Why is it that TSCC is the only church I've ever gone to that allows people with no musical talent to perform at their sacrament meetings?
A TBM friend of mine was telling me about a brother and sister musician team that performed at their ward recently. The brother was a decent pianist, but the sister played the violin like a couple cats in the throes of bestial passion.
My friend said it was an absolutely excruciating experience for everyone in which the sister probably only nailed, at most, 8 or 9 notes correctly.
I live in a house full of musicians but one instrument that has never been allowed is the violin, it is a horrific instrument unless played by an expert even then it can be eek inducing.
We had an incident recently in our little music group. One of the guys I play with had a nice banjo, but he stopped at the Circle-K on the way home and left it in the back seat of his car. He was only going to go inside for a second and thought it would be okay. But when he came back out, sure enough somebody had smashed his rear window and thrown in another banjo.
And I swear, some of those musicians couldn't care less. Back when all three of my SIL lived in driving distance of each other, they would sing at family baptisms and funerals together occasionally. The only problem is, although they have lovely voices, they never seemed to practice other than to run through the song once or twice immediately prior to the meeting. Inevitably, one or two of them would forget words or be off in their timing and start giggling or rolling their eyes at their mistake. That may have been cute as pie when they were 7, 5 and 3 years old but as grown women with children of their own, it was cringe-making. Practice if you are going to perform - practice until you can actually perform the piece you selected. You don't get a free pass to torment a captive audience.
Fun thread that brings to memory way too many very mediocre and terrible musical numbers I've listened to either in church or at funerals.
Seems like one of the doctrines of Mormonism is that you will be blessed forever if you offer music (be it bad or good) unto the lord. So everyone gets into the act.
You could be in a ward where there aren't enough people to have a music chairman, or the music chairman was only asked to do it to activate him/her, or they are "artsy" but not dependable. Then you have meeting after meeting with no music whatsoever. I would MUCH prefer some amateur to another ill prepared talk.
Boy that was not the case in the ward I was in way back when. There was some excellent talent there. An opera singer, several instrumentalists, great organist. Just depends I guess.
Be thankful they don't participate weekly! Many protestant churches have "praise bands", every Sunday morning, that inject a tone of very bad rock and roll (poorly written and poorly executed)into what otherwise might be a fairly decent morning service. It's supposed to "appeal to the young people", but any young person with an ounce of music training would cringe at most of these bands' performances. They destroy any possible feeling of reverence that has developed. Large churches give the "praise band people" their own "contemporary" service, but smaller congregations provide time within the morning service.