- Working Together (Some of Our Ladies Making Perhogies)
Today during the sermon, we heard that faith is not a worldview, but rather a mystical inclination of the heart that cannot be expressed in words. We must ask Christ for this gift, for to the one who knocks the door will be opened.
Our dear Father in the Lord, Igoumen Gregory, was out of town today, attending the anniversary of St. John Maxomovich’s glorification. Fr. Deacon Michael led a reader’s servcice. I directed the choir.
Perhaps it was because yesterday was a holiday, but people came into church very late and very few today. At 9:20, the moment when our choir meeting begins, only three of us were in the loft. Fr. Deacon Michael was reading the prayers so we went into the hall, the next room over, to review the changes for the day’s service and to warm up a bit. We decided to sing everything in unison since there were, to our knowledge, only three of us. We also switched to Znammaney chant for the Prokeimenon. All three of us were younger, newer choir members and as such we are interested in expanding our capacity to sing more authentically.
Five more people showed up to sing in the choir before the service had ended. I don’t know how other choir directors feel about this, but I find it disruptive when people who have not been at the rehearsal want to sing in the choir. In this case, none of the people were to blame. One had been taking care of her sick husband, one man was new, and one had been out of church sick for weeks, with serious illness, and didn’t even know that we had instituted a choir meeting. One explained to me after the service that she had been busy with other church work and found it impossible to finish in time for the choir meeting. I was very happy that she communicated with me about it and there are no bad feelings there at all.
So why do we choir directors, some may wonder, feel so strongly about people not singing in choir unless they’ve attended rehearsal?
1) During rehearsal, changes to the service are announced and books are marked accordingly. When most of the people singing know what’s going on, the choir director doesn’t have to stop and make unnecessary announcements, or wait while people rustle pages and try to find their place. The service flows more smoothly and with less distractions for worshippers.
2) People who have not rehearsed have often not warmed up, either. As a result, as each new person hurries in late, their vocal uncertainty destroys whatever unity the choir had acheived before their arrival. In the case of the our reader’s service today, we even had people trying to sing in parts, destroying the gentle, contemplative effect we were trying to achieve.
3) Contrary to the beliefs of the uninitiated, a choir director’s goal is NOT to have as many people as possible in the choir. Rather, what we want is to have perfect unity among those who do sing. Two people singing in close sympathy make a better choir than ten or twenty who are uncertain.
4) Usually, a choir director is more musically knowledgeable than most of the choir members. He or she will want to educate the choir members. I want to do more than arrive on Sunday morning in time to wave my arms. I want to communicate with my choir members whatever I myself have been learning about vocal technique, musicality, authenticity, and the Orthodox musical tradition. I have to make decisions about when we should simplify and when we should venture into new skills. I have a very good sense of where we fall short of the musical and liturgical standard and I understand what kind of exercises or explanations would help us to correct such shortcomings. And the only time I have to educate my choir, to make us better, is during rehearsal. If people do not attend then I am working with a largely uneducated choir that keeps on making the same mistakes and committing the same musical sins. Again, it would be better to have three people sing something correctly than a loft full of people who sing unmusically.
My choir members are happy and supportive about any of my efforts to improve our choir. They seem to sense that arriving ten minutes early is little enough to ask when one is offering worship to the Most High. (Yes, we only meet as a choir for ten minutes per week.)
There’s always one person who decides to get sour about something being different from what they are used to. Yet I cannot sacrifice the integrity of our choir’s efforts to offer worthy worship to God in the Church. After all, it’s not really anything new that I’m asking of them.
So, what I have learned this week about Orthodox Christian music:
1) When choirs sing traditional chant with harmonies, they are doing something essentially inauthentic. According to the postmodern worldview, in art literally anything is authentic if it truly comes from within the person who is doing it. However, serious artists, especially among musicians and filmmakers, laugh at this idea. Authenticity comes from agreement. When all the parts are in agreement with one another, and when the execution is in agreement with the theory, then authenticity begins to be arrived at.
2) When a choir is chanting in unison, a certain sound is proper, with elements of speaking and elements of singing. The rhythms are those of speech ( of the language in which one is actually chanting, that is) but because notes are also being sung, a sustained, mellifluous sound is also required.
3) A gentle, dispassionate performance is proper. The accents or inflections in the music should not be an attempt to convey any emotions that you may feel or may think that you are supposed to feel. In group worship, it is cheating to achieve fervency by whipping up those volatile feelings that surge and ebb at the very surface of the human psyche. In fact, the whole effect of chant is to soothe those feelings, and ultimately to bypass them, invoking something that happens on a far deeper level. This deeper level can only be accessed through a certain “stillness” that banishes worldly concerns and paltry attachments to what is passing and temporary. When we chant the music of the Church, we are providing a flowing, sustained link between the Body of Christ, with all its host of saints and attending of angels, and the people standing around us waiting for the grace of the Lord. The worst thing we can do is to make an intruder of our own individuality, disrupting this connection.
There’s a funny thing that has to be considered at this point, however.
How much authenticity can be achieved by proper technique, and how much depends upon healthy relationships within the choir?
When the seventh council proclaimed that icons are good and proper and belonged to the church, they made some pronouncements about what kinds of materials were allowed in the making of icons. They firmly believed that certain materials were “worthy” of the subject matter and some were not. Likewise, when the musicians of the church chose their eight tones, they were banishing from the church many other tones which were currently in use in the general culture, but which they concurred were too worldly, and unworthy of worship. In other words, some arrangements of the material world are proper to express religion and some are not. It would be so easy to forget these ideas, because they have no place in our current culture. We postmoderns believe quite firmly that any medium is appropriate to wroship so long as it is sincerely and fervently offered. The whole of scripture and church history is against such a destructive misunderstanding of the relationship between flesh and spirit.
Yet this truth cannot be held alone. Using proper materials will not be sufficient for all that church worship requires. For among laws and rules of the Church, there is only one true law and it is love. If the choir cannot cohere in love, it cannot offer worship that is pleasing to God, regardless of how proper its style of performance.
And I remember again and again, that in the Christian way, it is the person in authority who takes upon himself the sins of those he serves, who makes it his responsibility to ensure that love prevails. If someone in my choir is making trouble (in my current self-protective view of things) I may feel that it is better that that person simply remove himself from the choir. I may feel that this would remove the problem. However I would be wrong in this belief. One fracture of communion, if I suffer it, will not fail to spread. The whole choir, in fact the whole church, could fall apart, if I were to establish endorse such disagreements and strife as constantly knock on the door of our house of spiritual endeavor.
And in fact, what I have found in these few months that I’ve enjoyed communion with the Orthodox Church, is that this “upside down” way of dealing with disunity works. The most obedient, the most innocent, the most faithful people always suffer the most, always take it upon themselves to apologize or offer the olive branch or give in, without questions of who is in the right. It happens because of the sacraments. People will do a lot rather than shut themselves out from the light that shines in confession and communion. And the people who want it and understand it most will go farther than others in protecting the communion between themselves and other church members that is the primary spiritual requirement for benefiting from communion with Christ. One cannot embrace Christ’s body in the Eucharist while fighting against Christ’s body in the congregation of the Church.
And what is the outcome?
There are literally no divisions in our church. No feuds, no cliques. At one time there were such things, and we’ve suffered dimunition as a result. But the faithful and the humble remain. No one else was willing to stay and deal with the results.
So when it comes to leading the choir I know that I must continue to seek the most worthy manner of singing, and at the same time I must also seek perfect unity. I can’t compromise either of them. So in some way that I have yet to understand, we must attain them so that they are one and the same.
