Christian music

Christian music is created to reflect personal or shared beliefs about Christian life and faith. Its themes often include praise, worship, penitence, and lament, and its forms differ greatly around the world. This category includes church music, hymnals, gospel, and worship music, as well as contemporary Christian music, which itself covers styles like hip hop, rock, contemporary worship, and urban contemporary gospel.

Like other types of music, how Christian music is made, performed, and understood changes with culture and social setting. It can serve ceremonial, educational, aesthetic, or entertainment purposes.

In worship services, Christian music is most often used in church or group gatherings. Singing is common, whether by the whole congregation or by smaller groups like soloists, duets, trios, quartets, madrigals, choirs, or worship bands—or both. Instruments frequently accompany the singing, but some denominations—such as some Exclusive Brethren, Churches of Christ, Primitive Baptists, and the Free Church of Scotland—prefer unaccompanied or a cappella singing. Others, like Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, use some form of accompaniment. Groups like the Bruderhof sing songs with both religious and non-religious meanings, valuing the act of singing itself. One early form of worship music was Gregorian chant. Pope Gregory I is recognized as the first to organize such music in the church, giving it the name "Gregorian" chant. This reform happened during his reign, around 590–604 CE. Gregorian chant had a monophonic sound; Gregory I kept it simple, believing that complexity could lead to cacophony and ruin the music.

In the West, most Christian denominations use instruments like the organ, piano, electronic keyboard, guitar, or other accompaniment, and sometimes a band or orchestra. Some churches have historically avoided instruments, citing their absence from the New Testament, though many have changed this stance over the last century. Eastern Orthodox singing is generally unaccompanied, though in the United States organs are sometimes used due to Western influence.

Some worship music is purely instrumental, without singing. During the Baroque period, the chorale prelude for organ became common, often based on a popular hymn tune. A large body of solo organ music developed across Europe, with well-known composers including Johann Sebastian Bach, Dieterich Buxtehude, George Frideric Handel, François Couperin, César Franck, and Charles-Marie Widor. Later composers like Olivier Messiaen, Louis Vierne, Maurice Duruflé, and Jean Langlais also wrote instrumental organ music as worship. The church sonata for orchestra and chamber groups, along with other sacred instrumental forms, emerged from the Baroque period onward.

Christian music includes many genres that reflect diverse worship styles, cultural influences, and artistic expressions. While traditional hymns remain foundational, modern Christian music often sounds more like mainstream music, helping artists reach new audiences.

Chants involve the repetitive speaking or singing of words or sounds, usually on one or two main pitches called reciting tones. They can range from simple melodies with few notes to complex structures with much repetition, like the Great Responsories and Offertories of Gregorian chant. Chant can be seen as speech, music, or a stylized form of speech. In the later Middle Ages, some religious chant evolved into song, influencing later Western music. Chants are mostly used in Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox churches. Examples include Ambrosian, Anglican, Armenian, Celtic, Ethiopian, Galician, Gregorian, Kievan, Mozarabic, Old Roman, and Syriac chant.

A metrical psalter is a kind of Bible translation: a book with a metrical version of all or part of the Book of Psalms in vernacular poetry, meant to be sung as hymns. Some include melodies or harmonies. The creation of metrical psalters was a major project of the Protestant Reformation, especially among Calvinists. They are mostly used in Reformed churches and by Anabaptists. Examples include the Genevan Psalter, the German Psalter "des Königlichen Propheten David," the Dutch Psalter, and the Scottish Metrical Psalter (1650).

The Reformation’s normative principle of worship led to a burst of hymn writing and congregational singing. Martin Luther is notable as both a reformer and the author of many hymns, including "Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God") and "Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ" ("Praise be to You, Jesus Christ"). Luther and his followers used their hymns, or chorales, to teach faith tenets to worshipers. The first Protestant hymnal was published in Bohemia in 1532 by the Unitas Fratrum.