|
A Keynote Address given at Newman College, University of
Melbourne, on Friday 24 September 1999, as part of
"Take up the Song", the First Australian National
Ecumenical Hymn Conference.
Thank you, organisers of this magnificent Conference, for the
opportunity to offer some reflections on the role of hymns in worship in the
years ahead. It has been a great privilege to gather here in
Melbourne to meet and share ideas with contemporary practitioners of the
hymn: writers, composers, worship leaders,
publishers, theorists and singers, coming together from the
whole continent of Australia and the international scene beyond.
What is immediately obvious is that the hymn is in good health, and
flourishing as vigorously in this country as it does elsewhere in the
singing communities of the Christian Church.
Indeed, such is its popularity and its natural powers of
multiplication, that I am inclined to compare it to the spread of that
apparently innocuous and pretty plant the gorse bush, carried by early
settlers from England and Scotland to adorn their gardens and make their
hedges on the other side of the world. As a New Zealander,
taking academic leave in the English town of Oxford, I recall my
amazement on entering the quadrangle of New College, to see one lone
gorse bush in a pot, lightening an otherwise gloomy day with its
yellow flowers. There, in the country from which so many
of our best-known hymns have come, the gorse bush could take its place
as an admired garden plant, a specimen contained and limited by the
climate and its many competitors and predators. Out in the
colonies, released into a more favourable environment it quickly
escaped all restraints and became an imperial invader, overwhelming
most native plants and occupying whole hillsides, to the point where
it is regarded as a noxious weed, attacked with grubbers,
axes, fire and chemicals to limit its expansion and occupation of the
land. So the hymn, from small beginnings, has taken
God's advice to Adam and Eve and gone forth and multiplied to the point
where it exists in the thousands and perhaps millions of specimens wherever
Christianity has taken root in the world.
But before I can begin to think about the role of the hymn in tomorrow's
church, I must ask the obvious question:
What is the role of hymns in worship today?
I take it that despite range of our backgrounds in worship we could probably
agree on why it is that most Christian communities practise
hymn-singing. Would your such list of reasons include some or
all of the following?
- Hymn-singing provides a natural vehicle for the primary activity of most
worshipping communities: the expression of praise and adoration
through the offering of song to God. Our hymns are both our gift
and our statement of gratitude to the One we worship.
- The practice of hymn-singing continues and extends the traditions of
worship that link the earliest cradle of Jesus's spiritual life,
synagogue worship, to the life and practice of modern Christian
communities. We sing because our foremothers and forefathers in
God also sang in this way.
- Hymn-singing contributes to a necessary variety of behaviour in the act
of worship. Singing can be and often is a welcome change from
liturgical gestures and bodily actions - standing,
sitting, kneeling, processing and so on, or from speaking
and listening - to the prayers, the bible readings,
the notices (the public administrative business of the
congregation), the sermon, the blessings, the creedal
affirmations and so on.
- Hymn-singing helps to develop the spirit of unity and solidarity in the
singing community, through shared and corporate activity by the
community. And it's not just any old kind of corporate
activity. It is a relatively simple popular activity in which
everyone can participate; one that does not require the performer to
have any special abilities or knowledge, or to act in a leadership
mode. It is also an activity which requires agreed standards of
discipline and self-control: like starting together and keeping in
time as a group.
- Hymn-singing strongly teaches and reinforces the faith and practice of
the singing Christian community. What we sing we remember and
internalise far beyond what we see or read or hear.
- Hymn-singing allows us to address contemporary issues, both
religious and non-religious - supplementing the work of the
sermon. Although some kinds of religious song, notably the
chorus or praise song, are so rooted in the language and thought forms
of the bible as to be virtually an extension of that primary but ancient
text, the hymn (certainly the modern hymn) allows for the
creation of original (independent) texts, images and
thought.
- And since a hymn is usually an original text set to an original
composition the very act of hymn-singing helps to endorse and express the
creativity and openness to change of members of the community, in turn
symbolising the creativity and unlimited life of God in us all.
And of course, while the placing of hymns in the liturgy and even the
number of hymns used may be set, there is always an element of free
choice in the selection of the hymns to be sung on any particular day or
occasion.
- Hymn-singing helps us to consolidate and memorise the faith of the
community.
- It expresses the universality of Christianity, symbolised by the
fact that in most churches musical artefacts (hymns) from any
culture and any historic period may be drawn on to contribute to the
discourse of contemporary worship.
- As an activity hymn-singing declares the equality of Christians with
each other - for (unlike the solo chanting of the
priest, or the trained group singing of a choir) everybody gets
to sing on an equal footing.
- Hymn-singing provides an outlet for both the rational and emotional
capacities of our spiritual nature. The hymns we sing are made
to work on our minds or our feelings, and frequently both together.
- Although, at worst, hymn-singing may be managed in such a
way as to hypnotise some praise communities into desirable attitudes and
states of feeling, at best hymn-singing may act as a mantra,
drawing us beyond thought and emotion into a deeper contemplation and
experience of God.
- Hymn-singing is there partly to affirm in a religious context
(and often sub-consciously) the values and centres of interest of our
own culture.
- Finally, we sing hymns to give us something we enjoy doing.
Well, will it always be like this? Probably, unless
hymns undergo some unimaginable future change in direction. But
there are the possibilities for changes which we will need to negotiate
successfully, if hymns are to continue to serve us as well as they
have done in the past in the context of public worship.
The way in which we provide the materials for hymn-singing in the future
will affect the role of hymns as I have described them.
Hymns are a collaborative art. In the context of
worship they are neither a spontaneous nor completely individual
activity. The typical hymn is brought into being by a writer,
and a composer, or one of that rarer species a writer-composer,
whom the singer will in all likelihood never lay eyes on. These
days it will usually be brought into the community for use through the
offices of a publisher who probably lives and works on another continent or
in a city far away from the church where the hymn is finally
sung. It will be chosen by a leader of worship whose process of
choice will normally remain completely unknown to the congregation: in
my sixty or so years of experience, hymns are simply what you see
listed on the hymn board, without any explanation as to the rationale
for their appearance during that particular Sunday service. It
is the provision of the text in that collaboration that I want to
concentrate on for a moment or so.
Once, pre-literate and pre-print congregations had to operate from
memory, being taught throogh hearing the hymn by someone who might or
might not have had access to a written text or score. It was the
way most human groups transmitted their culture: by word of
mouth (as some still do). The Scottish precentor,
lining out the psalm for the day, line by line, and being
imitated by the singers, line by line was how it was for most
congregations in the remote past.
Then came printing and the printed codex, the book of hymns,
a large volume containing up to a thousand hymns or a small pamphlet with a
handful of texts. The book became more and more elaborate:
first just verbal texts, then texts and their musical settings,
melodies only, then full scores. Then all the apparatus of
scholarship was added, introductions, indexes, lists of
contents, dates of authors, translators, arrangers and
composers, indications of metre, alphabetical names of tunes and
all the other extras we have come to take for granted. But even
these encyclopaedic monster volumes (each denomination with its own
large standard hymn book) failed to keep up with the quantity and
speed of production of new hymns. Pews were and are now
cluttered with additional books and supplements and eventually loose-leaf
folders to contain the inflow, the impossible overflow.
Books became too heavy for frail wrists to hold; too many print
sources used for a single service brough confusion and
disorder. . . . 'We don't seem
to have enough folders; would you mind
sharing' . . . 'You'll find
this hymn in the second supplement to the hymnbook: that's the
blue-covered volume' . . .
As improvements in technology have taken place (photocopiers,
scanners, computers linked to printers) many congregations have
abandoned their hymnbooks and taken to printing the chosen hymns for the day
in a service bulletin, or have adopted the way of the projected
overhead, with a technician (perhaps a couple of bible class
kids) shuffling a pile of transparencies projected onto a large screen
to provide a common readable text (seldom a musical
score). There are further changes just out ahead of us which
could revolutionise the way we place hymns in the hands or before the eyes
of the congregation yet again. I have spoken to several
leading editors of large standard printed hymnbooks who have expressed their
belief that the long day of that once familiar form, the printed
codex, is over. And you will be aware that library systems
are fiercely debating the division of funds for book purchases as against
computer terminals, that much new and old knowledge has been
translated onto CD ROMs and laser disc and that new methods of
electronic publishing through the Internet are rapidly gaining a place in
the sun.
As churches catch up on such developments in the secular world of
communication and storage it will become possible (it is possible
now) to download the hymns for the day from unthinkably vast
international depositories on the Internet, and then to print them
direct onto the Sunday worship bulletin or the overhead; even to
Internet text and performed musical setting - with or without
the sounds of professional singers to lead the swelling chorus.
Now there are advantages and disadvantages in every form of knowledge
transmission humans have ever invented. You can't see overheads
in bright sunlight, and no screen has yet been devised that is big
enough for those at the back of a large church to read them -
let alone the aesthetic disaster which is a huge white screen dangling from
the ceiling in an otherwise orthodox altar or sanctuary area.
Overheads can only be put up one at a time so that there are problems with
longer texts, and you have probably experienced the extraordinary
muddles that can occur when their manipulators get the order
wrong. Books have serious deficiencies, too.
Books have the problem of size and weight.. These days they are
too expensive to be replaced regularly and they date if held too
long. They are only as serviceable as the wisdom of their
editors can make them, and left too long as the only medium used by a
congregation they can become prison-houses of the mind, impediments to
spiritual enlightenment and theological development, objects of
nostalgic affection rather than tools for effective contemporary worship.
But once we have achieved the new freedoms of choice offered by entry
into a computer-dominated rather than a book-dominated world new dangers
threaten. For all its faults the denominational or
multi-denominational hymnbook offered an agreed compendium of appropriate
hymns, a standard collection of hymns that both taught and reinforced
the unity of a particular field of faith and practice. The
Lutheran hymnbook, the Scottish Psalter, Hymns Ancient and
Modern, the Methodist Hymnbook, the Moody and Sankey
collections, defined the faith communities which created and used
them. It would even be possible to argue that single hymns
identified a tradition: 'Eine feste burg', 'And can it
be', 'How great thou art', 'Majesty'. The common use
of the same book throughout the churches of a Christian denomination
fostered a sense of identity and community. The use of a large
standard set of hymns also fostered catholicity, a generous
theological range, the preservation of standards of quality, and
guaranteed a broad conspectus of Christian themes and topics.
The possibility that in the future each congregation, each worship
leader, could exercise independent choice from a virtually unlimited
range of options might promise wider horizons and a greater measure of
modernity, but it could just as well lead to loss of all
coherence, religious provincialism, the bad effects of personal
bias especially in leaders uneducated about the hymn and untrained in its
use, and so on to the evils of random choice and blinkered narrow
mindedness in our singing worship. Finally, since the wide
dissemination of new work depends on the existence of a substantial
network, a coherent market larger than the local congregation,
the splitting up of the consumers into tiny free-agencies could quickly
check and stifle creativity and innovation.
I have mentioned quality of choice and selection. But there are
other quality issues ahead of us.
We will have to give serious attention both to encouraging creativity and
insisting on keeping up quality controls if hymns are to continue to hold an
important place in public worship
The growth and development of hymn-singing as a major component in worship
has in large measure been brought about by the high quality and
effectiveness of a steadily accumulating body of good hymns. We
sing more hymns these days because there are so many good ones
about. And modern congregations have a sharper awareness of
relative quality than their predecessors could possibly bring to bear on
their hymn resources. Where a Tudor or African village community
might be largely illiterate and have little or no access to cultural and
artistic resources outside the walls of the church, first-world modern
congregations have ready access to professional texts and quality music and
performance, through public libraries, public education
systems, a deluge of commercial products and the omnipresent
media (newspapers, films, radio and
television). They have a developed critical awareness based on
comparison as well as on a developed personal taste.
Further, centuries of hymns in worship have tested the quality of
what has been produced; the sheer passage of time purges dross and
buries in oblivion enormous quantities of second- and third- rate hymn
writing. Changing needs and emphases over long periods of time
further winnow and select the grain from the chaff: most hymns do have
a 'use by' date on them.
In the changing open-choice environment for hymns it will be necessary to
both encourage fresh writing and composition, and develop better
mechanism for quality control. If we want good new hymns to
replace worked-out ones, to address new issues and satisfy a critical
audience, there are a number of strategies to work on.
- Workshops, seminars and conferences to teach and extend the skills
of the craft
- opportunities for writers and composers to network and engage in peer
critique, to submit work for review and to read the reviews of others'
writing
- local support for emerging writers and composers to test out their new
work in actual performance and to receive the encouragement of liturgical
leaders as well as friends and well-wishers
- better provision for rewards for and inducements to writing, such
as competitions and prizes, more commissions, and financial
support for early work deeserving publication (I can only be envious
when I read of the opportunities of this kind advertised in the pages of the
journal The Hymn, the journal of the Hymn Society of
America and Canada.)
- The encouragement of what I am inclined to call a 'craft
mentality' among writers and composers, the recognition that
inspiration is a precious beginning but only the beginning of a sustained
process of drafting and redrafting, of deliberate elaboration and
refinement to bring to completion a hymn worth other people's
attention.
- the establishment of good library and study facilities;
conferences, networks and guild
meetings . . . but, of course,
that's part of what this conference is about, isn't it. At
the same time, that may help to set out an agenda for future action.
And now some crystal-ball gazing.
What challenges will the future bring to the hymn as an instrument of
worship?
For the hymn to continue to play a significant role in the worshipping
congregations of the future I see a number of things we have yet to do or to
do better than we have done them in the past.
We will have to achieve a better balance between the volume of
international hymn material which will be available to the congregations and
worship leaders of the future and the growing claims of indigenous writing
to be seen and heard.
I have recently completed a survey of representations of the New Zealand
landscape in the hymn literature of Christian congregations in my own
land. What I quickly discovered is that from the time of the
first Christian services in New Zealand right up until the early 1980s the
hymns sung by New Zealanders were predominantly British or European in
origin; the theological understandings, the images of the texts
focussed on ancient Middle Eastern or British and European
geographies. It was as though the spirituality of their very own
land, the world of nature all around them, did not
exist. Now we are replacing one form of hymnic imperialism with
another. The huge impact of American religious musical styles
and their accompanying texts (and theologies) is obvious;
there is the distinct possibility that this energetic,
inventive, fertile and well-resourced Christian culture will colonise
and subsume the native developing cultures of countries even as large as
this one. The rapid globalisation of western civilisation,
which we commonly think of in secular terms of economic, political and
cultural development has the potential for disabling and marginalising local
and indigenous distinctiveness in the field of hymn production and
consumption.
A similar point might be made about the never-ending struggle between
those who wish to conserve and replicate tradition and those who wish to
make room for growth and change.
In this case, however, the balance of power lies with the
conserving and not the innovating present. Nostalgia for the
hymns of yesteryear seeps through media programmes on hymns (radio is
highly conservative, TV less so in my country; what about
yours?); it often determines the composition of hymn lists in services
of worship (we take modern prayer texts more easily than we take new
hymns): it has a power-base among congregations where the average
age-level steadily rises; and it is assisted by the discomfort of
learning new things and adjusting to new ways. However,
the Christian sense of history is neither circular nor static, but
dynamic and open-ended. 'There is yet more light and truth to
break forth from His word' says the old hymn, and that is true
of the future history of the hymn itself; we must just make sure that
there are open windows for the new light and truth to shine in,
otherwise our congregations will grow pale and weak in their closed
rooms.
We will need to educate leaders of worship (both ordained and
lay) to much higher standards in selecting and presenting hymns as
well as in more intelligent use of the hymn resources of their time.
I am greatly under-whelmed by present levels of competence among the
worship formers and leaders of today's churches in this crucial area of
their liturgical work. Far too many ministers, priests and
lay preachers have little understanding of the powerful formative influence
of repeated hymn singing in matters of faith and practice, and
consequently treat the selection and presentation of hymns to their
congregations in the most casual, unthinking way.
There are those who are passive purveyers of whatever they find within
the book's covers. If the editors print fourteen verses of a
hymn, without question that is the demand placed on the singers
- no matter that they may be gasping for breath and exhausted by the
end of the performance. Few attempt to pre-programme the hymns
to be sung over several Sundays or over a full year of congregational
song; to develop a thematic or theological or historical series of
engagements with hymn literature. 'Hymns of the
Reformation', 'The work of contemporary women hymn writers',
'Folk-tune settings of hymns', 'Celtic hymns', 'Famous writers
and composers of hymns', 'The top pops in our congregation',
'Modern expressions of the faith, in hymns', 'Australian hymn
writers', 'Hymns of the Trinity', 'Earth, air, fire
and water: Nature in the hymns we sing' . . . and so
on. Fewer still bother to background the hymns, using the
biographies of their makers and the stories associated with their conception
or their performance, to engage and inform the congregation,
whether dealing with older 'heritage' hymns or the work of a
very contemporary composer or writer. Many are simply and
absolutely ignorant of hymnology or of any strategies to turn this powerful
ally into the educational and inspirational tool it might be.
'And now we will sing hymn thirty-nine, "Beauteous are thy feet upon
the waters"' is too often the only preface to a hymn.
Where are the courses to fill such needs, to train and inform the
choosers and announcers of hymns in worship? Are we planning
them now, for the next millennium?
Hymn-makers and worship leaders alike will need to become more sensitive to
cultural and social issues embodied in the texts and musical styles of the
hymns they require to be sung by their congregations.
While we think of hymns as primarily and purely 'religious'
in character, inhabiting a circumscribed and special-purpose
world, in fact they are loaded with cultural and social implications
and assumptions. Like all other human creations they carry the
usual freight of the secular world, indelible marks of the whole
culture in which they are born.
It is now a commonplace that well into the twentieth century
- and, some would argue, to this very day -
the majority of hymns created in male-dominated societies affirmed male
primacy in ways that went well beyond the use of exclusive or male-gendered
language. Now we are bringing better understandings of the
sub-textual messages that hymns carry, and our congregations
(many of them) are becoming sensitive and openly critical of what they
are given. The hymns chosen for worship in the future will need
to undergo a much more serious critique than they were ever given in the
past, when a quick check for theological orthodoxy and congregational
familiarity was almost the only kind of screening thought necessary.
In this respect it is an interesting exercise to compare the 1977
Australian Hymnbook with its successor Together in
Song. The editors of the first book, published over
twenty years ago, devoted pages to explaining their practice in
modernising the language, removing archaic forms of address,
adopting contemporary practice in matters of spelling, punctuation and
capitalisation. The editors of Together in
Song are concerned to present all their material so that today's
worshippers 'can use it without embarrassment or
confusion'. They address seriously and at length the issues of
gender-inclusiveness and the different needs of younger and older members of
congregations for 'classic' hymns and 'the newer songs'.
Ethnicity, recognition of the first people of the land,
changing attitudes to militarism ('Onward Christian soldier'
looks no better in the context of Kosovo than a militant Muslim song would
look in the context of East Timor), new understandings of our
relationship to the natural world and to each other: these are issues
which future generations of hymn-writers, hymn-singers and worship
leaders will have to take into account.
While the spontaneous writing of hymns on whatever subjects interest their
makers must go on (which probably means more thousands of
'Jesus loves me' hymns) we should be encouraging writers and
composers to address the black holes, the serious voids in existing
hymn literature; to write, that is, for the needs of a
growing, developing, moving ahead Christian Church in the
context of a changing society.
A useful strategy here is the 'hymn search', a declared
subject or topic which writers and composers are challenged or invited to
address, often with a prize or promise of publication for the
winner. As an example, the Hymn Society of the United
States and Canada recently announced a search for a new text taking 'a
broad look at the history and future of Christianity, giving thanks
for faithful persons and important events of the past, while outlining
the mission and challenges which call the Church into the
future'. Specific commissions are another way of bringing into
being hymns which fill the gaps. And gaps there are aplenty.
For all its riches, the body of Christian hymnology is spindly and
undernourished in many areas opened up by modern scientific advances,
contemporary social, ethical and intellectual problems, recent
theological developments, and much else. Genetic
engineering, the impact of Aids (though Shirley Murray's
'When our lives know sudden shadow' is a magnificent exception)
the character of life in our cities, the brutalities of civil and
religious wars, the plight of refugees and the marginalised, the
religious needs of children and young adults, the daily realities of
our common life, the moods of alienation, despair, anger
and grief, schism and division within the communities of the Christian
church, there is so much to write about, to create a new
vocabulary of Christian song to express the new circumstances of the
Christian church. Writers and composers, editors of hymn
books, worship and choir leaders, there is so much to do to
bring into existence what Wesley Milgate called Songs of the People
of God fitting to be sung in the strange wastelands of the present
and even the stranger unknown lands of the new millennium.
It is very difficult to make intelligent choices for the future without a
knowledge of the past, and I foresee the need for much more
intentional study and recording of the huge heritage of international and
national hymnologies.
Now that we have the technology to make it possible, many developed
nations have come to a realisation of the value of their past and their
cultural heritage. They are embarking on the monumental
enterprise of recording and preserving their total print culture and
history. Hymns are part of that history: but they are
difficult, intractable stuff for the bibliographer, often
ignored as merely popular art, and they suffer a high rate of
mortality. There are some general written accounts of the hymn
as an international phenomenon but too few national histories or
biographical studies. Dictionaries, companions,
theses, critical and interpretive works: there are unfilled
needs for all of these forms of study, interpretation and
explanation. There are some archival collections, but they
are scattered, frequently the work of private collectors, and
often highly selective and not well organised. Data bases are
just coming into existence: the Hymn Society of America and Canada's
work is leading the way here, but there is a long way to
go. Notoriously, theological colleges have given little or
no attention to equipping and preparing ministers and priests in
training (the usual leaders of worship) for their task of
selecting and presenting hymns for the community's use. In many
liturgies and services hymns and hymn singing occupies almost one-third of
the precious 'Sunday hour of praise', the sermon, ten
minutes, but you would tell this from the proportion of educational
time given to the one as against the other. Academic courses on
church music, including the hymn, are not common, and
interest in the hymn is easily smothered by the heavyweights of classical
liturgical music (Bach, Mozart, Haydn,
Britten), the grand tradition of choral composition
(Tallis, Purcell, Vaughan Williams, Arvo Pärt),
or the lure of the unfamiliar (medieval plainsong, African
chant, South American religious music). We will need more
conferences of the Melbourne kind and those organised by the British,
Asian and North American churches and hymn societies, more journals
given to hymnology and its context, more courses of study, more
theses on hymns, hymn-writers and the sociology of the hymn,
more information gathering. More, more, much
more. And when we have more, we can bring into being a
well-informed appreciative body of practitioners - I mean
singing congregations, who know what they are about and why.
We will need to address urgently and intelligently issues concerned with
providing the means for hymn-singing, because this activity
- at least, as it is practised now in so-called main-stream
churches in developed countries - depends heavily on technical
aid and assistance.
The average hymn-singer in a western-style congregation, habituated to
a state of dependence, expects to have a physical copy of the hymn in
his or her hands, and the comfort of a competent musical
accompaniment, before taking up the time-honoured invitation:
'Now we will join in singing hymn fifty-six, hymn fifty-six,
"Now thank we all our God". I have already alluded to the
problems of providing that physical copy of the hymn, so I won't
repeat myself. But there are other considerations.
As pipe-organs and even electronic organs and pianos of a reasonable
quality escalate in cost beyond the reach of most congregations; as
enthusiastic instrumental groups break up when their players have to move on
to further their training, their career or find a job, a
partner, a new church association; as fewer and fewer piano and
organ players emerge with the skills or the willing commitment of time that
regular worship entails; as those voluntary workers now occupying the
organ benches and piano seats in our churches age to the point of
incompetence - do I describe reality for you, or just some
nightmare of my own private imagining? - where will we find the
music to go with the song? Or will the inventiveness of modern
technology save us from such a crisis?
I recall an important 1987 conference on Liturgy and Music, held at
Manila under the direction of Dr Francisco Feliciano, at which a
Japanese musician and World Council of Churches representative, the
Reverence Tishitsugu Arai flourished a small black box as the instrument of
our salvation. It contained, he explained, a full
musical accompaniment for every one of the verses in every one of the hymns
in the hymnbook which it was designed to accompany. A kind of
karaoke instrumental accompaniment, no longer requiring a person to be
present and play for the hymn singers. I am not inclined to
scorn it, particularly since a small elderly congregation in my own
home town asked me to record on tape accompaniments for a selection of their
most used hymns. It may be the way of the future; but at
the very least we need to urgently consider what is to be done to ensure
that hymn singing in the new millennium does not falter into the silent air.
Shouldn't we be creating realistic career structures for church
musicians, exploring substitutes for traditional ways of accompanying
singers, thinking of new kinds of support music (and getting
our congregations used to the idea)? In my own home parish there
are seven places of worship: one organsit broke her leg, a
second is losing her eyesight, a third has had a severe illness,
a fourth shifted away. We are in crisis! Please help!
And there is one more problem which looms large as the church moves away
from a system of voluntary support and free services into a user-pays
economic structure. I don't believe I am exaggerating when I say
that the legal issues of copyright and the ownership of hymns are becoming a
threat to the survival of the tradition of hymn-singing. They
are a particular threat to the acquisition by congregations and worship
leaders of new music and new texts; that is, to the development
and continuation of the tradition of hymn-singing. Hymns
nowadays mean money for those who can claim ownership. Despite
the appearance of umbrella licensing companies (none of them able to
protect the whole range of hymns any reasonable leader or congregation
might want to sing in their time) has gone some way to relieve
responsible leaders of the need to seek permissions from - in
some cases - all over the world; but at a cost which not
all can afford. The commercialisation of the hymn as
intellectual property is just one more issue which we will need to address
in the next millennium more adequately than we have done in the present
century, if hymns are to continue to play their vital role in
worship.
And surely that is what we all want.
|
