Four-part harmony singing and music education in worship

A follow-up to a recent post about Charles Spurgeon's essay on music in worship.

Brian Sauvé, a pastor and hymnwriter, posted recently on Twitter about his church's approach to music in worship:

I get this question enough that it's probably worth posting about it separately:

"How do you do music at your church on Sundays?"

Here's the breakdown:

We sing almost exclusively from the Cantus Christi 2020 hymnal, accompanied by a piano. Most of the settings are in four-part harmony.

We don't amplify anything. I conduct the congregation from the front, but don't sing into a microphone. Sometimes I sing the melody, but often I sing the Tenor part.

We sing 10 songs per service. Three of them stay the same each week (David Erb's setting of Psalm 134, The Lord's Prayer, and the Doxology).

The other seven usually consist of about five Psalms and two hymns. These are scattered at different points of the service, including two that we sing seated during the distribution of the bread and wine for Communion.

Why we sing in four parts:

1. It allows men to sing like men, women to sing like women, children to sing like children.

2. It takes effort. We don't want to offer to the Lord that which costs nothing.

3. It is objectively beautiful, far more so than the best contemporary worship band I've ever heard--and we're not even particularly gifted or anything.

4. Much of the great musical inheritance of the Church is in parts. Lose this skill and you lose access to the richness of that blessing.

How we learn to sing songs in parts:

Every Tuesday evening, barring the last Tuesday of the month, we have a potluck followed by a Psalm-singing workshop. I use the "Sing Your Part" app to teach each group their parts, then we practice. The actual practice is only 45 minutes, so the whole thing only takes 90 minutes each week.

We typically have about 50% of our Sunday attendance at Psalm sing on Tuesdays. This lets us learn, on average, one new song per month.

I couldn't even read music when we started learning this stuff. Any church do this if they decide to.

Sauvé offers a video of his congregation singing a setting of Psalm 134 by David Erb, which they sing every Sunday.

Nearly everyone can learn to sing on pitch and to sing a part. St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, has a freshman chorus that includes the entire class, many or most of whom have no previous musical experience. Music is one of the Seven Liberal Arts, one of the quadrivium along with geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and thus a key component of a classical education. By the end of the year, the freshmen have learned to sing Gregorian chant, polyphonic motets, and harmonized spirituals and folk songs, and they perform in a concert.

The unofficial anthem of the college is Palestrina's Sicut Cervus (Psalm 42:1), learned as part of that freshman chorus experience, and every week on Wednesday afternoon, after classes, a little after 2 p.m., any student or tutor available gathers in the Pendulum Pit in Mellon Hall, a stairwell that has a Foucault pendulum, an upright piano, and excellent acoustics, for the "Sicut Sing," a tradition that began in 2012. Sheet music is available for those who need it, but many students manage without. I was able to participate one Wednesday, and it brought me close to tears of joy.

The words translated: "Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks: so longeth my soul after thee, O God." (Coverdale, Book of Common Prayer)

St. John's student Brian Liu wrote about the weekly Sicut Sing:

I have wondered why it has become so beloved at our school. While some may say that it is loved so much simply because it sounds beautiful, I would suggest perhaps a deeper reason. The theme of the piece is man's yearning for God. And though St. John's is a secular institution, that longing - the longing for something more transcendent than ourselves and our longing for communion with it - is the spirit of our institution. It is the spirit of our educational endeavor. We like to think of ourselves as working towards something higher when we read, write and discuss our texts.

In another post, Sauvé lists four essentials of singing together in worship:

Corporate singing should:

1. Be singable by men, women, and children. Parts singing helps greatly with this.
2. Include the singing of whole Psalms.
3. Sound primarily like people singing (not overpowered by instruments).
4. Inspire the cultivation of musical skill.

In his thread providing five reasons to learn parts singing at your church, Sauvé writes:

Many modern unison arrangements are too high for the average man to sing. You discourage men in your congregation when you ask them to sing like Bon Iver....

Parts singing grants you access to some of the richest treasures left to us by our spiritual forefathers.

It is astonishing the treasures we have.

Our forefathers laid up some potent bottles in the wine cellar that we cannot even open if we won't learn to sing in parts.

If you can only sing songs written in the last 20 years, you are cut off from all of this richness.

You'll have to rely on popularizers to sing dumbed-down and gutted versions of a few of the old songs.

Tomlin might get you a few.
Shane & Shane might get you a few.

But if you learn to use the tools, you'll find a whole world of musical glory in the great tradition of Christian Psalmody and hymnody.

While visiting Annapolis, I've often attended Christ Reformed Evangelical Church, which practices the precepts set out above. Their website lists "Singing of psalms and hymns robustly to God" as a distinctive component of their weekly worship service. One Sunday I was there, they introduced a new psalm setting just before the start of the service, playing each part individually and going over a couple of specifically tricky fugue-like passages so that the congregation would be ready to sing it together the following week. They sing at least a half-dozen hymns and psalms each week, singing all the verses at a brisk pace. Four-part music is printed in the service booklet.

MORE: A playlist of congregational singing from the Cantus Christi hymnal. Here is the Christ Church congregation singing "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" (tune Diadem):

RELATED: Tony Esolen offers:

Why guitars are generally not good for leading a congregation in song:

• They don't play the melody, while


• their chords turn muddy in a large space, so


• you have to rely on the soloist, so


• he or she needs to be miked up, so


• the congregation is smothered.