Theopolis Institute conversation on secularity and the problem of church music ... I'm not sure the problem of traditional vs vernacular is a problem of secularity as much as its a challenge of high liturgical white guys not being sure how to get the music of low liturgical POC to fit into their traditions

First I'll load up the relevant links and then, assuming you've read the whole conversation, I'll proceed with some thoughts about it after the break:
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/secularity-and-the-problem-of-church-music/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/catholic-music/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/hold-to-the-old/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/traditional-contemporary-and-the-psalms/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/a-winsome-inequality/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/moving-past-musical-dystopia/


Pointing out that in the last century or so there's been a gap between traditionalist ideas of what church music should aspire to and what advocates of vernacular music believe church music should include is one of those Captain Obvious moments.  It's almost too mundane an observation to keep making and yet it will continue to be made and it may well be that, at the risk of putting things so starkly, theologically conservative white guys will tend to frame everything in terms of metahistorical claims and attempts to recover or discover a "tradition" that, as was pointed out in the conversation above, has itself been a distinctly modern invention.

What didn't come up in the course of the conversation much (if at all) regarding traditional and vernacular is not so much which traditional, since Gregorian/Carolingian chant got name-dropped along with Greek and Russian chant, as which vernacular ... namely American popular styles. 

Whether we're discussing country or blues the vernacular styles in the United States that can seem difficult to reconcile with the high liturgical traditions of chant are styles indebted to African rather than European musical idioms and instruments.  The banjo, in case anyone in 2020 doesn't already know this, came to us from Africa by way of the diaspora.  Throw in the evolution of country styles in the wake of the Age of Ragtime and even what seems to be the whitest of white vernacular American styles could not have evolved the way that it did without recourse to the banjo, for instance. 

Merely to say that the challenge of a successful juxtaposition or fusion of "traditional" and "vernacular" has been a pressing issue in Christian liturgical music in the last century or two in, say, the United States, can miss that two different ways of conceiving of music have been interacting and this would be where the terms Eurological and Afrological, hesitant as I am to endorse them beyond academic discussion, are not merely relevant but necessary to meaningfully discuss a traditional/vernacular synergy debate.  When J. S. Bach juxtaposes something he'd just written with old chorales and chants he was doing so within a vernacular and a traditional that, to borrow a previously mentioned term, could be largely construed as strictly Eurological. 

When Paul Buckley went through the variations on psalm-chant he spanned the Middle East, Greece, Russia, Africa and the United States. The chant itself stayed fairly steady, i.e. the Paschal Troparion. 

Strict psalm-singing would tend to preclude the lining hymn tradition approach of African American churches to the "Doctor Watts" hymnody. 

At the risk of putting things too simply, the last century and a half of American pop music has been music pioneered by African American Pentecostals and Baptists who have hailed from the American South while the reception history of musical tradition has been defined East Coast Anglicans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and/or Methodists.  Strictly in terms of an American Christendom east coast white high liturgical people have mediated the "tradition" through which or with which the southern black low liturgical pioneers of American vernacular music were implicitly or explicitly enjoined to find some interaction with ... if such interaction was ever going to be granted as theoretically or actually possible to begin with.

If race is as much a social construct as some people say such a synthesis should not be hard to achieve but if we're going to have people dealing with any kind of atavistic essentialist views of race then such a synergy between "tradition" and "vernacular" could be rejected on both sides of the previously outlined dyad.  If we're going to be stuck having Romantic era notions of post-Herderian ethnic authenticity then a synergistic interaction between the proverbial high liturgical East Coast white music and the low liturgical Southern black music is going to be off the table because styles of music have gotten defined in racialized terms. 

If humans cannot escape the impulse to fuse art and religion then let me suggest that we're in the middle of a scholastic quagmire in which obsession with musical protology can preclude musical eschatology and frequently does so on the basis of appeals to ethnic and racial purity codes.  What do I even mean by that?  Let me try to explain it with a few questions. Do we want to define African American popular music as something that some sometimes wish to have roots so deep no one can steal it?  Wesley Morris sometimes has wished for that and the problem I've highlighted in that approach is that it's no work to take the "soul" of "African" music that "white" people can't steal and to discuss the "soul" of "German" music that the "Jew" can't steal.  Do we want to discuss jazz as a music created and pioneered by African Americans that became a global urban popular style in the last century, in places as far-ranging as Iran, Estonia, Russia, China, Turkey, Poland, Italy and elsewhere?  Or do we want to pine for the days when jazz was regarded as a protest music made by blacks that has suffered through being brought into the academy?  Paradoxically since the end of the Cold War jazz scholars have begun to explore just how much jazz has flourished outside the United States, even within totalitarian regimes, give or take some fraught but not always antagonistic relationships with established power.  Jazz has emerged and even survived in totalitarian states in ways that should give Americans some pause about the Americanist fixation on jazz history as "our" music.

The problem isn't wanting to get jazz more in touch with popular song and dance forms, the problem is the lost Golden Age narrative, the claim that as jazz entered the academy it lost its soul.  Maybe anything that goes into the academy in American cultural terms is likely to do that anyway, but my observation about the contrast between protology and eschatology is my guiding thought--whatever jazz has become as barely more than one percent of music sales in our time, it has become the music of a cognitive one percent if not always the financial one percent.  That jazz in the wake of Coltrane and Davis has cemented into virtuoso display variations on head tunes instead of being anchored in Tin Pan Alley pop song structures can be partly why people don't "get" jazz and can't enjoy it; that jazz has also become the hold music of American customer service can be an even bigger reason many Americans hate jazz. 

But pining for a jazz that gets back to its root was what the Marsalis family tried to do and what came of that?  Having fans of bop and bebop try to get jazz "back" could be seen as an intra-jazz variation on Make America Great Again.  I think Wynton Marsalis' experiments with closing the boundaries between jazz and classical makes more sense than trying to keep jazz pure, whatever purity in jazz might be expected to mean.  We live in an era in which the theoretical and formal and practical tools for thinking through a synthesis of "highbrow" western European concert music idioms with popular styles pioneered by African American musicians could be relatively easily done provided our goals are eschatological rather than protological or even analytical/theoretical.  We don't need to keep arguing about which theories best explain the music of the past if we can take some of those theories and use them to further a fusion of what have been called Eurological and Afrological approaches to music-making in the present.  The rebirth of formal analysis in American music theory shouldn't have to be used primarily to debate whether Hepokoski and Darcy's ideas adequately account for the symphonies of Bruckner when they could be used to explore how it will be possible to make sonata forms drawing upon Monk and Ellington or the possibility of writing a fugue that draws upon the groove of Wilson Pickett.

The idea that a traditional/vernacular synthesis of the kind that happened in days of yore isn't happening now because "secularity" is not a thesis I find myself able to take very seriously, even if I was interested in contributions throughout the conversation along the way. 

If anything the resurgence of popular song and dance in the last century suggests to me that the era of the "autonomous" or "absolute" music of the long nineteenth century coming to a steady decline means that a traditional/vernacular synthesis should be more rather than less practical in the twenty-first century.  For such a synthesis, synergy or collaboration to occur we might have to shake off the ideological shackles of Romantic era art-religious dogmas that treated certain styles and methods as functionally sacramental and do this across both the pop and not-pop sides of the divides.  Or as Mahalia Jackson put it, the Gospel itself didn't change even if Thomas Dorsey added a little "bounce" to it, but for that path forward we have to be cautious about exactly what from the past we are regarding as sacred, even if there's inevitably going to be some talk about the mysterious congruence of "form" and "content".  Whether on the jazz/blues/pop side or the classical side, sacralizing the "how" at the expense of considering "what" will likely not help us.