This was posted on Tim Hughe's blog a few days ago. Tim is the guy who wrote "Here I Am to Worship" and "Beautiful One" to name a few. Pretty interesting.
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Below is an extract from an American Newspaper objecting to new trends in church music.
“There are several reasons for opposing it. One, it’s too new. Two, it’s often worldly, even blasphemous. The new Christian music is not as pleasant as the more established style. Because there are so many new songs, you can’t learn them all. It puts too much emphasis on instrumental music rather than godly lyrics. This new music creates disturbances making people act indecently and disorderly. The preceding generation got along without it. It’s a money making scam and some of these new music upstarts are lewd and loose.”
Who were they attacking? It wasn't Delirious? or Matt Redman. They were attacking the hymn writer Isaac Watts, famous for writing ‘When I survey,’ in 1723! The old hymns once upon a time were radical and cutting edge. Our music and our songs must also always be pushing new ground. Let's go for it.
2 comments:
I was waiting for the "pierce your ear; lose your job" comment. :) :) Thanks for relieving my angst.
I just posted a similar comment on Tim Hughe's blog:
In the spirit that "all truth is God's truth":
There are certainly comments like this to be found here and there in church history. The thing is, Isaac Watts wrote only texts, and no music, so it's not clear what this writer is referring to. Watts is significant and progressive in that he was one of the first English writers to write "freely-written" hymns, as opposed to scriptural paraphrases, and in that sense he was innovative. But we can't cast him as a musical radical, because he didn't write music.
The same is true of most hymn writers throughout history...texts only, no music (Martin Luther is a notable exception to that, however).
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