Congregational Singing: Screens vs. Hymnals
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Recently, over at Proclaim & Defend, Taigen Joos offered some thoughts on projecting song lyrics on screens during congregational singing.
I appreciate pastor Joos’ focus on practicality, and that’s my focus here also. He’s absolutely correct that there are challenges involved in using screens without hymnals, and that churches should think through their options.
So, should churches use screens or hymnals? I see it as a question of tradeoffs. Both approaches have different strengths and weaknesses.
A bit of my background, so you can filter for bias:
I grew up with hymnals and choir sheet music. I also grew up doing lots of singing without printed notation—with my family, and in a variety of youth group settings.
College extended that. As a member of one of the “vespers” choirs, my fellow students and I were all about sheet music. But those years also included hymnal-free singing at the church I attended Sunday evenings. It was just a guy and a guitar and Psalms. I think he was creating his own tunes half the time. He would teach it, then we would sing it.
So I’ve been enjoying congregational singing, both with and without music notation, for as long as I can remember. Recently, I’ve sung with hymnal-only congregations, hymnal-and-screen-mixed congregations, and screen only congregations.
Joos’ Four Points
Taigen Joos’ article offers five observations on screen-projected song lyrics. I’ll reproduce them here and interact with each.
Observation #1-Even if hymnals are available and acknowledged, hardly anyone (if anyone) in the congregation uses them.
This is consistent with what I’ve seen. I don’t have a lot to say about this one because it’s not important in itself. Its importance depends on the remaining three observations.
Observation #2-Generally, there is very little to no harmony being sung by the congregation.
This also fits what I’ve observed, but with a caveat: In hymnal-focused churches I’ve sung with recently, people aren’t singing harmony much either.
Singing harmony requires skills that aren’t completely met by having musical notation in front of you. You need two things: a) a somewhat trained ear for harmony, and b) some ability to read music. If you have the ear, you can—with practice—generally do pretty well without musical notation. If you have music reading skill without the ear, you’re going to struggle with harmony, even with a hymnal.
I doubt that the presence or absence of music notation is resulting in less skill in reading music. It’s probably the other way around: There is less notation-reading skill, so people see less value in printed music.
Toward solutions: Congregations and music leaders could sometimes teach a harmony part to the congregation in a service. It’s not something you’d want to do every Sunday, but some songs can go two-part pretty easily, and a percentage of people will be able to pick it up without reading music. In youth groups growing up we did this with several songs using nothing but printed lyrics and someone’s memory of a harmony part they learned from someone else.
Some may wonder, “No harmony, so what? Why does it matter?” The answer derives from how you read the Psalms and from your view of why we sing in worship at all. Briefly, the Psalms’ references to lots of instruments encourage us to view musical complexity and variety as things God values. As for why we sing at all, part of the point is to love truth more deeply by beautifying it, and to take truth into our emotional being as well as our intellect. Harmony is more beautiful.
Observation #3-It is much more difficult to teach through the stanza progression of hymns when only a screen is used.
More difficult? To be sure, the process is different—and anything that deviates from what we’re used to is more difficult until we adapt to it.
Toward solutions: This is a technology issue. If you want to teach through stanzas before singing, all you need is a few slides with more text on each. It may also help to have your own slide control so you can go back and forth between slides yourself as the teacher.
You can also print out the text of the hymn and hand out copies before the service. At our church, we always have both the slides and a handout with all the lyrics on it. This accomplishes several things:
- Speakers can easily explain or expand on lyrics ahead of the singing.
- They can just as easily do the same after the singing, to tie themes together, etc.
- Everyone has a backup if there’s a projection glitch or an error on a slide.
Observation #4-Only those familiar with the hymn can sing it.
This is true of most people, with or without hymnals. Few people can pick up printed music and, on the first try, correctly sing a song they’ve never heard before. (Unbelievers visiting a church are even less likely to have this ability.) There is some advantage to printed music, though. Those who can read music will probably pick up the tune a bit more quickly and recall it better the next time around.
In my experience, though, even with a completely new song and no music to read, people stumble around for one verse and chorus and then start to get the hang of it.
Toward solutions: The fix here is mostly the same with or without hymnals:
- Give the congregation multiple exposures to the song before they attempt to sing it together. This can take the form of vocalists singing it or a recorded version playing in the lobby.
- Look for songs or arrangements that help with learning—tunes that move in relatively predictable ways and avoid excessive complexity.
- If using screens, slide timing is important. People need to see what they’re to sing next soon enough to move smoothly into it.
- Some churches use screens that display musical notation. This must require a lot of work, but if the benefits are worth it to you and you have people to do the work, it eliminates every objection I’ve heard to using screens.
Conclusion: The Other Trade-offs
In the trade-offs analysis, it’s true that there are some negatives for screens vs. hymnals. Lyric screens may not harm musical literacy, but they don’t help. Lyric screens offer a slight disadvantage for some in learning new songs. There’s a little extra work involved if you want to be able to discuss lyrics and have people look at them together.
But there are also negatives in the hymnal approach.
- People are looking down at their books a lot rather than forward, heads up. This discourages singing out and breathing deeply.
- Hymnals wear out and are expensive (true also of AV equipment, but the same equipment can be used for teaching, so there is more utility).
- There is less opportunity for non-musicians to be involved in the worship service. With screens, you need volunteers to operate your projector(s)/screens and slides, as well as people to create the slides, track copy permissions, etc.
- People who didn’t grow up singing hymns have a heavier learning curve. They have to find the song in a thick, unfamiliar book that doesn’t have page numbers like a normal book.
- You’re more limited. You can only sing what’s in the hymnal—or, if you want to go outside it, you have to print a lot of copies of sheet music.
Of course, some additional disadvantages of screens could be listed here, too.
The bottom line is that each approach has advantages and disadvantages. I’ve done it both ways quite a bit now, and I don’t have a strong preference one way or the other. For me personally, the screen approach has been a huge blessing the last few years. Serving in a church that uses that approach has allowed me to learn so much excellent music I hadn’t known before, drawn from multiple hymnals and other sources.
Photo: Michael Maasen on Unsplash.
Aaron Blumer 2016 Bio
Aaron Blumer is a Michigan native and graduate of Bob Jones University and Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He and his family live in small-town western Wisconsin, not far from where he pastored for thirteen years. In his full time job, he is content manager for a law-enforcement digital library service. (Views expressed are the author's own and not his employer's, church's, etc.)
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It is a great point about new songs. I grew up in churches with hymnals and solid choirs and orchestras and solid harmony singing amongst the congregation. But we still used screens, because new songs were not in the hymnal. I grew up in the largest most influential fundamentalist church at the time in the 1980's. I remember first being exposed to this with Ron Hamilton's "Rejoice in the Lord". Of course it wasn't a cool projector at the time, it was an overhead projector (if you remember those), and we projected the song with all of the parts, just as it was found in the hymnal. That was the first time I was exposed to a projected song during a church service (although we had seen them at Summer Camp).
....that we do not get too worked up about whether we use screens or hymnals, but rather concentrate on the lyrics, poetry, music, and finally the ability of musicians to present those songs well.
Really like what Aaron notes about harmonies as well, as I personally learned to sing harmonies in church choirs, despite having what I'd thought was a pretty good musical education in high school band. There is really something about getting the "feel" for where the harmonies ought to be, even if one never has a fighting chance of emulating the greats in barbershop, black gospel, or Motown.
(for those who might lead singing, one approach I use is to, with the overall songleader, sing the melody the first verse, and then start harmonizing to give a musical transition, and also to avoid confusing the congregation...)
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
I think where harmonies are dying in churches, is probably from two areas. The reduction of music requirements in school and the disappearance of choirs in churches. Both of which I benefited under in growing up and my early years as an adult, but which is increasingly missing today.
Back when I was a young pup, many moons ago, popular music, even hard rock, often had (e.g. Motown, Van Halen's Diver Down) at least periodic tight harmonies. Fast forward to today, and rap/hip-hop has basically eliminated that, and the "coffee shop voice" (vocalist sloughing off air past his/her vocal cords in a breathy whisper) has replaced the delightful baritone of Elvis Presley and the wonderful high tenor of David Ruffin. Instrumentally, you also see the capable instrumentalists of the past too often replaced by people who use a $5000 piano as (effectively) a metronome while the singer holds down the only semblance of a melody in that coffee shop music voice.
And since high school/middle school music instruction tends to follow popular music trends (who among us didn't do the "Bus Stop" dance or sing along with the Bee Gees in elementary school?), David's correct that the decline in popular music forms is paralleled in high school music education. As a former marching band participant, I remember being appalled when I first heard that a town's marching band was "pretty good", and then I noticed that in a parade, they largely could not even keep in step. The basics are being lost.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
Somone pointed out to me recently that musical trends through history seem to cycle between periods of increasing complexity and periods of contraction/simplification. He believes we’re in a contraction but it will pass.
There is some evidence to support his thesis. We’ll see.
There are some a cappella or mostly a cappella groups doing pretty well—and they’re all about complex vocal harmonies. But they don’t top the charts or anything. With the flattening of the music industry, we now have large numbers of something like digital buskers. They run their own Youtube channels and produce their own music for their fans and followers. So several things are unprecedented right now: the way music reaches people, the way musicians make money, the low threshold for publishing—you can do this with relatively little investment. It’s easier than ever to sample different artists and styles for free. Oh, and lots of these Youtubers/Patreon/Spotify musicians layer their own voice in harmonies on a regular basis.
We have less cultural homogeneity with music than ever in our history, I’m pretty sure. What that means for church music going forward, I don’t know.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I like "hearing" music sung in parts. My talented wife can sing a part without music, which she tells me is a rare talent. There are some people who read music and can sing parts. I don't read music but I can sing my part by following the "ups and downs" and it helps to have someone near me singing the same part. When I do that I find that I find that I'm concentrating more on the notes than the words. I can concentrate on what I'm singing if I sing the melody. I would venture the assertion that a majority of people either can't read music or are like me. One additional thought: Our church (app. 100) has multiple screens and that allows me to make eye contact with others "singing to one another) when I'm singing.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
I have some thoughts on the arguments often made about the loss of hymnals. Essentially it generally falls along the lines of bemoaning the loss of the ability to read music. As Ron mentioned, the majority of people can't read music and I don't believe it is a part of the church's mission to teach that ability to people. Ron is also right when he says "I can concentrate on what I'm singing if I sing the melody." I believe that is a far more important aspect of congregational worship than the ability to sight read the notes.
We still have our hymnals available for our congregation to use if they wish. We project the hymn number and announce it but the majority of people sing from the screens.
I also wanted to mention a great service that we subscribe to mobilehymns.org. This provides a virtual hymnal with the music that can be accessed through a website. To Aaron's point about the work involved with creating slides that include the musical notation, this is already done for you by mobilehymns.org and they provide a PPT file that can be downloaded. It's also great option for those viewing our livestream and we also have a few that use it when they gather for worship. I think that making as many means as possible available to people to use according to their ability level is a good thing.
Phil Golden
Great tip
To Aaron’s point about the work involved with creating slides that include the musical notation, this is already done for you by mobilehymns.org and they provide a PPT file that can be downloaded. It’s also great option for those viewing our livestream and we also have a few that use it when they gather for worship. I think that making as many means as possible available to people to use according to their ability level is a good thing.
There is biblical precedent for developing musical skills as part of worship. It would be difficult to make a NT church mandate out of what King David did with his training of musicians, but it should give us pause.
I’d agree that getting the message of the words is vital, but the purpose of singing (as opposed to, say, reciting) is to beautify truth and take it into our emotional as well intellectual life. So… I can’t say there’s a NT requirement for singing in harmony or otherwise excelling in music itself, but there’s also no reason to let that die if you already have it.
And there is definitely value in nurturing it if you can. The mix of priorities is complex, so I get that it could be a good ways down the list of things to work on. We’re not teaching music skills to anybody at our church at the moment, as far as I know, but the idea has some appeal to me. … it might not be a stretch to say the church is teaching me musical skills. Sort of. It has needed me to gain some skills so I’ve been doing some self-teaching, so the congregation has definitely contributed to skill preservation/skill growth in my own case. And I think the growth has benefited the body in ways that fit its biblical purposes.
Still, at someone else’s church it might be better to teach someone accounting first! Or “how to organize a short biblical talk” (sometimes how to ‘teach’ scares people… but I digress.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
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