This version has a less driven sound:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N-hN740J6qA
OTOH, after the first verse, the arrangement becomes slightly more than a simple congregational reading.

I maintain that the documents of the church clearly allow some form of contemporary music, particuarly Musicam Sacram paragraph 61:

I think you have to view MS in the context of the time and place when and where it was written. My suspicion is the writers would have pulled their hair out over the "contemporary" music appearing in many Catholic parishes. That music is so divorced from tradition that it has become irrelevant to any Catholic tradition. As another pointed out - Chonak, I think without rereading all posts - MS was allowing for indigenous cultural music in mission territories, not the U.S. where it would be difficult to even find an indigenous culture. I still think what we have in the U.S. is a case of I like, I feel, it stirs my emotions, so it is good and appropriate. Don't think that is what MS or the Church ever had in mind.

Granted I approach music with 21st century ears, having heard much that would not have been heard in any 1600s society. I would agree that some appropriate liturgical music can be "boring." However, its purpose was never to entertain but to convey sacred text. Really, that is its only purpose.

Chonak, I was suspecting that this assumption underlied your logic - that the musical culture of the United States should not be incorporated into liturgical music. I've seen this line of argument before, and you present it better than I have seen it before. I nevertheless still disagree. The weak link in your argument, as I see it, is this premise:

I assume you're writing from the United States, jcl, so I would challenge the fittingness of using models of "inculturation" at all here: they are intended for missionary settings in which the Gospel is entering for the first time. In that setting it is fitting to appropriate the existing religious music forms of a non-Christian people, if they can also be applied to express the values of Catholic Christian worship.

I have never been able to find official support for this position in any liturgical documents. I further think this bends the text of Musicam Sacram past its breaking point: "Adapting sacred music for those regions which possess a musical tradition of their own, especially mission areas..." - if this was supposed to refer exclusively to mission areas, it would simply read "exclusively" rather than "especially." The position you are articulating suggests we should follow the "spirit of Vatican II" rather than the plain meaning of the text. Further, who is to say that the USA isn't a mission region these days? So many people have adopted secularism and either weren't raised in the church or now have a broken relationship with it. I have personally experienced how using the idiom of worship music can put our beliefs in a language that our culture is capable of understanding. I was once told by a friend who converted to Catholicism that a time where I played a mass followed by adoration was the first time she ever full believed in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. I've also had multiple people tell me that they didn't understand why adoration was important or did understand but couldn't figure out how to pray during that time until hearing me play worship songs during adoration.

I did some research on what the meaning of the word "inculturation" is to the Catholic Church, and I found this document: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_1988_fede-inculturazione_en.html
I found this paragraph of particular interest:

23. The inculturation of the Gospel in modern societies will demand a methodical effort of concerted research and action. This effort will assure on the part of those responsible for evangelization: (1) an attitude of openness and a critical eye; (2) the capacity to perceive the spiritual expectations and human aspirations of the new cultures; (3) the aptitude for cultural analysis, having in mind an effective encounter with the modern world.

Speaking of "inculturation of the Gospel in modern societies" seems to discredit the idea that inculturation is only about re-purposing pagan religious practices for Christian worship. What does it mean to have "an effective encounter with the modern world"? The document leaves this to the judgement of the reader. My personal judgement is that this involves doing what Musicam Sacram paragraph 61 calls for, which is "to harmonize the sense of the sacred with the spirit, traditions and characteristic expressions proper to each of these peoples."

Let's not kid ourselves: P&W songs are based on forms of entertainment music. There's nothing wrong with entertainment per se, but it is intrinsically non-sacred. P&W imitates various genres of commercial pop songs: rock anthems, boyfriend songs, dance songs, TV themes, advertising jingles. Even if you were using an inculturation model: those are not the religious music forms of any existing culture here. And it's not hard to recognize the structural elements P&W songs often take from their commercial counterparts: when you hear a P&W song drop the instruments out after two verses and bring them back, you know you are hearing a "breakdown", a common structural element in commercial entertainment-oriented pop songs.

I object to the word "entertainment." All of the genres you claim it imitates are genres I agree have no place in the liturgy. With the possible exception of "rock ballads," all the genres you just listed have a heavy cheese factor to them. I suspect that your experiences with people saying they were doing worship music were cheesy. Part of why I am on this board is to articulate that it doesn't have to be that way.

I suggest rather that praise and worship imitates the songs structures that are common to our culture - ballads, anthems, hymns, and uses the instruments common to our culture to support them. Entertainment music, as a product of our culture, will of course have some of these themes, but the distinction between entertainment and folk is that entertainment is by definition transitory, constantly trying the next new thing to make money. Church songs derivative of entertainment songs will sound silly in a decade. Folk music on the other hand represents the musical idioms that belong on a permanent basis to said culture. Something I always try to keep in mind is that I want to pick songs that my kids would respect me for having played in a generation. This gets to what Pope Pius X said about universality. Even when I am picking something that audiences will appreciate for being new, I want to make sure it has lasting artistic value. Praise and worship at it's best sets a Biblical text to a tune and uses the common instruments of the people to support it. Consider this song inspired by Pslam 103. It uses contemporary instruments but maintains a hymn structure that lends it to congregational singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtwIT8JjddM

In summary, I don't think that inculturation is limited to repurposing of already sacred pagan worship idioms to Catholicism. Rather, I think that inculturation is about harmonizing our sacred music to an idiom that the people of the culture will be able to understand.

On the general issue of P&W music, let me commend to the reader a pair of articles by Fr. Christopher Smith, who brings his expertise in liturgical theology to the Chant Cafe, our sister site.
In 2011 he wrote "Praise and Worship Music is Praise but not Worship"; and in 2015 he followed it up with a re-visit to the topic which discussed the reception of that article.

http://www.chantcafe.com/2015/09/lets-revisit-praise-and-worship-music.html

Folk music on the other hand represents the musical idioms that belong on a permanent basis to said culture. Something I always try to keep in mind is that I want to pick songs that my kids would respect me for having played in a generation. This gets to what Pope Pius X said about universality.

Oh, I get it. You think Praise and Worship songs are folk music. And because you personally don't find them "cheesy", you think that they are timeless and universal, and have a place in the Mass.

the earth doesn't collapse in a cloud of dust and fire because of it.

Yet.

Church songs derivative of entertainment songs will sound silly in a decade.

No. They sound silly right now.

And Chonak's listing did not mention Broadway, which is also well-represented in the repertoire-of-shame in many RC churches.

Did not the lighting of the Easter fire start from a deliberate, provocative, appropriation of pagan practice by St Patrick?

bigger problems than "Amazing Grace."

Is impossible. SMOD shall smite you for such talk, infidel!!

I have some small issues with the theology behind "Amazing Grace." I am aware, however, that most Catholics know little or nothing about theology. If the enemy is battering down the gate, it isn't the time to be arguing about thread counts in vestment fabrics.

If the enemy is battering down the gate, it isn't the time to be arguing about thread counts in vestment fabrics.

Send this thought to Cardinals Kasper and Cupich. What we sing at Mass is strongly influential of how we believe.

I 'proved' that Sir Thomas More's Utopia and Jean Jacques Rousseau's Contrat Social were poster texts for absolute monarchy.

I am sincerely impressed.



On another point, is "mission" land status created by intentionally bad catechesis?

.

I would have thought that most think of skating rinks, not baseball. Organs are only in the big parks (the Major League parks, although most of that is now electronic). But skating rinks have had recorded organ music since before I was born.

I've been pondering whether to pick up this point or not - decided I will

Thanks for jumping in Pax. You articulated some sentiments I share but had not quite found words for.

I was rather shocked to have my post where I cited church documents showing that inculturation does not only apply to tribal regions still attached to pagan practices and that Musicam Sacram paragraph 61 seems to clearly refer to all regions with a unique musical tradition and not exclusively mission lands replied to with unsourced claims that simply repeated the prior assertions without addressing the claims of my argument. For example:

The cultures to which you refer are NOT Catholic cultures. That's the starting point.

There has been a failure on this thread to engage with the fact that all music that is uniquely American is some blend of European and African musical traditions. While those who have grown up in a church with traditional music have come to accept European musical traditions as their own, this is not the case for those who have not grown up in the church and hear these genres as a foreign musical language.

The inculturation of European music in broader American culture has substantially declined with the disappearance of white-European-ethnic ghettos in the 1950s with white flight to suburbia. Coupled with growing secularism, many Americans have not grown up in a musical culture that views Anglican style worship as the norm. Nevertheless, some still have a preference for this genre. To be clear, I think people deserve access to this genre; I am arguing against onlyism not against the existence of traditional music.

Inculturation is at least in one sense about speaking in a musical idiom that the culture can both understand and experience as sacred. We must confront the fact that in nearly all American genres of music, the guitar is the lead instrument. We must further accept African inspirations to American genres, particularly the more complex rhythms that descendants of African polyrhythm. Harmonizing sacred music to the musical expressions native to the United States should reflect these traditions.

The historical incultured genre of American sacred music is gospel, in two forms, white Gospel and black gospel. Praise and worship is the modern descendant of white gospel; this genre can be traced back to at least the 1870s:

The first published use of the term "Gospel Song" probably appeared in 1874 when Philip Bliss released a songbook entitled Gospel Songs. A Choice Collection of Hymns and Tunes. It was used to describe a new style of church music, songs that were easy to grasp and more easily singable than the traditional church hymns, which came out of the mass revival movement starting with Dwight L. Moody, whose musician was Ira D. Sankey, as well as the Holiness-Pentecostal movement.[3] Prior to the meeting of Moody and Sankey in 1870, there was an American rural/frontier history of revival and camp meeting songs, but the gospel hymn was of a different character, and it served the needs of mass revivals in the great cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_music

Some on this board have an emotional preference for European hymnody over Gospel hymns. I do not begrudge your personal preferences. What I take issue with is the deliberate slanting and misrepresentation of church legislation on music with the purpose of making your personal taste enforced on other people and communities.

We see the results today in the rejection of the monarchy (meaning Americans really don't understand the church's governance model at all: how can your church be run by princes when you reject the very idea of them. You espouse individualism, the right to bear arms, insularity (a huge proportion of Americans don't have passports and never leave the country) and obstinate monolingualism (there's really no reason why people in the South, at least, should not be as good at Spanish as they are at English), deliberate mis-spelling of English-language words, writing dates in your own special format (have you seen the map of all countries which use mm-dd-yy format - you're the ONLY country in it). You took the pipe organ from it's Europrean home in church and deployed in your ball parks: when the average American hears the organ, they think "baseball", not "God".

Really? If I were you, I wouldn't travel to the US. The savages there might chop you up and toss you into a soup-pot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_music

Some on this board equate "holy, beautiful, universal" with "European."

To the contrary, St. Pius X said that anything that was holy and beautiful would by its very nature be universal. This can include music from other cultures.

Maybe in another 300 years, guitar might be considered appropriate for sacred music, but not yet

It has been reported that you can clear teenagers from a shopping mall, should you wish to do so, by playing Bach or Mozart over the loudspeakers.

OTOH, the majority Boomers and Gen Xers are totally into Bach and Mozart.

It should be known that I used to be a huge advocate of what some would call music which is not sacred. I became a "convert" when I experienced the organ for the first time. I was immediately connected with the concept of beauty and the requirement of that beauty to be distinct from the rest of the world, and that the music must not make the mass a concert.

I would suggest listening to some of the classics (Palestrina: Sicut Cervus, etc) and then exploring the world more. You will find "a new dimension in the world of sound" (how many get that reference).

Bach in malls would make me stay. I love listening to that stuff lol!

Thank you so very much for that, Adam.
___________________________________________

There are those (they are like termites in our educational system and amongst our 'intellectual' elites - they are often highly intelligent and even 'nice') who are bent on repudiating our culture, and doing so with a vengeance. Anything will do, anything at all, for the purpose of supplanting it. No other culture on earth seems to be plagued with such existentially contradictory currents. This is a condition unique to, and arising from, western liberal thought since at least the early XIXth century, which with a passion denigrates our own culture in favour of that of others, or that of the street, who, unlike us, are presumed (so it would seem) to be yet in a state of natural grace. (It occurs to me that G.K. Chesterton addresses this very phenomenon with characteristic aplomb in The Everlasting Man.)

As for the reported teen aversion to 'classical music' - well, to the extent that it may be true, it doesn't say much for those particular teens, does it!? The problem here is definitely not the music but a lamentable educational praxis and lack of moral formation - and those not-very-grown-up grown ups who think that the fault lies with the classical music. There is not a visionary amongst them. Further, the grasping at straws of these particular teens as exemplary of all teens (scraping the bottom of the barrel, actually) rather gratuitously fails to note that very large numbers, millions, of teens study classical music, love it, and are put off (to put it mildly) by those who sneer at it. One could ask for a more mature assessment of more mature teens, couldn't one! Why, even animals and plants are affected by music - positively by 'classical music' and negatively by rock and certain other genres.

Emeritus HF Benedict's justified concern over the threats of relativism are not without pertinence in this discussion. Indeed, the very idea of the 'objectively good' as opposed to one's 'personal definition of good', or that 'objective good' and what 'I like' are not necessarily synonymous, is repugnant to our apostles of relativism. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to note that the meretricious is very often preferred over the meritorious by too many in all strata of our society, who haven't even the grace either to be embarrassed by it or apologetic about it. Such relativism is a dagger pointed at the very heart of all believers and the Church as a whole. It saps society and the Church of cultural vitality, of aesthetic authenticity, and of intellectual vigour, not to mention spiritual health and wholesomeness. Thank you, but we do not need to be lectured to about the relative worth or cultural authenticity of Palestrina or Howells and chant versus Mr Haugen et al., and secularly inspired religious music.

(20 February AD 2017 )

Well noted, Chonak -
One could write a dissertation on why the Eastern Rites and the Orthodox seem to have come thus far unscathed by the anti-cultural manifestations that have malformed western Christianity, Protestant and Catholic alike. Their historic liturgies and their attendant music do not seem to have been the least bit threatened by the foul music and embarrassing liturgical praxes that have wreaked havoc throughout western Christendom. Even the Orthodox and Eastern Rites in the US, their youth and adult faithful alike, are free from these manifestations of decay. I suspect that the reason may well lie in some of those historic and fundamental differences betwixt the Eastern and Western mind, particularly betwixt Eastern and Western intellectual and spiritual formation. (Perhaps CharlesW could weigh in here.)

I have known numerous young men and women who finally threw up their hands and embraced Orthodoxy (not even Eastern Rites or Ordinariate) in search of authenticity. Of course, we can perceive that they left a magisterial authenticity for a cultural one; but, on the other hand, a good case (I think) can be made proposing that each, magisterium and cultus, has its own value and that, being the two sides of one coin, neither is whole without the other. If one or the other is besmirched there is no healthy whole.

You are not aware of the complexity of the music in O God, Our Help or the other music of the church since you are are interested in rhythmic movement instead of harmonic movement.

The harmony of a classic hymn changes at a rate of one chord per beat, which gives these songs something that most contemporary church music lacks: intellectual interest.

Richard, the goal of intellectual stimulation remains an arbitrary and dependent barometer of response still subject to the skill of the composer and the taste of the performer/audience. We've evidence that on this thread, what with my citation of FINLANDIA as exemplary, and MJO's rejection of same. If I go to a convention hymn sing, for example, I expect to be piqued by a tune/harmonization schema of THAXTED, rather than of MADRID, the latter a pedestrian affair (tho' effective) and the former an explosive one. {Sidebar- for intellectual stimulation, perhaps we should let jazz composers harmonize our hymns?}
Perhaps the same discretion, rather than wholesale partitioning, of 20th century sacred song, could be applied?

How much of that music could be sung unaccompanied by a congregation without a strong leader?

I don't mean just the refrain, and I don't mean just one or two refrains at the end as an additional texture after six minutes of guitar wailing.

How many of these songs could be sung with musical/artistic integrity, in their entirety, by a congregation, without one leader's voice sticking out of the crowd to guide things?

On a separate note...

You mentioned using this music at adoration. I think that, if there is a valid place for these songs in Catholic worship, this is it. Adoration is devotional, not (strictly speaking) liturgical. Even here, though, I worry about the focus on directed emotional tracking. If its the music that gives people the spiritual experience, they can go have that same spiritual experience in absence of the True Presence at some evangelical mega church (where, by the way, the music is probably done even better).

There's an analogy to be made here to cooking. Salt and oil make food taste better, so they have a place even in the most gourmet of kitchens. But salt and oil are not, by themselves food. If you routinely make them the most noticeable aspect of the food you feed your children (even if they sit on top of healthy vegetables), don't be surprised when they discover they can get their fix from McDonalds for less work.

How much of that music could be sung unaccompanied by a congregation ?

With a strong amateur leader, about 90% of what I pick

without a strong leader?

Maybe about 10%. But this gets to the role of the choir, which is to lead the congregation, not replace the congregation. In my experience, congregations will follow a strong leader, and if you don't have a strong leader, well, pick easier stuff. I note that this is by no means a problem exclusive to contemporary worship music.

I don't mean just one or two refrains at the end as an additional texture after six minutes of guitar wailing.

I didn't have any instruments other than an occasional violin at my undergrad school, so all the songs I play work with a piano alone.

I worry about the focus on directed emotional tracking

I worry about this too and make a point not to do it.