On May 21st to 23rd, I traveled down to Boston to attend a workshop called “Music that Makes Community.” The workshop was led by several key figures in a growing network of church leaders, liturgists, and musicians who are interested in making paperless music part of their worship. About forty of us – many Episcopalians, several UCC and ELCA folk, and others – gathered for three days in a beautiful round room below Trinity Church, Copley Square. Leaders shared theory, technique, and experiences, and we all sang together. A lot.
What, you ask, is “paperless music”? Paperless music is music that you can learn without having anything in your hands. If you think about it, this is the most fundamental form of human music. How did you learn the first song you learned – the first dozen songs you learned, most likely? By hearing them sung by others, absorbing them, and copying what you heard. (One principal underlying this approach is that copying or mimicking is cognitively simple – we’re programmed to do it, it’s how humans learn – whereas reading music and producing what you see on the page is an advanced cognitive skill that has to be learned and practiced.)
Folk music, lullabies, work songs – the songs people really sing, from around the world and throughout history – have a lot of common characteristics that make them easy to learn and easy to sing together. Rhyme, repetition, rhythm, simple words, familiar tonalities and tune structures can all help make a song easy to learn and sing. Much of this music is simple on the surface, but there are many ways to add complexity – rounds, harmonies, different parts sung together (“layering”). Those who were in church at 10am on Pentecost Sunday learned a simple Pentecost song that I led at the end of my sermon – two simple parts that sound great together. (And you did sound great! I was impressed!)
Why bring paperless music back into contemporary American churches, where we’ve grown so reliant on hymnals and the organ to support (or drown out!) our voices? Because singing as a group is a fundamental human activity. (One leader, Donald Schell, says, “People did this for 30,000 years, then stopped doing it about 100 years ago.”) It’s beautiful, and it connects us with each other, helping us feel ourselves as part of a meaningful whole. It can give confidence to those who feel musically inept, to hear their own voice becoming part of something lovely. Also, singing something we’ve taken in deeply, learning it by ear, can allow it to become prayer – whereas when we’re reading a hymn off a page, we’re often too preoccupied by matching word and note to really take in the meaning.
Mind you, I have a lot of favorite hymns! And I love to hear the choir sing something they really enjoy and are eager to offer to us and to God. Nobody wants to replace all worship music with paperless music. There are musical opportunities in our liturgies that are better-suited to paperless music than others – such as times of gathering or prayer, when a simple text and a repeated melody can say what needs saying and draw us into the moment; and times when we are offering deeply familiar words, like the Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might…”). And there are liturgical settings that are better suited to paperless music than others. We’ve begun doing a little on Wednesday evenings at our 6pm Eucharist, when I preside; and we may try a little more on our Great Hall Sundays and other times when our worship takes a step down in formality. I always welcome feedback on how it feels and what you liked, or didn’t like.
If you’d like to know more, let me know! It would be great fun to get some folks together – people who know they can sing, and people who think they can’t, but would like to try – and learn some songs together, and enjoy singing for singing’s sake. Maybe we’d pick out a song or two that we’d like to do at church someday; maybe we’d just try it out and go home. Either way, I believe we will know ourselves and each other differently for having listened to each other and made music together, in the simplest and oldest way there is.