The Recovering Choir Director

I don’t have the words to state them as well or as in-depth as I’d like to, but briefly: my reservations for some paid directors are the same reservations I have for some paid liturgists who know next to nothing about the liturgy, its history, and/or its recent legitimate developments. I don’t know how much that explanation helps, but it’s a start, I suppose.

Peace, all.

Would Ms Dashwood object to paying clergy? By our host’s suggestion, it might even be questionable whether all clergy are worth their keep.

It seems to boil down to what a parish wants. If the people want good music and can get it without paying, more power to ‘em. If people complain about poor music and don’t get anyone (by hire or volunteer) to fix it, I have no sympathy. Likewise no sympathy for parishes that hire badly and choose not to fix it.

If a parish wants accountability and professional standards in a job most Catholics would agree needs to be for pay (priest, custodian, or schoolteacher) then the same standard applies to anything the parish wants to hire for. If the people object to how a person conducts herself or himself in a position of music director, custodian, or nursery school teacher, then the matter is either one for personal taste (learn to live with it!) or job evaluation and review (in the case of severe incompetence).

Mrs. Dashwood may have served in some musical capacity at her parish, but her post displays a certain ignorance of some basic tenets of litrutgical music leading me to believe that whatever her musical skills she, at least, would NOT have had the expertise to be “hired” as a director of music, or even to serve as one on a volunteer basis.

Yes, instrumental music is unnecessary, polyphony is unnecessary, harmony is unnecessary, anthems are unnecessary, the choir is unnecessary.

But MUSIC is necessary.

Church music, properly done, IS the liturgy.
It is not some extra, tacked on for your aestheitc pleasure.

And Mrs. Dashwood’s latest post is disingenuous, to say the least, when she states that she would be wrong to expect the Chruch to compensate her for her needlework skills.

It is simply a misleading, I might say dishonest comparison (I take that back if her pastor expects her to offer up 20 hours every week embroidering or tatting for her parish.)

She’s right that a parish that can’t make its mortgage cannpot be expected to pay a living wage to its musicians.

I know of poor parishes where even the priest returns his stipend.

That does not absolve prosperous parishes of paying a living wage to anyone who, at its behest, devotes himself to that parish’s liturgies.

Music, yes, but not necessary. Organists, yes, sometimes, but forget the “repertoire” and Bach/Beethoven. Forget too the Protestant hymns centered on us rather than what God did for us. Forget too the idiot-theology hymns. Stick to our patrimony of glorious simple music and Catholic hymns. Practically, it boils down to $ compensation for an orgainst if necessary but forget the salaries and phony ideas of ministry. One man’s opinion.