On the other hand, it's fair to say that professionalism includes meeting the expectations that you've agreed upon with your superior.

I know musicians whose pastors are willing to accept a No from the musician, and conversely I know musicians who are willing to accept a "do this" from the pastor.

Accepting bad decisions from a superior is not necessarily a sign of a lack of integrity: it can be a matter of "choosing your battles". It can be based on a rational calculation: is this parish getting better music with me than it would without me? Is my work here a good influence?

All this is tempered by the fact that, often, the music director will outlast the priest. So, I think that music directors will "suck it up", knowing that the priest may be gone in a few years. Also, any other MD position that may be more favorable to sacred music, could be trashed with a new unsympathetic priest at any time.

It takes one week to destroy a good music program. It happened at a local parish when a new pastor arrived. Eighteen years of program building went down the drain.

However, I will reflect the eastern belief that Tradition is a gift of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, there are practices from Medieval and Renaissance times that are small "t" traditions, not on the level of the big "T" traditions. The differences between the two are often confused.

"Are you absolutely sure that you are not somewhat overstating your case? I should think that nearly all Traditions would be shared by both east and west, as would be consistent with their nature. The only exceptions of which I have knowledge would be the matter of filioque and Assumption. There may be others, but I don't know what they might be. "

No, there's more to the differences in tradition between East and West than that. For starters, the understanding of original sin, scholastic theology and its progeny, individualism, ecclesiology, et cet. It's typical of Westerners to try to minimize the list, but that tends to confirm a sense in the East that Westerners don't get it.

Liam and Charles -
Be more specific about the categories you name.

Too bad!
It is a far more worthy topic than some things that words are wasted on here.

I think there is a political element, as well. There was an emperor in Constantinople until the 16th century. The patriarchs were not allowed to develop the political power the western pope did in the vacuum of feudal Europe. Not saying they didn't have influence - they did. But competing with the emperor would have been dangerous.

I have wondered at times, if Justinian had been successful in reuniting the empire, events could have been different. But for that plague that stopped it, a united empire might have been strong enough to contain Islam. We will never know, of course.

.

Well, Mr Phillips, this example of your work is quite good indeed. It is considerably above what might have been expected from the tenor of your remarks so far relating to tradition and sacred musical historiography. In fact, I had wondered just what the music at your church was really like. Is this typical? For all we know your 'boss' expects Tallis and Poulenc, Gibbons and Stravinsky et al. from you every Sunday and you preside over a fine organ - though I suspect that this is not the case. Perhaps if you shared more commentary about the musical regimen at your church and less advertisement of your not altogether unique 'professionalism' fewer feathers would have been ruffled. Is your entire musical program on a par with the example you have shared here?

(One might venture to note that some considerable attention to diction and intonation would improve the example you have shared.)

@Rphillips -- that's a recording of Matthew Curtis singing that piece, yes?

I have never fought for the singing of propers in OF masses because I do not think this is a fight I can win, so I plan hymns that are as traditional as possible, and which evoke the propers of the day as close as possible with their text.

I have made the case for the Proper of the Mass, and of course I was outright refused by my priest (this is in the OF, from when I was a DM). His initial ban was on Latin, so I offered to have the Proper sung in English, for which I have many, many resources, but he still refused, stating "I don't want chant." Of course, I obliged, respecting his decision. I also tried as you suggest here, to choose more traditional hymnody that reflected the Proper for the Sunday, but he also objected to that, stating that people couldn't sing the hymns I was choosing. Specifically, I would try to choose a hymn that fit the Proper from the stable that the congregation already knew, and if that wasn't possible, then I would just put something in that they could sing, since that is what the priest said was his primary concern: that people were singing. That's the main problem with that approach: sometimes, there just isn't a hymn that fits.

Though I have written much in this thread on professionalism, I would just like to conclude for now with the thought that we cannot turn this word or this approach into a bad word, or a sullied approach. On the contrary, it is a necessary approach in order to advance the very tradition we hold dear. It does not yield immediate results, but I do believe, in the long run, it will yield long-term results.

How would your approach yield long-term benefits? What would be the mechanism by which the current musical situation would change in the long term as a result of your approach?

But I think that this mindset corrodes the efforts we make to have good conversations with priests and others who have a different set of ideas regarding music and music traditions.

The problem is that many of us live in a liturgical world where the priest doesn't want to have the conversation with us at all. In those situations, it is much more difficult to even get the ball rolling towards progress, and that's probably an intentional roadblock set by those with another agenda, or as I've often said, those whose priorities are in a different place. In my above example, from my experience as a DM, the priest probably wouldn't have cared at all about what sort of music we had for Mass, but it wasn't a priority for him, and he probably had people complaining (although he denied it when I asked if people had complained) due to my stylistic change; the priest had told me that they were "fairly traditional" in regards to music, but that was ambiguous and we had very different definitions of "traditional." "Fairly traditional" meant "we don't have a praise band," and "we don't do P&W." What it didn't include was "we sing good, solid, orthodox hymns," nor "we include Gregorian chant as an integral part of our liturgy." I also think he meant, "we sing crowd favorite hymns from the 70s and 80s," as opposed to the more modern Christian rock and praise band types of music. Of course, the priest has the right to decide whether or not he wants to discuss the issue, but that sort of closed-mindedness creates environments where all we can do is accept it or shake the dust from our sandals and move on. I've also often said that just because someone has the right to decide doesn't mean that they've made the right decision, i.e. that authority doesn't translate into objective correctness. I believe my exact words at the time were, "just because you HAVE the right doesn't mean that you ARE right."

All of that is, of course, anecdotal, but it is part of my experience and illustrates a bit of where I'm coming from on some of these issues, and some of the things I've learned from doing the job.

Liam, the eastern doors are always open. We would welcome you with open arms. :-)

.

.

.

If it's all about "affect" rather than substance, we're already lost.

Yep, you got it!