Ea$ter

Thinking about ways to make money playing brass instruments, what would we do without churches? I wonder if someone could tally, with any degree of accuracy, the annual brass revenue from Easter, or the average per-service rate. For that matter, how much money is then spent on Brass arrangements purchased from Christian music publishers (like Word or Hope), who now offer web-based widgets to tailor arrangments to available or desired instrumentation?

Some American Christian worship is unchanged from the hymn-heavy days those hokey Nehylbel arrangements or hymnal-sanctioned descant books were published. But churches are branching out. Many, to raise their profile on Easter and Christmas ("Gateway Holidays," I suppose you could say) mount programs rather than worship services, something more performed than worshiped. And those terms are arguable by just about anyone.

Catering to older audien--er, congregations--some mainline churches today are more apt to try to put on a Bach cantata, a classical mass, or some of The Messiah than before. After all, aren't the aging congregants of America's mainline Christian denominations the same demographic who still head rather faithfully to the concert hall, to see regional symphonies and traveling recitalists?

Then again, this weekend I just played a set of services at a small evangelical megachurch. There were elements of heavy characteristic brass writing, but always with an element of guitar or drums happening. The conductor moved to a click track to coordinate with video screens, and rich brass tuttis abruptly moved into funky sixteenth-note subdivisions, Tower-of-Power-lite for amateurs (even though, surprisingly, some of the material reached to the extremes for the horns and trumpets, low for the horns and high for the trumpets). The production value of the whole thing was impeccable, timed (literally, on a crib sheet) to the second and it was interesting to note how authentically the music staff worked to square the seemingly incompatible goals of natural and spontaneous spiritual experience, all while (for the purposes of agreement, technology, and production values) eliminating spontaneous variables in the service. Of course there was the guy with the synthesizer, filling in the added voices. All this evangelical service was missing was a very frazzled, gray-bearded bassist who looks out blankly, gets into it, but--you can tell--he's trying to rock out his demons from those years on the state fair circuit opening up for CCR, before he was saved.

I used to play two Sundays a month at a giant Lutheran church in Wisconsin. We would play brass ensemble arrangements of hymns done by a standard Lutheran publishing house, every once in awhile with a Robert Nagel or Robert King transcription or something along those lines mixed in for a prelude or postlude. Then once every couple months the organist would have me contract a full orchestra for what my wife and I referred to as "The Jesus Disco." Imagine three full services of Lutherans rocking out to what they imagine contemporary music to be (or what they remembered it to be the last time they listened to secular radio in 1978, around the time that Chuck Mangione and the Beegees cornered the top ten--and that's what it sounds like.)

But these Lutherans, those evangelicals don't have to hire brass groups. The publishing companies offer "tracks" where the pros can back up your service for a small fee. Or why not MIDI? So as we all probably go to play what will feel like that nineteenth verse of "Christ the Lord Has Risen Today" next week, maybe we should count our blessings, grin, and bare it. For at least one week a year the world believes that the sensation of vibrating metal filling a room is utterly indispensable, as our teams of red-eyed angels belch, nod off, and empty our spit in front of the hundreds of twice-yearly churchgoers who assume we're there every week.

It is sort of like the olden days, in fact. Kings and cities (Venice, for example) used groups of trumpets and trombones as symbols of wealth. Don't churches really do the same thing? More on that later, maybe.