like when I read a passage of St. Thomas that mentions fire as a specific example of any broader principle,

Your analogy reminds us to take similes metaphorically.

The sacred curriculum also includes an equally authoritative textbook of sacred music: The Roman Gradual. ... and carries the same authority as the Lectionary or Missal.

It has not been my experience that the GR has the same authority (de facto at least) as the Lectionary nor the Missal.

Most modern Catholic parishes have fallen prey to the “four-hymn syndrome,” which was ultimately borrowed from our Methodist brethren

Does anybody know if that is actually true? If it is, I've got some other comments to make about the subject.

Young monks or cantors would sing the difficult parts, and the rest of us would slog our way through the easier remainder.

Maybe Dr. Mahrt can enlighten me on this one, but this seems factually incorrect.

Most parishes fly by the seat of their pants, using missalettes and throw-away liturgical planners, with no master plan.

Yup, and priests just hand us the liturgy magazine that comes with the missalette subscription and say, "pick from here."

Reserve a meaningful part of the parish budget to provide quality music for Mass.

Sound advice, but I know at least one priest to whom music means nothing beyond schmaltz and making people feel good. I mean, exactly how much should we pay for entertainment?

Think of your music director as a qualified educator, not a soloist or entertainer, and pay appropriately

Again, sound advice, but I actually AM a qualified educator, with a license and experience teaching music, but I was never treated as such by my former boss.

Is the parish choir or music ensemble healthy and growing?

This may not be under the control of the music director nor pastor.

My point is that even though there are good points in the article, and most of us know what the Church wants us to do, it is meaningless without a priest who is willing to allow it.

It occurred to me after posting the above, where were the editors of the once great "First Things?"

I liked a lot of what was said in the article, but would correct one little detail:

The Roman Gradual . . . was published after the Second Vatican Council in 1974, and carries the same authority as the Lectionary or Missal.

The 1974 Gradual was published by Solesmes as a "private edition" (see the footnote on page 8) which intentionally omitted a few chants which the Holy See chose to retain as options in the 1972 Ordo cantus Missae. The only decree of approval in the '74 Gradual was the decree of approval for the OCM; so it's fair to describe the Gradual as modeled after an official liturgical book - but not completely following it, and not bearing the same authority.

...the faithful must sing and stand throughout the whole procession as a signifier of unity...

This. It's like the congregation has to prove somehow, at every Mass, that they are one in Christ. When I hear statements like that (such as from SttL), I can't help but feel like it's just for show.

Then at the recessional, one ought to do a hymn and strike everyone with a beautiful (and outrageously simple, all things considered) descant on the final verse.

Not quite sure about the "outrageously simple, all things considered" part and not restricted to the final verse, because it consists of one descant on verse 2, another descant on verse 3, and both descants on the final verse 4 ... but here is the recessional hymn from opening Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit at the 2011 Colloquium:

http://music.dierschow.com/2011Colloquium/14Tuesday/Mass/Come Down O Love Divine.mp3

Well, descants will typically be placed in the penultimate verse (and sometimes the second verse) if the ultimate verse involves alternate keyboard harmonization - confronting the congregation with the latter AND a descant if the tune is not, say, something like the Old Hundredth, may end up leaving the congregation in the dust.

Many thanks for the above recording. One's heart is raised on high. Methinks, though, that a descant on every or too many stanzas really spoils the effect, which should be sudden enthrallment, not a less enthralling continuum. I, as an 'ordinariatist', do, though, as anyone might expect, quite love descants. They have much more effect if they are on the penultimate stanza, leaving the ultimate one free for the organist to improvise upon. If they are sung on more than one stanza, the stanzas ought not to be successive. Just my very, very, lowly and humble opinion.

It is always possible to plan...build a descant on a reharmonization for the last verse.

It's fun for me to see these comments for the first time, more than six years after I wrote the article under discussion. I stand by what I wrote, and the intervening six years have not changed my opinions.

Today, Catholics largely still do not know how to sing, nor how to read music; and while we all enjoy listening to a great choir sing polyphony during Mass, the documents of the Second Vatican Council and earlier call for the congregation to sing. Most congregation members don't know how to sing, and therefore they don't sing. How do we bridge that gap?

We plan and follow a curriculum.

I actually did my thesis for second masters degree (Choral Music and Organ) on this very topic, supervised by a board of entirely secular educators at Syracuse University. FYI, my first Masters is in Education, Literacy, and Curriculum development. My second masters thesis sought to understand the factors that lead to strong congregational singing and musical literacy. This was a huge challenge as a Catholic, to try to explain things which are matters of the heart and mind (a Catholic mind, at that!) to folks who had no background or shared experience. Anyhow, to provide a common language with my board, I decided to approach the question using data. I conducted surveys and used the data to perform statistical analysis. Accordingly, with this empirical data from across the world, hundreds of churches, I have a good say on what leads to good singing and musical literacy in Church. This was the impetus and focus behind the article and the recommendations, of course coupled with my 20+ years of professional experience as an organist and choir director.

The purpose of the article was to outline practical ways and next steps that a mainstream parish can follow to raise the musical literacy of the entire congregation (which in the end will make your choir better and more capable!). Prudence is not a rule, but an approach and a virtue; and certainly I wasn't writing the article to be dogmatic or suggest rules will bring about the best results for one particular parish. The more important thrust of the article is that if anyone cares to improve the music in their parish, certain approaches can raise the musical literacy across the entire parish (which, at least in theory, will help improve the quality of the choir). I have seen these approaches bring about this result in the parishes where I have served. The approaches I recommended are not saying "sing garbage and abandon polyphony" but rather to take an educators eye to things and allow opportunities for the congregation to learn and improve over time.

Readers from this forum are welcome to share disagreements with me, or claim that's not how Bill Mahrt or Jeffrey Morse or others do things. That's okay by me - I am friends with both of them and relate as an equal. However what I can't abide is the comment that people did things differently at the HOLY SACRED MUSIC COLLOQUIUM!!! ...as if a gathering of like-minded traditional Catholics who love traditional music is in any way representative of the culture or realities in any average American Catholic parish, where the real work of renewal remains. Come on, y'all, the COLLOQUIUM is preaching to the choir, literally! I've been to these events and enjoy the hope and energy they provide for all of us, but by NO means are the experiences there liturgically normative or authoritative for other situations.

Every community is different and based on my experience in mainstream parishes, the revolution for great music in our parishes is not won through tactics but through a long strategy, one that follows educational best practices such as I have outlined in my article and really gets the average parishioner in the pew interested and involved in the music. Without that engagement, the most common comment will be "why can't we sing XXX, not this Latin stuff that nobody knows." As I've experienced painfully at a few times in my career, no pastor will keep a music director for very long when the feedback from the congregation is overwhelmingly negative and people are leaving and collections are tanking... no matter how excellent the music may be from an academic or performance perspective. The strategies I outlined are ways to engage the congregation in its own renewal, to avoid this negative outcome we've all seen so many times.

To those who commented above, I guess I can see the criticisms mounted as remotely or possibly valid for a more traditional parish (i.e. oh yeah, all of our people know Mass II by heart, we sing it every year at Christmas!!), but I cannot see the criticisms as valid for mainstream parishes (i.e. our people sing Mass of Renewal and few OCP things well, otherwise they don't sing and don't want polyphony or things that will make Mass go long). The mainstream parishes were the target audience for my article; and based on the wide readership the article received at FT, the discussion it stimulated and the FT editors' praise of it, I think it's been a success.