Excellence in Conservative Christian Music Begins in the Home
“First, Christian parents should play and learn to appreciate ‘classical music’ in their homes on a regular basis…. Second, Christian parents should seek to provide classical musical training to their children in the form of music lessons if possible.” - P&D
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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.)
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.
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.)
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
On a side note, Ron Bean's fundamentalism card has just been revoked.
Carry on.
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