Full Text for Lutheran Worship 2- Volume 71 - Musical Style Changes in the LCMS (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 71.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> PAUL: Thinking about the new hymnal makes me curious. What musical style changes have occurred for hymns in the LCMS in the last fifty years or so? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: Well indeed, musical styles have shifted somewhat. We can take as kind of an orientation The Lutheran Hymnal published in 1941. It's been used for over fifty years, and so we've actually found the musical style in that as a tool that continues to be useful in our congregations. Some have set it aside and moved elsewhere. So the way to maybe focus on this is what happened, say, with Lutheran Worship. What is happening with the kind of music being put in the new Lutheran Service Book. I would point out that various movements will cause some new materials to show up in these collections. First of all, there was a huge folk song movement. In the '60s going into the '70s there were hundreds of thousands of this type of music created. The Roman Catholics used it considerably, but it entered also into our usage. A lot of these materials kind of disappeared over time. They seemed like they would overwhelm everything in the late '60s. But now, there aren't many people that use them. So that was one movement. And we may see a few kinds of pieces that use that folk idiom. A second thing happened was a greater surge among the American tunes, especially what were the frontier music making of the shape note tunes where a singing master would come and teach people how to sing in a five-note scale where the hard things were removed as kind of a social activity. But it was also a church activity. And they created tunes like �Amazing Grace� that has a power. It's not only folk tune, but it is one of those tunes like that frontier music. Then came kind of a sophisticated explosion to find really interesting musical styles to kind of challenge what had been included in hymnody. So I can even think of one, "Have no fear little flock" in Lutheran Worship. It has kind of a string bass basic beat underlying the whole thing, and it's written by a German, German jazz, if you want. So there are some things now that are driven more by rhythm. Folk tunes reaching across the globe have come into it. The African kind of songs which were learned kind of on the spot in which everybody could participate. This is entering hymnals. So they've now gone global with kind of a folk music that goes around the globe. These are movements that we see show up in hymnals. And a greater desire even to explore Asian sort of things. So the ethnic materials have exploded. And this is what we can look for in materials as kind of new elements. So indeed, styles are changing.