No you're not (you may, however, be a baritone or baritenor; Handel's choral tenor parts often require genuine tenors, choir directors' wishes and resources notwithstanding - sorry, but if you don't have enough genuine tenors, you need to skip over that part of the repertoire for your choir - it's too painful to listen to otherwise). Choral tenors probably provided ministration to Handel in Purgatory given his sometimes hateful voice leading for his choral tenor parts.

I hate Stanford's Ye Choirs of New Jerusalem. Shrill (even with dulcet English trebles, still shrill); contrast his Beati Quorum Via.... Drains the joy out of Easter Sunday even to merely hear it.

I misread the title and briefly thought we were going to be discussing the merits of the various pronouncements of the Council of Trent.

I guess we will have to wait for the future for some such discussion...

"anathemas"

I can't stand the tenor line of the Handel Hallelujah.

As a tenor who has sung much classical choral music in my time, I can say that Mozart and Beethoven are equally evil. I think that many composers simply expected their tenors to be able to sing viola parts.

* by Rutter.

There is Proulx anthem on "Amazing Grace," which is neither amazing nor filled with grace. I have an elderly chorister who has bugged me for some time to do this. I am thinking that if I do it, I can stall for years before doing it again. By that time, either she will have passed on, or I will have retired.

Well, Jackson, we all know how you feel about Stainer's Crucifixion . . . you're all for it!

1. Pitoni - Cantate Domino
2. Attwood - 'Come, Holy Ghost'

What's really awful is when every anthem and every hymn on Whitsunday uses almost the same if not the same 'Come, Holy Ghost', or 'Spirit' text.

My top three in order of hatred

Ravanello - Haec Dies (the one from Pius X Hymnal)
Willaert - Veni, Creator Spiritus
Mozart - Jubilate Deo

And I will add, since they are WAY over used in a choir that I sing with:

Farrant/Hilton/Anon - Lord for thy tender mercy's sake
Farrant - Call to remembrance, O Lord
Ford - Almighty God who hast me brought (arr. a3)

"Palestrina - O bone Jesu"

To be particularly cruel after an a cappella offering of it, one could take out a pitch pipe at the ending of that just to see illustrate how flat the singers got. It can be treacherous even for normally pitch-solid choirs. I think of it as Choral Purgatory.

That's quite an endorsement, but I can't agree FWV 62 is in K618's class.

Melo, I can't find Gesualdo's "Absalon", at least not in the more reputable catalogues. Maybe something else to seek out at Ye Olde Spuriousity Shoppe?

Dare I say it: Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus.

P.S. I liked it the first 500 times I heard it, but it has long since lost its appeal.

This mostly seems a record of overuse rather than profound awfulness.
What about some really ghastly stuff:
The Singing of Birds (Easter Cantata) - George William Warren
What strangers are these? - Richard Purvis

I agree that Mozart is a subperb composer, but was not much some of his best music written for the freemasons?

I wouldn't call Mozart a "church" composer. He did write elaborate operatic masses, but not so much in the way of ordinary mass music. I am not aware of any routine mass music from him, such as Propers, Ordinaries, or such. He wrote for the stage.

I suspect you mean Emperor Joseph II, not his great-grand-nephew Franz Joseph....

There is nothing new under the sun. Someone, somewhere, has always messed around with the basic structure of the Mass.

Yeah, Joseph II. Post-liturgical time is not a time to be pressed for exact details . . .

And I finally figured out one of my least favorite anthems: Yon's Jesu Bambino. It's sad that a man of such talent be remembered for an awkward piece that paved the way for the likes of "What Child is This?/Child of the Poor".

I would think Haydn masses would be much closer to useful for mass. However, the EF masses don't work for the OF since the missal has changed. You really have to do some cobbling to make them fit. The whole world has changed since those were written. Given the repetition in some of those mass settings, it would be difficult to get a congregation to sit still for them on a typical Sunday morning.

Some musicians in my area drag out that Coronation Mass for special occasions. I think any stage work by most Italian opera composers would accomplish the same. I have said those performances were concerts, not masses.

The Spatzenmesse is easier to use during Mass than the Missa Papae Marcelli, as beautiful as that is, in the new missal, in my view.

Jackson, I think they had a different view of FCAP. What they did somewhat misses the mark. But it isn’t worth throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I also don’t think the medieval liturgy would fit the post–Vatican II view of FCAP, even the Dr. Mahrt way of chanting the Ordinary and Propers with robust congregational knowledge of the former.

And Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven's patrons were commissioning music to overawe their subjects rather than for their own worship?

I think that secular styles infiltrate church music in every age, and are still doing so. Granted, the secular may have been of higher quality at a given time.

When did a dotted eighth note - sixteenth note - quarter note or dotted eighth note -sixteenth note -half note motive take on the character of a "jazz-flip rhythm." Guess I missed that one in theory class.

Lest anyone think that what is said just above expresses disdain for gorgeous and splendid liturgy, let him or her think again. But, it must embrace the direct participation of the faithful, not alienate them.

That's the rub—define "participation." Perhaps FCAP indicates the congregation's active, conscious, internal prayer that is united with the more refined singing of the choir (which may be singing, say, the Gloria in a setting by Palestrina or Mozart), instead of meaning that everyone must be singing everything all the time (or even just something part of the time). The latter automatically means you are going to get a less beautiful musical result, which (I would argue) will foster a less meaningful prayer on the part of the congregation.

And that brings me to this point, the one that riles everyone up when I say it: for this reason, as well as for reasons of musical grammar, every single piece of "congregational" music, without exception, is musically and liturgically inferior to every single piece of "professional" music (for lack of a better term).

Let the fireworks begin—happy belated Fourth of July!

Some clarification seems, yet again!, needful. There seem to be those who, in justified horror of the abuses of the last sixty years (which, it must be said, differ from those of the previous hundreds of years only in their form), wish to discredit the true participation, which is at once passive and active, inwardly and outwardly expressive of the soul's awe and ecstacy at worship. The recent council spoke wisely, and a few hundred years belatedly, in admonishing and teaching that the faithful should participate in the mass, not in private devotions at mass; that they should be mentally engaged, prayerfully in profound reverence, and actively (that means activity that is both inward and outward). I think that St Paul's exhortation (loosely recalled) 'show me your faith, and I will show you my works' is a cogent reminder that without works, which include vocal, physical, involved expressions of a profoundly reverent soul, there is no real worship. It is very wrongful to seek to demean heartfelt song, bowing and scrapping, making responses with full voiced joy, as if these were the enemies of the inward disposition which some would have us believe is obliterated by such outward acts. If there is no outward act, there is no inner disposition - if there are no works, there is no faith. The mass, how many times does it need to be repeated?, is not an occasion for private, solely inward, devotion. It is the People of God unified, as one, in unmistakable praise and thanksgiving (eucharist) of and to God for his ineffable gifts and goodness to us and to all men. And to think that there are those who come to the Supper of the Lamb with their mouths glued shut when they should be singing with thankful hearts 'and on earth peace to men of good will', their voices barely audible, and wish to pass this off as an inward activity. It isn't.

This is not a diatribe against inward worship, inward activity properly understood, inward ecstasy. Quite the contrary. That silence in which one can hear 'the still, small, voice' is a spiritual jewel without price. There is no spiritual life without these. But, if they are not expressed outwardly at the public worship which is the mass, they are, somehow (charitably expressed) specious. There is no faith without works. Faith without works is dead. Likewise, there is no inward life if there is no outward expression of it - AT MASS.

We all know that none of us is an apologist for any of the gruesome abuse that has been heaped upon the mass and upon God's people in the last sixty years. We also all know that everybody does not have to be outwardly (or inwardly) active in the same way at the same time. Everybody does, though, have specific times at the mass at which his 'active' participation is more inward than outward, or more outward than inward. We all know this, don't we!!! So, kindly stop using this as a cudgel by which to discredit our 'bounden duty and service' to worship God with our whole selves, 'in spirit and truth', ignited and enlighted by the Holy Ghost, at public worship.

But then you knew that didn't you, and this is just contradiction for the sake of contradiction.

No, it's not!"