| New festival spotlights music and faith
by Chris Verkaik
Staff Writer
This spring will bring the first Festival of Faith and Music to Calvin College. Taking place from March 28-29, the conference will bring together musicians, critics, academics, students and all those interested in the connection between faith and music. It is designed to be a time of enjoying live performances, as well as a place where serious discussions about the relationship between faith and music can take place.
The festival will focus on those Christian musicians who choose to make their music outside of the Christian music industry. “We’ve been finding and discovering these people for years,” said Ken Heffner, Director of Student Activities at Calvin. “Their art is shaped by a biblical vision, but they don’t call themselves Christian musicians because the name ‘Christian musician’ has been kind of copyrighted. We wanted to get those people to come together.”
Heffner described the festival as an opportunity “to have a somewhat academic conversation about this calling, this art, this enterprise that we’re involved in here, which is doing music that points to the kingdom without wearing it on your sleeve so much.”
Christopher Smit, an instructor in communication arts and sciences, was involved in the planning for the festival. He also expressed a specific interest in “people who are Christian people but not writing specifically Christian music.”
“We’d like a place, and an event, where they can get together and talk about this. Because we don’t only think that they can learn from each other, but also that we will learn from them,” he said.
The conference will not only be for musicians but for listeners of music as well. In this way, Heffner likened it to the Festival of Faith and Writing: “Most people who go [to that festival] aren’t writers; they’re readers. Most people who will come to this one will be listeners, not composers.”
Along with musicians and listeners, the third audience for the conference will be other Christian colleges. Heffner believes that Christian colleges have reached a crisis in terms of how they deal with pop culture.
“They’re stuck. They want to find another way to approach pop culture because the more fundamentalist, separatist approach has failed.” This conference will be an opportunity to try a new approach.
Many of the musicians participating in the festival are familiar names to the Calvin College community. Most have performed on this campus within recent memory: Karin Berquist and Linford Detweiler from Over the Rhine, David Eugene Edwards from 16 Horsepower, David Bazan from Pedro the Lion, Daniel Smith from the Danielson Famile, Don Peris from The Innocence Mission, Denison Witmer and Jan Krist.
The festival will also include the participation of a musician completely new to Calvin College, the Grammy nominated singer/songwriter Greg Brown. Brown was contacted through a personal connection of Smit.
“I didn’t know if Greg Brown was a person of faith at all,” said Smit. “I thought that maybe, because of the honesty I hear in his music, there would be something faith-related there that he can talk about. Maybe there is a strain of spiritually that the normal, everyday listener would not hear.”
Smit hopes that Brown’s presence at the festival will set a precedent for inviting people to these events who might not be immediately associated with questions of faith, spirituality and popular culture. “His coming here is really a perfect example of what we’re trying to do in this conference, which is to achieve a certain knowledge about how Christians write music,” he said. “And we’re trying to do that in a sort of odd way, which is to talk to people who we wouldn’t expect we [would be able to] talk to.”
Smit added, “We find light in popular music from people who are explicitly Christian, but I also think . . . that sometimes we can find out about the light from people who we don’t expect the light to come from.”
In addition to musicians, several writers and music critics will speak at the festival. “We’ve invited them because we see them as part of this puzzle as well,” said Heffner. “They’ve been good examples of a more deeply developed Christian vision for how to do music criticism.”
The keynote speaker will be Steve Stockman, who is a pop culture critic for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Stockman is the author of Walk On: The Spiritual Journey of U2. Also participating will be David Dark, the author of Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons; Nick Purdy and Josh Jackson, who are the co-founders of paste-music.com and the magazine Paste: Signs of Life in Music and Culture; and Calvin’s own Professor William Romanowski, whose latest book is "Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Pop Culture."
The festival will include two evening concerts. Greg Brown will perform on Friday night and the other musicians will perform short, rotating sets on Saturday night. Individual workshops and lectures with the different participants will take place during the day on Friday and Saturday. The festival also includes a Saturday morning worship session led by Daniel Smith and David Eugene Edwards, which promises to be a one-of-a-kind worship experience.
The registration fee is $100 for professionals and $50 for non-Calvin college students. Calvin students and staff can register for $25.
For any potential ticket-seekers, the Fine Arts Center parking lot has two parking spaces reserved for people buying tickets. Just don't take longer than 15 minutes.
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