I loved this video and shared it on Facebook yesterday, right after I saw it for the first time.

Pretty good stuff. The analogy is not false. We know what musical styles mean and light rock guitar surely doesn’t serve well as a backing track for the Last Supper.

But... but... in the tradition we Latins use silence, or at most a chaste monophonic chant, for the consecration. Even the Byzantines do not make the music "more dramatic" for the anaphora. And certainly not instrumental music, background music, not of any kind. For these reasons I started thinking the vlogger was a protestant, actually, until I saw the final scenes in a (modern) Catholic church.

(He should now do another one about church architecture, nuff said.)

I think "Make X Great Again" should perhaps be retired or at least put on furlough for a while because of... certain uses. However, the vlogger Holdsworth is Canadian, maybe that softens it slightly.

Hmm. At first I liked it, yet I also think there is too much emphasis on emotion. This is from the youtube author's description "It (music) can make or break the effectiveness of a film’s ability to capture the emotional investment of an audience."
So, yes, we want the music to fit the Mass, but we don't want it to be too much (wink wink) like theater, do we? Because we know from an earlier discussion that Holy Ritual is not theater. So, I think that certain kinds of music are more fitting to the Mass, and while his example is brilliant, the Mass is still not about manipulating an emotional response, is it?

Let me affirm and magnify what dad29 just said. Not only popes, but the recent council has made it clear that music is, shall we say, the 'queen of the arts' and named it the greatest artful treasure in the Church's dower. If we can for our purposes divest that Greek word, drama, from its theatrical associations it becomes clear that sacred drama (sacred 'action') is exactly what we are about in our rituals. Architecture contributes to this. Vesture contributes to this. Language contributes to this. Painting, mosaic, embroidery, the silver- and goldsmith, the embroiderer, the sculptor, and every conceivable art contributes actively, 'dramatically', to the message and the act as uncommonly holy and beyond normal human experience, divinely inspired, divinely ordered, and divinely oriented. Music, said the council, is chief of all these. If it is sad and maudlin during Eastertide, it is woefully at fault. If it is overly exuberant and glistening with solemnitas during Advent, it is woefully out of place. If it sounds like Broadway at a wedding, it is a curse. It is music's unique role to, more than any other art, transcend the atmosphere with ritually appropriate sound which enlivens in its own distinctive way the ritual itself. Just as uncreated light emanates from the All Holy in heaven, so do the arts, his own endowments upon us, play that role at his worship in his temple here on earth. In doing so it is inevitably drama-tic (active) in glorifying God, whose gift to us, by which to glorify him, it is. Its absence is a denuding of the ritual, just as not singing the ritual is a subtraction from it, NOT an addition to it. The absence of choral and organ music, and especially the absence of a grateful singing priest, is no different than the absence of proper vesture - as if a priest celebrated mass in a mere cassock, or the ubiquitous trousers and cardigan. It should be equally unthinkable for him to get up there and celebrate mass in the spoken voice, not employing, 'wearing', appropriate vocal 'vesture'.

'The Lord is King, and hath put on glorious apparel, * the Lord hath put on his apparel, and girded himself with strength', Ps. XCIII, Dominus regnavit. In our rituals, our 'bounden duty and service', the arts are that apparel, the arts and our grateful song-filled hearts.

No, the music at mass is not about eliciting an emotional response from the worshippers. In fact, it is best to remember that the worshippers at mass are not the object of the music, rather God is the "audience," and the music is firstly for the court of heaven to hear.

That said, all music elicits some response, usually an emotional one of some sort unless it is dehumanized modern music specifically crafted to be inhuman and a mere object. But although all music elicits a response, I think it would be unfair to say that alll music manipulates a response. Cheap music and poetry, such as eagles wings, be not afraid, or blest are they, manipulate a response because they are sentimental.
Biebl's ave Maria also elicits an emotional response, but as it is a piece of true art, it elicits much more noble emotions, and can be seen as appropriate for performance for that noble company that occupies the court of heaven, with whom we worship at every mass.

davido: Biebl's stuff is 'noble' because it lifts the MIND and the heart, just as the Bruckner E Minor Mass does, or any Proper chant.

In fact, Chant which is rendered without emotion (the heart) is just as sterile as is music that does not have appeal to the mind.

Indeed! Haven't we all heard the emotionless and deliberately ugly performance of chant (or any other music) by those ill-bred clowns who don't like it and wish to convey to others how awful it was.

In too many places, it was awful. That is why many did not object when it was thrown out.

One key element here, at which Davido and Mr. Osborn seem to hint, is that truly beauteous sacred music and liturgy will always elicit an emotional response. This is precisely because the human person is oriented towards beauty. Pleasure prods us to seek out and partake ever for fully in beautiful things. Emotion is not the end goal of sacred music, but it is certainly an intrinsic aspect of truly beautiful music.

I think Ratzinger referred to this experience of emotion as "sober inebriation" in some of his writings. It is an emotion which sweeps us up from the level of the profane, and joins us in that one heavenly hymn to the father. It is sober, moreover, because we join in Christ, the Logos, the supreme Reason when we do this.

Sacred music is theatrical, but only in reference to the drama of salvation, the richness of God's revelation. It must always point towards this reference point, lest it become sentimental; that is, emoting beyond its object