Thank you for the plug… I couldn’t tell though if you generally agreed or disagreed with my point that relying on the “competent musician” to make judgments about music’s suitability for liturgy is naiive at best and catastrophic at worst. It seems to be a root cause of the problem in my opinion.

That isn’t to say that Church musicians don’t need to be competent…they certainly need competence in music… but the issue of determining music’s suitability for liturgy is, oddly, outside of the sphere of musical expertise, just as being an expert in literature does not necessarily qualify one to select liturgical readings. It may seem counter-intuitive but it is nonetheless true.

“First, giving people what they want is not always the right thing.”

Indeed — in fact, hear, hear. The Liturgy is not about us, much less what we want, or what we “relate to,” or how we feel. If worship is theocentric, that is, if the point of worship is, indeed, worship, and therefore, God, as opposed to making us feel good, or validated, or needed, or raising our sel-esteem, then this issue would never raise its head. It is only when you remove God from the liturgy by making it some sort of feel-good group therapy session, AKA Oprah church, that suddenly, bringing in the worst sort of “pop” music into church becomes an issue.

That is my general Orthodox viewpoint. We do have our own liturgical music issues, but this is not one of them, because we have not yet succumbed to the Oprah church (and God willing, never will). And however strongly I may disagree with some of my brethren about liturgical music, I hope the issues about which we disagree are the worst we have to address. And I suspect you might get an even more conservative position from an Eastern Rite commenter than I.