The customer is always right?

I often post clips of music performances on my Facebook fan page. I think the people that follow that page may be the most honest people on Facebook because they are brutally honest in their evaluations on those clips.

For the most part, I like that. But if I am being honest, I don’t like everything I read there. In fact, I get annoyed by some of what I read there. The thing that really gets under my skin is when people go beyond judging the musical aspects of the piece to judging the motivations of the performer.

Not long ago, I posted a clip of someone playing a hymn arrangement. I don’t know the performer; he is new-on-the-scene Southern Gospel pianist. I liked his harmony a lot. I don’t care for everything he does but overall, he does a great job.

So the good folks on the Facebook page started analyzing that clip. Like I said, I like that and encourage that. But as always happened, a few started going down the road of judging his motives. In this case, they thought he was playing too fancy in an effort to make the song more about himself than God.

And of course, they pulled out the normal trump card that goes something like this: we are supposed to be playing for God, not people and we are not supposed to draw attention to ourselves.

I am not an exceptionally technically gifted pianist so I am not often accused of being too fancy. But even so, I don’t like the insinuation that fancy pianists are playing to draw attention to themselves rather than God. That may sound spiritual but there are a number of problems with it.

First, Christian musicians are not just playing to God. Performers perform in front of people. To deny the relationship between the performer and the audience is just silly and I don’t understand why some Christian musicians try to insist it does not exist.

Should a performer take that opportunity to point the audience toward God? Absolutely they should, and there are multiple ways that happens. One of those ways just could be by playing technically complex music. That is not against the nature of God. After all, God designed a very complex world and it is full of very complex beauty.

Second, what exactly is the threshold for the number of notes per minute a pianist can play before the song becomes about the pianist rather than God? How flashy is too flashy? For many of us, I suspect the answer is this: anything more flashy than we ourselves are capable of.

It is a very dangerous thing to start judging music and musicians that way. Here is something to remember: musicians that play technically difficult music with ease probably do not even see their music as flashy in the first place. It is just natural for them.

And lastly, the idea that technical mastery should be viewed with suspicion is closer to gnosticism than a healthy attitude toward worship. Christians need to be very careful about rejecting what God has not rejected. In the case of music, technical mastery is a natural result of the way God designed the world to work and humans to interact with the world.

In general, Christians should rejoice in the skills demonstrated by musicians that strive to reach their full potential. The attitude of a musician who believes God is worthy of the best is an attitude of worship; the number of notes crammed into any given measure is relatively insignificant.

Now, I do not want to imply that technical mastery cannot be abused. I am sure it can and I am sure that there are Christian musicians at every level of ability who abuse it regularly. But it is not my place to start judging the motives of every musician I listen to simply because of the fancy runs they use.