SDG Music Radio

[Ep09] Beautiful, Excellent, and Diverse Contemporary Christian Music w/ Joanne Jolee

• Magnus Gautestad & Joanne Jolee • Season 1 • Episode 9

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In this episode of SDG Music Radio, host Magnus Gautestad discusses the unification of the church through beauty and excellence in music with guest Joanne Jolee, a conservatory-trained musical artist and theologian. They explore the importance of integrating both modern and traditional music styles to create a unified worship experience that glorifies God. Joanne emphasizes that music which comes from a right heart and offers praise and thanksgiving brings glory to God, while also highlighting the need for skilled musicians to lead worship and elevate the congregation's spiritual experience. She also points out that music education and engagement in the church can promote spiritual growth and emotional well-being.

Joanne provides practical advice for church leaders on how to introduce new, excellent, and beautiful music into their services, advocating for a gentle and thoughtful approach to change that includes educating the congregation and reducing reliance on loud electronics to encourage active participation. She also underscores the importance of continual skill development and collaboration among musicians to create more powerful and diverse music. The discussion concludes with ways for listeners to connect with Joanne’s work and a call for collaborative efforts to enhance the contemporary Christian music scene.

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Could it be that uniting around beauty and excellence is what can bring the church together to glorify God more fully? In this episode, we have a guest that will be sharing very specific advice for church leaders on how to bring about change and a very encouragement and inspiration for you as a creative about your important role in empowering contemporary Christian music. Let's jump into it. There's a war in our churches between in modern and traditional music. But the question is this, can we creatively integrate the best of both worlds to unify the body of Christ and glorify the Lord more fully? Join us on this podcast as Christians from various stands share their voice and come together to develop new creative arrangements and compositions that will help us to worship the Lord more fully and to empower evangelism. I'm Magnus Gautestad, and welcome to SDG Music Radio. Greetings. We are back here on SDG Music Radio on a quest to empowering the contemporary scene of what we can call Christian music. I'm here with Joanne today. How are you? Doing great. How about you, Magnus? I'm excited. I'm very excited to be with you, especially. I've seen a lot of your work as a creative, but also as a creative that has taken theology and your study and your walk with the Lord first, really, and are able to combine these things and other important work also you're doing in the business sphere for the glory of God. An interesting person to be with. And of course, I think we resonate a lot with that we see that there are some issues that should be addressed the Christian music scene today. But we have a heart to help it, to provide guidance and ideas and try to be... I'm a very practical guy. I can do some philosophy or some theology discussions, but when it comes down to it, I do that. I like to solve problems. I like to create and build things. I really hope that for those who are listening here, listening on a discussion and think, how can I apply this in my church, me as a musician, creating music or playing music? Is there any principle chairs we can do to glorify God more fully? Which is really when it comes down to it, the intention of our life and of this podcast. So let's start with a little bit of an introduction. It's good to have a backdrop. So Joanne Jolee is a native New Zealander. She's a conservatory-trained musical artist, author, business owner, mother of five, and grandmother of seven. She is a licensed yacht helmsman and holds certificates in Old and New Testament studies. For more information, you can visit the Joanne Jolee's central hub at joannejolee.com And that's with two E's. We're going to start off with some challenging questions that we have also been asking others at this show. It can be interesting for you viewers to also compare these with the other episodes we have as we're working on resources to really help the church leaders make better decisions regarding music inside and outside the church. The first question then, Joanne. What type of music gives glory to God, and what doesn't? Well, first of all, Magnus, thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor to be on the show. I really admire your vision and what you're trying to do with beauty and music. It's a wonderful thing, and it's timely, it's needed. But to answer that question, the type of music that gives glory to God comes from a right heart. This would be music that offers praise and Thanksgiving, this glorifies God. When you talk about style, perhaps, styles are always changing. But according to the scripture, this praise and thanksgiving music is anywhere at all times on all the Anything that it breathes can sing or shout and offer praise and thanksgiving. This is in the church, this is in the shower, this is driving to work. This is praise and thanksgiving from our hearts to the Lord. Now, Amos, Amos, Chapter 5, he talks about it in the negative or the opposite. He says, God is saying, take away your noisy hymns of praise. I'm not going to listen to your music, the music of your harps. What I want want to see is righteous living. This is what worship is. The church has gotten a bit mixed up with worship and music. They're two separate things. Worship is, well, in the Old Testament, worship used to be these sacrifices, plain and simple. The people would bow in worship and the musicians would play. Today, we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice. Our worship is a daily, moment by moment, bowing to the will of God in all the things that we choose to do. This is not always easy. Sometimes it's painful to submit our will to God. That's why I think in the New Testament, it says to offer a sacrifice of praise, because if we want to be miserable and horrible and depressed, praise is a sacrifice, really. I love the way Amos puts that and reminds us that we need to live righteously, otherwise God is not interested in our praise and our music. For composers, you and I, I think that our music is going to reflect the attributes of God. Think about the moon. The moon's a rock. It has no glory of its own, but it shines by reflecting the glory of the Son. Those attributes of God, you point these out consistently. Things like truth, extremely important, beauty. God is beautiful. His creation is amazing. The variety, the color. Excellence. I think Bach, above all, did the most spectacular job putting all of this together. He's an example to emulate. He really believed that his music came directly from God. He got it from God. People used to say, We can't sing this music and we can't play it. It's too hard. He would just say, You know what? This is what God gave me. You're going to have to figure this out. You're going to have to work harder. But he believed his music came from God. He gave all the glory to God. He wrote it on his manuscripts. Many times when he started a piece, he would write, Jesus, help me, in Latin, I think it goes, Help me, help me to write this so I can give glory back to you. I think that being said, it might be useful to point out that music really is a tool. It's a very useful tool. Let me give you a couple of examples because my husband and I had founded a charitable organization. It was a music foundation, and we had several missions, and one of them was to put a music school into the local children's home. These were children that were displaced from their families. Their parents were incarcerated or something was going on where they had to live elsewhere. We provided a school where they could have music lessons weekly in piano, violin, guitar, ukulele, other things. It was a good quality music education. I hired all the teachers. They taught the theory of music. We had annual recitals But Plato, for one, said that this is the key to learning. In the patterns of the arts and mostly music, the keys to learning. This is true. I think, I don't know if you've seen a lot of the studies that have come out in the last few decades, but a music education for children is one of the best things that they can get. The stats show that they do better intellectually, they do better emotionally, they have a way to pour out their emotions and express themselves. There's a new program called Music in Prisons. I don't know if you've heard of this, that they take teachers into the prisons and teach the inmates to play an instrument. I saw this marvelous article with an inmate. There's a picture of him with his orange suit on, his prison outfit, and he's holding a flute. He says, When I hold my flute, it feels so much different than when I'm holding a gun. Even just holding a musical instrument is this marvelous exercise. There's so many other studies that have been done. Are you aware of all the studies on melodic intonation therapy for people who have had traumatic brain injury? Just basic health and well-being, the playing of music on a daily basis as a medicine, can eliminate depression, mild depression. I think to finish up that point, It's because music brings joy. It's a happy, joyful, wonderful exercise. The Proverbs say that a happy heart is like good medicine. I believe that all of that also as a tool brings glory to God just in the culture. I think that's a great point. And that process, so not just the end result of the music, but also that process of facilitating musical growth, artistic growth in the church, can also have a spiritual formational function to it, that it shapes the heart into glorifying God more, and it's a way to be good to people. So I think it's great that you're connecting both the process and more the end result, the actual performance of the music sharing together as a big opportunity to glorify God. There's a lot more we could have said on that, but we want to move on to something a bit more concrete because this podcast is really to come down to principles and solutions so we can find that spot where we are We are really producing excellence in the church. We are really teaching the whole Bible through music. We are really getting to know God in all his attributes through our music, etc. For a leader of music in churches, what is your main advice? Well, I wouldn't want to be a music leader these days. I think it's a really, really tough job because people can get so wound up styles and so entrenched in what appeals to them. One of the big problems we have in the church today is the division over music. We have services where contemporary music is favored, services where the classical music is favored. I think that what needs to happen is that somehow those need to be to merge. I think the church leaders need to open up to creativity. Contemporary Christian music is rather in a sorry place in so many ways. The excellent musicians, the skills musicians, the musicians that have the spirit of the Lord, including that skill, I think that that's what the model is.

We've got Psalm 33:

3. Sing a new song, play with skill, and with loud shouts. I think those are the three mandates for praise and thanksgiving in the assembly. In the old Levitical system, the Levites led the music. They were skilled. The general congregation can't participate at that level, and actually they didn't. The worship was the sacrifice. The assembly would bow down to the ground in worship while the sacrifices were being made, and the Levites would present the music. They're very separate. I I think that in the assembly, when the skilled musicians present the music of praise and thanksgiving, and someone suggested on my website, I have to throw this in here, they suggested that perhaps the musicians should not be facing the audience in a rock concert-like position. They should be down in a pet with their backs to the audience, facing whatever it is, the stained glass winter or whatever. They're not the focus. I really thought that was intriguing. But The general assembly is not able to participate at the skills level of the musicians, and they shouldn't be either. The skilled musicians should be bringing forth excellence and beauty, and the assembly should be passively. They're passively participating in that with their heads bowed. You can see a soloist or a duet or trio presenting something magnificent and something new, something played The people are just in their hearts bowing and allowing the music to lift them up. That's what this music does. It elevates, it takes you into... Beethoven said this. He said that music is the mediator between the sensual world and the spiritual world. That's what music does. That would be the work of the skilled musicians to lead the people in that worship. Of course, we know from David and Saul and David, David plays his harp, the The mental problems, the demons that Saul is experiencing, they're chased away. I think that's a huge part of a meeting or of an assembly where the skilled musicians drive out the demons and they put people into a proper state of mind. Then with the assembly, with the participation, obviously, everybody can sing. There's very few people that can't sing. I was a music teacher for decades. In all the years I taught, I only found One person who had a tone deaf, they could not hear a pitch, but even that can be worked with. Everybody knows how to sing. Everybody can sing. The problem today is that we have the electronics in the church really, really loud. There's this massive wall of sound, and the people don't have to lift their voices. This is what the scripture says over and over. Lift your voices, lift them up. You have to release your inhibitions to be able to do that. We learn that as singers, you've got to let go. You've got to open your mouth wide and let the sound out. This is what God wants us to do. Let go of our inhibitions, sing and shout. The congregations today don't do that. My recommendation would be, turn off the electronics. Help teach the people, all the people, participating in the singing or the speaking to lift their voices. I think that's really, really important. Right now, the singing in the churches is very feeble. People don't have to lift their voices. I spoke about this in one of my videos, an experience I had when I went to Fiji, I was 12 years old, and we happened in a remote village on a Sunday into this little tiny chapel, and the Fijians were singing acapella because they didn't have any instruments. It was so incredibly loud, and it just shook me to my core. I'll never forget it. There was a reel that went around, and it went viral just recently over the Olympics because the Fijians in the Olympic village, every morning, they sang and they shook the place. These Fijians, they know how to lift their voice. We can learn from them. That's what I say. I just say that trying to broaden and bring variety and bring excellence, this isn't going to be easy because not all styles are relatable to all people. But I'll tell you, everybody can recognize beauty and excellence, can't they? People know when something is lovely. Have you heard of the blobfish? The blobfish, it's known as the world's ugliest creature. If you look at this creature, go look it up on the internet, the blobfish is just the blob of gray mess, and it's ooosing. If you look at that, you're just like, oh. Obviously, you can appreciate this is God's creature, and you can find something lovely about it. But honestly, you don't want to sit there and stare at the blobfish. But then you go to the Notre Dame and you look at the rose windows and you can stand there for hours just in awe of the color and the intricacies and all those things. We know innately, we know that the blobfish is not beautiful and lovely, and we know that the same glass is. I think it's the same in music. If the church leaders can bring in, very gently, so people don't walk away, which they'll do if something changing changes to their taste. But if they just bring it in gently and people can recognize that something wonderful is taking place here. Another thing the church leaders could do, actually, is if they decide that they want to try and open up a wee bit to new compositions, and we keep saying beautiful and excellent, they can send out an E-blast a few days before the service, and they can just say, We're going to do something new. They can go through the scriptures and just say, Here's why we're doing this. People can intellectually process the changes coming. So that when the people come to the service and they see this new element, this new thing, they're not going to just be blindsided and shocked and just go into an uproar and walk out. I think that they could do that. Then I think people will find that their hearts are uplifted. Of course, you talked about this previously, the message, the truth. Truth, beauty, excellence, new, all of those things. Those are the things in the assembly that I believe would glorify God and that the church leaders need to make a real effort to start moving in that direction. Well, I really love how specific this is. It can be quite a clear strategy laid out just on the words you said there about how to gradually start to bring in more, like you say, excellence and beauty. And that is really, I think in a biblical Christianity, that should be two concepts everybody can unite around. Everybody can unite that more excellence and more beauty is good, and it does reflect the truth. And you have already talked about then ways to bring in in that and for open up through and do it in an intelligent way, where you can also remember that change can be very impactful with people and being able to lead them lovingly through that intellectually and show some understanding for that can really increase our chances for things like that, being able to open those doors and that those doors can remain open. So lots of good ideas there I'll be thinking about myself for sure. But we're going to move on to another question that we like to ask here on the show. What differences in music for evangelism or music for worship should there be if and any. Even the question in itself maybe put some boundaries which might not be there in everybody's ways of wording it. But I think you know where I'm coming from is, for example, music that's outside the church buildings, basically, and music that we have inside the churches. But you can take this wherever direction you would like. Well, I think that for musicians, they have to act in faith. I think that's the bottom line. I think each musician needs to carefully examine their own hearts, what their motives are for what they're doing. Then after they've gone through that process and they're convinced, they're convinced in your own mind that I am doing the right thing, then we don't get to judge what other musicians are doing. Because I knew musicians all over the place, believers who are playing in the secular world, who are doing all sorts of things. Everybody is on a faith journey. Everybody is at a different place. If they are in faith, convinced before God that they're doing the right thing, that's the end of the topic for me. But I'll speak for myself. I know that my work is going to be tested by fire. It's going to be tested as to whether it's wood, hay, and stubble. Now, if it is, it's going to go down in flames. I think that as The age that I'm at, my grandchildren are now marrying and so on, I am driven more and more to really, really consider how my gift is going to be used to benefit the kingdom, to benefit the body of Christ. I have I've tried in the past to modify my music to be more appealing to the world, keep a really good message, tone down the gospel a little bit. There's not necessarily anything wrong with doing that, but that's just not for me anymore. As I said earlier, I pray that I'm going to be led by the spirit for whatever I do to make the best use of all my time. Then after that, I'm going to trust. When you get that moment of inspiration as an artist, and you get kicked in the gut, and you just go, I've got to do this. This is exactly... And then you pour yourself into it. I trust that whatever I'm doing, that it's led by the spirit and that it's going to achieve what God intends for it to achieve. I don't want to control the outcomes. I don't want to try and control the outcomes or to try to mold something where I think it's going to fit better. I don't want to do that anymore. I just want to do what the Holy spirit promised me to do. For me, that's to inspire and encourage people. That's the direction that I follow. I hope that answers your question. Yes, there's definitely a good food for thought there on how we can connect that with our purpose here. Another interesting question to get your take on here, Joanne, is how can Christians come together to make more beautiful and powerful music, or I would say, excellent music, both for modern and traditional churches? There might be two different ways, or there might be the same. What do you think? Well, I would say that any musician anywhere, when you talk about a skillful musician, there's no end to increasing in your skill. Someone that perhaps is an intermediate level musician, they can play play with the excellence at the level that they're at. So all musicians, to keep increasing in skill, growing and broadening ourselves. We don't want to get locked into a style. I always want to shake up the way I compose and try to attack it from different angles so that I'm not just doing the same thing over and over. I think we have to be open to new ways of creating music, collaboration, supporting each other. Artists are pretty Pretty solitary. We heard that phrase, too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth or whatever it is. We tend to work alone, and so it takes more of an effort to work together. There's a book I'd like to give you this quote here. The book was published in 1922, and the author is Ernest Hunt. What he said is, The function of the artist is to act as a link between the spiritual and the material. They are the prophets revealing the otherwise hidden message. I just love that because this is what we do. We live in a vibrating world. Everything vibrates down to the atoms. Inspiration, the same inspiration that was available to Bach, pressing down on him, is available to us. We have to learn how to tune into this and act like receivers, tune in and receive. I would encourage musicians everywhere of all levels, of all styles, to just keep growing, to keep broadening, to connect as much as possible, to offer support to each other somehow, however that works, however that looks. Well, that's very encouraging. I think if we encourage everybody to just get better, then there will be a variety and a diversity. But at the same time, a lot lots of those improvements can inspire each other and we can see new directions and it will keep on growing. I remember somebody said once that you're never really stuck. Either you're growing or you're dying. I think in some churches, the music, the vitality of the music might be dying compared to what it could be. Or if it's not growing, it's never at the same place to make sure that things are growing, developing and new without, of course, the modernist for the sake of originality. But there is definitely something to keep on creating. There is a reason why there are so many people in the churches that have been given these gifts and that have this need to keep on creating something new. That's not just the painful urge. It's there for a reason. As many things, these things can be used to glorify yourself, and they can, of course, be used to keep on developing the redemptive story of God. I just wanted to end here with how people now can connect more with what you are doing, because there are so many different fields that you have been working and that you are working and that you want to be working to have an impact for the Kingdom of God in your life. For this audience, which is mainly Christian musicians, how can they get in contact with your music and be a part of support or learn from your work? My website is the central hub where I have everything. Just go to the website joanjolee.com you'll see their links out to all the different things, the music and other things that I do. Youtube is where I'm probably putting a lot of my energy these days. I have two YouTube channels. There's the main one, what's called a Sip of Inspirations, where I, on a pretty much weekly basis, offer something. Then I have a separate music channel where I post my compositions and the music work that I'm doing. But that can all be found from my website. Also, probably one of the best things you can do when you go to website, there is a link to my newsletter. That's where I put out the most fresh what's going on content and just sign up for the newsletter and then you'll get it as it comes. Well, excellent. Simple, clear. I really appreciate that you have thought about excellence in all areas, also in the way you are actually packaging and delivering what you have. And so I think the creatives on this channel have a lot to learn from you also on how you have really gotten your stuff together, really. And we need to help each other also in that way and be role models also in that way, just to help people get visible, help people to unleash their potential in these areas, and understand just how important the creative work is within in the church and has been throughout history. It seems like maybe the Enlight period and some other factors have started reducing down a bit the whole will of God. I think the creatives have an important role now to step up and help to get that unity of the true, the good, and the beautiful. And with that comes an excellence that is very attractive in a very good way, I think, to the world to understand that there is really something so amazingly different and unique through Jesus and the power thereof. So thank you very much, Joanne, for coming together for beauty, coming together for excellence, coming together to empower the really shaping the future of Christian music. That's what we hope to do here. So again, it was joannejolee, that's with two E's, dot com. There you can learn more about her, and we'll hope to find ways where we can collaborate on various projects moving forward. So for all our listeners, we are on Instagram. If you want to see shorter takes, we'll be releasing lots of new, shorter videos to help remind you of some of the main principles. So you can stay tuned there on Instagram. Of course, also subscribe to us if you are not listening on podcast, you can see it also visually and you can see it with the subtitles. That's something I like to do just to keep my mind engaged. So make sure also to let us know what your thoughts are. If we are off here, if there are some of these things you think we're not on the right track, well, let us know in the comments. I really want this to be an interactive discussion, a loving, respectful discussion about where we can take this and we can can learn and not be too sectarian with our different music styles and everything. But really, of course, create more crossover and collaborations and explore, but also just come together for beauty more. I think this can help to grow us a lot. Again, for all our listeners, thank you very much. We will be having a lot of growth with the new projects coming up, so stay tuned and let's empower the contemporary scene of Christian music together. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.