Church music

Fascinating... also a meditation on the utter uselessness of the labels "liberal" and "conservative" adequately to describe Church matters.

Has anyone ever read that book "Why Catholics Can't Sing"?  I have not, but I ran across a chapter from it on the internet.  What it said was something I had never heard said explicitly, by anyone.   Ever.  It's probably not what you expect, either.  But when I thought about it for a minute, it seemed to fit the facts I knew better than my current working model I had of the last hundred years or so of Church music history.  While you read the article, think about the following (it'll make sense in a minute): Dorothy Day - big promoter of Gregorian chant; Hilaire Belloc - liked his Masses "low and short."  Baroque conservativism - maintaining the mentality of the musical status quo railed against by popes from Benedict XIV to Benedict XVI; the reform "Liturgical Movement" of the 1800s - trying to restore Gregorian music (think Solesmes).  It also helps explain the broad range of people who consider me something of a bothersome troublemaker when I start to talk about Church music.

Please take a minute and read the whole thing, or come back and read it and then tell me what you think.  I know it's long for a blog post - it's a couple pages.  If you are a little weirded out by the "play" thing, be open-minded and give it a chance - Pope Benedict (well, Cardinal Ratzinger, but he stands behind his writing) uses exactly that language in the foreward to his book "The Spirit of the Liturgy."  The link follows:

Thomas Day on "De-ritualization."

In case you are curious, here is a link to a fuller version of that H.L. Mencken passage that Day references.  You should probably read the other article, the Day link above, before you read this one so that you have more context.

Comments

[Aurelius]

I'll have to (re)read the chapter later, but I wanted to note that while Ratzinger mentions the idea of liturgy as "play", he proceeds to leave that idea aside and dig for something deeper (I don't remember what).