Music at Red Mountain

What does music look like at Red Mountain Church (RMC)?

Music is mysterious. It moves people and it takes people places. Music resonates with our souls. Church music is particularly mysterious. Why do people sing together? Why do people choose their particular style of music? How does it work?

By no means do we think we have things figured out at RMC, but we have found that people are increasingly curious about the music at our church. This paper is not meant to be any sort of "how-to" for church music. It is simply us sharing what has been our experience at RMC.

We sing only hymns and psalm text. Some songs are played with their original tunes, but many of them are played with new tunes. For more on why we sing what we sing, please refer to our paper on "Why Hymns"?

Here are some principles that have guided our music philosophy at RMC:

Develop a community of musicians. From the beginning, one of the key tasks for the "chief musician" at RMC has been to work with musicians in the community, play in bands and recruit musicians to participate in our church. The goal was for our church to be a place that supported the arts; a church that specifically supported the local music arts community in Birmingham.
Participate in the local arts community. We try and encourage our people to go out and listen to local bands, especially the many local bands which are represented by our church members. We don't host concerts at RMC, but at times, we have church parties where we will usually hire a local band to play their original music.
Musicians are expected to play music in places other than church. This is good for two reasons. First, it encourages our musicians to get out and play other places, allowing us to further our relational reach into the arts community. Second, it helps to maintain a high caliber of musical talent at our church.
Red Mountain musicians do not have to be Christians. We have said from the beginning that a vocalist must be a confessing Christian, but the musicians can come and play, whether they believe or not. It has been beautiful to invite musicians to play with us who have not been in a church for sometimes upwards of 20 years.
Playing music at church is not for all people. This goes against some people's church music philosophies, where the music leader is more inclined to let anyone participate who has the desire. When a music leader has the time to train people on music skills, this might be a good philosophy, but in our setting, it is not possible. We have an expectation that our musicians and vocalists be experienced, accomplished, and excellent at their craft. This means, unfortunately and sometimes awkwardly, that not everyone who wishes to play at RMC will be able to.
We rehearse as little as possible. It is very important to be sensitive to people's time. Musicians are expected to be able to sit down, follow chord / lead sheets, and with very minimal rehearsal (one time through), be able to play the song and add tasteful, improvisational musical parts.
We keep the instrumentation simple. Our records will often have recordings where there are many instruments playing on a single song. This is great for a record, but we don't try to replicate that in our corporate worship service. Visitors are sometimes surprised at how musically stripped down our services can be. A typical service usually has piano, bass, drums, acoustic or electric guitar, and one or two vocalists. We never have more than two vocalists, and we try to limit the second vocalist to only singing legitimate harmonies.
Rotate musicians. It has taken several years to get this established, but we are now about 3 musicians deep in each instrument. Usually our musicians play one month, and then have two months off. Musicians are often sad at the end of their month that they will not be playing again for awhile, but our goal is to have musicians playing with us in 20 years. We don't want to burn people out in the short term. We want people to love participating in our music for many years to come.
We allow a lot of freedom. It sounds crazy that our music environment is a place of freedom, especially after reading points 1-8. However, mysteriously, within our parameters, we've found the music to feel very alive, legitimate, and improvisational. We are fortunate to have some of the best musicians in the city playing together, and that allows musical freedom because no one person has to worry about carrying a song alone. We also allow a lot of freedom for trying new things and making mistakes. There have been MANY nights (my wife tells me about once a month) where I completely botch a song, and I just stop the song, and say "oops, let's try that one again..." and then we start it over. It feels messy in the moment, but experiencing that multiple times has revealed that our church is very gracious and that it's okay for us to try new things and make mistakes.

philosophy