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Thursday, 25 March 2010

The Worship /Music Graph


Dear reader, the Archdruid has asked me if I could knock up one of my quick graphs. So here it is.
This is in response to a debate on musical complexity, quality and worship on Banksyboy's excellent and thought-provoking blog.

In essence, it maps depth of worship intensity against musical complexity. Now clearly these words are emotive and therefore I need to issue lots of caveats:

(a) This graph is assuming a uniform quality of musical performance -i.e. somebody who is good enough to play quite complex music, but not necessarily doing so. So not the Beaker Band, equipped as they are with an out-of-tune banjo, a badly-played bodhran and an ocarina.

(b) Of course you can worship without music at all. "Worship" and "Music" are not synonymous. But the minute music starts, it tends to define the worship for that period of time. That is why the value "0" for music does not have a corresponding "worship" value.

(c) On the music scale, a complexity value of "1" is roughly equivalent to somebody banging a piece of corrugated iron with a mallet. "15" is a piece of Messiaen played by an organist accompanied by mail voice choir, bag pipes and marching brass band. So 6 or 7 would be round about a small choir and organ singing some Stanford, or a 5-piece rock & roll worship band, playing something by Delirious?

(d) That question mark in (c) isn't mine. It belongs to Delirious?

(e) Rats. Did it again. It's really very confusing.

1 comment:

  1. I've been off the blogosphere for a couple of days so haven't seen this before, but it is absolutely spot on. Thanks, Burton!

    ReplyDelete

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