Modern Church Singing

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 25, 1874

Modern Church Singing.

The Liberal Christian has been to meeting. Where else could it have been but in Boston, for the church was “in a city which prides itself upon its appreciation and patronage of the fine arts.” But, alas for its reputation, this was what the editor found: the pulpit exercises occupying but fifteen minutes, and the choir performance not less than half an hour. This, in the writer’s opinion, was greatly to the detriment of the devotional character of the service, as we should think it must have been from the following particulars: First, the organ voluntary was a careless and utterly inappropriate pot-pourri of familiar opera airs, such as would have been appropriate for an entre-act at a theater. The opening anthem was rather commonplace, but fairly sung, and, perhaps, unobjectionable. The brief New Testament reading was immediately followed by a second anthem with solos, which, after the distressing voluntary and the long opening anthem, already suggested the idea that the choir intended to take entire possession of the services. When, finally, at the conclusion of the Old Testament reading, the organist sounded the alarm for a third anthem, but having played a few introductory bars, changed his mind, his music, and his key, dashed off into another noisy anthem with solos, and when this anthem proved to be nothing but a wretched adaptation of the Miserere and Prison Air from Verdi’s Il Trovatore, of which the original passionate words, “Leonora, be mine,” were unpleasantly recalled by the quasi frantic religious appeal. “Father, be mine,” we confess we never felt more complete sympathy with Luther’s alleged throwing of his hymn book; never before realized how completely a vulgar choir-leader has it in his power to abuse and destroy the devotional character of public religious services.

The Liberal Christian evidently is of much the same mind with the Congregationalist, as to the “incubus” on the churches.