Christian music
Christian music is music that has been written during the last two thousand years to express either personal or a communal belief regarding Christian life and faith. Common themes of Christian music include praise, worship, penitence and lament, and its forms vary widely across the world.
Like other forms of music the creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of Christian music varies according to culture and social context. Christian music is composed and performed for many purposes, ranging from aesthetic pleasure, religious or ceremonial purposes, or as an entertainment product for the marketplace.
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Worship services
The most prevalent uses of Christian music are at religious or worship services, most frequently at church buildings on a Sunday morning, but they may also be held on other days and nights of the week or at other venues. Most Christian music involves singing, whether by the whole congregation (assembly) or a specialised subgroup such as a choir, or worship band.
Instrumental accompaniment
In the West, the majority of Christian denominations use instruments of various types to accompany their worship. But some (such as some Exclusive Brethren, the Churches of Christ, the Primitive Baptists and the Free Church of Scotland) have historically not used instruments, citing their absence from the New Testament. During the last century or so several of these groups have revised this stance.
The singing of the Eastern Orthodox is also generally unaccompanied, though in the United States organs are sometimes used as a result of Western influence.
Instrumental music
Some worship music may be unsung, simply instrumental. During the Baroque period in Europe, the chorale prelude was widely used, it being a variation on a well-known hymn tune. The most well-known exponent of such writing was Johann Sebastian Bach.
More recently, various composers have written instrumental (often organ) music as acts of worship, most notably Olivier Messiaen, and in particular his La Nativité du Seigneur.
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