Popular music styles of music are totally devoted to inspire emotions.

The restrictions placed upon composers by the church were there for a reason. The use of emotional music during testimonials at RENEWAL groups drug this music into the lime light and, as you can see here, people mention it as a moving force in decisions they make.

FNJ, I believe you've set up a straw man no win, tictactoe argument here. You are spot on correct with the intent of folks like Wise in that era "composing" music to primarily move the heart rather than all of our faculties/senses. However, the restrictions you infer to be both pre and post-conciliar documents such as CSL/MS/GIRM/TLS etc. are the tools by which we learn the disciplines. But to quote Hammerstein, "You have to be carefully taught." And after that, the teacher has to assess and foster that learned discipline upon his/her charges.

That didn't happen then, and to some extent, is not happening still to this day. There were then, as now, true disciples to the liturgical exercises- the pivotal generation of Skeris, Schuler, Salamunovich, Wagner, and of course, Mahrt, and likely hundreds of other lay and cleric heralds in the new, vast wasteland. The other side of the coin's vacuum (liturgical indifference or confusion) was filled by the singing nuns, the Wises, Repps and Miffletons, the Don Osunas and Peter Scholtes, and then ultimately by the SLJ's and their heirs, who labored to give the folk idiom authenticity. Who's missing from this picture? The guys with the red hats and red piped cassocks. And their parochial vicars in rectories everywhere.

Once discipline is acquired, rules and law are codified and tacitly accepted, these mores won't last long if they're not enforced or cultivated to grow in strength and quantity over time. I daresay that if it weren't for the World Wide (inter) Webs, the burgeoning growth of CMAA among millions of other disciplines would not have happened so rapidly. Many of us would still be left to our devices and abilities, without a cogent, coherent guiding philosophy. And not to overstate the obvious, if more of our bishops were on-board with our love, respect and dedication to the liturgical mission that growth could be exponential. But on one hand when these guys get together in conferences or synods, it's like the three blind wisemen tasked with describing the physicality of elephants. On the other hand, when a "lone wolf" like Burke, Sarah, Arinze or Ratzinger offers solid red meat about the majestic truth found in liturgy, they're immediately dismissed as "medieval" renegades proffering museum church, by THEIR PEERS much less the media.

Along the lines of Al CappPogo (WKelly), we need to be mindful of "we have met the enemy, and he is us." All each of us can do is look in our bathroom mirrors and make sure we haven't become the enemy by inaction.

Though it has no bearing on the argument, I believe you meant Walt Kelly, not Al Capp.

If I only had a brain

I knew a straw man once that used to say the above.

Well, I'm old and not at all well. Thank you all for your fraternal corrections and charity.

Al Capp was Li'l Abner.

Abner was a smart hayseed, in that he married Daisy. Next to Jessica Rabbit.....uh....well.....nevermind.....

?

Noel, I don't see anything purposeful in the observation. If your intention was to initiate yet another kiosk of inflammatory rhetoric, then by all means, have at it. To me, it's just another game of pin the tail on some donkey.

Noel, I don't see anything purposeful in the observation.

To me, it represents an example of how this music and prose adversely affected people's lives. I can't imagine the same affect occurring while singing Holy God or Veni Creator. I assumed there were people out there who wonder how and why people were affected causing them to abandon the traditional.

If I want to be inflammatory, I'd have mentioned bowties and the ictus.

Should such a "kiosk" be entered into the listing of collective nouns, between "kine of cattle" and "knab of toads"?

Better that than near a "murder of crows" or a "murder of lawyers." Oh, and I thought it was a "knot of toads." Learn something new every day.

A minor point: It is tempting for musicians to presume that their medium is so powerful that an ill-conceived and ill-placed song might cause a complete meltdown of a person's understanding of moral truth, the nature of holy orders and matrimonial vows, etc. I get that temptation.

However (and I do not mean to be discounting the importance and power of music), there's a lot more than a banal (or worse) song at work in this story, the woman's recounting of events notwithstanding.

I thought the main idea of the thread was the Pope Emeritus' statement: "Certainly as far as the liturgy is concerned, we cannot say that one song is as good as another."

That is a great extrapolation, Kathy, but re-reading Noel's post, I don't find that overtly present. History has proven to these eyes that revisionism reigns supreme. The excesses of Ockeghem's parody Masses were decried in his own day, supposedly a part of the concerns of Trent, and now is still esteemed as a compositional genius and relentlessly defended. Okay, got it. To me, a rat wheel of de gustibus.
Now, to emotions- find me a more romantic passage in all of any music of measure 41 of Pierluigi's "Sicut cervus pars prima" where the tenor and bass voices rise in parallel. How are the emotions of singer and audience not touched? What about Mr. Architecture, JSB? No one's ever gotten teary when hearing "Bist du bei mir" (yeah I know, not Bach, not sacred), "Air G string," "Sheep may safely.....Jesu Joy.....Wachet auf...." etc.? No one's ever been emotionally moved in multiple movements of Vivaldi's "Gloria?" Samuel Barber's "Adagio" is merely an intellectual schema of suspension/resolution? Ligeti's "Threnody" is an inexplicable pastiche of nonsense?
You go down this philosophical road of discerning idealism in musical idioms and genres and as soon as you think you've found the rule, the exception to that rule will present itself. So why bother?
The one maxim I've learned in CMAA is (via Mahrt) you'll know sacred music when you hear it in church (the Justice Stewart litmus test.) But I think the same courtesy ought to be extended to other idioms that you have directly experienced, and not dismissed out of hand because it doesn't meet a rubrical criteria.
And I'd personally be in debt if anyone would remark to the issue of hierarchical oversight.

You and I are both spoken for, Noel.

I think that one cannot escape the emotional nature of art in general, and that includes music and architecture among other things. The issue that I have is when music is selected intentionally for an emotional effect that distracts from the sacrificial nature of the Mass. The intention may clearly not be to distract, but just for the emotional effect, not thinking about the sacrificial nature of the Mass, but that doesn't mean that it's not distracting. Enjoyable? Yes. Fun, emotionally rousing, and stirring? Yes. In context with the sacrifice of the Mass? Not always. This is where care must be taken when selecting and preparing the music for Holy Mass. This is why certain styles of music and other art are not permitted for use by the Church. The Extraordinary Form is extraordinarily easier to do this for (pun intended), as there is no laundry list of options to choose from, no arguments about which one to choose, no conflicts (read: division, divisiveness) about who gets to choose and when, etc.

I find it odd that the OP subject heard a love song to Jesus and fell in love with the priest (anecdotally). In the Bach duet, it is also a love song, though in this case Christ is a part of it, which is played out as a love duet, rather than a quasi-didactic pop love song (in Bach's day, perhaps the duet came across as a "pop" love piece). Anyways, it seems odd, and would be odd with the Bach, too, for someone to hear that, directed at love of God, and have it be the impetus to fall in love with someone else (admittedly someone in persona Christi.

Recent discussions (or things I've read?) have made it clear that good sacred music balances the emotional and intellectual, whereas there is little of lucid, orthodox intellectual thought in things like the OP music.

It s also an aberration or lack of order to desire to have no emotions, don't you think?

WWMSD? What would Mr. Spock do? ;-) "Live long and prosper" – "dif tor heh smusma" in the Vulcan language.

@Stimson can you provide a link to that article?? Sounds good...

Slightly off-topic, but this discussion made me think of a comment that an acquaintance made recently. He attended a family wedding in a nearby state, and he said that the wedding was an "emotional homerun". He meant that in a positive way, and it just got me wondering if that's what people want and expect from a wedding, or from church services in general. (I don't even know if the wedding was in a church, I suspect not). The heartstrings are paramount, I suppose!

You can't handly emotional homeruns?

You can't handly emotional homeruns?

Come again, Mr. Yoda?