The hymns from Sing Praise for the last week or so have taken the serious themes of repentance and commitment. A more joyful note now follows with today’s song, a Taizé chant, “In the Lord I’ll be ever thankful”. I have known the chorus or ‘ostinato’ part of this song for many years (it was written in 1998) but the words to the ‘verses’ (or rather the soloist’s or cantor’s acclamations) are new to me. John, who has been playing these songs online as part of morning prayer, thinks they may be offered as examples of the sort of words that could be extemporised to suit the theme or mood of a particular act of worship, since they don’t fit easily to the metre of the chant that the congregation or choir sings at the same time. It’s not possible for a single person to sing both at once, but John has recorded both parts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6EqDdGrw0w
The cantor acclaims her or his reasons for trusting God: “You are my salvation”, “The Lord is my rock and fortress”, “The Lord God is worthy of praise”, “You have done wondrous things”. These are in one sense quite vague, though all are Biblical. It is up to each worshipper to know make these personal in their heart – how has God saved me? How has he protected me? What has he done in my life to make him worthy of my praise? What wondrous things has he done?
Singing the praise of God can actually be hard work, to get beyond repeating the words on the page or screen and really meaning them. Another reason, perhaps, for thinking that these are merely suggestions and the cantor could actually be intended to make them personal to themselves or their congregation. For example, “I praise you Lord, for you saved me from depression. I will be thankful always for the dream that gave me new hope”. Or corporately “God has brought us new members, let us praise him. For our sisters and brothers in Christ let us give thanks”. The skill is in fitting these words around the ostinato, and again the various lines of music in the book just give an idea of what is possible, but it requires a gifted singer to do justice to this cantor role.
To fill in some background to Stephen’s comments: the Taizé Community is an ecumenical residential group in France, which specifically aims to be “international” in the sense that language is not to be a barrier to spiritual growth together. As well as being a monastic community of those who lived there full-time, the Community also organised large gatherings for worship and prayer and teaching and fellowship, and the location became a place where people could go for “pilgrimages” or “retreats” (in the sense that Stephen was describing yesterday in his post entitled “Athirst my soul for you”).
The worship, and so the music, for these large gatherings had to be conceived of as being multi-lingual in the sense that each visiting believer could say and sing words in his/her own language to tunes which everyone was using communally. Each song generally focussed on a short bible passage which was sung repeatedly – perhaps for a period as long as 20 minutes – and this provided a chance for people to meditate on its meaning and application in their own lives. Whilst doing this, instrumentalists and singers could improvise around the song, and did so in order to provide the living dynamic that enabled the song to be an opportunity for thought rather than simply vain repetition or mantra. With a fixed chorus-melody and harmonic structure, but with varying improvised add-ons, the result was a form of Christian communal jazz.
Of course visitors who appreciated this often went back to their home churches and asked the clergy there if they couldn’t have Taizé services back home in their own settings. To which the honest answer is inevitably: “Yes, we can try, but it’s impossible to reproduce the atmosphere of a French summer all-day rural carnival in an English urban evening winter church service!” As a result the Taizé chants have become quite widely known up and down our land, but inevitably the atmosphere of Taizé itself is less accessible. As a vicar myself I’ve felt conscious of putting on so-called “Taizé services” which have had some of the form and material, but which must have been millions of miles away from the essence of what Taizé was trying to do.
In singing this particular song I sang the melody of chorus a couple of times, and then observed the rubric which says “some or all of the optional verses, for one or more cantors, may be added once the ostinato has been sung at least twice”. I think the key word is “optional”, and I hazard a guess that the professional element of reading the notes off the stave and singing exactly what’s written is really a far cry from what actually happens at Taizé itself! But the experience does say something important: namely that we need to find ways to let scripture penetrate our hearts, and songs with fixed meters and rules of rhyme are only one way of doing this.
Of course, one of the things we lose in translations of the bible is the sense of rhythm of Hebrew poetry. I think the mechanics of how to improvise the scripture verses in song alerts us to the fact that scripture can speak on more than one level, and should encourage us to pay attention to other features of the original; and so to ask ourselves whether there are other ways in which we can “translate” the meaning into our present-day culture and context?