact shouldn’t, move like one.
The Psaltic Art is… strictly monophonic [emphasis in the original]. In other words, it is performed by a single cantor or a choir singing one melody in unison… It should also be noted that psaltic melodies are frequently accompanied by the ison (drone), which is a constant humming of a single note (the root of the main tetrachord in which the melody is moving). This… practice is sometimes considered a form of proto-polyphony. However, its primary function seems to be tonal stability rather than “harmonic” enrichment of the melody (p. iv).
So, it is not intended to be harmonized, and the drone is intended to provide stability — that is, a structural foundation — for the melody rather than instability – that is, the harmonic function of a bass line. Not only that, where the drone is pitched has to do with where in the scale the melody is, which itself is a function of what mode the melody employs. If you’re in the first tetrachord (that is, the initial division of four notes of the scale) of sticheraric Plagal Fourth Mode (a/k/a Tone 8), the ison is not going to be sung on the same pitch as a melody written in irmologic Fourth Mode (a/k/a Tone 4) — and yet, that’s exactly where some people instinctively want to put it, and if you gently point out to them that there actually is a right way to do it, ask them nicely to do it the right way, and even if you sing it the right way in their ear, they will adamantly insist that the two modes must be the same by shoehorning them into the same Western framework of tonal harmony.
It has been suggested to me that this constitutes “organic development”, and that we don’t need to treat the Byzantine modes as anything special when there are twelve major and twelve minor keys in Western music. I cannot agree; what this constitutes is, plain and simple, doing it wrong.
Can we agree that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this stuff, and that stubornly improvising harmonies in thirds and making up drone notes that are on the wrong pitches and not functioning within the musical texture the way they’re supposed to, no matter how much you may like to sing that way for yourself personally, represents singing it the wrong way? We can deal with equal-temperament later — first we have to at least come to terms on the fundamental approach towards the music. Are we going to learn to sing it the way it’s supposed to be learned, or are we going to insist that we get to sing it in a way foreign to its nature because we’re American and thus special?
And please don’t bring up Russian music. If Obikhod is what you’re thinking of, well, there is Russian liturgical music composed before Russians started learning composition from the Italians that would singe the hair of your toes.
Why does this matter? Is it because we musicians want to control everything and force all of the regular folks in the congregation to either shut up or to do things our way? No, it matters for the same reason that you don’t get to make up your own version of the Lord’s Prayer to say when the time comes in the Liturgy for the congregation to say the Lord’s Prayer, or your own version of the Creed. It matters for the same reason that iconographers are supposed to depict the Mother of God’s veil as red and the rest of her clothing as blue, and not make up a paisley print and polka-dot pattern. It matters for the same reason that we’re supposed to use a particular kind of stamp on the Eucharistic bread rather than carving our names into the loaf. There is a way things are to be done, decently and in order, and we don’t just get to make up our own way of doing things, even in the name of “participation”. There is this impulse among some people to special-case music so that these concerns don’t apply in that sphere, and I really don’t get it. On a broader level, how I might put it is that I have never myself experienced a musical scenario where people can successfully argue that they have the right to sing wrong notes, but that comes very close to what I sometimes hear given as the response to these issues.
Update, 30 January 2012, 7:04am – I made a big point of saying that American music doesn’t generally use drone and that that was something important I’d come back to, and then I forgot to come back to it. Hazards of blogging right before you go to bed.
A related idea — I’ve had some very interesting conversations with people that lead me to believe it is possible to simply be culturally uncomfortable with monophonic music. I don’t have a clue how or why this could be, but I’ve had people tell me before, “Do I have to sing melody? Can’t I just make up a harmony? It feels wrong not to in my voice.” A couple of my attempts at Orthodox hymns that would employ some features of American folk music have met with the reaction from more than one person, “Hey, nice melody. When are you writing parts?” Explaining that I’m intentionally writing a melody to be sung in unison usually generates a confused stare and the question “Why?” asked in such a way that tells me I’m not going to be able to explain it to them.
Back to drone. I’m hardly an expert on anything, let alone American folk music, but I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head that use drone. Drone is usually discussed as a characteristic of either medieval music or “world music”, which subtly makes it a different beast than it would be living in a part of the world where it’s a characteristic of the local “folk music” rather than “world music”. I hesitate to go whole hog and say that we’ve constructed an orientalizing narrative about kinds of music that use drone, or that’s it’s a feature of “primitive” music whereas harmony is how “advanced” societies think of music, but I think there might be some relevant thoughts there.
In any event, because it’s not a feature of American vernacular music, as soon as we hear it, we know it’s either from the old country (whichever old country that might be) or just plain old. That at once seems to validate it as “authentic” and also prompt some people to look for sharp corners that need to be filed off. The chronotope is a double-edged sword.
My solution is education; cantors need to be able and willing to explain what it is, what it’s doing, and what the right way to sing it sounds like. This has to work both ways, however; people need to be willing to ask, “How is this supposed to be done?” and then willing to follow the instruction they’re given. Unfortunately, I’ve seen instances where the attitude is, “If I can’t sing it along with you in a way that seems instinctive and natural to me the first time I hear it, then you’re excluding me from participating.” It’s a tricky business, to be sure.
As I mentioned, Fr. Andrew Damick has been kind enough to invite me to disseminate some of my crazy ideas about Orthodox church music at his parish. I’ll be talking on Saturday, 3 March at St. Paul Orthodox Church in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Fr. Andrew just posted a schedule for the day on the church website, and he has created a Facebook event. I should note that the flyer marks the first public mention of the St. John of Damascus Society, which hopefully means I’ll be able to talk more about what that is shortly. Anyway, if you’re anywhere close to that neck of the woods, by all means please come!
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese has released for purchase by the general public the textbook used by the Archdiocesan School of Byzantine Music. My copy arrived in the mail today, and while I haven’t had a chance to sing through the whole thing or thoroughly read through its contents, at first glance it looks wonderful and quite handsomely put together. It’s very similar in a lot of respects to the Margaziotis exercise book that’s floating around out there, except that it’s written in English and includes both an overview of some of the theory and an essay outlining the history and key figures relevant to the Byzantine musical tradition. There’s also a CD, and while the Margaziotis pdf has musical examples embedded, the CD introduces all of the exercises in English as well.
Here is the table of contents:
Acknowledgments: Archdeacon Pantaleimon Papadopoulos, ASBM Director
Foreword: Dr. Demetrios Kehagis, ASBM Instructor
Introduction: A Brief Overview of the Psaltic Art, by Grammenos Karanos, Ph.D. in Byzantine Musicology, Assistant Professor of Byzantine Music, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology
Byzantine music theory and practice
Chanting with melos
Definition of terms
A synoptic theory chart & reference
Index of Byzantine music characters
Here is the book opened and compared with the full-size photocopy of the Margaziotis book that I was given:
And, mostly for size purposes, here it is compared with a standard Anastasimatarion:
The CD of musical exercises is nicely and clearly sung, and among other things, I think it will be of help to people who are trying to figure out where the intervals are in their own throats.
Anyway, I’m really impressed with the care that’s gone into presenting this material to an English-speaking audience, and on the whole the exercises seem very consistent with the method used in the Margaziotis. If somebody has worked through Fr. David Barr’s materials and figured out how to understand the version of Byzantine chant that’s filtered through Western music theory well enough that they want a new challenge, this book seems like a worthy next step.
The one potential downside is that the musical examples from actual chants are all in Greek, so you need to either be able to read the Greek characters or have access to somebody who can teach the hymn texts to you phonetically. The next step after this book is going to be a Byzantine music theory and exercise book that’s not just written in English, but also uses English music examples. Factoring that out, this publication looks to be the state of the art in terms of educational materials that make learning Byzantine chant (including notation) accessible in English. I’m quite tempted to order five copies to have on hand for people in my choir.
I would very much like to think that the Antiochian Archdiocese, particularly given some things said recently by higher-ups about wanting a renewed emphasis on the Byzantine chant traditions of the Patriarchate of Antioch, would take some cues from what the Greeks are doing with the Archdiocesan School. Right now there are scattered efforts to do things, but nothing systematic so far as I can tell.
You can order Byzantine Music: Theory and Practice Guide from the link above.
I have never particularly wanted this to be “a convert’s blog”. I am an Orthodox Christian, yes, and a convert to same, and that’s one of the things I write about, but hardly the only thing. This is basically my notebook for interesting things that happen to me and the things that occur to me that I hope will be interesting, and I’ve written about my experience as an Orthodox Christian but also about religion as a broader phenomenon, movies, music, travel, language, school, and so on. There are big things that have happened to me I have specifically not written about, either because discussing them publicly will either be awkward, send the wrong message to certain parties, and maybe they’ll just be boring in the context of a blog.
My conversion experience falls under the last of those categories. There was a time when I was devouring convert stories and eager to tell my own to whomever might listen, but after awhile I realized that it The Journey of the American Orthodox Convert had become its own genre with its own tropes. Much like, say, Rush, it’s a kind of product that is principally interesting to other people who produce the same kind of product (and I speak as a Rush fan), and while that’s not to say that people don’t encounter such an account for the first time and find it meaningful (after all, I had to become a Rush fan), the Next Great Conversion Story isn’t, I don’t think, really the cultural lack that somebody like me needs to be desperate to fill. I’m happy to tell my story if people ask, but the other problem is that if the chrism oil going on the forehead is the telos, the happy ending and the whole point of the story, then that’s a truly unrealistic picture of the Christian life. It’s really not a matter of being dunked and/or basted, everybody saying “Seal!”, receiving the Body and Blood for the first time, going home, and then everybody lives happily ever after on a diet of incense, icons, and chant, all covered with awesome sauce. That’s no more true than the wedding being the end of the story for a relationship — and also recall that the normative experience for an Orthodox Christian would be infant baptism, which makes these kinds of convert stories not just outliers, but self-selected outliers. Anyway, there’s still a life that has to be lived afterward, and that’s the real story and struggle. I’ve seen my share of converts who fall off as quickly as they jumped on, and I think it’s because they weren’t adequately prepared for that, perhaps due to the unrealistically rosy picture that some convert accounts paint.
Still, some of my recent posts, I realize, perhaps need more context. I came very close a couple of times to referencing things that happened to me during my path to being received into the Orthodox Church, and I realized that they wouldn’t make any sense without the whole story. So I left those things out. I told somebody recently that I’m no good at apologetics, because what I find convincing is a result of some points that are a little too peculiar to me, but I should probably explain what those points actually are.
Here’s the thing — I’m really terrible at short versions of stories, as anybody who is the least bit familiar with me or this blog probably knows (and certainly as the board members of the St. John of Damascus Society know by now). I also really really really don’t have time to just write a novel right now, so this is going to get split up into multiple posts. It’s entirely possible that it may not happen linearly. Nobody’s exactly begged me to write this, so I’m certain the three of you out there who read this won’t care, but just so we’re all clear. Don’t make me pull this car over.
Where I will start for now is that my first real “religious” memory is being baptized at the age of three on Easter Sunday, 6 April 1980 (right in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis, and evidently the same day the Paschal greeting was first given in Hebrew by Pope John Paul II), in Anchorage, Alaska at St. Mark Lutheran Church (way back in the day when it was LCA rather than ELCA). I got dressed up in a sailor suit, and what I remember is that my godfather (Karl Bartholomy, my dad’s best friend) picked me up by my ankles and dipped my head in the baptismal font. That’s about all of that I remember, but my mother provides an account in my baby book:
Richard was baptized on Easter Sunday. It was a lovely and very special ceremony. Karl lifted Richard up to the baptismal font and the highlight was when they lighted a candle and gave it to Richard to hold. He wore a little white sailor suit with gold buttons, a red tie and his black water boots! (His new sandals were too small.) Uncle Dan [my mother's brother] couldn’t make it as he lives in Seattle. But Mimi [my paternal grandmother], Great Grandpa [my dad's maternal grandfather] and Alma came up especially for Richard’s baptism! He was so cute and sweet and such a good boy. I took my first communion on that day too. So it was all in all a very special day. (Karl and Nancy camee from Fairbanks just for Richard too.) And Daddy came to church!
Huh. I actually don’t think I knew that Mom took first communion that day. She was 25, and my dad was 34.
My mom and I went to St. Mark’s semi-regularly, as I recall, but my first memory of regular church attendance was when we moved to Wenatchee, Washington towards the end of 1980. We went to Grace Lutheran Church, and what I principally remember are a) not really wanting to go because I liked to sleep in on Sunday morning, b) sitting in a pew at some point during the service and reading a book, minding my own business, and some dude standing behind me thumping my shoulders to try to get me to stand up, c) the pastor giving me a blessing at the rail rather than communion, and d) being entranced by the candlelight service at Christmas Eve. It’s the only aesthetic point I remember at all about my Lutheran experience, truth be told.
If it’s not evident by now, there was no particular unity of faith in our little family — my dad, as I understood by the time I was five, is an avowed atheist. More on that as it is relevant.
This manner of being didn’t last long, as in 1984 we moved from the east side of the mountains to the Seattle area, at which point much about how my family functioned in relation to Christianity changed. So much, in fact, that it’s going to have to wait for another post.
It is reasonably common that I do my grocery shopping after Divine Liturgy on Sunday. That tends to mean that it’s harder to keep wine and beer around the house with this state’s antiquated liquor laws, and it’s something of a pain, since it usually takes two or three stops total depending on what all I need (Starbucks for coffee beans, the local food co-op for most stuff, and then a conventional grocery store for a small handful of other items, which still leaves me having to go to a butcher shop that isn’t open on Sundays at another time during the week), but it’s more often than not the most convenient time for me to go.
Today, in line to pay for my staples of cheese, Honey Bunches of Oats, and bananas, the headline of the local paper grabbed my eye — “Losing their religion: Young people rejecting organized worship at an unprecedented rate”. (Note that, while I’ve linked to the story on the Herald-Times website, it will be virtually useless to you, so to speak, unless you’re a paid subscriber — the H-T apparently is enough on the fiscal bubble to be concerned about using their website as a loss-leader, and as such headlines are the only content they’re comfortable letting you see for free.) I was intrigued by what local angle the piece might have and bought the paper; Bloomington is certainly still within the borders of the Bible belt, but Indiana University on the whole is about as secular of an institution as they come, so religion is everywhere in this town (I remember a Distinguished Academic Visitor coming to Bloomington a few years ago and telling his host, “I can tell I’m in small-town America because of all the f–king churches”) but to an extent that just means that it’s ignored by more people. There is a Knights of Columbus pro-life ad on a huge billboard right in the middle of downtown, but then the town’s buses were sporting the “You can be good without God” cards a couple of years ago too.
As I was poking around to see if there was any way to find the full story on the web, I realized that the H-T story was largely a re-digesting of some reports that various news outlets have been covering for the the last month. There’s a Baylor University report on religion as well as statistics released by LifeWay Research, USA Today ran a story about them on Christmas Day (using roughly the same headline as the H-T), and GetReligion did the obligatory analysis of the USA Today piece. Still, there’s a bit of a local angle with some representative quotes from IU students and a couple of area clergy, starting with one Elyse Kienitz:
[She] says during her teenage years, her parents forced her to attend a Lutheran church where her father served as music director.
“It was a family obligation for me and my four siblings… Church just didn’t work for me. I couldn’t apply what I was hearing to my daily life.”
[...] [C]limbing out of bed at 6:45am each Sunday to attend the 8 a.m. service was sheer torture. So when she turned 20 and moved… to Bloomington, church ceased being part of her life.
“I know for a lot of people the church is a source of refuge, and I kind of envy that,” Kienitz said. “But I’m an agnostic. I need absolute proof before I believe. Creationism is not valid in my opinion. I believe in Darwinian evolution.”
I have mixed feelings about how seriously to take this, truthfully, and it has less to do with Ms. Kienitz and more to do with how the reporter chooses to present the story. Creationism is elided with Christianity and church, which is one problem, but another problem is that the writer seems to betray bias off the bat by saying that Ms. Kienitz was “forced” to attend. Now, I’ve been the five year old kid lying in bed on Sunday morning hoping that Mom just forgets to wake me up, but “forced” is a bit much. What’s more interesting, at least to me, is that the relationship between religion and family ties isn’t really explored at all, but it’s clearly there in this case, and once it’s not there, bam, the kid’s done. So what’s the extent to which this “rejection” of religion by young people is a function of a mobile society?
Then there’s Stephanie Partridge, who “made some friends in church, but it wasn’t a good fit for me”:
“My spirituality is pagan and nature-based… Organized religion doesn’t work for me because my spirituality is extremely personal and sacred to me. I wouldn’t be who I am without it. I meditate and pray at home and in nature, and that allows me to find peace of mind in the midst of chaos.”
So, “spiritual but not religious”. Bob Whitaker, senior pastor at Bloomington’s Evangelical Community Church, characterizes this issue as the desire “to adapt a religion to fit their personal desires and don’t feel they need community to shape and guide them, and to shine a spotlight on their character and motivation[.]” I’ve never been of the “spiritual but not religious” persuasion; it’s always seemed to me to treat religion as a taste in accessories, a more-or-less personalizable sensibility. I’ve got to be check my own tendency to be snarky about that, because I’ve certainly exercised my own personal choice where religion is concerned, and I have done so more than once, but it has always seemed obvious to me that a “spirituality” that is exclusively personal is essentially an exercise in self-justification.
Even if that’s the case, however, are those who feel that way coming by it honestly in our culture? We’ve taken so many things that used to be experienced almost exclusively in a communal context and made it possible for the general population to experience them now in a 100% user-defined bubble. Music is no longer something one hears in the context of a gathering; it’s something that an individual listens to in order to shut out the rest of the world. Movies and TV are watched on personal devices that require no interaction with anybody (except maybe the screen). Work is done from home. We can shop for almost anything we could possibly want without ever having to interact directly with a person. Even friends and family have been fed through the individualized electronic pipe via Facebook. So why would religion be any other way, particularly if church is just going to repackage everything in a language that’s trying, usually poorly, to ape what you’re feeding into your brain through the earbuds? It makes it “accessible”, but does it actually make it worth anybody’s time in the long run? This is a question I would be very curious to hear the “bishop of Facebook”, Metropolitan Savas of Pittsburgh, consider.
Is the real issue perhaps not that we’re in a post-religious world but a post-communal one? Is seeing a need for physical interaction with a real person in a geographical location something that has simply become itself a quaint throwback?
Ned Steele, a local Methodist pastor, says that church is “just not relevant to that age group [of 20-somethings]:
“People in their 20s believe in scientific research and truth, and when they come to church and hear about creationism they feel like they’re back in the Middle Ages. Too often the church is judgmental when it comes to different lifestyles and sexuality; and we preach the exclusivity of Christianity too much, as if other paths to God don’t count.”
This is a fascinating statement. 20-somethings believe in “truth”, but they apparently don’t want to hear that Christianity is the “truth”. (I’m curious what else one would go to church to hear.) So what is it they want to hear about truth? That truth exists, but that the truth is that there isn’t really any truth beyond that truth we pick and choose for ourselves?
Again, let’s perhaps concede that maybe these 20-somethings are coming by it honestly. Truth is what can be reproduced in a laboratory, truth is the homeless person on the street, truth is the real story behind this or that person’s public ascendancy — might it be fair to say that “truth”, as understood in our present-day collective mindset, is a construct that itself is actually never constructive?
I don’t quite know what to think when I hear about “young people” “rejecting” Christianity. I’m not going to lie, some of the things expressed by Ms. Kienitz and Ms. Partridge resonate with me, but it stopped being a family matter for me in seventh grade (and was really only imperfectly so to begin with), so whatever I believed I had to own for myself early on, and the questioning that some of that prompted in me was only of the dominant Evangelical Protestant paradigm, not of Christianity itself or the overall need for a worshiping community. If anything, my problem in my teens was having been brought up to consider the continuum between Evangelical Protestantism and non-Christian cults to be minuscule, so that when I found early on I could not honestly identify as an Evangelical (nor, as a couple of folks made clear, did Evangelicals want me to identify with them, if I wasn’t going to believe certain things) and thus was led to believe I perhaps shouldn’t even consider myself a Christian anymore — well, I craved the community that Evangelicals seemed to be telling me I couldn’t have. Would I have felt the same way if I had Facebook and an iPod? Hard to say.
There’s the whole matter of solutions looking for problems I brought up a little while ago. I’m not sure what to say about what problems these people actually have, except to say that they want to know what Christianity actually has to do with how life gets lived in 2012, and probably they want to know in terms that don’t make it seem like a dated museum piece or in terms that don’t come across as reactionary. But how do you that in a way that doesn’t make church so secular-looking that there’s no real point in going to church anyway? If church is going to look like a hipster coffee shop, well, why not just go to a hipster coffee shop and listen to one of Mark Driscoll’s podcasts over your cappuccino? The coffee will be better, and frankly so will the music, probably.
A friend of mine was talking about how his priest handles skeptical youth by saying, “That’s okay that you’re questioning those things. We love you anyway. Keep coming.” Maybe rather than trying to keep up with “who” the 20-somethings “are”, it’s better for the Church to remain steadfast in what she is so that the 20-somethings know that they can always come home and know that their room will be ready — but maybe even that’s going to be waiting for calls that never come.
Thanks to a couple of friends kindly sharing yesterday’s post on Facebook — I suspect that the ulterior motive in doing so was the opportunity to publicly display goodwill to the deranged — I saw a number of comments on the piece that were not actually posted on the blog itself. I replied to a couple of them, but I also thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to address them here.
What I found very curious about some of the criticism is that what they were objecting to was also what I was objecting to, or at least I thought I was. I grant that I finally hit “Publish” at close to 3am and it’s possible that what seemed like a clear, cogent train of thought at the time was actually me calling for mandatory Batman tattoos on elephant trunks. I’m also enough of a postmodernist, at least in terms of absorption of cultural surroundings, to know that authorial intent is in no way authoritative, so if you think that I called for mandatory Batman tattoos on elephant trunks, I called for mandatory Batman tattoos on elephant trunks (even if the words I actually used were “I prefer rhubarb pie, but only with a nice strong cup of Ethiopian coffee and a rose liqueur chaser”).
One comment went as follows:
I think that that way lies madness on two counts:
1) The approach discussed, answering peoples’ ‘Felt Needs’, is exactly the approach that has led to the decline, and now fall of the historic Protestant denominations in the United States. Speaking from my personal background, the Dutch Reformed Church started saying to itself, “People don’t have a Predestination problem…” “People don’t have a Total Depravity problem…” “People aren’t wandering around feeling guilty about the sin in their lives…” and slowly but surely, all of those distinctions went down the sewer pipe and the Dutch Reformed denominations, with Robert Schuller leading the parade, left Protestantism, then Christianity, and blended into the American religion.
2) There’s an exceedingly false premise in the midst of this piece, and that’s that the Holy Orthodox Church isn’t the only one preaching Christ crucified in the United States today. I don’t know if its stated out of charity or ignorance of just how bad the religious landscape has become, but Orthodoxy is, frankly, the last vestige of Christianity available in the United States. Everything else has blended into the hydra that is Americanism, a kind of Nationalistic Therapeutic Deism. One head is Southern Baptist, one is Mormon, one Episcopalian, but at the core they’re teaching the same thing, a bland moralism, worship of patria, and whatever self help strategy is popular this week.
America is a threat unlike anything Orthodoxy has ever faced. We’re faced with a culture that believes itself to be Christian, but is anything but. A culture with no sense of history whatsoever, and which actively denies history’s relevance to religion. A culture whose religious experience is entirely subjective and individualistic. A culture that has fused this false religion with an overpowering Statism.
To my knowledge, the Orthodox Church was not seeking converts in Western European nations in the 19th century, nor in the fascist states of the early-20th century, and Communism of course left Orthodoxy in no state to seek growth until its fall in the lands afflicted. Those are the only places where She might have had a similar experience to attempting to convert the United States today.
The last thing I’m suggesting is that Orthodoxy blend into the American religion. However, I’m also trying to be realistic about the cultural circumstances that inform the problem, and I’m explicitly problematizing the approach of revising our visible, external practices as a way of making peace with those cultural circumstances. As far as the matter of whether or not Orthodox Christianity isn’t the only one preaching Christ crucified goes, my point is that, even if this commenter is right that Orthodoxy is the only one, we nonetheless are in the position of having to fight to be heard over the din of everybody else claiming to do so, and the ways we try to distinguish ourselves in the midst of that dull roar are received more often than not as exercises in question-begging, at least from what I’ve seen. Your mileage may vary.
Here’s a personal anecdote that seems applicable to me. When I was a little kid, I had a Sherlock Holmes-style double-billed deerstalker hat, a trenchcoat, and a briefcase. I insisted on wearing them to school every day. My parents told me, “You can wear those if you want. You need to be aware that you will probably take some heat for it because you’ll probably be the only kid at school wearing anything like it.” I chose to wear them nonetheless, completely unfazed. Yes, I had a lot of problems getting along with some of the other kids at school as a result, but I stuck to my guns.
From where I sit now, close to 30 years removed from that set of circumstances, I don’t think it was right or wrong that I made the choice that I did. It was just who I was (and still am, to a certain degree), and the way people reacted to me was a function of who they were. To be who I was without those externals was incomprehensible to me. But I still got beat up (and worse, sometimes) and my hat still got stolen on a regular basis (but always recovered — I still have it, in fact). I could have saved myself a lot of grief by just choosing to fit in, but I didn’t want to do that. What I did to adapt, rather, was to do the best I could at the things I was good at and that I was interested in, and eventually my path became clear. (Not until I was 29, and then I was 32 before I could actually go down that path, but never mind that now.)
I have a friend who just very recently started talking to me about the prospect of becoming a priest eventually. It’s coming to him out of a sense of vocation, not to evangelize the United States with the One True Church, but rather — and I can’t say I’ve ever heard any of my various would-be seminarian friends and acquaintances ever put it this way before — to heal people’s souls. Wow. When I think about how rife our culture is with depression, and how much effort we put into possible solutions for it, some that might work and others that assuredly won’t — well, talk about a problem people actually do think they have, and that we as the Church actually can do something about. Is that an impulse that leads to Nationalistic Therapeutic Deism? My instinct is to say no, that it’s rather an impulse to do what the Church should be doing anyway, but maybe I’m wrong.
Here’s another one:
Myeh — he’s right, but he’s wrong. His rhetoric is good, but he dismisses alternate claims on a kind of wistful idealism only then to transition into a realist “let’s meet real problems” mode to throw you off his trail. Not biting, thank you. What’s frustrating is that we _do_ need to translate some things, but it can’t be the result of one generation’s engineering project of “inculturation.”
We do need the Liturgy in English, we also really should have music that taps into some kind of cultural memory (there is such a thing, even if it’s weaker than it is in other cultures — and even, contra the choir director in this piece, if it seems “arbitrarily chosen” according to critical standards…these “arbitrary choices” are the result of decisions that the entire culture has received, that this kind of music captures something primordial about who we are, and it is probably made on a host of very difficult-to-pinpoint resonances between the form of the music and the forms of a bundle of things — the feel of the land, the forms of historical events that are received as defining, etc.).
On the other hand, the ascetical and liturgical tradition of the Church should not be tampered with. I don’t know why people would think that these should change. If there are little changes in iconographic style or vestments or whatever that would translate the tradition better in our land, then these will accumulate slowly over time from deepened fidelity to what is received, and will not result from a program.
Finally, Orthodox people say lots of really silly things about what the West is and what Secularism is. (They also say silly things about what Protestantism is, or what Catholicism is — even converts from these traditions.) This all really needs to be straightened out. In every pre-modern Pagan people that I know of, they had the Gospel translated into the symbolic idiom they knew — so that in the Anglo-Saxon world, for instance, they had the Pagan mythology subtly re-configured to communicate the form of the Gospel. There is continuity, and discontinuity, and I don’t know that there’s any other way to graft something on. Unless someone can articulate the American mythology, we’re not likely to have much success other than pockets of people who’re faithful to their heritage and peculiar converts who can buck all kinds of countervailing forces.
What is there to be wary of in American culture, in the condition of Secularism we all find ourselves in? The shadowboxing will likely continue until someone can speak clearly.
I’m not certain what alternate claims I’m dismissing with wistful idealism, and it’s also unclear to me what he means by saying I’m trying to throw people off my trail. Dealing with the rest of it — I never said we don’t need the Liturgy in English; I said that English is important. What I suggested, perhaps clumsily in my 2:30am stupor, is something that seems to me to be well in line with what he says — that English isn’t functioning as part of a mission so much as part of a cultural agenda. The agenda is looking an awful lot like the tail wagging the dog, and it isn’t addressing what strike me, at least in my own limited experience, as the real pastoral issues that have to do with language and culture.
Unless someone can articulate the American mythology… well, somebody did that. His name was Joseph Smith. The particular genius of Mormonism, it seems to me, was figuring out a way to incorporate an American sense of place into its sacred history in a way that no Protestant group has really managed to do, and that Catholicism and Orthodoxy really struggle to figure out how to do. The way most Protestants seem to have solved this problem is to become semi-gnostic (at least) in their approach to place. I had a conversation with somebody about a year ago, basically a garden-variety Evangelical, about my experience in Greece and being someplace where particular events in Christian history are embedded in the cultural memory. This person looked very thoughtful and said, “Well, that’s interesting, but why does anybody actually need that? I don’t have a sense of place that has resonance with Christian history, but I’ve got Jesus, and I don’t see where I’m missing anything.” (Which again smacks of solutions looking for problems.) I’ve suggested before that the way American Orthodoxy will develop its own sense of place will be American saints who actually were born here and active here, but that’s not going to happen overnight.
(Incidentally, Flesh of My Flesh does medieval Germanic stuff, and I’m well aware of the Gospel being translated into the symbolic idiom that they knew — still, there are limitations there. The Germanic tribes stayed Arian for a long time, for example, and my wife has also talked about there being some very strange things going on with things like the Heliand, the Gospel harmonization written in Old Saxon.)
What is there to be wary of in American culture? That’s a question that I’m sure could take multiple dissertations to answer, but here’s where my brain immediately goes: I met a man once who was a mortgage broker. It wasn’t terribly exciting, but he was very good at it, and he was proud of what he did. “If you’re going to make shoes, make good shoes,” he said. It was a point of view that got me thinking, and I remember mentioning it to my dad, who promptly shot down the man’s attitude as naive and, mortal sin of mortal sins, inefficient. “If you make good shoes that nobody can buy, you’re not going to have a job,” he retorted. “Better to make shoes that are just good enough that the average person can afford them and feel like they’re getting a halfway decent product. Sell to the classes, eat with the masses. Sell to the masses, eat with the classes.” It seems to me that that’s a good place to start.
has no unread messages in his GMail OR http://t.co/2j58otsB e-mail accounts for the first time in God only knows how many years. 21 hours ago
has a GMail account at 0 unread messages, down from ~9,500, after deleting 2.5 years worth of unread junk mail. 1 day ago
has managed to get his spam filter, and by that I mean my GMail account, under 2,000 unread messages. 1 day ago
wants you to know -- think a large chunk of kiwi fruit can't just randomly fly into your coffee? It can. I know. 3 days ago
realizes that if Queensryche's singer quit, the band would be milky, because it would lack Tate. 6 days ago
hates to admit it, but I'm increasingly tending to interpret the phrase "evidence and research-based" as meaning "totally made up just now". 6 days ago
@kevinbasil: That actually may be the wrong abbreviation. Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs chrétiens. 1 week ago
has a question for my fellow antiquarians -- does anybody have a scan of the source abbreviations from the Lampe PGL and the DLD handy? 1 week ago
Gloriose rex Richarde, vota damus, tu attende, tui sumus, recognosce, mortem aufer, vitam posce. Ave, quondam rex Anglorum, nunc cohaeres angelorum; placa nobis regem tuum, qui te fecit civem suum.
Here’s a personal anecdote that seems applicable to me. When I was a little kid, I had a Sherlock Holmes-style double-billed deerstalker hat, a trenchcoat, and a briefcase. I insisted on wearing them to school every day. My parents told me, “You can wear those if you want. You need to be aware that you will probably take some heat for it because you’ll probably be the only kid at school wearing anything like it.” I chose to wear them nonetheless, completely unfazed. Yes, I had a lot of problems getting along with some of the other kids at school as a result, but I stuck to my guns.
