Excellence in Conservative Christian Music Begins in the Home

I’m deeply grateful for the effort my parents put into music education growing up. As small children, we learned to sing together in three part harmony, took piano lessons, later sang in the church choirs.

And yes, some classical music a long the way. I went through a serious Beethoven addiction phase. When other parents were telling there kids to turn the rock music off, mine were—on family vacations—telling me they’d like to stop hearing all that Beethoven in the car. 😆

I’m just indulging in reminiscence here, but I’ll never forget the first time I heard “classical music” up close on a high quality large stereo system in our childhood home. It was Beethoven’s 6th symphony, aka the “Pastoral.”

I can’t hum through the whole thing from memory anymore, but can still feel the room when I recall the first few phrases.

Other bits of Beethoven immediately bring back the space I was in when I first heard them. Others, it’s more like the 201st time I heard them (Symphonies 3 & 7 always make suddenly feel like I’m in the back of a Buick station wagon on a road trip.)

To get to a point, there is no downside to classical music education in your youth. You don’t have to stay in the 17th-19th centuries. But it was a really great period in Western music, and you can’t go wrong having it as a foundation.

(As for “excellence” in a church setting, this is an overlapping but different thing. Church is about Body life, not artistic excellence… but that’s another big topic.)

We exposed our sons to classical music before they were born. Thanks to my wife who is a trained concert violinist, classical music, music lessons, voice lessons, and choirs were an integral part of their education. My musical tastes were more eclectic than my wife's and we decided that they would learn to find excellence in many musical genres. The result is that all of us not only appreciate excellence in the music we worship with, but also in the music we listen to. We love the old hymns as well as what we hear from the Getty's, City Alight, and SG. We appreciate excellent music from Broadway, Opera, and film. A lot of 50's and 60's music is well performed fun stuff and the Beatles were a talented bunch . Although it was way outside our culture, we appreciate Shai Linne's use of hip-hop to communicate Biblical truth and I will always remember my wife's repeatedly listening to Hamilton and saying, "This is really good!" We've concluded that there is excellent music in nearly every genre. (I tolerate her love for Opera and she does the same for my affection for Bluegrass.)

On a side note, Ron Bean's fundamentalism card has just been revoked.

Carry on.

The two very first pieces of music that I remember listening to, were two records my mom had. I listened to both more times than I can count. The first was Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade and the second was John Denver, live in L.A. To this day I still love Scheherazade.

I learned to play trumpet starting in 4th grade and continued all the way through high school. I primarily focused on a broad range of classical, including very bizarre modern stuff as well as early 19th century Americana. In high school, I had progressed to the point that I outplayed the teachers around me, and I had to pay a lot for more a more experienced teacher from the Chicago Philharmonic. At that point, my parents could no longer afford it, so I had to work to pay for my own. I thoroughly enjoyed the exposure and the years that I played.

I still love Scheherazade.

+1 for Scheherazade

That Beethoven I heard as a kid was part of a vinyl record series that, for some reason, was being marketed at the place my parents did their grocery shopping. So for a couple years they were bringing home classical records regularly.

Along with the Beethoven, there was a lot of memorable Mozart, a lot of Tchaikovsky. Pathetique (I had no idea strings could deliver that much emotional punch!) and Romeo & Juliette Suite.

Somewhere along the way, we started listening to classical on public radio, and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings was another early heavy hitter for me.

Then John Williams came along and the wonderful world of movie soundtracks drew me in (including Vangelis).

From there, it was OST’s plus a lot of traditional folk music (mostly Celtic).

I once played in an orchestra that did a season of modern classical music, some of that was pretty weird stuff. One thing that this article misses is that it assumes “high” music is older classical music. I would personally encourage families to broaden the scope of exposure to music with their kids.

I suppose someone is still asking what conservative Christian music sounds like. Gettys? SG? City Alight? Shane and Shane? And is conservative Christian music the only and/or the most excellent Christian music?

And is conservative Christian music the only and/or the most excellent Christian music?

First, in Taigen's articles, this point is assumed. You can argue with that point, but that isn't the point he is arguing.

Second, what he is arguing is that when we perform conservative Christian music, especially in our churches, we should strive for excellence. One of the key ways for excellence is putting the time and effort into quality training, which means music lessons and generally those lessons are done in the classics.

When my daughter was taking piano, we had a very good teacher who was not a believer. She trained in the classics (the Canadian Conservatory system, a very good program). People can and do branch off from that, but a good foundation is important.

Several others in our church have also had this kind of training. For a small church, we are blessed with many excellent musicians. It enhances our worship because we have excellent accompaniment. (If only the rest of us could take some voice lessons!!)

So this is the ooint. You seem to want to argue worship wars, but that is not the issue that Taigen is arguing.

I get your point Don. Thanks. I did ovér complicate the discussion. My personal challenge has been that I consider my favored church music to be conservative and I have been told, sometimes bluntly, that it isn't. What is the definition of conservative?

First, no apology needed!

How do we define conservative? It is not a precise term in any context. In politics these days it means those who want to conserve liberal ideals, but 150 years ago it meant those who wanted to conserve class structure (especially in England).

In music, these days, it usually refers to those who want to conserve a church style that is distinct from the world -- the "old hymns" -- though that often means the revivalists hymnody. Others (Aniol, Bauder) are more conservative than that and their old hymns equal largely church music before Moody and Sankey et al.

And the fringes of conservative style allow for some discrepancies between individuals. Most of us would say Ron Hamilton's music embraces the conservative style that we hold to, though he brought in some styles not quite in the usual revivalist tradition. Some of my friends think Ron's music was too loose and don't care for it.

Regardless of these discrepancies, we generally know what we mean by conservative Christian music. I don't think it is all that hard to identify, in a general sense.

But regardless, in our churches we should strive for as much excellence as possible. Still, that doesn't mean we disallow those who are untrained and unpolished. I was in a service a few weeks ago where they had a soloist who wasn't that good (she was better than me, but I am the definition of low bars on musicality). Despite her deficiencies, she blessed me and the congregation with her desire to serve the Lord to the best of her abilities.

To overcome those deficiencies, those who serve musically should keep at it, practicing, getting training, getting better, all for the glory of God.

That was helpful Don. Personally I like my church music to be doctrinally sound and singable. I found it interesting to learn that Rodeheaver didn't think his songs suitable for worship services. I'm like Bauder with the oldér hymnody but also like much of the new that's well written. I grew up with He Will Hold Me Fast but never liked the tune and appreciated Matt Marker's improvement of it.

There is, of course, some amazing modern classical music being written today. What Dan Forrest has produced is absolutely fantastic. This past year, it was fascinating to hear Haydn's Creation followed just a couple months later by Forrest's Creation, both in BJU's Rodeheaver Auditorium.

That said, I have taken my girls (who play violin) to two different concerts to hear Hilary Hahn, their favorite violin performer. One was in the Chicago and the other in Boston. For both concerts, she performance was the primary attraction. Both orchestras took advantage of her draw to perform some more modern atonal pieces that no one would have probably bought tickets to hear performed otherwise. For me, those pieces were terrible, especially the once piece played by the BSO. I was expecting something beautiful and what I got was something way different...I don't even know how to explain it. Now, it was fascinating for my girls, who have taken classes in music theory and "understood" what the composer was trying to do, but for anyone not trained in music, it just seemed like a hot mess.

I haven’t seen any warrant for why classical music is “better” than something else. I am puzzled at Taigen’s insistence that parents must use classical music in the home. He and I both took Scott Aniol’s worship class for our DMin program at Central Seminary. One nagging question from that class re-surfaces here: by what criteria do you say one musical style is “better” than the other, and can you defend these criteria? I fear Taigen’s article will not convince friends who don’t already agree on the criteria.

In other words, why is something from Bach objectively “better” and more pleasing to God than MercyMe’s song “Almost Home”?

As I noted in the previous thread, we might note that the key issue for "what is better?" is often "what has survived?". To draw a picture, the current "oldies" on the radio are songs from the 1980s, but there are a lot of bands that I remember from my teen years that thankfully are not on these stations. These bands, and their songs, have been thankfully forgotten in the same way that Peter Schickele made a career out of joking about thankfully forgotten works of P.D.Q. Bach. The same thing applies for the baroque era, the classical era, the romantic era, and the modern era of what we collectively call "classical" music today.

One thing that makes classical music instructive, however, is that the various eras/styles of music make a lot of the tools of music more obvious. So to develop a mature aesthetic sense, one that can be applied to any genre in music for church meetings, "classical" music can serve as the equivalent of Latin in classical education; the pattern by which we can see the modern genre.

Taigen isn't arguing for the superiority of classical music, but for excellence in producing conservative Christian music.

You all persist in missing the point.

In his view (and I agree, not that it matters), classical training is vital for excellence in conservative Christian music. The better one understands music theory, the better he or she can do in performance. Yes, some have natural ability and do well by ear, but they improve with training.

I don't think it should be controversial that we should promote excellence in our church music.