This past holiday season I found myself embroiled in a somewhat heated discussion surrounding seasonal music, parents, and students. The story is familiar to many of us: A Jewish child, in a choir affiliated with the public school system, was performing on my college holiday program. This child expressed discomfort in singing Silent Night. The parents asked for accommodations, which we were happy to oblige (the student didn’t sing with the massed choirs for Silent Night). The parents, however, did not limit their concerns to the nature of our accommodation, but challenged us on the acceptability of our entire musical programming for the holiday season. In essence questioning us on the appropriateness of Silent Night and the emphasis on sacred music from the Christian tradition, while exhorting us to explore a multicultural and secular program.
For the record, I am Jewish. I remember being a part of a “Christmas” program when I was in preschool in the late 1970s. I was very uncomfortable at the time. It felt weird to sing “Christ the Savior is Born.” I also felt excluded, because I really didn’t know most of the songs, and I certainly didn’t know verse two of any of these songs. I knew Jingle Bells, but the other kids already knew most of the other songs.
After that I mostly didn’t perform much sacred music until I started singing in choir regularly in high school. Some of the old feelings came up when we sang works with similar texts to Silent Night. But, I gradually became desensitized to it, and eventually was free enough to explore and examine the meanings and motivations contained within the text, and to use that to inform my singing and conducting. I haven’t been uncomfortable singing sacred music in decades, but I remember vividly the feeling.
Despite my background and heritage, I have become a staunch supporter of Christian sacred music within the choral art form. I think there are a number of points to be made, that aren’t talked about directly, and maybe coming from a Jew might be heard more clearly.
First and foremost: Choral singing is inherently a Christian tradition. It was founded, nurtured, and developed almost exclusively within the Christian church for more than 1000 years. If you participate in choral singing, you are participating in a historically Christian art form. If you chose to sing in a choir, and do it with an accurate representation of the tradition, you will sing a lot of sacred Christian music. There are many instances of secular choirs and choral music, choral music from other religions (including many examples of Jewish choral music), but the cold, hard facts are that the vast majority of choral music throughout history is of a sacred, Christian, nature, and that if it weren't for the Christian Church, we probably wouldn't have choral singing as we know it.
In order to study choral music and choral singing, and maintain any level of accurate representation of the tradition, it is impossible to separate the religious background from the art form. Any attempt to fully separate choral singing from Christianity means that you deny a major portion of the artistic tradition, and deny the students of the art form an accurate representation of what you are studying. You are, in essence, lying about what choral music is and is not.
Imagine you want to study stained glass artwork, and maybe want to become a stained glass artist to earn a living designing and installing stained glass. Now imagine begining your studies in this field, but not wanting to learn about stained glass in churches, for whatever reason. And take that one step further and say that you want stained glass design and installation to be your career, but you will not install or design for churches. The preposterousness of this proposition is almost laughable; you will be one unemployed stained glass designer/installer who knows very little about stained glass!
I understand that there are differences between stained glass and singing, but the fundamental truth of the argument holds up: when we deny that choral singing is a Christian art form, when parents say to the principal of the school “why is the public school choir performing any sacred Christian music at all? Isn’t there enough secular repertoire?”, we are challenging the study and performance of the fundamental artistic creations of the form. To remove Christian music from the holiday program is like trying to earn a living installing stained glass windows on businesses and community centers alone…it doesn’t make any sense.
The response from parents is often that they just want representation, diversity, inclusion, and balance, not wholesale exclusion of Christian music. I happen to agree wholeheartedly with this, because the same argument for including Christian music in the choral program holds for the inclusion of the other types of music: the need for an accurate representation of what is out there in the art we are performing and studying. However, this can be a slippery slope, and when this principle gets distorted, you wind up with the situation we have with Christmas and Hanukkah, which I will address in my next post about this subject.
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