Funeral Service Times August 2017 April 2019 | Page 22

22 SOAPBOX
VIEW FROM THE CHOIR STALLS
A monthly feature by Briony Rawle, co-founder of The London Funeral Singers. This month she asks;
why are funerals moving away from tradition, and how can live music help funeral directors keep up?
T
he funeral service is changing.
Funerals have begun to stretch
out, explore their limits, and
struggle against them. It is an
exciting moment to witness from within the
industry. As the growing popularity of live
music is an important part of this shift, we as
music providers have a good view from the
front lines, and we also have a theory about
why it has come about.
We are finding that families are prepared
to push the boundaries of the traditional
funeral service in order to shape the service
that they want for their loved ones. One of
the questions our clients most often ask us
is “am I allowed?” They ask whether they are
allowed to have secular music in a church,
whether our singers are allowed to sing
at the graveside – one client even asked
to hide singers within the congregation to
perform as a flash mob.
The music choices themselves also reflect
a change in tastes: where before there were
only hymns, there is now secular classical,
pop and jazz music. At one memorable
APRIL 2019
funeral our classical choir performed the
West Ham football anthem, I’m Forever
Blowing Bubbles. We began with a lone
male voice booming from the back of the
church, then slowly brought in all of the
other male voices to add power, and finally
had our female performers join in harmony
an octave below their normal singing pitch.
The result was incredibly powerful. At
another service there were lyrics to popular
musical theatre songs printed in the Order
of Service instead of hymns. It could be
argued that popular songs from theatre and
film are today’s social equivalent of hymns:
songs written for mass audiences with
simple, memorable tunes and lyrics. Why
not bring them into funeral services?
Of course the answer is that for many
people it’s still important to protect the
religious sanctity of the service. We have
found that while many churches have
relaxed their perspective on secular music,
most will (understandably) not permit songs
with inappropriate lyrics for the setting, and
some will not allow non-religious songs
at all. In some cases a compromise can
be reached – for example, at one funeral
our singer was allowed to stand on the
threshold of the church door to sing his folk
song to the congregation, as long as he did
not stand within the church building itself.
The growing popularity of live music, and
the lengths that families will go to in order
to circumvent the rules of the institutions to
which their loved ones belonged, testifies
to the strength of the need for something
more, this pull in a new direction. Our
theory about what is causing this tension is
a change in the function of the funeral, from
an outward occasion to an inward.
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