Magical funk

Expialidocious. Strangely haunting. Reminds me of Philip Glass.

Thanks to that master of cool, David Ould.

Brideshead Revisited

I know you normally don't click through on Youtube links, but make an exception in this case. The music from Brideshead Revisited. Take away everything except the trumpet and you have perfection, beauty.

Come on you Radiohead big-girls'-blouses, try it for a bit, you'll like it. Something good can come out of Oxford, you just have to look for it.

Music in church

Got a letter in the SMH today.

For five years I was a regular organist at the parish Phillip Jensen led before he was dean of St Andrew’s Cathedral. Musicians are there to serve and one way we do so is by playing to help people sing. The other is by not playing when they are trying to talk.

Music is a great blessing from God, but nowhere near as great as the blessing of quiet conversation about the glory of God, the resurrection of Jesus and the forgiveness of sins.

Reverend Gordon Cheng, Kingsford

The article this is responding to is so misguided and generally irritating that I'm not even going to link it, but google will be your friend if you feel the need to track it down.

Church music

I've posted on the Sola Panel about the subject, here.

I like music in just about any genre, and although I have definite tastes I wouldn't even go so far as to say that the stuff I like is particularly good. I mean, I liked Billy Joel for years and Billy Don't be a Hero still brings a tear to they eye and a lump to the throat, and that's not just the gag reflex. What I don't understand is knee-jerk hatred of hymns, which if you play them at a decent clip can really be a great sing.

Pinball wizard

Pinball Wizard
( The Who )

Ever since I was a young boy
I've played the silver ball
From Soho down to Brighton
I must have played them all
But I ain't seen nothing like him
In any amusement hall
That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball

He stands like a statue
Becomes part of the machine
Feeling all the bumpers
Always playing clean
He plays by intuition
The digit counters fall
That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball!

Teaching piano

I'm trying to teach my girls to play the piano. It's taken a while but at last I've been reminded about a fundamental thing, which is that you can't play piano until you can sing. Until you've got the sound in your head, sitting in front of a piano keyboard is just typing practice. Artur Rubinstein taught me that, in a couple of minutes on a documentary. But I keep forgetting.

So this morning Violet, Ruby and I were in the kitchen and I was asking Ruby to sing with me. 'C-D-C-D-C-D-Ceeeeee' Just those two notes. We pushed a bit on the repertoire from time to time to include A, B and E, but hey, easy does it.

This is as basic to playing the piano as learning Romans 1:1-17, and Romans 3:21-26 is basic to learning Christianity.

Learn it! Learn it in Greek, even if you don't understand it. Then take it apart piece by piece, think about it, pray about it, and reassemble it. One day you will wake up and see the Lord Jesus face to face, and understand in full what it is that you've remembered in part.

But be warned. If you do not, in the grace of God, understand it, then do not attempt to learn it. Return it to the shelf, because if you learn without understanding, it will return in fiery judgement on the last day to condemn.

Whereas any fool can learn to sing, and it's good fun too.

Yay for Yahwistic imperialism

Here's a lovely Old Testament song from Micah 4:1-5

Mic. 4:1    It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the LORD
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and it shall be lifted up above the hills;
and peoples shall flow to it,

2 and many nations shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

3 He shall judge between many peoples,
and shall decide for strong nations afar off;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore;

4 but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree,
and no one shall make them afraid,
for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.

5 For all the peoples walk
each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the LORD our God
forever and ever.

Loveliness and upbeatness notwithstanding, Kanishka Raffel reminded us at Men's Katoomba Christian Convention (MKC) that this song is a piece of Yahwistic imperialism that makes the American desire to teach democracy to the Middle East seem positively benign by comparison.

Notice how the mountain of the LORD (that's English for 'Yahweh') is the greatest and best mountain of all. That's because your piddling local mountain, where your piddling local deity has set up his, her or its altar, is no mountain at all. Just as Mt Kosciusko is a speed hump when compared to Everest; so the god of your nation, tribe or culture is and will be nothing but roadkill when faced with the towering majesty of the God who revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And the reason for the outbreak of peace that the song declares is that the nations have given up the fight, and come instead to learn from the God of the people of Israel.

In fact, the only way you might mistake this for a lovely tune would be if you'd been distracted by the music.

Which, I hasten to add, we weren't.

Conventional music

I recently attended one of those conferences that makes you glad to be a Christian living in Sydney. It was run by the Katoomba Convention people, who stand in the tradition of the great English Keswick convention movement that has spawned offshoots and imitators in many parts of the world, not just Sydney.

What I love about the Katoomba conventions are that for sheer quality of Bible teaching, they almost invariably hit the mark. It’s quite astonishing really, as there are so many other situations in life where you feel you’ve blown your money and worse, your time. The take-away food places that end with uncomfortable moments in the smallest room. The movie that you know five minutes in is going to be a waste of time, but there you are trapped to the bitter end with your friends. I mean come on—the third Lord of the Rings movie could have ended 45 minutes early and only the two people who weren’t sleeping would have complained.

But in the twenty plus years I’ve been to Katoomba, I’ve never felt let down and I’ve often come away exhilarated and excited by the power of God’s word, powerfully expressed.

The recent ENGAGE conference, with speakers Justin Moffat and Chris Chia addressing workers’ issues from Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah and other parts of the Bible was no exception. The most spectacular surprise was the music, which was brilliantly led, technically tight up-to-date and with carefully thought through words and some stellar renditions of new tunes to the old words of some glorious hymns. Not a false start or technical glitch in sight. No in-jokes amongst the musicians. No sermonettes from the song leaders. Only half a hint of a PowerPoint slip-up, but even that is, in my book, a cause for rejoicing. I was transported.

My only problem is where I was transported to. I can be quite specific, actually. I was transported back, in my mind and heart, to the Hillsong Annual Convention at Homebush Bay, Sydney 2006. Hillsong 2006, where the medium was the message, where speaker after speaker happily contradicted themselves and each other, and at the end of the day, it was all just one glorious delightful party with a great big hole in the centre where you would normally expect the theology to be fitted—and a large, almost unfilled absence where you would expect the cross and the atonement to be.

‘Right…’ some discerning reader will respond. ‘So you’re telling me that you went to a conference where the music was every bit as good as Hillsong, on a lower budget and with all the theological problems fixed, along with good speakers and great coffee. Doesn’t that mean…er…that it was a good conference?’

Well, yes, it does. It really does.

But here’s my two niggles worth.

The first niggle is that the antennae go up when I get the sense that we as Bible-believing Christians are being led down a path by an organization (Hillsong) where the gospel, if not completely absent, has receded a very long way into the background. Are we, Bible-believing Christians, running our music this way because that is how Hillsong is doing it?

There are a number of indications that we are. In the case of this conference, one not insignificant indication was that the whole style, sound, volume and appearance of the music was the same (not the words. Thank you God, not the words!) And especially when one of the key organizers of this convention, a man I respect greatly, tells me that ‘yes, we are in competition with Hillsong. We are aiming for the same market.’

Nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course. But if it is true, then it is at least worth asking ourselves a serious question. As we pursue headlong this great glittering prize of music that lifts and inspires our souls, and as we try to do it at least as well as ‘those people over there’, are there any traps that we may have stumbled into?

For me that question has been asked but not yet satisfactorily answered, and that is a concern.

The other niggle is much easier to name and claim. I loved the music and I loved the songs at this conference, and enjoyed it far more than at many other conferences I have been to, certainly including Hillsong 2006.

So why was I getting more and more annoyed? It struck me that my annoyance was not at the musicians at all, but that I (possessed of a singing voice that is probably too loud) couldn’t even hear myself shout. And being a man who loves the sound of his own voice, that bothered me. I certainly couldn’t hear the voices of the two people on either side of me, or anyone else for that matter—apart from the clear and beautiful voices of the singers on stage.

So I stopped singing, and promptly discovered that I was no longer annoyed. I loved the experience of the convention music, when I learned to treat it as a really well put together Christian music concert.

Which is a problem. Because if there’s one thing that the Bible is clear about when it comes to singing, it’s that the words we sing as a congregation, when we sing them are addressed to each other. Here’s Paul writing to the Ephesians:

“And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart…” (Ephesians 5:18-19)

Now don’t get me wrong here. The words of the songs at the convention were crystal clear, aided by the fact that as they were being sung they were being projected onto the screen in front of us (although I now can’t remember the words, and I have no easy way of referring back to them, which is an advantage of the old hymn books over the new technology). And it’s clear that I was indeed being addressed by the singers and songleaders.

But what I managed to lose somewhere in all the technical excellence—and let’s face it, the juiced-up volume—was the sense that we as a congregation were there to edify each other by what we sang to each other, and to God.

It was still a great, rockin’, foot-stompin’, Bible teachin’ convention. And I am going to be encouraging others to go along next year to hear Don Carson and Mark Driscoll. But part of me is a little anxious about where parts of this are heading, and why.