With One Voice, Part 3

Here's another segment from the Leadership Journal interview with worship songwriters Keith & Kristyn Getty. This part is little more about music, but it does have ministry implications. The complete text of the interview can be found here.

[Keith has just said that "the goal is to write melodies that are singable rather than songs that sound like ones on the pop charts."]

LJ: Where do you find your inspiration in that effort?

Keith: Our songwriting style has two main inspirations, both of them equally unchristian. One is Irish folk music, which is very singable and social. It's almost tailor made for congregational singing. The other is the only contemporary popular genre written in a similar style: the 1930s Jewish songwriters of Tin Pan Alley—George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. Their craft was honing perfect melodies and then putting lyrics to it.

LJ: To clarify, why is the melody so important?

Keith: Because a good melody transcends musical style. For instance, a Gershwin song became a Broadway musical, a number one hit in the pop charts, a jazz standard, and a standard in the classical music cult long before pops orchestras.

Kristyn: Sometimes with modern music, you rely on the groove or the lead singer or the syncopation patterns in order for the congregation to be able to follow along. So if you take out the drum, the song doesn't work. But melodic folk music is quite versatile. You can dress and arrange it in so many different ways. You can sing it with the piano and a leading vocal, or without all those things.

We often cite "Be Thou My Vision" as an example. The lyrics date to around the sixth century, but it's still being sung. And you've heard it with a big rock band, and you've heard it just voices and nothing else. It's incredible what you can do with that folk melody. That's a great example of how a song continues to be relevant. It's not bound by any generation or style.

So we're always chasing that melody that might transcend all those boundaries and just be easy to sing.

LJ: That sounds like a lot of work.

Keith: Since June of this year, I've probably written three hundred melodies, and I'll only use two or three of those.

You probably have a sense for what they are talking about, even if you don't know a lot about music in the technical sense. Here's a simple test: you know a melody is good if you can hum it, whistle it, or sing it without the radio to back you up. It's no accident that "Amazing Grace," "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing," or "What Wondrous Love Is This" are easy to sing. They arose out of folk melodies that people sang as they worked, played, or walked along.

This is not to say that contemporary pop music is bad-- it's just that it doesn't lend itself as well to singing in community, which is what the church is. There are some newer songs that do sing well, like "How Great Is Our God" to use a non-Getty song for example, but we can't assume that something that sounds good on the radio is a good congregational song.

This is all the more important to consider as we work with limited instrumentation. We would be happy to use more instruments as we have the talent available, but we have to choose our music in light of the musical support we can give it. We might be able to pull off more pop-oriented songs if we are able to develop a broader instrumental foundation, but we shall have to wait and see. The nice thing is, as the Gettys noted, you can always spice up a good song, but it's hard to simplify a poor one.