In music discipleship (click to see series), we want to grow in faith – to know God more and more. To compare, let’s take a mirror to “discipleship”. A great way to capture meaning of discipleship is to know God and make God known to others, described in “First look at syllabus” as Salt & Light Discipleship (SLD). With the mirror, Music Discipleship (MD) reflects SLD but with primary focus on music and worship. In the “First look” blog, there is an example of prayer life as a theme to grow in faith in SLD, and the same theme in MD.
A great part of music and worship is listening. This is in fact a lot of “work”. It has become relatively easy for some of us, because we have some second-nature skills, e.g.:
Effective songs have melodic contour that flows with the lyrics.
Different instruments have different temperament: from penny whistle to the organ, from lead guitars to euphonium, from piano to cymbal.
For songs with unusual chords or sequence, that’s where you spend more time to reflect and absorb its harmonic communication device.
Most musics are in 4 beats, followed by 3 beats, and some of theose with compound time signatures (e.g. 6/8, 9/8) still have a feel of 2, and 3, relatively.
The flow of chords (harmonic structure) is predictable.
We need introduction not only to set (or discover) the of the music in the worship team, but also “set the scene” for the congregation.
While listening is a lot of work, we do need to listen. Many classical-trained pianists require time to play in a band or ensemble, to learn “beat counting” following cue from others. The secret to good listening is probably, strangely speaking, what we are playing. An example of “room for improvement” in our music worship is “flatness”. Our music worship gets to a temperament level very quickly in the song or hymn, perhaps as early as in the first line of lyrics, or even in the introduction. We then stay at that level to the end. That flatness lacks expression.
Ideas we have – mostly in the word “variety”. Why we rarely achieve variety is probably due to lack of time, and lack of capability for “balance”.
Balance
In this context, a “un-ideal” balance is where everyone in the worship team plays their instruments, sings, or plays and sings to their optimum level all the time. There will be some variation, e.g. chorus might be louder, and slowing down and decrease in texture at the end of the chorus, prior to going to the next verse.
Some thoughts for balance might be realised in a variety of ways, for example, using a variety of the following in a hymn / song:
- Different voices taking turn to say the lyrics - give a sense of the words "spoken" to us
- One singing voice accompanied by the organ - not a combination we usually have
- All voices to sing in unison, medium loud, for a piece that has a soft temperament - "thicker" texture gives a different feel
- Different voices taking turn to say the lyrics - give a sense of the words "spoken" to us
- Worship team in music accompaniment, congregation sings and leads the music team in timbre and tempo - can be amazing outcome when congregation sings in one voice and in one step with tempo
- Keyboard solo on tune, with a voice as an echo - can help with the lyrics
