by Christopher Sutton | Dec 22, 2011 | Church, Music
This is part four in a series of posts on music in the Catholic Church. Previously: Part one, part two and part three.
One big discovery for me during the World Youth Day trip was the music of Taizé – a Christian community in the East of France, where they have cultivated a distinctive style of worship, welcoming all denominations of Christianity and putting visual icons and a particular kind of repeating sung music at the heart of each service.
I don’t think I’d ever heard of Taizé before that week, though looking back later I realised I had once experienced their music.
A First Taste of Taizé
During a period of quiet prayer in a vigil service in my church last Easter, somebody started singing a simple tune, and others joined in:
The words were so short and the tune so simple, that within a couple of repeats I was able to join in, singing softly with the dozen or so other people there. It was a wonderful peaceful addition to the service and a really memorable moment for me. I recognised it as a new and different form of sung music than I was used to, but didn’t have the relationships or the information to really follow up on it and learn more at that time.
During the World Youth Day trip, some of the music used by our excellent volunteer choir was in a similar vein. In particular this piece caught my attention:
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by Christopher Sutton | Nov 12, 2011 | Church, Music
This is part two in a series of posts on music in the Catholic Church. Part One covered my background and experience of Church music growing up.
So what does Church music look like today? Well it’s often very much that traditional hymn-singing I talked about.
But there are a few other types of church music…
Raise your hands
One mode of modern church music is what I think of as “Happy-Clappy” style. That’s too disrespectful a name really, but it’s the kind of music where you’re singing songs rather than hymns, the words aren’t based on scripture but are much more informal and secular-sounding, the music is more poppy and modern. Often there are actions (I must confess I cringe just saying that) and there’s a lot of clapping and waving arms in the air.
For a long time I was absolutely dismissive of this.
There’s a body of church music coming from African-American Gospel music, which is more upbeat, lively, and, well, ‘clappy’. I respect that as a genre and a mode of worship, although it isn’t one I’ve ever identified with. I think that’s the influence behind the rise of guitar-based poppy music in Catholic churches, often as part of youth outreach efforts, or children’s masses.
In dedicated family or children’s masses I think the agenda is different, and I think that style of music definitely has a place there. But until recently I would have been pretty resistant to its inclusion in any other masses, where I feel it’s mostly a distraction.
Waking up
I was given cause to rethink this by my experiences in Madrid this summer. (more…)
by Christopher Sutton | Nov 5, 2011 | Church, Music
As I mentioned in my last post, the World Youth Day trip I went on this summer was particularly inspiring for me on the musical front. I’ve long been involved with and interested in church music, but the WYD week exposed me to some new and wonderful types of worship music (along with some old familiars which I like to varying degrees!)
This is the first in a series of posts on the topic of music in the church, inspired by the new music I encountered on that trip.
As it was in the beginning…
I grew up attending Catholic mass every Sunday with my family, which about half the time featured sung hymns. Depending on which local church we went to, some of the mass setting (e.g. the Gloria, Sanctus, etc.) might be sung, but for the most part it was hymns from a hymn book, accompanied by piano or organ.
I like hymns.
There are some fantastic hymns, and sung hymns can (if well chosen and well led) be a wonderful addition to a church service.
However.
The big curse of church hymns is that more often than not, they are performed at a snail’s pace, leaving even capable singers struggling for breath by the end of each tortuous line, and giving you so much time for your thoughts to wander during each verse you’re surprised the thing ever ends! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some weirdo with a fetish for super-speedy hymns. I’m just looking for a reasonable tempo that’s something approximating speaking speed; enough to give the words some meaning and allow natural phrasing.
I’ve been guilty in the past of (more…)
by Christopher Sutton | Oct 4, 2010 | Ear Training, Music Theory, Technology
Being an Apple App Store developer is really a mixed bag. While it is streets ahead of other mobile platforms’ app stores in terms of platform consistency (which developers love), the market size, and audience for your apps, there are some deeply frustrating issues as well.
I want to briefly discuss one: the lack of two-way communication with users.
I’ll also look at some particular issues one user had with the RelativePitch app my company developed, around learning relative pitch with or without a harmonic context.
The App Store Review System
Users are free to write reviews of apps they download – and in my experience user reviews make an enormous difference to app sales. The App Store interface shows the most recent reviews of an app prominently, and having a negative review visible there can really impact sales.
A recent 1-star review can strongly influence App Store shoppers
What’s truly frustrating though is that developers have no way to respond to reviews, either publically or privately. We can’t email the users, and we can’t post a reply to their review. Some developers will respond within the app description text, but this isn’t scalable or particularly beneficial.
Sometimes a user will have misunderstood something, or somehow missed out on a large part of the app’s functionality. In a lot of cases this can be useful information: you can improve the app to aid the user’s understanding more in future. In other cases you just have to throw up your hands in the air and wonder what went wrong and whether the user spent even a couple of minutes trying to resolve their issue or looking at the help screens!
Once in a while there will be a review which puts me in a bad mood. Normally this is because they’re flaming the app without real justification – this inevitably affects the impression other potential customers get of the app, despite lacking substance.
And sometimes the reviewer raises interesting points which I disagree with, and I’m simply frustrated not to be able to respond.
Harmonic Context in Interval Training
One such reviewer appeared this week. They were kind enough to review both of our paid apps, leaving a 1-star rating and a strongly worded negative review for each. They raised some interesting points though, which I’d like to respond to here.
I’ve included the whole review below, and then again with my comments in-line.
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My name's Christopher Sutton and this is my personal blog. You can learn more about me