Getting men into church

Note: The second part of the T&A post from this morning will not appear until tomorrow.

I was doing some singing this morning and thought, as I have often done before, something fascinating about music. There is what I call the tyranny of the treble clef. If you look at a treble clef you'll notice it creates a standard of normality. The bottom line of the clef is an E and the top line is an F nine steps above. If you want to go beyond that, you need to use ledger lines. So the Treble clef tells that a normal range runs from C (the first ledger line below the staff) to A (the first ledger line above).

For those of you who don't read music, a much simpler way of putting things is that the treble clef tells you that normal range for men is tenor.

And it isn't. Overwhelmingly, the normal range for men's voices is baritone meaning that hymns that fit comfortably on the treble clef will usually be slightly out of our range. These hymns either don't let us use our rich bass tones on the one end or they will force us to strain on the other.

This may seem like a trivial point to some, and all by itself it would be, but it tells you a whole lot about how alien church culture is for men. And it has only become more so in recent years.