Megan Brophy's List: Critique Paper: Music

• Larry Norman is frequently dubbed "the father of Christian rock."
• Why Should the Devil Have All The Good Music
• In fact, nowhere in the Bible does it say, "Sing the gospel of Christ." It says to preach it!
• mentioned over 800 times in Scripture
• It is our conviction that rock music cannot be used to communicate spiritual truth
• Being that the very term rock 'n' roll identifies with fornication, and the fact that music for the Christian is deemed to be worship, then the test it must pass is found in Philippians 4:8 -- "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things [are] honest, whatsoever things [are] just, whatsoever things [are] pure, whatsoever things [are] lovely, whatsoever things [are] of good report; if [there be] any virtue, and if [there be] any praise, think on these things."

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• it is still common to believe that music has--or can have--a moral character, and that the character of a work or style of music can "rub off" in some way on its devotees.

• Mozart
• Haydn
• St Augustine says that "To sing once is to pray twice"
• History of religious Jewish music
• Gregorian chant
• The mass is a form of music that sets out the parts of the Eucharistic liturgy (chiefly belong to the Roman Catholic Church, the Churches of the Anglican Communion, and also the Lutheran Church) to music.
• Carols
• Christian hymnody
• A hymn is the praise of God with song; a song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.
• The Protestant Reformation resulted in two conflicting attitudes to hymns. One approach, the regulative principle of worship, favoured by many Zwinglians, Calvinists and other radical reformers, considered anything that was not directly authorised by the Bible to be a novel and Catholic introduction to worship, which was to be rejected.
• The other Reformation approach, favoured by Martin Luther, produced a burst of hymn writing and congregational singing.
• Many churches today use contemporary worship music which includes a range of styles often influenced by popular music. This style began in the late 1960s and became very popular during the 1970s

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• Contemporary Christian music first came onto the scene of popular music during the Jesus movement revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
• Contemporary Christian music has been a topic of controversy in various ways since its beginnings in the 1960s.^[3] The Christian college Bob Jones University prohibits its dormitory students from listening to CCM.^[6] Others simply find the concept of Christian pop/rock music to be an unusual phenomenon, since rock music has historically been associated with themes such as sexual promiscuity, rebellion, drug and alcohol use, and other topics normally considered antithetical to the teachings of Christianity.^[3]

• Chronology
• The widespread availability of music that can be downloaded for free off the Internet has decimated sales of compact discs in recent years — amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
• Chronology
• Indeed, a recent Pew survey found that two-thirds of Internet users do not care whether the music they download is copyrighted.

  • Find this study
• Computer users illegally download more than 2.6 billion copyrighted files (mostly recordings) every month, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
• The trick is to make legal downloading at a buck a pop somehow more attractive than obtaining the same music illegally for free.
• While young people love the immediate gratification of downloading and being able to mix up tracks from different albums, most adults past college age still prefer the CD to any digital device available so far.
• McGuire of Gartner G2 agrees that the CD will stick around for a few more years — but not forever. “Part of the larger transition we're making is a shift away from owning a physical thing and having access to a file on a computer somewhere.”
• Background

  • Folling section is a history of music.
• Colorado Gov. Bill Owens vetoed his legislature's version of the bill

  • Ha! Interesting...
• ecording artists, meanwhile, who have long felt they were being ripped-off by music companies, are turning to the Internet to sell their own music directly.
• Some analysts predict that in the not-too-distant future CDs will mainly exist as promotional tools artists give away to encourage attendance at their concerts.
• Some observers, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believe that consumers will soon pay copyright holders a few dollars a month to download or “stream” all the music they want on the Internet.

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• The impressive sales have not gone unnoticed by the purveyors of mainstream culture, including such entertainment giants AOL-TimeWarner, Vivendi-Universal and Sony, who all have invested in Christian media in recent years.
• Lorraine Ali, “The Glorious Rise of Christian Pop,” Newsweek, July 16, 2001.

  • Find this article.
• Christian music also has become a huge industry, with $747 million in sales last year — 7 percent of all music sold in the United States in 2000. Evangelical artists span the stylistic spectrum, from hard rock to pop to rap.
• Indeed, Christian music acts like the hard rock bands “P.O.D.” and “Lifehouse” get regular play on MTV. Other Christian acts, most notably a roots rock band called “Jars of Clay,” are attracting non-evangelical audiences. “They're already huge, huge, huge in the Christian world, but now they're very successfully crossing over without watering down the religious message one bit,” Caldwell at Beliefnet.com says.
• The trend points to a culture that is at once part of and apart from broader society, experts say. “This isn't really a counterculture,” Balmer says. “It's more like a subculture.”
• Green agrees. “They may have a distinct moral view, but Christians have learned to adapt to the salient culture with that viewpoint.”
• Ali, Lorraine , “The Glorious Rise of Christian Pop,” Newsweek  , July 16, 2001. Ali examines the many sides of Christian media, a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry that includes everything from music to films to best-selling books. She also profiles the young people who buy the books, videos and CDs that make Christian media one of the fastest-growing sectors in the entertainment industry.

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• Stories wait for endings, but songs are brave things bold enough to sing when all they know is darkness

• The Flap Over Music Warning Labels

• Yet many in the industry argue that some media are more dangerous than others. They note, for example, the intense powers of recorded music, which young people like to play over and over, often within the private world of their headsets. Music “has shown a greater ability to shape ideas and popularize behavior than either of the two visual modes . . . because the audience for visual modes is essentially passive, while popular music is more interactive,” says Hollywood movie producer Lionel Chetwynd.

• The Rock Music Connection

• What is different about the music, he says, is the use of “praise chants, simple phrases or basic truths, often from the Book of Psalms, that focus on a personal approach directly to God, rather than the traditional hymn that uses four verses and a chorus to tell a story.”
• “And yes, we do use drama, contemporary Christian music and multimedia presentations
• Then why has the church narrowed its options and selected a talking head as its only form of communicating the most important message on the planet?”

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• Festival Con Dios, the first Christian alternative-rock tour
• . This is the sanctified answer to hedonistic summer blowouts like Lollapalooza and Ozzfest, an extravaganza where amped-up rock and roll meets tamped-down self-control
• Because so much of this energy fails to register on the seismographs of mainstream industry and media, the ruling parties that tend to dismiss Christian entertainment as too marginal ever to outgrow its niche position.
• Contemporary Christian music is now the hottest genre in the entire music industry.
• tarting in the early '90s, its artists began borrowing from more relevant styles of music and fashion to promote their words of praise.
• Artists can choose to dedicate songs directly to God, referred to as "verticals," or praise-and-worship tunes, or to sing about religious values, sometimes with a deliberate ambiguity to attract less conservative listeners
• . Occasionally, the music crosses over: CCM stars such as crooner Michael W. Smith and the roots-rock outfit Jars of Clay get play on VH1, and the metal bands P.O.D. and Lifehouse are embraced by MTV.

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