No Emotion

A woman called several weeks ago to thank me for a sacred song I’d written that she sang as a solo in church. We had a most friendly talk and near the end of the conversation she said proudly, “I just want to assure you that I sing your songs with absolutely no emotion.”

This took me back a beat and so I asked her what she meant by that and she explained, “Well, I think there should be no personality in church singing whatsoever, that the solo should be performed emotionless.”

As we talked I discovered a real confusion in this poor soul about the art of sacred solo performance. She was essentially confusing bad acting with emotion; and since she basically did not understand the craft of acting through song and did not like it when other singers “hammed it up” in a church solo, she had made the wrong decision that all acting/emotion in a performance was bad. I tried to help her make sense of all this, but she would have none of it. To her, ‘emotionalism’, as she called it, did not belong in the church service.

As a composer who has been thinking about this fascinating world of music for about 40 years now, I’ve come to think of music as essentially aural symbols of emotion. The drama of a song is hugely important to me as I write and governs its flow. Without emotion, what do you have? A passel of notes arranged by some intellectual method which most often results in a boring song – boring, because it does not go anywhere. Devoid of emotion, you have a song devoid of interest. It’s why people are not that attracted to computer written music. The computer is smart and can arrange music in lightening speed, creating millions of compositional patterns, but no computer has ever written a song that captures the public consciousness and probably never will unless somehow man is able to teach computers how to process with human emotion.

So I say to my friend, the soloist who sings with no emotion, please don’t sing my songs that way. Let the reality of your emotions be expressed through the lyrics and the melodies of the song. Touch people’s hearts with your feelings. Tickle their imaginations with your deep understanding of the full range of emotion that plays through a song. Share your emotional insights of these sacred songs with your audience, your congregation, so that all may take advantage of your spiritual insight.

When you hide your emotion or lid it down, you simply cut off the real experiential possibilities of the song. Bring your own particular corner of life to the song through your true feelings so that I may see the truth through your eyes. And if your personality, or better, your individuality, shines through the song, I say we’re all better off for it. If you can bring a tear to my eye or a laugh to my heart in the course of the solo, that really means that you have touched me so deeply with the truth of the song that I am moved – moved from one point of understanding to another higher one. And that, my friend, is why I go to church.