A few thoughts on the end of choir season

We had a cantor rehearsal last night, and I was struck at the end of the vertigo-inducing trek, how the choir loft, the place itself, was somehow less.... fraught, without the prospect (foreboding? threat?) of preparing for a "choir mass", at least until Assumption.
I do love the choir, but the calm of Sunday summers is welcome, to put it mildly.
We had some musical/liturgical/pastoral successes this year, a few disappointments.
But I am trying to take stock, not of the last eleven months, but of my entire tenure, and the direction in which I am trying to lead the parish, and whether there is the slightest genuine possibility for long-term improvement or positive change.
I am well aware that the choir is not the parish, but it's problems and strength are not a bad microcosm.
Our last Sunday and the week leading up to it was typical.
Turn out for rehearsal had been scant. We had some refreshments, a not infrequent occurrence, and someone expressed surprised it had only been announced for three weeks, and printed in the choir program for the past two.
Someone else suggested all the members ought to be called especially, on the weeks that we will be having a "party."
Why? Do I want people there who wouldn't come to practice the psalm but would come for cheese cubes?
Someone else said that I was too lax with my attendance policy. (This person is among the least conscientious and the most... well, frankly, necessary members.)
Someone else said we should do a sacred music concert. We should spend our rehearsal time on inessentials? or schedule more rehearsals for people to blow off? or worst of all, have people attend the one with the "fun" music in favor of the one with the liturgical music?
(Although the reasoning behind the sung Stations was exactly that that a concert would have been -- a non-liturgical setting in which, besides the ego-stroking inducement of an AUDIENCE for whom to prepare some new music, [e.g. the Schubert In Monte Oliveti, the movement from the Pergolesi "Stabat mater,"] they'd have a chance to sing some old favorites that are inappropriate for the liturgy.)
The programming for the last Sunday of the season was disappointing and typical.
I have yet to find a setting of Tu Es Petrus that works for us.
My reduction of the Monteverdi psalm, (which I had intended as prelude for the ordination but had to ditch at the last,) is tantalizingly close, but still no cigar without two key men who were unavailable last week (one is Himself, and if he has a professional gig that calls him out of town, what can I do? and if he missed rehearsal but was available for Sunday, a situation that was discussed under my predecessor, the rest of the choir insisted that he be made welcome. The other is our strongest tenor, and the local undertaker, who naturally enough, does not have much advance warning of or temporal flexibility in fulfilling professional duties that call him elsewhere.)
I allowed the choir themselves to make some choices.
I have tried, in dealing with the (bad, IMO,) custom of a virtual mini-concert as prelude. to do two things; one is to "throw them a bone" as one of my fellow bloggers calls it, program music I do not think suitable for use during the liturgy that is much beloved. (On This Day... on Mother’s day for instance ... my first year, when I didn't, because honestly, it never occurred to me, I was accosted by members of congregation and choir alike, in tears of genuine anguish.)
The second is to use it, (forgive me,) as a quasi-rehearsal, to make the choir sit up and sing at actual performance level in what is really only a dry run, (to a nearly or even totally empty nave,) of something that will be more appropriate later on in an actual liturgical setting.
And since we can't possibly prepare the psalm, the acclamation, the voice parts on the Ordinary when we switch to a new one, a communion proper or anthem, an appropriate postlude, AND three pieces or so pre-Mass (one of my predecessors would program as many as 7. I'm not joking. SEVEN,) I have adopted part of her practice, that is, of several "seasonal" anthems which are repeated more than I actually care for (once, IIRC, we sang the anonymous, Viennese-classical-school sounding "Let Your Light So Shine," 6 weeks running.)
So I've tried to gradually introduce anthems or motets that connect us a little more to the traditions of the Church, settings of translations of the neglected Office Hymns, truly great hymns that were not in our repertoire, (including acceptable ones form the Protestant tradition,) biblical canticle, and in tiny, tiny steps, bits of Gregorian chant. During June, for instance, there is a lovely setting of the several verses of the Litany to the Sacred Heart, in the weeks surrounding the Pope's visit to the US there was Oremus Pro Pontifice, leading up to the Nativity of John the Baptist a hymn setting of the Benedictus which we were able to introduce in the congregational repertoire....
As we kicked off the Pauline year, since we had nothing appropriate in our hymnal or files, I wanted to use the excellent text that Kathleen Pluth made available, http://hymnographyunbound.blogspot.com/2008/06/hymn-for-st-paul-excelsam-pauli-gloriam.html
a translation of an Office Hymn, Excelsam Pauli Gloriam.
Since time was relatively short, and we have had great success with the tune before (it lends itself to so many permutations,) I chose the Tallis Canon. It makes a lively postlude, we can add in a pedal point on the organ, maybe some bells?
Well, you would have thought I'd handed them Penederecki, with a text in Swahili.
In the past I have discovered that simply giving them a canon with the words under the notes and the tune written out a single time is not sure-fire.
To whit, I had one bass who, after being told this worked "like Row Row Row Your Boat" proceeded to sing the first three words of When Jesus Wept eight times.
So I took the time to set it in three vocal lines, see? here's all the men, here's the altos, this line, the top one is for all the sopranos.
How come there's no words for the sopranos at the beginning, what are WE supposed to sing?
And this was BEFORE the smoked salmon and the accompanying wine....
Anyway, by Sunday it wasn't a disaster, but it was nothing to write home about.
And back to their choices.
Mozart Ave Verum. Good. We'll program that for communion, and we haven't overdone it this year.
Jesu Joy. Okay, that will be the prelude.
And can we do it with the right words this time?
I can't recall what words we have ever done it to other than the usual ones.
Well, as conversation goes on, it develops that what they meant was Joyful Joyful, to which we have a big splashy, (some might say, "bombastic",) arrangement.
Okay, but that will only really work as postlude.
It turns out that no one, not a one of them can see any reason whatever to have sung "Sing With All the Sons of Glory" to the same tune during the Easter season.
Okay, now I'm not wedded to that second text, we're talking about a hymn, not a proper but it disturbs me mightily that they absolutely reject the very concept of trying to insure that the words we sing at Church be as appropriate as possible, that is as specific as we can manage to the day, to the Mass, to the liturgical function.

"What does it matter? They're just words."
(That's an actual quote from a church musician, from a discussion about a hymn text which someone else said made no sense.
And I was part of a "planning committee" for the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord's Supper, where, when discussion rolled around to an appropriate Offertory Song, one member drafted to be on this committee which had some authority piped up hopefully, well, [names lovely young soprano] singing the Schubert "Ave Maria" always brings a tear to my eye....
The most vociferous member of my choir's why-don't-we-just-sing-the-words-we-already-know faction is also a reader of New Oxford Review, and a longer for the "old Latin Mass."
Which is disheartening, because it implies that any dissatisfaction with the status quo is all just sentiment. As is most attachment to the status quo.
It's emotion, not principle.
Which kind of brings me around to that email dialogue I'm having.

We have so much work to do.