"A Program That Is Consumer Oriented"?

Well, by its very catholicity, the Church often feels compelled, or rather, some of Her leaders feel compelled to make Her into, a liturgical Walmart. "We got it in every color, at half the price of the other guys!"

Another tip of the hat, (or should it be a wave of the mantilla?) to Sacred Miscellany for pointing me toward this post from Dr.,(Rev. Mr.?) Edward Schaefer over at PrayTell.
He's had an interesting journey, both as a liturgical musician and as a worshiping Roman Catholic, and the witness he gives is very moving.

Yes, I admit it. I have gone to the “other” side. I travel 100 miles each week to attend a Tridentine Mass, and it has rejuvenated my spiritual life and my hope for the future...

My first professional position was as a church musician. ...
All in all, however, it was a losing battle. The pressures to “consumerize” the music were relentless. Ultimately, I took refuge in academia. ...

For reasons that are too numerous to list here and somewhat irrelevant anyway, that chapter of my life ended in 2007. However, what is worth sharing is that one of the reasons for my departure was the same as the one that led me to leave full-time church work – a relentless pressure for a program that was more consumer oriented. I left that university and took an administrative post in a public university, where curiously enough it is far easier to be a devoté of the traditional music of the Church than it ever was in a Catholic institution.

Early in my tenure here, a small group of students came to see me. Somehow they had discovered that I was a chant “scholar,” and they asked if I would form a group for them to sing chant. We started a small schola. The local parishes were (and still are) largely dedicated to various types of popular music, so our music did not fit well into the local scene. However, about 50 miles south a Tridentine Mass was starting. We offered our services and were warmly welcomed.

This was my first experience with the Tridentine Mass since my altar boy days in the early 1960s. My initial reaction was more personal than that of the younger members of the schola, but essentially the same: “This is so beautiful! Whose idea was it to stop doing this?”

However, as the last couple of years have unfolded, my appreciation for the traditional Mass has grown far deeper than reveling in its surface beauty. ...

... It is no longer my responsibility to choose music that somehow will offer the appropriate spiritual guidance for the congregation – or choose music that feeds a particular taste or choose music that satisfies any particular political interest group. I am simply a guardian of the Church’s music ...

....For nearly four decades now, in every instance where I have been engaged in a process of “slowly introducing chant and more traditional music” into the novus ordo Mass, there comes a point when everyone realizes that the process is not really about musical taste. It’s more about living life through a somewhat contemplative frame of reference, about living in the world but not succumbing to the world, about living a life that is less concerned with rights and “self actualization” and more concerned with repentance and submission of self to a higher authority. The chant is not just beautiful music, it is the handmaid of the Liturgy, the Liturgy that should also bring us to these realizations. In the traditional Mass this intimate partnership between the Liturgy and the chant is quite clear. However, in the novus ordo Mass, chant seems too often not to “fit.” I often find myself wondering, “Just what has happened to our Liturgy that this music, which for centuries was its handmaid, is no longer fit for service.”

...Perhaps this may seem like a post that is not adequately focused on chant as music, but the chant isn’t just music. It is truly the handmaid of the Liturgy. It is ostensibly an intimate part of the traditional Mass. On the other hand, it is too often something of an imposition on the novus ordo. The continued presence of the traditional Mass, and its integral chants, will help us to answer more honestly whether this sense of the chant being out of place in the novus ordo is simply a question of changing tastes or it is a question of things much more profound. As we face that question, I, for one, will continue to give thanks that God has blessed me with the opportunity to help keep the traditional Mass – and the chant as its welcomed handmaid – vibrantly present.

I so wish Dr Schaefer well.

I don't see myself going the same way, but it would not be out of the question.
I have read in too many places descriptions of the growing rift between musicians and their liturgist employers in the '60s and '70s which put a "I'm gonna take my marbles and go home," spin on the musicians' attitudes.
But the more I learn of those troubling times, the more I realize it was not an Exodus, but an Expulsion.
Their gifts were no longer welcomed, their skills were contemned, their wisdom and experience ignored.
And I have felt like that at times, (and I'm not that gifted or skillful or wise... how painful it must be for someone of his talents!)
So one day, I will be determined, stay, fight the good fight, do what you can to improve this... and the next I am just too tired.
And I lose hope, and I think it is silly to put duct tape all over something that is beyond repair.

On the other hand, I find myself likely to be living in a place, and in a familial situation where I will not have options. (And then I think, thank God for the "silent Mass.")

Ah well... I'll go eat thistles.

One funny thing -- at a marvelous seminar on the chant that Dr. Schaefer conducted which I was privileged to attend, he joked that you had to be careful of expressing too great an attachment to the chant. Otherwise, people might suspect you of being a, (I think this was the phrase he used,) "closet Tridentinist," he chuckled, as if such a thing were beyond the realm of possibility, absurd.

Um, yeah.... wonder if he'd chuckle to remember that?