Recently the journal published an article about Contemporary Worship Songs by Lester Ruth, Research Professor of Christian Worship at Duke Divinity School. Besides being my academic advisor, teacher, and friend, Dr. Ruth is a thorough and thoughtful scholar, and our journal was honored to publish his article: "How 'Pop' Are the New Worship Songs? Investigating the Levels of Popular Cultural Influence on Contemporary Worship Music."
Popular literature tends to trumpet how great, or how terrible, pop music styles have been for the church. Yet few people actually sit down and systematically comb through data such as song lyrics and CCLI reports. That's what Dr. Ruth does here. Using objective research methods, he analyzes the lyrics of a large body of Contemporary Worship Songs (CWS). Here are three things I learned from his research:
1. We pray differently than our grandparents did. Even though English speakers have not used words like "thee" and "thou" in their day-to-day speech for quite some time, church leaders were still using them, especially when praying out loud, well into the latter half of the 20th century. In the 1960s, worship songs began losing these archaic English words, and they were almost gone completely by the 1980s. (Bible translations produced over this period also reflect this change.) CWS may not be totally responsible for the shift to familiar pronouns, but studying the changes in song lyrics over the past 50 years reveals just how differently we pray now. Do you know people who still use "thy," "thine," "thee," and "thou" when they pray out loud? Most pastors were still praying that way 40 years ago.
2. Contemporary songs are getting more complicated. The earliest "contemporary" songs were mostly strophic -- that is, they were just a set of verses that repeated the same tune: Verse 1, Verse 2, Verse 3, etc. Later, choruses (or refrains) were added: Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus, etc. ("Lord I Lift Your Name on High.") Nowadays the newest songs often have bridges: Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus, etc. ("How Great is Our God.") There are even "pre-chorus" features in some songs. Each of these structures has a twist that sets it apart from the rest of the song. That means that a congregation has to learn at least three different parts to sing a typical worship song today. If you don't like CWS, don't say that it's because the songs are too easy, because that's not true anymore.
3. Newer songs don't rhyme (as much). This is a trend that I had not noticed myself, but it's true: the AABB and ABAB rhyming schemes and strict meters (meaning, standard numbers of syllables on each line) of traditional hymns are things of the past. Dr. Ruth attributes this to songwriters' desire for more natural, colloquial speech patterns, which is something that's been happening in secular pop music through the same time period. Among other things, this shows that the lyrics and tunes of contemporary worship songs are meant to stay together -- no more mixing and matching of words and music that our great-grandparents did with hymns.
Whether you think CWS is the best or the worst thing to happen to the church, you will learn something new from reading this article. May Dr. Ruth's number increase, leading to more objective studies of contemporary worship music.
No comments:
Post a Comment