This post is not about your politics: have you ever been "Trump-ed" by your pastor or successor? How do you deal with watching your work undone in an instant?
I've been blessed (not as a DoM, but as choir member) in that most transitions I've witnessed have been for the better. The only downer was at my EF Mass when our amazingly talented director and 1st rate organist who was moved on to pursue graduate work. The EF continues as far as I know (I moved as well) by very faithful priests, but the music isn't what it once was. Thankfully, while I've seen plenty of awful rainstick-and-djembe choirs, I've never seen a good music program devolve to one.
I was reversed at first, rather disastrously, so when that situation self-destructed after a year, my work was vindicated in the end, and there was/is a new Trump in town who is everything I could wish for my old beloved parish.
We've all heard awful choirs, but having heard our Swahili guest congregation raise the roof with a 4-part ordinary last Sunday (every single person at the Mass came early to rehearse) I'd say one person's recent fad might be another's venerable tradition.
Venerable tradition indeed! - It's not widely appreciated, but improvised polyphony, of the sort it would take our average good choir weeks or months to learn from the printed page, was commonplace in the late mediaeval, renaissance, and early baroque. The composer and the printed page as demi-gods, and the concomitant social forgetment of improvised music, are, as I think most here know, rather a modern phenomenon.
Though some others here can, I think, point to improvised group singing as it still flourishes in certain evangelical traditions, the nether regions of the Alleghenies, and other such 'folk' societies.
(All this is not off-topic, for it concerns the trumping of venerable traditions by the tramping of that tireless modernity which, from age to age, stanches untold treasures of human creativity.)
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