I have been mulling on this post about church music culture since a friend send it to me a couple days ago, and… I have some disagreements. Buckle up; this is an old-school fisking/bloggy rant. (You should read that post first; none of the rest of this will make any sense otherwise.)

First, for the really snarky take: if you want to know the result of following Ahern’s advice, go to any megachurch and sit through the service. You’ll get a coherent musical culture that hasn’t spent its time and energy trying to connect with the musical traditions of the past! That is: Bethel and Hillsong and Chris Tomlin. That is not my taste, and I suspect it isn’t the author’s, either… but it is exactly what he asked for!

For the less snarky take, though, a few points:

First, what he’s suggesting is simply not possible in practice, even if it were good (on which see below), given that we live in the age and era we do. We cannot create out of thin air a culture that doesn’t imbibe from all the surrounding and historical context, in a world which is saturated by that context. Trying to shut out the surrounding world to create our own little culture by avoiding pulling on it simply will not work: that is not how artistic creation ever works. Even the attempt would be a sort of LARPing of the thing. This is true of attempts to recover the premodern worldview as a person living in modernity in general: the conscious attempt to do now what was unconsciously done then is itself expressly and inescapably modern.

Moreover, to the degree it was possible for the folks he mentioned mostly because of the constraints they were operating under. They simply did not have access — much though they often wished they did! — to the music of earlier generations. It took the advent of print to start changing that, and generations of the existence of print before it fully altered the way people learn music. Bach would almost certainly have loved to have access to both a deeper historical well and to broader set of musical forms and influences to draw on, if his extensive use of contemporaneous forms is anything to go by. (The author half-acknowledges the latter, but since it militates quite strongly against his point, breezes by it — rather too quickly!)

The example he gives is profoundly flawed, for exactly this reason. The judgment comparing it to music from 40 years earlier is almost certainly in the “largely meritless and almost certainly spoken out of relative ignorance” bucket, given the extremely sharp limits of musical transmission across generations (to say nothing of) in the pre-print era. Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is very, very good on the way the press impacted all these sorts of things because of its impact on material culture, and also does a great job tracing how very long the reverberations took to shake out in culture at large.

Second, the example he gives is… honestly kind of silly in terms of supporting his point. It is extremely neat from a musical technique point of view, but has more or less nothing to do with musical culture. Notice that he describes not what the members of the congregation would be doing but what the professional musicians would be doing. It is sort of akin to someone writing with astonishment, in some hypothetical (horrific) future where all music is electronically generated, of the incredible fact that back in the past [our time] four people could read dots and lines on a page and from them play instruments with strings they mash down with their fingers and rub horse hair over them, in ways that the congregation found delightfully beautiful, all without any kind of director or computerized time-keeping. (That is: a string quartet.) Well… when you put it that way, yes, it is indeed astonishing, but then professional musicians, or even good amateur musicians, do always tend to be, if only we stop to notice. We only miss it because of the fact that it is our musical culture, and so we are inured to how very remarkable it often is. Nor is the fact that people in the Middle Ages liked having professional musicians, or at least good amateurs, particularly surprising. After all, so do we.

Third, both his example of those professional musicians and his reference to Bach are woefully misguided when it comes to the idea that we should want a musical culture that is intentionally trying to tune out the history or the surrounding world. The list of latter examples he gives makes this point for me: what exactly is Gospel music if not the express synthesis of earlier cultural forms? Pitting local and contemporary against global and past makes much the same kind of mistake as many critiques of “cultural appropriation”: it fails to understand that while yes, we should value local culture, it is always — always — in conversation with and borrowing from and remixing artistic moves from elsewhere and elsewhen. That does not mean that hyper-globalized, de-localized, de-contextualized art is all we should aspire to (though I think those descriptors often hide more complexity than critics who throw them around might grant). But there is no local, contextual art that is not in conversation with other places and times.

Long story short, I think the musical abilities described in the piece are delightful and a wonderful historical curiosity. It would even be interesting to see some group revive the technique! But that has nothing whatsoever to do with what the church ought to do or even can do in its practices.