Folk Group

[VML]

What's a folk group?

Crucible, Devil's Interval, Faustus, Bellowhead, lots of superb natural musicians who are red hot on instrumental and vocal harmonies with no sheets of paper anywhere to be seen; people who are gifted at encouraging others to sing the music of our heritage; any ensemble that includes the wonderful Paul Sartin, (and that's an awful lot: Might even include one of his main 'groups', the choir of Christ Church, Oxford)

On the other hand, what's a 'folk' group as understood by our parishes in the last 40 years? Help, is it really that long since someone put Kumbaya in a hymn book?

What it isn't is scrubbed guitars and a keyboard with the rhythm on auto..
Surely we have moved on from this terrible stereotype

There is still so much demarcation, snobbery even, in some parishes between organ and other instruments. That's a great pity. Lots can be achieved with an open mind. There is no set combination of instruments: Make full use of the gifts that we have within dignified reason: Heavy metal might not quite fit the liturgy. You know what I mean.

[sidvicius]

Demarcation etc yes there does tend to be, between the organ, wot is held in high steam by the powers that be, and er, just about every other instrument unless it's part of a full-fledged orchestra, which few of our local churches have. I think scrubbity-scrub on ye jolly stringbox has pretty much left the building, but the Wurlitzer is indeed a mighty beast, hard to tame, and doesn't usually get on well with other animals in the music kingdom, such as the humble fiddle, mellow French Horn or mellifluous clarionet. Same could be said of a horde of untamed guitars. Only the lesser spotted flutes and even rarer trumpets can keep unruly instruments in check, but cannot cope with their discretion when it goes quiet. what to do eh? A well-utilised church organ/music group is a thing of beauty, but so often they lead from the front and I maintain this is wrong, for any instruments used in mass. Instrumentation is not there for performance, it is there to assist us in achieving a state of prayer, praise or worship via music.

[VML]

Precisely, Sid.
We are ther to assist and enrich the liturgy and worship, and even the mighty organ can be moderated, and used as symathetic support of the congregation, and, I maintain, in combination with wind and strings. Obviously it depends on your group, but it is possible.

I am not fond of the huge noise made by some broadcast voluntaries and postludes at the end of the Sunday service et al. where the organist seems set on demonstrating the brute power of the beast, and any music involved is overwhelmed.

[sidvicius]

Darned right. Parpinetto's trumpet involuntary in Z minor and whoopee! it's out with the Fat stops. Never mind that poor guy in the 74th pew who doesn't speak a word of English and would like to spend some private time after mass praying to his God, having had to sit through another hour of incomprehensible, dreary torture . Meanwhile someone I've never met in my life before is berating me for putting my cap on after mass IN A CHURCH A HEINOUS CRIME WORTHY OF EXCOMMUNICATION.

So if anyone cares to put me or VML straight tonight, go ahead, make my day.................

I can say that with impunity because of all the 342 members and 408 visitors to this forum, only 9.7 of them ever actually post anything. It's what I call a full and unconscious inactive participation . (Exit sid', screaming like a maniac.)

[Dot]

"There are lies, damned lies and statistics......"
Where do you get your statistics from, Sid?

I was at a funeral on Wednesday (no one I knew) and an expert organist was extemporising for a good twenty minutes before the service started. Many things were going on in that time, many distracting things. I observed for a bit, and then listened to the ingenuity of the playing, and then I prayed, and it was the music that led me to prayer. Towards the end of the service there was a time set aside for reflection (no liturgical action whatever) during which the organ played again (Rutter's "May the Lord bless you and keep you") and them we sang Fauré's "In Paradisum," subtly accompanied on the organ.
After that experience, I want to side with the pro-organists. I am not an organist and I normally sing and play in a group with instruments, including guitars (you may have heard of it elsewhere). They can be ideal instruments to accompany certain types of music (not necessarily folk music) that would sound ludicrous on the organ. Equally, there is music that is fantastic on the organ and ludicrous on a guitar.

I don't know of any little old lady organists that wear hats; the ones I know are brilliant musicians. So is the guy who leads our music group.

Dot

[musicus]

A well-utilised church organ/music group is a thing of beauty, but [...]

Quite so. Good musicians will make good music, whatever instruments* or voices they use. For every 'bad' organist I know, I can think of a 'bad' instrumental group, but I know plenty of good ones so I wouldn't want to generalise about one or the other.

Live and let live, eh?

(*Well, OK, almost whatever instruments...)

[asb]

"There are lies, damned lies and statistics......"
Where do you get your statistics from, Sid?

I was at a funeral on Wednesday (no one I knew) and an expert organist was extemporising for a good twenty minutes before the service started. Many things were going on in that time, many distracting things. I observed for a bit, and then listened to the ingenuity of the playing, and then I prayed, and it was the music that led me to prayer. Towards the end of the service there was a time set aside for reflection (no liturgical action whatever) during which the organ played again (Rutter's "May the Lord bless you and keep you") and them we sang Fauré's "In Paradisum," subtly accompanied on the organ.
After that experience, I want to side with the pro-organists. I am not an organist and I normally sing and play in a group with instruments, including guitars (you may have heard of it elsewhere). They can be ideal instruments to accompany certain types of music (not necessarily folk music) that would sound ludicrous on the organ. Equally, there is music that is fantastic on the organ and ludicrous on a guitar.

I don't know of any little old lady organists that wear hats; the ones I know are brilliant musicians. So is the guy who leads our music group.

Dot

The best post I've read here for a long time.

[oopsorganist]

Sid

I think I know why people don't post. Anyway it's only a thousand people involved there isn't it? Which is not so many interested bods really!

So for all you talented and passionate musicians (who help and advise and support) there will be some like me who just accidentally got caught up doing the best job with meager skills and resources. And then there is often this debate about taste, choice, and poor quality music........ "folk" and bad guitars and old ladies in hats too.......some of it is judgmental. It might put off people who are just playing guitars badly or struggling with an organ........... but if they get their parish singing or enhance the Liturgy a bit then they are doing their job. Some parishes near me have to play tapes. I was going to wander off into a thought about whether unaccompanied singing would be better than bad music but I'll try and stay on the thread. Which was about folk music wasn't it.

If you were an old lady that played the organ you could wear your hat all the time and it would be approved of.

[gwyn]

Oops said,

...but if they get their parish singing or enhance the Liturgy a bit then they are doing their job.

You're right, Oops. Thanks for that.

[TimSharrock]

Good musicians will make good music, whatever instruments* or voices they use. [...]

(*Well, OK, almost whatever instruments...)

Our trumpeter is nagging me to buy him a Didgeridoo

but I did find that a wooden iguana fitted nicely into Silent Night
(A night feels more silent when you hear wildlife that are normally drowned out)

[docmattc]

but I did find that a wooden iguana fitted nicely into Silent Night
(A night feels more silent when you hear wildlife that are normally drowned out)

Things have suddenly become extremely surreal round here!

Is that the native Mancunian iguana?

[TimSharrock]

Is that the native Mancunian iguana?

I will try to take a photo tomorrow...

Tim

[dmu3tem]

Personally, I am not too concerned about definitions. However, I note that amongst many Catholics (and members of other Christian denominations) 'folk groups' have very negative connotations. The reasons for this seem to be twofold: (1) Complaints about the style of what they call 'happy clappy' music and (2) Complaints about the poor quality of performance coupled with sloppy instrumentation.

The key question, to my mind, is instrumentation. 'Folk Groups' in the 1960s and 1970s revolutionized music in the English Catholic Church because they broke the exclusive monopoly hitherto held by the organ-choir nexus. During that period and in the 1980s the Catholic church led the way in developing the use of instruments in combination with singers and keyboards of various types (including the organ). This was most obviously seen with St Thomas More group composers, taking their cue, to some extent, from Taize as well as church 'folk groups'. However, from the 1990s onwards, such developments have stalled. Worse, there has been a tendency to think of instruments as being exclusively associated with 'folk groups'. This means that those who are opposed to 'folk groups' reject all forms of instrumentation in favour of the tradition choir-organ nexus.

The basic reason for this is that composers and arrangers have tried to write 'all purpose' parts that will fit a variety of melody instruments. By definition this produces anodyne colouration. In addition, the policy of thoughtlessly bolting on additional descants above or around the basic melody and accompaniment simply to give people 'something to do' tends to produce a clutter of sound. In short, instrumentalists are not treated (nor do not treat themselves) as seriously as singers and organists. Symptomatic, for example, is the frequent expectation that Clarinettists will cope with parts that no-one has bothered to transpose. The subliminal message this sends is that they do not need to be rehearsed as seriously as singers in a choir - with inevitable effects on performance discipline.

To some extent, then, we have to step back from the 'all purpose' part approach found in St Thomas More style compositions. We have to write parts specifically for particular instruments. The test should be: 'will there be a discernible effect if one particular instrument that has been written for is not there?' Descants can, of course, be used with great effect on many occasions, but we should resist the tendency to use them all the time. Instead we should consider rearranging keyboard and organ parts so that they provide accompaniment only and leave the tune to a single melody instrument. In turn this means that keyboard players, especially organists, have to rethink the way they play their instruments, especially as regards their choice of stops and usage of pedal boards.

Conversly, if one has rhythm guitarists, then it is obvious you should consider giving keyboard players the melody, or counter-melodies (if they are there) to a keyboard in octaves. Try experimenting with different spacings - 2,3,4 octaves apart - to see which sort of colouration is most appropriate. Better still, try using parallel writing in thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, ninths or mixtures of these. These approaches are often more satisfactory than falling back on the Taize/St Thomas More technique of providing a skeleton four part harmony wash of sound that counteracts any rhythmic drive supplied by guitars. Guitar players themselves should be made to think through how the rhythms they supply interact with the rest of the music. Better still, the rhythmic patterns should be written down as a matter of course on their parts.

Lastly, we really need to come to grips with the problems of how to rehearse instrumentalists in combination with singers. I note that instrumentalists often have a poor understanding of voice production whilst choir-organ buffs display similar ignorance about instruments.
Some key points are: (1) Time has to be given to instrumentalists to tune up; just as time is spent 'warming up' cantors and singers in a choir. (2) To some extent instrumentalists and singers have to be rehearsed separately before the two groups are put together. It follows that instrumental - and for that matter vocal - parts have to be written out and given to players in advance. (3) When they are put together, care has to be taken over the balance between the different elements.

These are, by and large, technical problems; but they are problems that have been neglected by many groups over past decades, largely because people have been slow to recognize that, whilst the supply of old fashioned choir singers and organists has declined, the availability of instrumentalists has greatly expanded. We should set out to take advantage of this by persuading more instrumentalists to play in church alongside singers and organ/keyboard players. However, this is only really possible if we face up to the technical issues involved.

If you have practical technical tips about how to write, arrange, rehearse or perform music combining different sorts of musicians why not post these up on the 'tips for composing and arranging' thread?

Thomas Muir

[presbyter]

The key question, to my mind, is instrumentation.

I vote to bring back the serpent ...... once the mainstay of the church/village band bass line.... and I know where there is one too (no longer in its village church though )

BTW - it's not necessarily the STMG composers who want to adorn their pieces with layers of ornamental fluff for "instruments in C". The publisher sometimes requests it.

[presbyter]

Better still, the rhythmic patterns should be written down as a matter of course on their parts

Thomas - as always - speaks much sense throughout his post. Yet how many of our guitarists could read a rhythm or a melody line in staff notation?

We have to walk before we can run ....... and many of our musicians can't even toddle yet ...... even those leading parish music, in some cases.