We Didn't Sing Music Like This at the COC
The choir season at my church kicked off just a couple of weeks ago. We are rehearsing Maurice Durufle's requiem to sing at the All Saints service on November 1. Durufle was inspired by Gabriel Faure's requiem, which we sang last year, and it's equally beautiful and inspiring. If you have the time, I highly recommend that you listen to the Durufle requiem. There are some parts that send chills up my spine. The soprano part is challenging, but I'm very excited to sing it.
I certainly never felt this way about the songs we sang at the Church of Christ. Some of the songs were pretty and I enjoyed them, but most of them were not terribly interesting or inspiring. We used the Sacred Selections songbook (only denominations call them "hymnals") and I don't think there were any songs in there written after the 1960s. Most of them were frontier-era songs with simple harmonies and repetitive lyrics, written with shape notes, and intended for people who had no musical training or education. What really made things boring is that we sang the same 30 or so songs over and over and over, with very little deviation. I don't mean to be too critical because I know that it's hard to introduce new songs when almost no one in the congregation has musical training, but it was very tedious for me at the time.
It's funny--we do sing a few of the same songs at my current church, but sometimes with different lyrics. I strongly suspect that the editor of Sacred Selections changed the lyrics to reflect COC doctrine. For example, we never sang, "When we all get to Heaven...," we sang, "When the saved get to Heaven..." because not everyone in the congregation will be saved and to sing otherwise would be a lie. Isn't that tedious? Even in our songs, we were judging and condemning one another. Such overflowing Christian love!
I certainly never felt this way about the songs we sang at the Church of Christ. Some of the songs were pretty and I enjoyed them, but most of them were not terribly interesting or inspiring. We used the Sacred Selections songbook (only denominations call them "hymnals") and I don't think there were any songs in there written after the 1960s. Most of them were frontier-era songs with simple harmonies and repetitive lyrics, written with shape notes, and intended for people who had no musical training or education. What really made things boring is that we sang the same 30 or so songs over and over and over, with very little deviation. I don't mean to be too critical because I know that it's hard to introduce new songs when almost no one in the congregation has musical training, but it was very tedious for me at the time.
It's funny--we do sing a few of the same songs at my current church, but sometimes with different lyrics. I strongly suspect that the editor of Sacred Selections changed the lyrics to reflect COC doctrine. For example, we never sang, "When we all get to Heaven...," we sang, "When the saved get to Heaven..." because not everyone in the congregation will be saved and to sing otherwise would be a lie. Isn't that tedious? Even in our songs, we were judging and condemning one another. Such overflowing Christian love!
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