LSB Rant
Let me start this by saying that this post is a rant. I'm pissed off right now, and this has built up for several months, so much of what I say should probably be dismissed as just that. I may not have drunk the LSB Kool Aid, but neither do I hate it as much as this post would indicate.
I am responsible for picking the hymnody for Sunday morning worship, adapting it for guitar, and playing it for the actual service. I've been at it since September, and you know what I've realized? LSB was a complete waste of synodical resources. I don't care about a dang "hymnal in every home." The thing sucks.
Of the roughly 660 hymns (including the ones only found in Lutheran Service Builder) and liturgical pieces, only 110 have not been published in other Lutheran hymnals--less than 20%. With such a small percentage of LSB being remotely original, they would have been better served by releasing another small supplement and a software compilation of all of the hymns from previous hymnals.
Furthermore, most of the music is flat-out unsingable. I am a trained musician, and without the actual sheet music in front of me, I flounder on quite a few of the hymn tunes, which severely limits my choices. I start having serious difficulty tracking with a melody, and I look down at the name of the tune, and sure enough, it's German. I know our heritage is German, and I understand fully that we want to hang onto that aspect of who we are, but surely there are better ways to do that than reprinting tunes from before the Baroque Era. Try setting some of these things to any instrumentation other than a 4-part chorale, and you'll want to bang your head against the wall.
Not that this impossibility stopped them from trying. But don't get me started on the over-priced, two-volume Guitar Edition; it really sucks. This paragraph might be the only one in which I am not exaggerating. First, the chord changes are too rapid and awkward for an amateur like me. It was edited and designed for a classically trained and experienced guitarist, which is exceptionally rare. Second, the Guitar Edition was not intended to be played along with the organ. So with this being the case, since the editor needed no longer keep the vocal range of all four parts in mind, you'd think they would bring the melody down. But no, it keeps the melody in soprano range--too high for the average parishioner to sing at all comfortably. In my adaptations, almost all of them are brought down lower--some of them as much as a perfect fourth, which is huge! And finally, the layout is everything I despise about reading a hymnal. I have always had difficulty tracking with a stanza from one line to the next, especially when I have to pay special attention to the music, so adding a line of guitar chords even higher only compounds the problem. Lead-sheet format would have been infinitely better.
Now for my biggest pet-peeve in the lyrics... I thought Dr. Gibbs effectively crushed the "death as homecoming" idea in his op-ed "Five Things You Should Never Say at a Funeral." And yet so dang many of the texts in LSB reinforce this utterly Gnostic message. It's like for the Easter season we remember the resurrection, and then for the rest of the year, we treat "going to heaven" as the chief end of man with no mention of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, except in the Creeds. I know grandmas and organists everywhere love those sappy old hymns, but it really is time to start phasing them out of the official publications. They're misleading and not representative of the true Gospel message.
If I were an ordained pastor, I would try to work my way into the Commission on Worship for the next hymnal. But I'm not, so I can't. Which means that despite these complaints, in another 25-30 years, another collection of overpriced tomes filled with borderline heretical texts set to 4th-rate music will be inflicted upon an unsuspecting synod (what color will the next one be?). Unless we do something. So anybody who is interested in writing hymns for all seasons of the Church year and willing to collaborate, please let me know. I am a trained musician (majored in trumpet) and an educated theologian, and I've already added a stanza to one of the hymns.
Who knows? Maybe some of our hymns will get picked up by CPH or somebody else, and we'll be able to put our kids through college. Or maybe we'll just have a deeper pool of theologically sound hymns from which to draw. Either way, it's a win.
Okay, my rant is finished. I'm back to being a good, happy, compliant Missouri Synod Lutheran.
...yeah, right...
I am responsible for picking the hymnody for Sunday morning worship, adapting it for guitar, and playing it for the actual service. I've been at it since September, and you know what I've realized? LSB was a complete waste of synodical resources. I don't care about a dang "hymnal in every home." The thing sucks.
Of the roughly 660 hymns (including the ones only found in Lutheran Service Builder) and liturgical pieces, only 110 have not been published in other Lutheran hymnals--less than 20%. With such a small percentage of LSB being remotely original, they would have been better served by releasing another small supplement and a software compilation of all of the hymns from previous hymnals.
Furthermore, most of the music is flat-out unsingable. I am a trained musician, and without the actual sheet music in front of me, I flounder on quite a few of the hymn tunes, which severely limits my choices. I start having serious difficulty tracking with a melody, and I look down at the name of the tune, and sure enough, it's German. I know our heritage is German, and I understand fully that we want to hang onto that aspect of who we are, but surely there are better ways to do that than reprinting tunes from before the Baroque Era. Try setting some of these things to any instrumentation other than a 4-part chorale, and you'll want to bang your head against the wall.
Not that this impossibility stopped them from trying. But don't get me started on the over-priced, two-volume Guitar Edition; it really sucks. This paragraph might be the only one in which I am not exaggerating. First, the chord changes are too rapid and awkward for an amateur like me. It was edited and designed for a classically trained and experienced guitarist, which is exceptionally rare. Second, the Guitar Edition was not intended to be played along with the organ. So with this being the case, since the editor needed no longer keep the vocal range of all four parts in mind, you'd think they would bring the melody down. But no, it keeps the melody in soprano range--too high for the average parishioner to sing at all comfortably. In my adaptations, almost all of them are brought down lower--some of them as much as a perfect fourth, which is huge! And finally, the layout is everything I despise about reading a hymnal. I have always had difficulty tracking with a stanza from one line to the next, especially when I have to pay special attention to the music, so adding a line of guitar chords even higher only compounds the problem. Lead-sheet format would have been infinitely better.
Now for my biggest pet-peeve in the lyrics... I thought Dr. Gibbs effectively crushed the "death as homecoming" idea in his op-ed "Five Things You Should Never Say at a Funeral." And yet so dang many of the texts in LSB reinforce this utterly Gnostic message. It's like for the Easter season we remember the resurrection, and then for the rest of the year, we treat "going to heaven" as the chief end of man with no mention of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, except in the Creeds. I know grandmas and organists everywhere love those sappy old hymns, but it really is time to start phasing them out of the official publications. They're misleading and not representative of the true Gospel message.
If I were an ordained pastor, I would try to work my way into the Commission on Worship for the next hymnal. But I'm not, so I can't. Which means that despite these complaints, in another 25-30 years, another collection of overpriced tomes filled with borderline heretical texts set to 4th-rate music will be inflicted upon an unsuspecting synod (what color will the next one be?). Unless we do something. So anybody who is interested in writing hymns for all seasons of the Church year and willing to collaborate, please let me know. I am a trained musician (majored in trumpet) and an educated theologian, and I've already added a stanza to one of the hymns.
Who knows? Maybe some of our hymns will get picked up by CPH or somebody else, and we'll be able to put our kids through college. Or maybe we'll just have a deeper pool of theologically sound hymns from which to draw. Either way, it's a win.
Okay, my rant is finished. I'm back to being a good, happy, compliant Missouri Synod Lutheran.
...yeah, right...