Congregational singing is always a living proof of the Faith

Recently I recently came upon an article from a Catholic priest and pastoral worker, writing in a magazine with a less liturgical focus.

There's one bit I disagree with:

Make sure you have the best musicians you can find (paid or volunteer) and use them; do the difficult things and ask people who are holding your program down or even making it worse to step aside.

"Best" is a subjective term - and often the best of musicians want to make great music, rather than to model God's love for their colleagues and parishioners.     I'd rather have a teachable musician with a heart to serve God's people, than a virtuoso any day.

But one of their key points is

It’s not exactly clear to us why that is so, but congregational singing seems to be a reliable bellwether for church health.

Like them, I believe this is true, even though I have no evidence, and no real explanation about why it's the case.

Then, today, I was totally stunned to find this gem in a Catholic hymn book published in Australia in 1952 - long before Vatican II was called.   I've included a picture of the key bit here - just because it's so stunningly different from what many traditionalist musicians would have us believe about church music pre VII, and the expectations about who (people vs choir) should be singing.

You can read the whole thing here:    http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn2152603-s4

A short history of sacred music

Ref:  http://blog.adw.org/2013/12/what-is-sacred-music-historically-its-a-bit-more-complex-than-you-may-think/

However, it focuses on the style of the music, rather than the content of the words, and I think this is a mistake: There is "gospel" style music today which is not Godly - and plenty of secular tunes which have been well-baptised.

The latter are even more interesting when the people who are using them for liturgy / worship / prayer don't have any idea about their origins:  not many Irish people realize that the tune they sing A Mhuire Mhaithar to started its life as a love song, and has been used for many things including the New Zealand theme tune for the Volvo Ocean race back in the day!

Music is NOT a universal language

In interesting article from a more evangelical perspective.   The key phrase that someone picked up on:

"Music is the universal language." How often have we heard the phrase? It's amazing-the power of an oft-repeated, unexamined aphorism. This one in particular, it sounds so, romantic-convincing."

Anyone who's ever listed to traditional music from Asian cultures will know that the line isn't true: somehow what sounds right to their composers sounds totally wrong to ears formed in Western patterns - even if we don't have the training or vocabulary to recognize and describe what's wrong.

So what does this mean in a liturgical / catholic / Catholic context?   In short, Gregorian chant is no more the universal musical language than any other. Jesus didn't use it the way we know it - any more than he prescribed sing the Psalms the way the Jewish people did as the only way to worship God.


Personally, I found this part interesting too:

"We Went, We Sang, We Conquered…
During the 19th and 20th centuries, as Western and European Christians went out around the world, ... some even tried to “help” the local music-makers by teaching them to sing in unisonand by encouraging the translation of Western Christian songs into local languages. Current
practice [does not] always demonstrate a value for the God-given musical and artistic resources of the host cultures.
... it never occurred to most Christian workers that just as they were learning new, complex, and “strange-sounding” languages in order to communicate with local people, they also needed to learn to understand the local music systems. Instead, they brought their Bible in one hand and a hymnbook in the other. Often the Bible was translated into the vernacular, but when it came to the hymnbooks, only the words changed (in translation), not the basic musical language of the songs."

I think it's even worse than that:

As well as margnalising the indigenous musical expressions, many of the missionaries weren't actually the best of musicians. So I've met people who were taught to sing Latin hymns that many Catholics regard as treasures of the faith to tunes that Western culture considers trite and disrespectful (eg Kumbayah). I've also met people who think that certain hymns are "traditional African hymns" because those (18th century and out of favour) hymns aren't widely used in European countries any more.