This is a video of Balinese Gamelan, a shriek of clanking out-of-tune bells, which most Westerners have a hard time listening to. In the next video we hear the high-pitched, nasally, shaking voice of Peking Opera, another type of musical sound not easily digested by the Western ear.
Neither one of these musical pieces are bad nor are they lacking beauty, however, the way in which they will be received relies heavily on the cultural background of the listener. To someone who is Balinese or Chinese their respective musics are beautiful but to someone outside of those cultures this music can be heard as bad, ugly, annoying, etc. There is a false assumption in Western societies of a universal standard for musical aesthetics that music must always be beautiful. But as the famous Twilight Zone episode so effectively displayed, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
However, in some specific contexts Westerners not only accept “ugly” music, they celebrate it. At baseball games during the seventh inning stretch, the entire stadium will sing Take Me out to the Ballgame loudly and proudly in out-of-tune voices and yet, no one complains of the music’s ugliness. Or who could forget the American Idol reject, William Hung? Celebrated for his awful singing, he went on to produce an album which debuted at #34 on the Billboard 200, selling a little over 37,000 copies in the first week. Recently, Burt Crane a 77-year-old man rapped his way into infamy on America’s Got Talent with his Casio keyboard and his terribly catchy chorus stating, “Watcha Gonna Do?” Then there is the context of the Christian worship service where a good number of people cannot carry a tune but oddly enough no one pulls a Simon Cowell telling the bad singer next to them, “Excuse me I don’t mean to be rude but your singing is terrible.”
While in some contexts we celebrate “bad” music, we need to look at all the music we create (ugly and beautiful) from a heavenly perspective. Do we not understand that before God is a choir of angels continuously singing the refrain “Holy, Holy, Holy” in the most beautifully perfect voices anyone has ever heard (Isa. 6:3, Rev. 4:8)? Day in and day out this music is ever-present in front of our creator. So if you really think about it, how can any of our music, regardless of culture, ever compare to that pure everlasting music praising the true “beholder?”
The good news is that God’s standard of beauty is different from ours. Beauty is perfectly defined in the blood, gore, pain and suffering of Jesus on the cross, so when God hears the “bad” singing of the one who worships him in the spirit and truth of the gospel he says, “That is good.” Our sacrificial worship of God, even in a voice that breaks glass, makes dogs howl, sounds like screeching brakes on a car or nails on a chalkboard is to God a beautiful fragrant aroma (2 Corinth. 2:15-16). That aroma is the sweet smelling offering of Christ in us who makes our singing beautiful. So sing loud, sing badly, be bold in making an awful sound but sing with all your heart, mind, soul and strength in love for the one true triune God (Mark 12:30).
Retuned 