Rant alert: calling Marty Haugen to Hell
Gamma Gamaliel
Shipmate
in Hell
And Rutter.
And all composers of elevator muzak for liberal Protestant and Catholic traditions.
I am resolving to abstain from calling individual Shipmates to Hell yet am aware I run the risk of doing so by proxy. I hasten to add therefore that I bear no ill-will towards those who may use Holden Evening Prayer and similar monstrosities in their services.
I've been warned for some time that contemporary liberal/mainstream church music could be every bit as bad, if not worse, than the contemporary charismatic evangelical repertoire.
I wasn't so convinced until I looked some of this stuff online.
Come back Hillsongs. All is forgiven.
What's going on?
If I had Bach in my tradition I'd be playing his cantatas to anyone and everyone who would listen.
Likewise Byrd or Tallis. Or Allegri, Palestrina, Victoria, Monteverdi.
Or Moody & Sankey.
Or spirituals.
Or Redemption Hymnal even.
At least they've got guts and fire.
Two or three minutes of Holden Evening Prayer was as much as I could stand without turning into a jabbering wreck or reaching for Hymns Ancient & Modern, a Gregorian chant CD or a tambourine.
How on earth?!
My brother in law abd sister in law worship very happily in their local Methodist church. It's a loving, welcoming and warm community.
But where are the Wesleyan hymns? What's with the middle-class guilt trip ditties where the lines don't scan and we tell God how sorry we are for being privileged without doing anything to rectify that?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not putting my own or any other Tradition/tradition up as an exemplar. Far from it. We all have material we'd love to edit or excise.
But forgive the rant ... I was truly shocked when I listened to Marty Haugen. Can church music possibly plumb any lower depths?.
Hell seems the most appropriate place for it. An eternal Room 101.
And all composers of elevator muzak for liberal Protestant and Catholic traditions.
I am resolving to abstain from calling individual Shipmates to Hell yet am aware I run the risk of doing so by proxy. I hasten to add therefore that I bear no ill-will towards those who may use Holden Evening Prayer and similar monstrosities in their services.
I've been warned for some time that contemporary liberal/mainstream church music could be every bit as bad, if not worse, than the contemporary charismatic evangelical repertoire.
I wasn't so convinced until I looked some of this stuff online.
Come back Hillsongs. All is forgiven.
What's going on?
If I had Bach in my tradition I'd be playing his cantatas to anyone and everyone who would listen.
Likewise Byrd or Tallis. Or Allegri, Palestrina, Victoria, Monteverdi.
Or Moody & Sankey.
Or spirituals.
Or Redemption Hymnal even.
At least they've got guts and fire.
Two or three minutes of Holden Evening Prayer was as much as I could stand without turning into a jabbering wreck or reaching for Hymns Ancient & Modern, a Gregorian chant CD or a tambourine.
How on earth?!
My brother in law abd sister in law worship very happily in their local Methodist church. It's a loving, welcoming and warm community.
But where are the Wesleyan hymns? What's with the middle-class guilt trip ditties where the lines don't scan and we tell God how sorry we are for being privileged without doing anything to rectify that?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not putting my own or any other Tradition/tradition up as an exemplar. Far from it. We all have material we'd love to edit or excise.
But forgive the rant ... I was truly shocked when I listened to Marty Haugen. Can church music possibly plumb any lower depths?.
Hell seems the most appropriate place for it. An eternal Room 101.
Comments
I find it hard to get exercised over hymns unless the words are really execrable.
Precisely.
Seriously, get over it.
Meanwhile, I guess farcebook is an appropriate place for those church music snobs to spend their time.
I'm grateful to have seen the revivalistic and "old time gospel" hymns and Gaither songs edited out of hymnals or rotation in my lifetime (here in the Midwest of the U.S.). But at least we had those, when many church music programs were engulfed in the mindless, unmusical "worship chorus" wave; at least the revival stuff usually had great melodies and harmony, which Baptists used regularly to sing here.
Until we changed churches Husband and I regularly visited other churches on the highly patriotic Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, where we hoped to hear the gospel rather than christian nationalism.
One church was intimidating. I was simply not sexy enough to worship there -- with their motorcycle ministry and cool lighting for the electrified worship Band. One song nearly drove me to (through?!) the door with a line addressed to God: "I am mindful of...."
Puke. I have no idea what the rest of the song, sermon service was about. "I am mindful of.... " like a meeting with HR, right before you get told you don't get unpaid leave to be with your kid in the hospital. Blech.
(FWIW, I quite like Holden Evening Prayer, though we've never sung it at Our Place).
I didn't diss them.
I said 'all was forgiven' in comparison with the Holden Evening Service.
I came across it when a Shipmate referenced it on another thread and found it grimmer than grim.
But each to their own. One man's fish is another man's poisson.
Of course we don't.
It would be Outrage.
I encountered it for the first time last night when it was referenced on another thread. I messaged a Lutheran friend in the US about it to get her reactions.
They were very similar to mine.
I'm certainly not dismissing all liberal Protestant or liberal Catholic hymnody.
FWIW I'm still very partial to Wesleyan hymns, 19th century US hymns and spirituals and I certainly don't object to all contemporary worship songs and choruses.
I suppose I was expecting Lutheran church music - although Baugen isn't Lutheran any more - to be muscular and sinewy like 'Ein Feste Burg' or achingly sublime like Bach's cantatas and parts of his oratorios.
I'm Welsh so like hymns in the minority key and have more than my fair share of sentimentality. We are allowed to be sentimental.
So Male Voice choirs singing 'Myfanwy' or 'Gwahoddiad' turn me into a blubbering wreck.
But what I can't be doing with are saccharine arrangements with Katherine Jenkins and Bryn Terfel.
The Holden Evening Prayer reminded me of that. K-Tel proudly presents crap church music.
There's awful it is with this predictive text.
What the heck. Let'er rip
😉
Sure. I s'pose it'd be like someone from the US clicking on a UK YouTube video of an Anglican service and expecting choral Evensong with John Major's proverbial old ladies cycling there along quiet country lanes ...
Only to find (insert nightmare of choice here) ....
But while it's a great compliment to have people expecting top-rate music simply because we are Lutherans, if you think about it, you'll see that we are just as capable of producing crap as anybody else. I can't stand 95% of what Stephen Starke writes, though I love the Te Deum set to Holst's Jupiter melody ("We Praise You and Acknowledge You, O God"). But his wording drives me batty.
I just scrolled quickly through as I don't have time to sit through the whole thing. I must have missed the singing of the Sanctus in the round so must go back and look for that when I have time.
I didn't detect any Middle Eastern beat in the sections I listened to but again, I was skimming through at a fair pace.
I won't get into the gender-specific language aspect as that's been rehearsed ad-infinitum on these boards.
Ok. First impressions. Pretty much what I'd expect from a liberal Catholic setting. Musically I didn't find it aa objectionable as the Holden Evening Prayer.
That just sounded bland to my ears.
Perhaps because it was a live setting it had a more raw and 'authentic'quality about it which the more glitzy production of the Holden Evening Prayer lacked.
Perhaps I wouldn't have objected to that so much if it'd been a raw recording of a live congregation and not a somewhat glitzy, schmaltzy and off-puttingly polished video in terms of production values.
Nick Tamen is right @Lamb Chopped there wasn't a link in any of the posts but there are various settings on YouTube from both Lutheran and Episcopalian churches and from Holden Village itself.
I can't remember which ones I saw but I looked at two I think and recoiled in horror.
Here's the first part of the service, including the hymn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HMgj7UVAMg
It must have been the particular videos I watched that sent me scurrying for cover.
Move along everyone, there's nothing to see here.
I usually get "Let my prayer rise up" stuck in my head for weeks - here's hoping the HEP service never falls into the hands of our nation's enemies!!
Truth be told, as @Nick Tamen has identified, the 'shock' came from coming across something unexpected.
The settings on the videos I saw were rather schmaltzy and reminded me of a third rate Hollywood musical. Not quite something I'd expect to see on a stage in Las Vegas but certainly not what I anticipated.
I didn't particularly 'like' the version on the video Bishops Finger shared but that's irrelevant really. It didn't give me the screaming ab dabs like the schmaltzy versions I saw online.
One thing about Covid is the sheer range of churches that put their services online meaning it's easier than ever to see the range even within a single denomination.
One thing about his pieces are they are directed towards praising God--no Jesus is my friend stuff. He is not a praise band composer, though some praise bands have adapted his material. His preferred instrument is a simple stringed instrument.
Some people like him. Other people don't. I do not think he is so awful that he has to be condemned to hell, though.
Many of the videos of HEP services show it being held in the context of an *ordinary* church, with perhaps only a few singers and/or musicians, and therein lies the value of this, and similar, work.
I admit that I'm not familiar with any other Haugen works, though.
Having learned Here in this place from scratch about a month ago I can certainly attest to the singability (something shared with a lot of traditional metrical psalm tunes). It goes largely how you expect, which makes it not all that interesting but at least suitable for a congregation.
I have qualified my comments and my Hell call.
The arrangements on some of the You Tube videos were what I found sulphurous.
The footage of ordinary congregations singing this material far less so.
Had I seen those first I wouldn't have issued the Hell call. I wouldn't have been particularly impressed but not provoked to the point of venturing into the Abyss.
Thanks, Simon
Okay, I looked it up and behold, it's exactly the thing my host congregation uses for Advent/Lent evening services!
Which leaves me in several minds about it...
I mostly like the music. I have several spots where the words drive me batty and I attempt not to screw up my face where other people can see it. A few cases in point:
"Joyous light of heavenly glory, loving glow of God's own face" (Wha? somebody's a glow?)
Never mind. Presumably this is addressed to Christ, right? Until we continue...
"you who sing creation's story..." Wait a minute. Those are the sons of God, aka angels--it's straight out of Scripture. So are we singing this to the angels now?
[more random words and then we get] "God of daybreak..." Okay, so it IS Christ.
And so on, and so forth...
There's also the un-Lutheran bits, like this from the litany:
"For all the beloved who rest in your mercy..." which is clearly a reference to dead-and-gone Christians. In my experience of Lutheranism which is only what, 40-some years, we just don't pray for the dead. We assume their state is fixed, hopefully in glory with the Lord, esp. if they are said to be "resting in your mercy," in which case they need no prayers (and if it's the other way round, prayers will do no good at this point). We do pray for their grieving loved ones....
I have to say this thread has been an eye-opener, though. I did not know that this was apparently a Lutheran writer? Ah no, I see from Wikipedia (that grand source!) that he is apparently UCC, though raised American Lutheran Church.
Just a reply to your comment:
This is not an argument, just relaying how I look at that particular phrase.
I see it as more a petition of thanksgiving for the Christians who came before us that passed on the faith to the next generation. I do remember the strong witness of my grandparents on both sides. One of those grandparents was not baptized until he was in his 70s but he had made sure his home was a Christian home from the very beginning. My parents were very active in the church too.
Whenever, I pray that last petition, this is what I think about. I am not praying anyone into heaven. It is not about praying for the dead as much as it is about giving thanks for their ongoing witness, at least for me.
Hope you have a blessed Sunday. Looks like it is a good day here. The rain has stopped. Blue skies have opened up. Warmer than the last few days. Good day to worship.
I daresay the more 'catholic' aspects of the wording of the Holden Evening Prayer will have come from Haugen's work on RC liturgical music. I might be wrong.
On the prayers for the departed issue, I'm sure many Anglicans would hold a similar position to @Gramps49 on this one. Others would have no compunction about praying for the dead. RCs and Orthodox do it as a matter of course, of course. 😉
I understand the difficulties Protestants have with this, most certainly, as a former hot Prot myself. Nowadays it just feels like a natural thing to do, although I quite understand and respect other people's qualms about it.
Like @Lamb Chopped though, when I followed the lyrics online on the YouTube versions I saw, I found them confusing. I wasn't sure who was being addressed or referred to at times.
Overall though, I must confess to being embarrassed about this Hell Call. I over-reacted and ran the risk of repeating egregious errors I've made aboard Ship in the past when I've shamefully dissed other people's musical tastes.
I may start a new thread in Purgatory with hopefully some sensible questions about the Lutheran tradition, in which case a kindly Host may wish to put this thread out of its misery.
Derivative as hell, clearly based on the simplest of responsorial psalm tones (🤢) but not in a good way, and then the morphing into a Shenandoah sound-alike chorus.
I can see what MH was trying to achieve, as could anyone with half a brain who isn't tone deaf: he's trying to modernise (why) the plainchant for Compline, but as to why anyone would think it needed changing, I'm stumped. The end result strikes me as an adult version of this and about as profound.
Well, each to their own, of course.
I like HEP precisely because it is simple and easy to sing, although I wouldn't want it every week...
I like Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, too, so thanks for a reminder of my younger days. We simpletons have our favourites, even if we're tone deaf, and with less than half a brain.
When he wrote “Holden Evening Prayer” in 1986, Haugen was doing a stint as composer in residence at Holden Village, a Lutheran conference and retreat center. At the time, everyone staying in Holden Village was expected to attend Vespers and the Sunday Service. Given that the community joined in Vespers daily, there was a desire for some variation from the one setting for Evening Prayer found in the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship (compared to the three settings for Holy Communion). (The LBW name of the service is “Evening Prayer,” with the subtitle “Vespers.”)
So what Haugen was trying to do was write another setting for the Evening Prayer liturgy (more or less as found in the LBW) that was in the American Lutheran musical “vernacular” of the time (which in turn was influenced by the post-Vatican II American Catholic musical “vernacular”), and that worked for the community at Holden Village. Nothing more, really, I don’t think.
Indeed. (Not that I’m agreeing with your self-description.
The primary consideration should always be whether a given setting or piece of music enables the gathered community to worship sincerely, and many factors beyond musical quality can go into whether a particular piece of music enables worship in a particular community.
Sorry, @Arethosemyfeet . I don't know that song.
The one I heard, and can't remember more of, was some obnoxiously condescending American hipster praise song from the early 2000s. Which I interpreted as something like "God, I am mindful of the inconvenience my sin has been and the trouble you went to in order to get me out of that scrape. Much thanks. You free for lunch sometime soon?"
Hearing it once was really more than enough, but not enough to be able to remember it well. And that is a blessing.
TBF it's fairly objectionable on grounds of tune alone.
I was organist at a church when I was still at school that loved the horrid thing. Tastes eh?
Is outrage! I rather like it, but then no-one has ever accused me of having musical taste. For reference:
https://youtu.be/ZCQy1r-45jw?si=Zlo5qSgLVwOCM8W7
But then I'll sing Shall we not love thee mother dear if it's put in front of me.