I don't think "Protestantizing the liturgy" is something Noel talks about much.

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Just think about it: Catholics don't have Catholic music and liturgy because the Episcopalians have it and it's therefore Protestant and we don't want to protestantise our liturgy. Logical! n'est ce pas?

Jackson, everything prior to this statement was most accurate and eloquent.
That acknowledged, is your perspective provided by a microscope or a telescope? Catholic sacred music, however specified, codified or modified has never, never (!) been encapsulated into a species unto itself, or been congenitally nurtured by a cultural ethos spawned by a distinct historical and cultural moment. Oh, yes, we RCC who've paid attention are, no doubt, envious, nee covetous of the heritage of the infused Ordinariate. But in no ways is it time to strut like King Chanticleer claiming, literally, the high ground.
I suppose I'm just waxing akin to my post about hammers and nails, but at this moment in time, a great part of me would rather be among the Chaldeans left in Iraq chanting in Aramaic than with real Anglicans doing Willcocks, or faux-Anglicans rolling "r's" to either Thaxted or Tallis, or with any number of intra-focused musicians singing anything from Kumbaya to Maher who actually believe they're evangelizing the Christ.

It is interesting and rather humbling to note that beauty in music and liturgy is not a safeguard against error and schism (or remaining in schism).

I have often wished and stated that it would have been wonderful if our Vatican II "reformers" had looked to an Anglican model when creating translations and mass music in English. Instead, they looked to some of the worst possible examples from questionably talented people. Go figure!

There is a Chaldean congregation using our sanctuary on Sunday afternoons and they occasionally chant things in a very untutored, unsystematic and nasal sounding way. I ponder that Gregorian chant could well be made to sound very similar if we traded in our rounded vocal tones and carefully tuned belcanto style for something more middle eastern sounding. Somehow I don't think you'd find it convincing as an example of the best of church musical art.

dhalkj,
Have you possibly missed the larger point I made and with which Jackson concurred?
Nevertheless, one could turn your example on its head and yet make the case that it just might be possible that beauty and art can be found in the "untutored (and) unsystematic."
I personally would be as distracted by a choir singing tutti bel canto as one singing like the lowlands' Mississippi shape note congregation within the context of Mass. Come to think of it, I have been thus distracted; back when Cdl. Bartolucci (RIP) was running the show in St. Peter's.

Breathe deeply every 4 words and you will sound like my soprano section. LOL.

I just have to ask: Why Anglicanism? I mean, is English the only vernacular that the N.O. is said in? So we Americans/Australians/Englishmen/Canadians/etc. can point to the BCP and what the Anglican tradition is and say: "See? That's what vernacular liturgy should look like!"

What about the Church in German-speaking countries? Should they perhaps have looked to 19th Century Lutheranism? Perhaps while we're singing Howells' Anthems at Mass in English they could sing Bach Cantatas at Mass in German.

And what about the French? And Poland?

More Crucial, what about Italy: What wonderful vernacular/Protestant tradition would the Italians have had to draw on? Surely Italian Catholics would not have really been exposed to Italian Liturgical texts, I am sure there were plenty of Italian devotional texts; but what about something truly liturgical, like an Italian equivalent to the BCP.

I ask this because I truly want to know. I think that when it comes to vernacular liturgy we English-speakers are often too quick to point to the Anglicans and hold them up as the model for Vernacular Liturgy. And it is far too easy for us to get decent liturgical music in English: the Palmer-Burgess, a ton of Tudor stuff on CPDL, there are Howells and RVW and Holst and Walton and others that we can get from OUP, Novello, and so-on. As speakers of English, I think it is valid to hold up the BCP model, after all it is part of our Patrimony of English Liturgical and Devotional Literature. But, from what I can gather, those who were instigating the Liturgical Revolution were mainly from Catholic Countries that had no real tradition of a vernacular Liturgy, and therefore didn't have that long tradition to attach themselves to.

(I hope that I am expressing myself as I want to, and that I do not sound argumentative.)

an hieratic

Good god, sir - are your Hs silent?

Few, though, would claim that it is not without serious defects
of vocabulary, rhythm and pace,
and, sometimes, clarity of thought and grace.

But then, you construct this little poem, and I think:
How can I stay mad at you?

MJO, what they really mean is thoroughly contemporary English in idiom and syntax. Shakespeare's plays and the Prayer Book are thoroughly modern English, but they might be considered archaic, which is the problem. Words have shifted meaning, usually in a narrower sense, and that's difficult, because the older meanings covered by words tend to be more apt in the liturgical sense. We can adjust to syntactical differences more easily, I think...

I also wonder how the minds of those audiences and worshipers adjusted, because people did not speak like Shakespeare's characters nor did they use on a daily basis the BCP vocabulary. Yet, in time both were thoroughly well-received.

Salieri, this is part of the problem with a vernacular liturgy. There is no model for most tongues, but the Romance languages' biggest compromise, it seems, is the use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs whereas Latin would use only one word. They can stay close to the Latin without moving too far from the original in form or losing a sense of it being the vernacular. Although their usage is now shifting, Romance languages (and others too, I understand) never had this weird pronoun shift in the second person. The plural 2P was also the formal singular 2P, and they never switched, whereas in English the plural 2P is also the singular 2P for everybody ("y'all," "yinz," and other local forms are quite helpful!), and what was the singular common usage became the formal address reserved to God. An example of this is the contemporary French Notre père, where they use the informal 2P singular instead of the formal 2P singular/plural.

In contrast, we can maintain something of a Latin-influenced vocabulary and syntax which has an obvious sense of the sacred, but we have to work on it in English being that we speak a Germanic tongue with a heavy influence of Norman French.

this weird pronoun shift in the second person... An example of this is the contemporary French Notre père, where they use the informal 2P singular instead of the formal 2P singular/plural.

This only happened in 1966, according to WP. But it used to puzzle me that Michaelas seemed to have so much trouble pronouncing "protege-moi" before it ever occurred to me that they were addressing God as "vous".