There is much to discuss here. My immediate reaction is that the problem isn't so much the 'facts' (such as they are - or seem to be), but the slant in which they are couched, and the all-too-apparent adjectival bias in their delivery. The basic premise (which is an all-too-familiar one) is that such and such in the Catholic Church was/is bad (and indeed it was/is), therefore whatever replaced it was/is good (which indeed it isn't, categorically). This is, of course, an all-too-common and little examined non sequitur. It is, also, and exercise in illogic which, furthermore, suggests none too subtly that there was/is no good in the Catholic Church and no ill Protestantism. This is a very complex matter which isn't clarified by blind and ill-tutored polemics on either side.
Equally disturbing is the implied use of music as a polemical tool. True, music has many times, by both Catholics and Protestants, been shackled to play this role, functioning as a mere carriage for messages and memes. It's use by Luther was hardly an historical first. Even Ambrose's hymns played a similar role in the combat with Arianism. Regardless of who uses music to further which goal, the kidnapping of such a sublime art for adversarial purposes is a sad and cheap degradation of so noble an art.
church, most people only heard austere plainchant, sung in Latin by a choir.
Well, of course it was in Latin. Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper....! It had been that way for years upon years. On the other hand, "austere plainchant"...."austere? Has no one at the BBC ever heard Missa Cum Jubilo?
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