Dialing it in a bit

When you play music in church, you are playing for people.  Now, I know of course, that ultimately you are playing for God.  But let’s be real.  The reason you play in front of people is for those people to hear you.  Your goal is to impact them through your music in a way that leads them closer to God and helps them worship God.

Don’t miss that point.  If your music is not impacting the audience, you are just filling time at best and wasting time at worst. 

There are a lot of ways that your music might not be impactful.  You might not do a good job with it for example.  But there is a subtle danger at the other end of the spectrum.  You could get a little to “artistic” and lead your audience to tune you out.

I have emphasized many times on this blog that you need to learn to read your audience.  You need to watch how they react to your music and you need to listen to them when they talk about your music.  I like to watch audiences when people play.  It is interesting to me to watch church pianists play offertories on YouTube.  I have seen pianists absolutely tear up a piano while the choirs sitting behind them never so much as stop whispering to even glance at the piano.

Sometimes, you need to back off the fireworks.  Sometimes, you need to back off the complex harmony too.  I am not prone to fireworks but I am prone to getting cute with harmony.  For example, I like both of these voicings of a C13 chord:

The first voicing has a 9th and #11 while the second has a flat 9th.  While I like both of these voicings, I only use one of them in my church.  If you play them both, you know which one (the second one).  I would and do use the first, more dissonant voicing at times.  For example, I use it numerous times on my recent Christmas project.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that first voicing.  It is not a matter of right or wrong.  It is not even about appropriateness.  It is rather about what the audience is used to hearing and especially, what they are used to hearing in church.  Playing that first voicing would be distracting and frustrating to them.

If I wanted to, I could really reharmonize hymns in some very interesting ways using some very cool chords.  But for the most part, I don’t.  I know that the audience has a limit on how fancy they want the harmony to be.  The same goes for technical fireworks and other things as well. 

Yes, church pianists are artists and we feel the need to get out of the box.  And that is not a bad thing.  But be careful about how you do it and don’t lose your audience in the process.  Sometimes, the best thing you can do is hold yourself back.