Your Hands

Instruments?

Who needs instruments?

We don’t need no stinkin’ instruments.

You've got two hands, don't you?

In my last post I mentioned how I have had difficulty adjusting to singing while clapping a syncopated rhythm. What I neglected to mention is that there is no keyboard or guitar in most of the church services I have been to while I've been here. In fact, there hasn't even been much in the way of drums! Well, except for in Achi. And Awka. And Lagos. Okay, so I don’t have a solid grasp of what’s “normal” regarding music in the churches here! Not too different from back home in the states.

Anyway. There is a point I’d like to make here, and it concerns rhythm and it concerns hands as instruments. When we clap in the U.S. about the only debate that rages is whether to clap on the downbeat or the ‘offbeat’ (beats one and three vs. beats two and four if you’re keeping time). As I mentioned previously, here it’s more or less one strong clap per measure with a second syncopated clap. There is sometimes an additional syncopated clap per measure. But that only tells a part of the story.

You see, when there are no drums or other instruments, the only rhythmic variation is in how the clapping is done. Here, after two or three times through a chorus, sometimes additional clapping will occur as a crescendo / diminuendo bridging the end of the chorus and the beginning of the chorus again. A sort of rhythmic interlude, if you will. I find it most difficult to describe because the intensity of it exists on a scale that would be difficult to imagine if you did not experience it.

The worship leader is also able to cue the clapping by a simple exhortation, “Your Hands!” This can mean anything from 1) starting a clapping rhythm where one did not previously exist, 2) a growing intensity of varying clapping rhythms as a bridge or interlude between choruses, or 3) I have even seen a “clapping song” where there were no words, only a swirling rhythmic vortex where rhythmic clapping in concert constituted the entire musical output of the selection. It was amazing. And I will miss it. When I am back in my congregation in the U.S. and I try saying “Your Hands” it will not be the same.