When I was working for the government, I got to spend a lot of time researching why objective analysis was so difficult. I am out of that business now, but it is neat to see that problems of analysis are not confined to the world of international/comparative politics. Even simple parish priests get to see how people trip themselves up by using unreliable analytic methods when they develop their opinions.
My Case Study: Introducing New Music
Summers are funny times in small parishes. People seem to find other things to do on Sunday mornings than come to Divine Liturgy at their home churches. I am sure this is true everywhere, but when your depth chart is pretty thin, it probably has a greater effect at small parishes. One of the things some places do is give the choir the Summer off, relying on a strong song-leader, a pianist, and the congregation to carry the day. In the Orthodox Church it is a bit more difficult as everything is done a cappella and many congregations are more used to simply consuming the music rather than helping to create it. My solution for this Summer was to try some simpler music that our consistory had put out using traditional Ukrainian melodies. We have been using this music for about year at all the services the choir does not attend, and it had worked well with all of my cantors.
I expected some push back, so I tried to frame the change deliberately to get more buy-in. I have spent years watching how information operations should and should not be run, and I tried to take advantage of that. It worked to some extent, but not entirely.
The main complaint has been that the music is boring, and that our regular music is better. Both are true (although I would use the word “plain” instead of boring – there is nothing boring about simple music done well), but the implication of the complaint is that the change should not have been made. This brings me to my point: most people do not make relevant comparisons when evaluating things on the fly. The comparison being made in these minds is between “new, simple music being sung by the choir for the first time” with our more complex, familiar arrangements as done during the regular season.
The more appropriate thing to compare the new music with is either the counter-factual “how the Summer choir would have performed their complex music with half the choir” or by actually remembering how the choir sounded in the same circumstances last Summer (and it is not knocking our most excellent choir that it finds it difficult to pull things off when whole parts are missing!).
But instead, people compare the worst of the “new thing” (which some are already opposed to on principle) with the best of the “old thing”.
My effort to spin the new music did its job – I have not heard anyone complain that their new priest is trying to “change everything”. I love the fact that the worst criticism I received was that the music was boring – it shows what charitable people I serve. But I just thought this little case study was kind of cute (unlike the situations I used to study, where the stakes of poor analysis are usually too high to ever have allowed me to smile when they were made).
