The term "heart music" grew out of missionary efforts to find a style of music that connected best with a particular group of people. It was borrowed from the phrase "heart language", which is meant to identify the one language that a person speaks best and can use to communicate deep truths. The assumption is that people who grow up speaking several different languages still have one that is a first language or "mother tongue."
Some of the first music missionaries and ethnodoxologists worked in areas where identifying the mother tongue and heart music was not difficult. For example, when Tom Avery worked with the Canela people in Brazil, they mostly spoke one language to each other and had their own indigenous style of singing. Because he worked for a mission organization (Wycliffe Bible Translators) that emphasized the mother tongue, Tom used the same approach to understanding this group's music. He studied the local melodies and rhythms and then showed the people how they could create worship songs in that indigenous style.
This idea of identifying a culture group's heart music continued in the development of the ethnodoxology movement. The vision statement of the International Council of Ethnodoxologists (ICE) states:
The ICE network exists to encourage and equip Christ-followers in every culture to express their faith through their own heart music and other arts.
Over the past couple of decades entire organizations have grown up around this idea of helping churches worship with music from the heart. Indeed, the organization Heart Sounds International even wove the concept into its name.
"Heart music" is more of a motivational term than a technical description. Like any word picture, it eventually reaches a point where it breaks down. For instance, during my time in the Philippines in the 2000s, it was difficult to find a people group who knew just one traditional way of making music. Even the culture groups with the strongest traditions of local music-making still had access to other music styles from around the world. The Mangali Kalinga pictured in the photo above still actively make music with gongs and bamboo instruments. But when they composed new worship songs in their language, most of the tunes sounded more like country and western songs that they hear on the radio. (Yes, American country music is widespread in the mountains of the northern Philippines.)
Even identifying a person's one "mother tongue" can be difficult. People who grow up in a multi-lingual town often have different places where they use a different languages: one for the market, one for the church, one for the school. And those may not be the "mother tongues" that they speak in the home. (That's assuming that parents and grandparents all speak the same language. In many cases there are two or three languages spoken in the home, and a child grows up learning all of them.)
Even if finding one "mother tongue" or "heart music" in all situations can be difficult, we still carry on in the effort to create locally meaningful worship songs. Today's ethnodoxologist just needs to recognize that there are many styles that can connect with a particular congregation. Blogger Bobby Gilles recently wrote about how to make new congregational songs easier to sing. Besides making the melodies in a better range and key for the amateur singer, the songs have to be arranged and set in a style that is locally meaningful. In the US, that means that songs should take the shape of regional styles. (Rock from Seattle is different from rock in Atlanta.) My hat is off to Gilles and others who are working to make contemporary/popular/rock music easier to sing and play in our churches. Even in multi-cultural, inter-generational, uber-globalized situations, there are songs that can speak to the heart.
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