- Is it the sheer abundance of the word "you" that distracts me? Perhaps. After all, when we use old English, we split the usage between "thou," "thee," "you," and "ye," whereas in contemporary English we use "you," "you," "you," and "you." OK, if that's my problem, I need to get used to it. But I'm not sure that's it, because switching from the KJV to the NIV did not spawn this reaction in me--just the music.
- Is it the susceptibility of the "oooo" sound to crooning that distracts me? Well, I'll admit that I am bothered by people crooning about God. But I'm not sure that's the sum total of my distraction.
Then yesterday I was blissfully ramping up for a new college football season, and decided to download a bit of Penn State Nittany Lions Blue Band music onto my iPod to get into the right mood. I know the tunes very well, but don't know the words (I know the "roar, lions, roar" part, but most of the rest is a bit muddled). So I decided to follow links to the lyrics of four of the most popular songs. And I found something very interesting. Three of the four songs (all, I think, of 20th century vintage) were written with "thees" and "thous." This usage was especially prevalent in the "Penn State Alma Mater," a nostalgic piece reminiscing about the author's college days.
And so I set to thinking again about why use of such language "feels" right in some contemporary songs...even in secular tunes over which the King James Bible has absolutely no sway. And I was reminded of a book that I read a few years ago, Who Needs Classical Music: Cultural Choice and Musical Value, by Julian Johnson. One of the author's major premises is that, historically speaking, the two biggest reasons for music have been to (1) create distance and (2) foster reflection. That is clearly the effect of the use of archaic language in the "Penn State Alma Mater," and it it also a practical effect of such language in hymns as well. God does not, of course, explain why he wants the church to sing to each other, but this is at least as plausible an explanation as any other I've heard.
Could this explain my unease with the use of "you" in contemporary hymnody? Well it at least fits. I have long been used to hymns that create distance and foster reflection--not the distance of nostalgia (at least not primarily), but the distance of reverence, awe, dignity, and transcendence--sentiments that dominate many old hymns.
This is not a diatribe against new music. I am well aware that music has a horizontal dimension, and contemporary forms can communicate this dimension more effectively, at times, than older forms. I am suggesting, though, that the distance/reflection factor is something that contemporary forms do not tend to communicate well, and we do well to keep classic hymnody around for this purpose. I for one plan to listen to my latest John Rutter download regularly. More, regularly, even, than my new Penn State Blue Band music.
9 comments:
Today at church we sang “How Great Thou Art” and also “In Your Name.” Singing the first without the archaisms would be strange. Singing the second with them would be strange. There are well-known hymns which lend themselves to “thee” and “thou” because of use. However I wonder how many languages have preserved archaic words. For example in the two foreign languages I know and in which I’ve sung “How Great Thou Art” those languages don’t have a way to distinguish between “thou” and “you.” So it might be more an English phenomenon and as such the creating of distance and fostering reflection by pronoun use due more to cultural conditionedness which “feels right.”
Mark,
How does Col 3:16 and the “teaching and admonishing one another” through music fit this sentence from your post? “God does not, of course, explain why he wants the church to sing to each other”
Dan
Dan, maybe that was confusing. I don't doubt that there is a biblical purpose for music (teaching, admonishing, etc.). What God doesn't tell us is the reason for music. IOW, why music? What does music add to church life that bare preaching does not?
Many factors commend themselves. Music is more mnemonic, allows for unified congregational participation, draws in appropriate emotions, and the like. I think Johnson pulls in some reasons that are mentioned less frequently--distance and reflection. Speaking for myself, I think I can say that when I sing spontaneously, distance and reflection best explain why I sing.
Interesting post, Mark. What I find distracting is people vacillating back and forth in public prayer - alternating between thee/thou and you in addressing the Lord, sometimes within the same sentence. For example, "Lord, I thank thee that you love us and that you have sent Thy Son into this world." It really *is* almost that bad sometimes. It also bugs me when song writers do the same thing in songs. When writing a song the poet has the time to weigh and choose words more carefully than when someone prays in public. So why not be consistent in song lyrics? For example, "Living or dying, may honor be Thine From this wretched life, You loved and forgave...."
Rob, I was saying something very similar to someone on Sunday. I'm glad I'm not the only one that finds it annoying.
Mark,
Just nitpicking here, but the pronouns you mentioned are Early Modern English (EME). Old English had more forms for the different cases. See this page for more info.
On another note, I wonder if an EME speaker would have the same feeling of distance/reflection, or if he would just feel that it was natural to address God in the singular. It would seem to me that the archaic forms did not start to carry a connotative meaning of distance until they actually became archaic. Thus, depending on when a hymn was written, over time it might have gained a sense of distance it didn't have when first penned.
Aside from consistency (see Rob's comment), my personal preference is for EME hymns to be left alone, but Modern English (ME) hymns to be written in ME. After all, though I may have studied EME in school and understand it as well as most people, my native tongue is ME and I'm living in the ME era.
David, you bring up an salient point that the use of thee/thou in the 17th century did not communicate the "distance" idea that it does today. Thee/Thou were simply standard conventions.
What is striking, though, is that modern poetry still uses thee/thou to communicate distance and foster reflection. And I'd argue that systematically retiring hymns that use such language or modernizing them to reflect contemporary usage is not warranted on the basis of archaic language alone. When the twentieth-century poet penned the sentence "How Great Thou Art," for instance, he used a twentieth-century poetic device to communicate something other than what would be communicated by the sentence "How Great You Are." There is no denotative difference between these two sentences, of course, but there is a huge connotative difference. Use of thee/thou in this case is a deliberate rhetorical device, and to change it would be to betray the poet--an interesting little twist on the adage "all translators are traitors."
The reason I pulled the Penn State Alma Mater into the discussion is to show that this convention is not something restricted to Christian hymns. Modern secular poetry uses this convention as well.
All this to say that my commitment to updating Bible translation to reflect modern English usage does not necessarily reflect in a corresponding commitment to update hymn language. Nor, in view of modern poetic conventions, do I feel the weight of necessity to eliminate archaic language from new hymns. Such a practice, I think, tends to overlook part of the connotative function of music that makes it of such peculiar value to the church. Specifically, I am concerned that the trend to modernization eliminates the distance/reflection element (or perhaps better, the transcendence element) that has tended to characterize historical hymnody.
Again, I'm not suggesting that we stop writing new songs and hymns. I am suggesting, though, that a general rejection of classical hymnody involves more than the retirement of old songs.
MAS
Alabama shall descend upon thee and thy fellow Penn State fans (and thy coach who verily is old enough to remember King James) and smite thee hip and thigh. After which you may repent of scheduling us at your leisure.
Me genoito (choose whatever translation you like).
:)
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