Some thoughts on 'Mormon' Music - a review of Jeremy Grimshaw's "Mormon Music After the Mormon Moment" on NewMusicBox

This blog post is a response to an invitation to comment on Jeremy Grimshaw's "Mormon Music After the 'Mormon Moment'" article posted today on NewMusicBox. It's in the form of a letter, and still rough, but I thought I would post it here rather than on a facebook wall. Would love further thoughtful comments.

Hi Kevin and Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick and the public world - thanks for bringing me in on this! In the spirit of Jeremy's full disclosure, I know him somewhat and have worked with nearly all of the composers he mentioned, either through their music or personally.

Some thoughts which I would be happy to expand upon more formally. Firstly, I think Jeremy handled extremely well the question of Mormon as an ethnicity - canonized into academia by Harold Bloom - what exactly, is Mormon, is a complicated, though much younger question - than what it is to be Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc. etc. There is also of course, some racial element to that from a historical standpoint. Walking the countryside of New England, and the strikingly-British-Looking-for-an-arid-desert streets of Much of Utah and Idaho will confirm the ideals and influence from the UK that this ethnic map of the US shows: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/bloggers-discuss-race-and-the-census/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

But what it means to be Mormon, and even Mormon history, is just as complex as is any other faith, tribe, or nation. Jeremy has dealt with this by casting a rather wide net of Mormonism - it includes those raised in Mormon families, practicing and not-practicing, or perhaps never-practiced, to recently-began-practicing. Given that, Jeremy's idea of what 'influence' is - from Mr. Young's yes-I-am to no-I'm-not to Ms. Tian's training far from the influences of what is generally referred to as mainstream or historical Mormon ideas - obviously changes depending on who he is talking about.

One question I have had for a long time (and have done a little work in trying to answer, but bow to Jared Oaks for the deeper research) is what was the style of many of the composers who wrote music for the institution and about Mormon stories when they weren't doing that? E.g., Leroy Robertson, Crawford Gates, Merrill Bradshaw, even Mack Wilberg, maybe others like Marie Bennett. I don't know the answer on the whole, but the things I have seen indicate that their ideas waxed a little more experimental in wider realms, just like those of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Mozart, and others who wrote music for institutions at some point in their careers. It so happens that the church started commissioning a lot of music during the time when neoromantic styles were the conservative style to write in, and in many cases, that has stuck as a church 'style' not so much because it is somehow indicative of a deeper Mormon aesthetic, but because that was the music that got people hired, and that was popular at the time.

Jeremy's points about normalcy also entice. The idea of Mormons as a culture striving for peculiarity and normalcy – sometimes at the simultaneously – is something I have experienced, but also a common trope in academia not just about Mormon Studies, but about many minority religions and cultures – even, in broad strokes, the impetus for much of the Counter-reformationists’ raison-de-etre, and the long history of Catholic Bishops spending huge amounts of time discovering whether miracles reported to their offices were bona-fide miracles, or simply a function of natural law/natural causes. From Mormon and American historical standpoint, yes, Mormons stood out from a crowd in some respects, but not all – they were perhaps the most populous and long-running of the religions that sprang from the hills of New York (and the 200-mile radius of Palmyra) in the early 1900s, but certainly not the only ones interested in finding old sacred texts and objects, seeing deified beings, experimenting with/changing/codifying non-monogamous marriage, family and sexual practices on religious, political, or ‘need-based’ grounds, etc. (As a commercial break, it only takes a short jaunt into American Colonial-Era history to realize that Western Americans were not, by and large, sexually monogamous, nor were they abstinent before marriage – there is a noticeable number of 5/6-month intervals between marriage and baby christenings in Puritan American vital records, not to mention the well-known practice of keeping mistresses. Ugh.)  Mormon persecution was of course severe and all-encompassing – but so was that of other faiths, often in proportion to their size/population concentration/propensity to show up on voting day.

All of that is to say, that it’s interesting that so many of the singular things about Mormons and Mormonism are surprisingly normal – migrations toward the west coast in the 1840s, forming religious and political blocs, temperance movements, family structure debates – was yes, peculiar in many ways, and arguably in magnitude and longevity – but also deeply culturally normal. Even the ‘outsized’ Mormon Tabernacle Choir didn’t start with even 100 of the 300+ choir so well-known today. It grew, I would assert, much in the style of other British and American mega-choirs that became icons of musical power much like surround-sound or big subwoofers does in today’s pop culture. Again, the Tabernacle choir has outlasted many other of the large-scale choirs, but its roots are quite secular and quite ‘normal’. So perhaps even the Tabernacle choir is an exercise in the church as an institution queuing up in American pop culture-land. (In the spirit of a review, I don’t think Jeremy would disagree with me on this, though I could stand to be corrected by the same Michael Hicks that Jeremy cites – maybe guru to all of us in the realm of Mormon Music History).

So it is that, in general, I am very pleased that this article has been published, and that some interesting, diverse, and talented composers have gotten some air time for it. Also, within the realm of composers identified by religion, I would be very curious to see how other groupings would compare. I’ve looked as far as Judeo-Christian liturgical music, hymnals, and a little bit of the radio-world. In the ‘Sabbath-day morning’ contexts Mormonism seems a little behind some, and right with others. The large number of Mormons in the Christian-pop radio sound-world, supported heavily by Deseret Book placements, and what they would call their demand curve, skews what many would see as the Mormon musical style largely in what is actually the pop-culture arm of musicians, which I see is the largest arm of music making in most cultures/ethnicities. Saying that Mormon film composers or pop musicians define Mormon music-making is a little like saying Kay Perry defines singers. It’s a little more complicated, of course, when a huge amount of music by Mormon pop artists about Mormon subjects is bought and sold through Deseret Book and subsidiaries – an institution owned by the Church Corporation – but not much more complicated than the existence of gatekeepers across the recording and music making industry.

Two other conversations I think are interesting points in this discussion are economics, and a revisitation of Mormon identity and the need for innovative culture within a cultural/ethnic/political group. I have many, many artist colleagues, not just Mormons, but many Mormons, who choose certain pathways for their work-lives out of considerations of supporting a family in a 9 to 5, middle-class way. This is a tangible contributing factor to the outsize number of film composers, media music artists, commercial-makers, arts administrators, and frankly, businesspeople in general that I am fascinated to gather more opinions/stories about for my own collection. But again, in the spirit of a Mormon claiming the comforting cloak of normalcy, I would wonder how this compares to society at large. My guess is that there are a lot of aspiring-artists-turned-consultants out there. It is worth noting that many of the composers Jeremy brought up in the end of his article (and, again, he admits this) are BYU faculty. I.e., a their salaries are being paid by a combination of tuition and Church-appropriated funds, which indicates a tacit approval/appreciation for their work and the need for it; it also indicates that they are composers for a living and still can support a family from it – perhaps they are part of a sadly small list of composers who have interesting voices and managed to ‘make it’.

I would add to the list of interesting ‘Mormon’ voices: Murray Boren, Ethan Wickman, up-and-coming composers Joseph Sowa, Curtis Smith (and at this point I proceed to name the composers in my BYU Music classes…) I’d be interested to know what they would say/what others would say about the influence question Kevin brought up.

The second thought that I’m interested in considering is other’s opinions on the idea of culture- or nation-building. For example, I have been to very inspiring lectures on the need for a ‘Mormon Shakespeare’ – great artists to help the culture (and perhaps the institution as an art-advocate) reach intellectual and aesthetic greatness on the proportion of game-changing household names like Shakespeare. Part of this mission, for some, is also to help bring to their fullness Mormon ideas (whatever those are) and their exploration through art forms. Another camp says ‘why bother with a Mormon Shakespeare when we already have Shakespeare’? (We=humanity and also we=Mormons). 

A deeply poignant thought in many ways, and a terrible place to stop the discussion.

So, I'll write a PS - Also, there is a wide world of Non-American culture based Mormonism, and Mormon Music, also barely touched on by Jeremy or here.