Well worth your time to read the whole thang [emphasis supplied throughout]:
another cultural view, perhaps too obvious to be analyzed by scholars, affected thinking on liturgy and liturgical music even more: democratization. The Cold War made democratization seem particularly virtuous and the rise to power of autocracies in Africa and in the Islamic world after the Cold War has only increased its allure.
I use this term and its verbal parent "democratize" rather than "democracy" because they imply the making of something into a democracy which formerly did not have that character. To say that democratization is an important agent for change in the modern Church is an understatement, and in liturgy in particular it can explain many of the reforms, both lauded and lamented, of the past four decades.
Under this thinking, the perceived value of the individual has risen in comparison to central authority, even in comparison to God. Everyone has a right, even a responsibility, to some role in liturgy. Every individual is potentially important and deserving of attention, which means that everyone has access to a role in the liturgy almost regardless of qualification, in the same way that most everyone can vote...
...the reconciliation of democratic principles with Roman Catholicism, whose theology makes the Kingdom of God a central image and yet recognizes a freedom of conscience, is problematic to say the least. More problematic is the democratization of music...
Music and democracy do not get along very well. Music is the most communal of the fine arts, so this seems a paradox, but it is nonetheless true. When music aspires to anything greater than the pub song, democracy proves to be highly impractical, and the greater the number of people involved (usually a sign of a successful democracy) the greater the impracticality.
Symphony orchestras and large choruses, the two flagships of western music, are among the least democratic of human institutions. Here, highly skilled and artistically gifted men and women surrender precisely what democracy prizes most — individual opinions, interpretations, decision-making, improvisation, physical autonomy, and to a great extent, freedom of speech — to the absolute rule of the philosopher king who is the conductor.
Individualism of any kind is the enemy of such music.
The last thing a section violinist wants is to be heard as an individual, to have audible character. Rather, his goal is to blend into the group as much as possible, to become an anonymous supernumerary. And why do these intelligent people cede their rights so cheerfully? In order to create a work of high art, unique in all creation, whose being depends upon their total dedication and surrender to the communal action that is the orchestra or chorus. But the point of it all is not communal action itself, or communal spirit, togetherness, or any such thing. The point is the music itself, to make it as great as its potential allows. It is not a bad analogy for liturgy, when one thinks about it.
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[The so-called "folk" idiom] is an easy and attractive solution to the problem of what to sing in the liturgy, at least at first, and not without certain virtues, one of which certainly is that the music is not imposed from outside by a foreign tradition, but arises naturally from the people and therefore seems as democratic as music can be.
In most cases, the acceptance of folk idioms was and is entirely uncritical.... anyone who suggested that a popular idiom would not do in the liturgy was branded a reactionary who rejected the spirit of the Council, a person no longer to be taken seriously. This refusal to judge music has proved a disastrous mistake, for in place of a liturgical repertory parishioners have a revolving door.
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The revolving door of parochial repertory is one big reason why people are unhappy with current liturgical music: it never acquires, for most of the year, the status of Christmas carols, songs that we have known from the cradle, that provide a distinct and warm sense of return every time the year rolls around again. The parish that has carols like that for every liturgical season, as all should have, is a rare parish. Instead, worshippers feel a subliminal tension each week: "What will they throw at us now?"
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And so we spend a lot of time on music of poor quality. [Which, eventually] we can no longer stand to hear or sing it. It has failed, abysmally, the test of time. Once fresh and exciting, it has now become an embarrassment, often ridiculed by the youth it was supposed to attract....
democracy is thoroughly egalitarian. Everyone's vote is equal in weight; therefore, by extension, everyone's voice is equal in influence. T.... Authority and expertise are suspect; the majority rules.
... this conception is alien to the real world of music making, which, except where it is corrupt, is an uncompromising meritocracy. All men are definitely not created equal. Some musicians play better in tune than others. Some play more wrong notes than others. Some can play very fast. Some can sing so as to fill a large hall, with beautiful tone. Some can improvise and some cannot. There are better musicians and worse musicians and, when things are going well, the best ones are in charge....
Rev. M. Francis Mannion, [writing in 1988 ] in the journal Liturgy:
There is a whole generation of mostly young Catholic musicians who are severely disillusioned with the state of church music in the United States and who feel thoroughly unrepresented by the nation's liturgical music establishments . . . They experience incredible frustration because their training is not taken seriously . . . They worry, with good cause, that the ministerial conception of liturgical music often involves a bias against professional excellence....If a parish were to install a new heating system, or to replace the roof or a crumbling foundation, can anyone imagine that notices would be placed in the Sunday bulletin asking for volunteers? Of course not; the parish would hire an expert and then execute his prescription. But in the business of music, which is many times more complex than any heating system, the typical American parish shuns the professional and his advice...
[The collapse of standards leads to] a vicious cycle of underqualified church musicians creating a market for music within their reach ...
Perhaps the most common complaint about the reformed liturgy, which indicts not the form of the liturgy but its performance, is the lack of solemnity. Like music itself, solemnity is not quite comfortable with democratic ideals. We are solemn in the face of awesome, infinite power, something far greater than ourselves. Solemnity restrains our behavior and makes us speak quietly, if at all, and sing otherworldly music. Solemnity implies attention to something other than ourselves, even other than our own families or community.
All such attitudes are dismissed in a democratized liturgy, which, in case we forget, is of, by, and for the people. Formality implies a social rank (witness the decline of the formal verb forms in French, Italian, German, and other European languages in the last 30 years and the ubiquitous use of first names in the United States)...
The last and saddest irony is how unnecessary it all has been. The aesthetics of a fine piece of sacred music and the ideals of participatio actuosa are in no way incompatible. Take a simple plainchant. For the typical congregant who is not a musician, it is easy enough to learn. For the music lover, still not a musician, it has a timeless sacred semantic that drives the growing revival of plainchant in Italy and other places. For the church musician, it poses more than enough challenges in performance and subtleties in appreciation.
And it doesn't even matter that everyone does not belt it out, for plainchant sounds better that way, rising mystically and anonymously from the people of God....
Most masterworks of liturgical music, indeed most masterworks in any art, have the power to appeal to nearly everyone on some level. That is one of the things that makes them masterworks. In this regard, they are true democratic art, far more so than the banalities that can satisfy, at best, the lowest common denominators of taste. If this is true, we may reasonably hope that the rediscovery of the treasure of the Catholic musical tradition is even inevitable. For after forty years of mediocrity, the people will demand it.
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