My favorite New Yorker cartoon (before I'd heard of the stage show but after I was all too familiar with the hymn to a Shaker tune) shows one worried cockroach telling another "Run for your life! It's the Lord of the Dance!" It's startling to learn that apparent innovations have pedigrees as old as the Dark Ages Springtime of the Liturgy itself: liturgical dance seems to be established in the 3rd century and the apocryphal Acts of St. John has Jesus lead a ring dance on Good Friday.

This is by way of recommending Joseph Kerman's collection of book reviews, Opera and the Morbidity of Music which contains (besides the expected appreciations of Byrd and Verdi, whose Requiem premiered in a liturgical setting) what seems to start out as a non-musical essay:

...I knew nothing about labyrinths before reading The Maze and the Warrior by- and this was a surprise- another musicologist, Craig Wright...Actually, music does not come up until about a third of the way in... the most extensive archival record of [Easter labyrinth dancing] comes from Auxerre in the 15th century, thanks to documents showing complaints about cost run up by the annual dance with its appurtenances and indeed its decency, for the dance also entailed a game with a pilota, a soft ball shaped like our football, and things could get out of hand. The organ played, and it would appear that competing clerics maneuvered their way through the labyrinth while also singing "Victimae paschal laudes".

We next get a survey of retrograde musical devices in the Notre Dame School and Machaut, and the special Masses at which the priest presided wearing armor.

The Armed Man is the Christian Warrior of the Maze. His recursive journey is symbolized in the Agnus Dei of the Missa L'Homme armé of Dufay, were the tune appears in retrograde motion; the Agnus Dei prays to the sacrificial and bellicose Lamb of Easter.

The Council of Trent did chant no favors and painted over Michelangelo's nudes, but I guess we can still give them a break.