The Recovering Choir Director

Cantor at Cantate Deo raises an excellent point regarding the bishops’ overwhelming approval of their guidelines on music for worship:

It occurred to me today that the same bishops who voted on “Sing to the Lord” (SttL) were once the parish priests who thought “Be Not Afraid” was just fine for funerals. In other words, I wonder if we don’t have a musically illiterate episcopate in this country.

And how many of us have pastors who appear simply not to care how well the liturgy is celebrated? It is out of this pool that the U.S. bishops have been selected. Again: the bishops who voted on SttL were the pastors when “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” was a responsorial psalm in the 1980s.

Jeffrey Tucker takes the ball and runs with it at NLM:

What he doesn’t really answer is why. With this in mind, I would like to offer a theory. For as long as any living person can remember, the music of the Mass has mostly (there are exceptions but I’m speaking about a general rule) consisted of: picking hymns from the hymnbook and singing them. Point and sing.

The only real talent here is really a task-based skill of being able to play a keyboard or strum a guitar. There’s just not a lot to it, and hasn’t been for a very long time. It’s not rocket science in this model. It is transparently easy in every way. Is it any wonder that neither the people who do this and nothing more (whether as professionals or volunteers), nor their craft, do not elicit a great deal of respect from the clergy? And can we really understand the fullness of the liturgical endeavor without understanding the music that is attached to it? I don’t think so, or at least we can’t appreciate what a gorgeous integration of theology and art the liturgy represents.

To that I will add that whenever certain musically or liturgically illiterate priests are confronted with the ‘problem’ of a musician they hired who is not only skilled at his craft but also discovers the standards laid down by the Church - in both faith and music—there is a tendency towards defensiveness. Especially when the idealism tends towards stridency.

The solution lies in the proper musical formation of priests in seminary, as an NLM commentator reminds us. Once that effort happens on a large scale, and is sustained over generations, overwhelming passages of episcopal conference documents such as “Sing to the Lord” will be unthinkable.

Papal pronouncements toward that end have been largely unheeded (if not initiated and dismantled) for over a century.