Rick Land & Russ Tapp: Blog

Now that I have the floor lets talk about a sacred subject for me, inspiration.  It's cousin might be transcendence. I have wrestled with this issue all my life.  When it happens it happens.  When I became an Episcopalian I was adamant with the choir to LEAD the liturgy, speak out with passion, meaning and authenticity.  It would be wonderful if we acted like we believe it! It took a while to bring an awareness that we must not take the spoken collective liturgy for granted. It can become inspired, transcendent and even highly emotional. Back during the revision of the Book of Common Prayer in the 80's the liturgical wars were highly charged and almost frightening.  My God, you would think that they actually took those words seriously. But to hear them uttered week by week you would think those folks were zombies and dead from the waist up. Music can also become mechanical and uninspired as well.  The spoken word can become as meaningless as taking a bath. 

What if we were to have a populist religious inquisition in America. Pause a moment and think about that. What if there was a religious uprising and the "right-wing"  or the "left wing" started bombing our churches, killing people as they left worship each week. I am afraid that if something is not done to quell the rhetoric and anger in the Anglican church - we could reach an impasse very soon.  I often find myself struggling to continue to give emotion and spirit in my music each week.  I am seriously looking inside to find the cause.  I often ask myself some extremely harsh questions and am highly critical of my music making.  I really, really believe that we need more than an infusion of spiritual urgency, we need a form of inquisition to force us to look around and awaken to what we do in church each week. Recently, Russ and I were performing a beautiful Pavanne by Gabriel Faure for prelude.  French music in general contains much transcendence and passion if you are willing to drag it out of the music. I got so caught up in the music that I almost forgot where I was.

I know that music communicated something to the listeners. I was a channel, so to speak - to deliver a message from my experience and from my very soul.  I am not bragging but, I simply do not want to waste my time playing music that does not move me. If it moves me it will perhaps move the worshipers. Then there is this issue of beauty, what it is or is not.

I believe entirely in cosmic forces and that those forces can affect us through music and the human voice. It is energy that must be translated through our eardrums, through our brains and into our emotional wiring.  To me that is the essence of worship. It is unique to the church - we have the freedom to explore the depths of emotion through our prayers, thoughts and liturgical recitations as a body. We do not endure long sermons full of personal opinions but, when there is transcendence behind the words, we feel it, we connect to it and it changes us.

I have come through all the loud "triumphalism' of the 80's and watched the ups and downs of modern church musical and theological rhetoric, coupled with all the control issues associated with it. We are aproaching Lent and I may really jump off the bandwagon this year and do something outrageous like scream out in the middle of a hymn "say it and sing it if you mean it, otherwise go home". Has liturgy become an "institutional" joke?  Has the Episcopal Church become a group of die-hards who cannot live without repetition and tradition?  Are we just a big old patriarchal institution that is bound to die just as we see every other institution struggling to survive...

next time Transcendence and Improvisation.