The Recovering Choir Director

Jeffrey Tucker has announced on NLM that the 1966 Proceedings of the Fifth International Church Music Congress and the founding meeting of the then-newly-organized Church Music Association of America, are now available from the CMAA website in a hefty 37-megabyte, 316-page PDF download.

He writes:

You will see that there was a great deal of apprehension in the air concerning what was coming. There was certitude concerning what the [Second Vatican] council was asking but grave worries about what was taking place in terms of the music world and the church generally with the coming liturgical reform, which was already taking place de facto. The speakers worked very hard to shore up the case for sacred music and deal with the unfortunate ideas about liturgy that were floating around, as well as attempted to come to terms with the coming of the vernacular and new ideas about the role of the people. There are some amazing papers here and some riveting material about the controversy in the press.

Reading Thomas Day’s 1990 book Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste, made me aware of this event. On Page 96, he writes (with my comments and emphases):

…there was a nasty fistfight between the Ancients, church musicians who looked to chant and Renaissance music for guidance, and the Moderns who believed that music from the remote past had absolutely nothing to offer the church after the Second Vatican Council. [Hermeneutic of rupture alert!] The fistfight became very nasty indeed at the Fifth International Church Music Congress, which was held in Chicago and Milwaukee in the summer of 1966. At this convention, the first such gathering of musicians after the close of the Second Vatican Council, the Ancients and the Moderns caricatured one another’s positions. Audiences were rude. Tempers flared. [Sounds like today's blog commentary!] As the Ancients tell it, the Moderns refused to listen to the wisdom of history and experience; they only wanted to twang guitars and sing peace songs. (The Vietnam War was raging; confrontation was everywhere.) The Moderns remember a different story. They say they were just defending themselves against arrogant Europeans and elitists. The Moderns’ crusade for musical freedom, they claim, seemed hopeless and it looked as if they would be silenced by powerful forces of reaction within the Vatican, but then Rembert Weakland, a Benedictine archabbot at the time, stood up and defended them; thereupon, the Ancients, hissing and licking their wounds, retreated back to their European basilicas. American Catholicism’s way of life was saved. (The truth is, both sides acted abominably. [Something about a clanging cymbal...] But perhaps the crisis of the Vietnam War made everyone irritable back then.)

To view their proceedings is to unpack Day’s dense paragraph; to read them is to take an unfiltered look into the minds of church musicians, scholars and liturgists during this tumultuous time.