Vicar blasts ‘cringeworthy’ beatbox machines
30 January 2013
Dr Giles FraserBBC
Dr Giles Fraser, former canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and now vicar of St Mary's, Newington, has condemned karaoke-style recorded music devices in churches as ‘cringeworthy beatbox machines with no gravitas.’
Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, along with Westminster Abbey sub-organist Robert Quinney, Dr Fraser said, ‘In the liturgy, a musician sitting at an organ needs to react sensitively to what's going on; a machine can’t do that and you can hear how inappropriate a machine's intervention is when it gets it wrong.’
Asked by presenter Jim Naughtie how else churches might replace superannuated organists with no obvious successors to hand, Dr Fraser responded that as Christianity predated the invenation of the organ there were and still are other ways of making music in church – plainsong and taizé chanting, for example – without resorting to machines. ‘If you wouldn’t have it at your funeral, you shouldn’t have it in church on a Sunday morning.’
Robert Quinney added, ‘Anything that sounds so transparently fake needs to be treated with suspicion. It’s not necessarily a natural step for a pianist to become the sort of organist who could play in a local church, but local congregations have changed, and there is still a stock of young organists coming through.’
‘Live’ organists are familiar enough with the perils of lack of co-ordination with congregations – getting ‘out’. ‘A human being playing the organ can hear what other people are doing, so accompanying a congregation enables you to be sensitive to the speed etc,’ said Quinney.
Dr Fraser concluded that, having witnessed one organist eating sandwiches during his sermon and another slyly improvising a processional on the theme tune of Blackadder for a visit by a former Bishop of Bath and Wells, he would miss their ‘fantastic’ sense of humour if replaced by machines, and stressed the importance of organists’ contribution to the liturgy.
Graeme Kay
