The Recovering Choir Director

would you be looking mainly for music that was done, or would you want other observations as well (homily notes, high/low points of the Mass, subjective response, etc.)? As a cantor, the music picks are interesting because I occasionally get new ideas; homily notes would be interesting for other reasons.

I like it — I tend to take notes at Mass anyway if there’s anything memorable (and especially if I’m not in my own parish.)

Sounds like a lot of work, but it could be very useful. It would need an easy-to-use form supplying a database divided in the most simple way: day, year, hymns, Mass settings, propers, etc.

One of the great difficulties of commenting on the current state of Catholic liturgy is precisely that there is no such thing as a modal liturgy in the US; there are only parish-specific liturgies, which can be dramatically different from hour to hour. A visitor to new parish would get a very different impression from attending different Sunday liturgies. And since it is no longer considered fashionable to identify particular liturgies as “folk” or “traditional,” it can be difficult to know what you are getting into in a single parish, much less to know anything about what is going on in the country at large.

The most recent approximation of a national survey of music trends in the US that I know of is the 1995 survey by the St. Anthony Messenger. The 1981-1989 Notre Dame survey is interesting in some ways. It showed that only 1 in 70 liturgies in the study had a sung Credo, and that “Low levels of engagement are associated with an exclusive use of hymns at Mass, with the use of guitar rather than organ, and with the amount of singing the congregation is expected to do. If the congregation is expected to sing everything, boredom levels also rise.”

Love to know of some other national survey. What percent of parishes or parish liturgies in the US employ any Latin at all? Is it 25% or 1% or 0.01%?

Not that this idea could provide that level of quantitative information but it could help fill a gap in knowledge of current Catholic liturgical culture.

” I am not surprised by the low numbers on a sung Credo; the US BCL discouraged the practice”

I find this startling (not that it isn’t sung, but that the BCL is agin’ it.)
For what possible reasons?
Can you cite where?

Music in Catholic Worship (1972), article 69:

“It is usually preferable that the Creed be spoken in declamatory fashion rather than sung. If it is sung, it might more effectively take the form of a simple musical declamation rather than that of an extensive and involved musical structure. “