HARMONIC CONVERGENCE IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK-WHITE CHURCHES: STYLE ELEMENTS OF MULTIETHNIC WORSHIP Paul Rumrill In the first decade of the twenty-first century, large Protestant churches (with one thousand or more in attendance each weekend) have trended towards multiethnicity. While five and a half percent of such congregations exhibited multicultural demographics—a church community consisting of a minority culture of twenty percent or greater representation—in 1998, by 2007 that number had jumped to fifteen percent, and to twenty-five percent among large evangelical churches. 1 A number of these congregations exhibit a blend of African-Americans and Caucasians; these black-white churches—often employing worship repertoire from Lakewood Church, Bethany World Prayer Center, Brooklyn Tabernacle, FaithWorld Church, Prestonwood Baptist Church, and various artists and songwriters from Brentwood-Benson and Integrity’s Hosanna Music—exhibit a number of charismatic practices in the services, regardless of denominational affiliation. 2 Some of these churches use a hybridized music language-family synthesizing elements of urban praise and CCLI-based praise and worship. While this worship approach is somewhat challenging to analyze musically, there are melodic and harmonic elements that can be identified as part of the cultural-worship style of a number of the contemporary black-white churches operating in this present day. MELODIC AND HARMONIC ELEMENTS OF LWM’S WORSHIP Congregational singing range during my later years at LWM (approximately 2003 to 2008) was approximately that of an eleventh, from about a Bb to an upper Eb. In certain Western urban popular musics, however, a prime unison melody above middle C is sometimes employed, where male singers in the choir and congregation are expected to sing the exact notes as females in a mix of chest and falsetto-head registers. This is a feature used frequently in songs popularized by Lakewood Church of Houston, Texas, such as in the bridge of Israel Houghton’s You Are Good or the verses of Better Than Life [see Figure 1, next page], a collaboration by Cindy Cruse-Ratcliffe and Houghton. At LWM we employed prime unison in these songs at and in other contemporary gospel works such as Kurt Carr’s In the Sanctuary and Jonathan DuBose’s We Praise Your Name. Most often, the harmonic color used to outline many of LWM’s pieces involved the blues scale, the mixolydian (flat-seven) scale, and various pentatonic scales. Analytically, LWM’s songs often had diatonic major/minor or mixolydian harmonic progressions, with choral singers 1 See the introduction to DeYmaz and Li’s Ethnic Blends: Mixing Diversity into Your Local Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010, 15-16. 2 See Chapter Three of Emerson and Woo’s People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
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HARMONIC CONVERGENCE IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK-WHITE
CHURCHES: STYLE ELEMENTS OF MULTIETHNIC WORSHIP Paul Rumrill
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, large Protestant churches (with one
thousand or more in attendance each weekend) have trended towards multiethnicity. While five
and a half percent of such congregations exhibited multicultural demographics—a church
community consisting of a minority culture of twenty percent or greater representation—in 1998,
by 2007 that number had jumped to fifteen percent, and to twenty-five percent among large
evangelical churches.1 A number of these congregations exhibit a blend of African-Americans
and Caucasians; these black-white churches—often employing worship repertoire from
Lakewood Church, Bethany World Prayer Center, Brooklyn Tabernacle, FaithWorld Church,
Prestonwood Baptist Church, and various artists and songwriters from Brentwood-Benson and
Integrity’s Hosanna Music—exhibit a number of charismatic practices in the services, regardless
of denominational affiliation.2 Some of these churches use a hybridized music language-family
synthesizing elements of urban praise and CCLI-based praise and worship. While this worship
approach is somewhat challenging to analyze musically, there are melodic and harmonic
elements that can be identified as part of the cultural-worship style of a number of the
contemporary black-white churches operating in this present day.
MELODIC AND HARMONIC ELEMENTS OF LWM’S WORSHIP
Congregational singing range during my later years at LWM (approximately 2003 to
2008) was approximately that of an eleventh, from about a Bb to an upper Eb. In certain
Western urban popular musics, however, a prime unison melody above middle C is sometimes
employed, where male singers in the choir and congregation are expected to sing the exact notes
as females in a mix of chest and falsetto-head registers. This is a feature used frequently in
songs popularized by Lakewood Church of Houston, Texas, such as in the bridge of Israel
Houghton’s You Are Good or the verses of Better Than Life [see Figure 1, next page], a
collaboration by Cindy Cruse-Ratcliffe and Houghton. At LWM we employed prime unison in
these songs at and in other contemporary gospel works such as Kurt Carr’s In the Sanctuary and
Jonathan DuBose’s We Praise Your Name.
Most often, the harmonic color used to outline many of LWM’s pieces involved the blues
scale, the mixolydian (flat-seven) scale, and various pentatonic scales. Analytically, LWM’s
songs often had diatonic major/minor or mixolydian harmonic progressions, with choral singers
1 See the introduction to DeYmaz and Li’s Ethnic Blends: Mixing Diversity into Your Local Church. Grand Rapids,
MI: Zondervan, 2010, 15-16. 2 See Chapter Three of Emerson and Woo’s People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
moving in linear motion up and down the same scale system. At the same time, instrumentalists
played pre-set riffs and fills that outlined various pentatonic scale divisions or the blues scale,
depending on the temperament of the drum/bass patterns and the content of the lyrics.