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Lloyd Douglas on Church Music, Part 8

From “The Music of the Church,” by Lloyd C. Douglas, in the 1/13/1921 issue of The Christian Century.

The following is from “The Music of the Church,” an article Lloyd Douglas published in The Christian Century on January 13, 1921. He has been saying that it is the pastor’s responsibility to make sure the church’s music is good. He continues:

“Now there are a few facts that every preacher really ought to know about choir anthems. First, the choir must never attempt anything that is too difficult to be rendered well. It is much better that the quartet should spend two hours trying to get together on ‘Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross’ – and then sing it with an eye single to one purpose – than to invest an equal amount of time on ‘The Radiant Morn’ – and tote it to the shambles. Every quartet wants to sing ‘The Radiant Morn.’ There are about a dozen church quartets on the Western Hemisphere that have any warrant for making the adventure. It is much more effective for the choir to learn ‘Hark, Hark, My Soul,’ so that it can sing it with good interpretation than to butcher Tchaikowsky’s ‘O Come, Let Us Worship,’ or Gounod’s ‘Sanctus.’

“In the next place, the choir should not attempt to present a new anthem every Sunday. That means nothing else than that the piece has been given only brief rehearsal. Possibly all that these loyal folk have achieved in that one rehearsal is a scrappy knowledge of the harmony. As to its interpretation, they have had not chance to attend to that. They just grind it out – happy if they all contrive to get through at the same time. It is much better if the choir should plan to present one new anthem each month, and repeat old ones frequently. The best choirs do it. If the piece is good, it will bear repetition. If it is not, it should never have been done in the first place. Quite to the contrary is the repeated sermon! Any sermon that the parson can repeat with a feeling of assurance that his congregation will not recall it never was worth preaching. Is that not a fact? When you preach an old sermon, do you pick one of the big ones that made everybody sit up? You do not? We are right, then, about this, as usual. It is not so of the anthem. The congregation likes an old anthem, if it is well done. Preachers who are poor readers of the Scripture Lesson should select obscure passages. The people have heard the familiar ones done well, and cannot forget about it.”

I will share Douglas’s concluding remarks in my next post.

Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade, Part 6

by Ronald R Johnson

From Lloyd C. Douglas, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century, 11/25/1920.

[The following is the conclusion of Lloyd Douglas’s essay, “Mr. Bryan’s New Crusade,” published in The Christian Century on November 25, 1920. He writes:]

“A few days ago this eminent lecturer spoke to a large audience of laymen in Chicago. The chance was his to make a notable contribution to that convention. What does it get from him? Why – the monkey jokes, of course! And the red cow! It is to be presumed that hundreds of laymen, going home from that convention under the impression that they had heard a great scientist speak his mind about evolution, will be on the alert now to detect the slightest deflection from orthodoxy on the part of their pastors. Let the good brother phrase his remarks in the language of modern scholarship, insisting upon a faith that may be held without damage to one’s intellectual self-respect, and he takes a chance of hearing unfavorably from the deacon who has just returned from the convention where ‘Darwinism’ – and all things scientific – had been weighed and found wanting.

“I write this partly to relieve my feelings, but mostly because there is no doubt in my own mind that we ministers, who have thought our way through these problems at no little cost of time and effort, should refuse any longer to tolerate such presentations of religion as that indicated above, if we may by any possibility put a stop to it! For Mr. Bryan to speak in any presence concerning the relation of religion and science is a piece of presumption! King David prayed, ‘Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins!’ David apparently considered this a serious offense – presumption. And David, being something of an expert on sinning, surely ought to be an authority.

“One is not forgetting that Mr. Bryan is a great and good man who means well and is loved devotedly by great masses of people. He has it in him to make a large contribution to religion. But however rich and active may be the wine of his faith and his enthusiasm, he really ought to stop trying to vend it in the old bottles. Oh – oh – but how fearfully old are the bottles!”

When Radio Was a New Concept

by Ronald R Johnson

Unidentified clipping, n.d. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

They called it “wireless” in those days. Only a few enthusiasts throughout the country bought the kits, assembled them, then listened eagerly for messages from other enthusiasts. They could originate from anywhere. That was part of the fascination of it: trying to determine exactly where a message was being broadcast from, and how far it had traveled.

In Lloyd Douglas’s scrapbook, there are two newspaper clippings about an upcoming wireless experiment on New Years Eve, 1919. Neither one tells us the name of the newspaper, but one, entitled “Will Wireless Greetings on New Years Eve” (see above), is either from the University of Michigan or from an Ann Arbor paper; the other (see below) is apparently from the Detroit Free Press and is entitled, “U of M to Radio 1920 Greetings.”

Unidentified clipping (probably from The Detroit Free Press) dated 12/29/1919. In 1918 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 5, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. © University of Michigan.

According to the first of these: “On the evening of December 31, [1919,] just before the new year is ushered in, radio operators at the university radio station will send out greetings for the year to all parts of the country. Community Service, Inc., under whose direction the movement is being carried on in all sections of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is starting what will probably be an annual event in a great publicity campaign.”

Wireless radio was such a new thing that they had to perform stunts like this to make people aware of its potential. The article continues:

“Every radio station in the United States will send out New Years greetings during the evening, and all amateur operators are urged to ‘sit in’ and copy each message received.”

A paragraph later, the article says that the university “will use both the radio telephone and the radio telegraph.” That’s how new this technology was: what we now call “radio,” they called “the radio telephone” to distinguish it from “the radio telegraph,” which was, apparently, a wireless transmission in Morse code.

From the Detroit Free Press: “The telegraphic message will be sent out at 8:30 the evening of December 31, and the wireless telephone will follow 15 minutes later. The message, which is not to be made public before it is sent, was written by Rev. Lloyd Douglas, Congregational pastor of this city [Ann Arbor], and is 60 words in length.” [They were referring to the “telegraphic” message. His “radio telephone” message would be longer.]

The event would be under the direction of Lieutenant-Colonel John Lucas, head of the signal corps work at the university ROTC, and Professor J. C. Evans of the university faculty. There was an official aura around this technology, with the ROTC providing a kind of military authority to it. Things would be very different later, when radio would become a commercial enterprise.

As both articles said, “A rotary spark transmitter will be used by the university station, and for receiving the telegraph message, receiving tuning sets should be set at 600 meters wavelength. For receiving the radio telephone message, tuning coils should be set at 660 meter wavelength.” The organizers hoped that amateur operators all over the country would write down whatever messages they received, then mail them back to the university with detailed information about their location.

It was an exciting experiment, and it was just the kind of thing that Lloyd Douglas would be involved in, not just because of his interest in science but also because of his eagerness to pursue new ways of expanding his audience. I’ll tell you about his messages in my next post.