As I’ve begun reading This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin, he’s made a point, which I’ve been thinking quite a bit about. I was recently challenged further on this point by some friends who just returned from a trip to South Korea.

Levitin tells the story of a friend who was conducting doctoral field work in Lesotho, which is surrounded by South Africa. After gaining the trust of the villagers, they finally asked him to join in one of their village songs, to which he replied “I don’t sing.”

Levitin writes, “it was true: We had been in high school band together and although he was an excellent oboe player, he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. The villagers found his objection puzzling and inexplicable. The Sotho consider singing an ordinary, everyday activity performed by everyone, young and old, men and women, not an activity for a special few.”

My friends, who recently visited South Korea for their son’s wedding recounted a similiar tale of being asked to perform the equivalent of the “special music” during a Korean church service. Their son assured them that the congregation was not expecting a performance, but a song, and even deeper, worship. That’s a difficult distinction for many of us to grasp. Levitin continues: “Our culture, and indeed, our very language, makes a distinction between a class of expert performers and the rest of us. The rest of us pay money to hear the experts entertain us.” Levitin concludes the story:

The villagers just stared at Jim and said, “What do you mean you don’t sing?! You talk!” Jim told me later, “It was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn’t walk or dance, even though I have both my legs.” Singing and dancing were a natural activity in everybody’s lives, seamlessly integrated and involving everyone.

Why have we lost this in our culture? Though Levitin doesn’t explore the reasons for this shift and I can’t speak for other cultures, in modern American culture, it seems to be part of the larger issue of consumerism. In modern America, one of our greatest enemies is ease and complacency and I’m not sure we realize how deeply it’s become ingrained in us. We view ourselves as “consumers” of everything, even music and worship.

Part of the issue seems to be that we’ve come to believe that there is always someone who does it better than us, whatever “it” might be, and instead of doing it ourselves, instead of stepping into “expert” territory, we’d better let the more-trained person flex his or her expertise-muscles. While this might certainly apply to things like electrical work and replacing a transmission, have we carried it too far? Have we robbed ourselves of an otherwise vital part of life in the process? Have we consumed ourselves right out of many of the actual treasures of life? Shouldn’t music be part of life for everyone rather than a select few?

My oldest son and I have recently begun taking piano lessons together. Though I am less than a novice, the experience has given me a newfound appreciation for those who do music well. But I wonder if our tendency towards consumerism has actually cheapened many of the things we should value most?

The tendency is not just confines to skilled labor; we have created a class of “experts” in nearly every field, including the arts. Instead of understanding that music is a part of everyone’s life, we’ve convinced ourselves that one must be an “expert” to do it at all. We pay great sums of money for a select few to do something that in other cultures is something everyone does for free and with joy. In other cultures, music is something that brings people together while in ours, it actually fosters division. How far can we push the concept of making absolutely everything a commodity before there’s nothing left to sell?

Deeper still, what are the implications for Christians who have long incorporated music into worship? Have we in fact separated our ability to worship from our perceived inability to sing? In many churches, worship “leaders” are in fact performers and the congregation little more than an audience. No one wants to sing with zeal because no one wants the crack in their voice to be heard by the person next to them who is just as self-consciously trying to sing without being heard.

How can we re-train our sophisticated, Western minds to believe that everyone sings? Yes, some might carry a tune better than others, but especially when it comes to worship, may we say with the Psalmist: Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you! (Psalm 67:3).

• Read This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin
• Read Music Through the Eyes of Faith by Harold Best

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