A lot of people think that differing ideas about church music are just matters of personal taste, but the Church has teaching on the subject and presents models for us to follow. The expressions of that teaching reached their highest level in the 20th century, with a series of documents from the Popes and from Vatican II. While I wouldn't try to summarize it all in the format of a forum comment, those teachings give us some principles that guide us. CMAA is all about following the ideals of sacred music according to the Church's teaching.

One principle about sacred music is that it should be recognizably sacred in form. Music that adopts the styles of entertainment music -- whether that be 19th century opera or 20th century theater or contemporary commercial evangelical pop music -- is falling short: it's following a secular style. One of the key words of the holy Mass is: "lift up your hearts": it reminds us that the Mass is not a continuation of our ordinary secular lives: instead it is our encounter with a timeless event, the Passion of Christ, which reaches across history and becomes present. Music that shouts secularity and emphasizes the ticking beat of measured time does not do its part to help us get out of our everyday mindset and lift up our hearts to that encounter. On the other hand, the Gregorian chants which the Church gives us as her official music for the Mass are all unmetered music and easily recognized as sacred music.

Quite frankly, it's not about what we personally prefer.

Do I like every bit of the Gregorian repertoire? Of course not. There are some sections that grind on my nerves a bit, as there probably are for everyone. That doesn't make it any less the music of the Church, by which all others must be judged.

On the flip side, I'm a great fan of Bruckner's F Minor Mass, Moses Hogan spirituals, and Rossini overtures - but including any of those in the Mass would, for various reasons, be inappropriate.

Ultimately, what moves your congregants is irrelevant. In fact, the emotionally manipulative sacro-pop of the post-V2 era is inappropriate precisely because of that fact - it puts the focus on merely human emotions and worldly passions.

Saying that "chant isn't to your liking" or that you don't think it fits with the Church means that you are rejecting an aspect of the Church that is as closely welded to it as any other aspect of the ritual. So should we take out the Old Testament reading in the NO purely because it may not move your congregants who feel the OT is just "fire and brimstone"?

"which doesn’t “lift up my heart.”"

The ZOLOFT Mass is available to everyone, just follow the hippies with the guitar cases. They've been leading music at the Mass since the 1960's but have never arrived.

Locked into a time warp of warm fuzzies.

Sandals optional, but no Crocs.

Parts of the chant should express joy, the melisma in a gregorian Alleluia is called a jubilus.
Unfortunately, collective a capella singing by a congregation of untrained voices is never likely to be lively. Whether it is heart lifting depends on how well you are embeded in the ethos, the more you use it the more enjoyable it becomes. Note the comments attached to this chant, (which is not gregorian).
So, I find this heart lifting, though I think it could be more lively. Perhaps not enhanced like this performance, but I suspect that a thousand years ago performance at a coronation might have been more like that.
I may arose the wrath of others here, but my view from the pew is that while I do not want guitar or banjo accompaniment to chant during worship, I can imagine it being useful while rehearsing with the choir. There are several videos available by Patrick Torsell, such as this one about directing chant, which I would commend. Though note that there are other schools of thought, and performance.

Some of the most joyous congregational singing I’ve heard was the Windsor Latin Mass community taking a Latin Credo at a refreshingly brisk speed. By memory.

Full, conscious, active participation, and I doubt any of the young families there were engaging the kids on the ride home with monastic recordings of Gregorian chant.

Church is church, entertainment is entertainment. Let each take its proper place, form, and sound.

I'm with Liam.
But y'all knew that.


But OTOH, if Banjoyist can do a great Bela Fleck and pluck out some Bach inventions at Offertory or Postlude, I'd accommodate.

The discussion about what music is suitable for worship an what music is not has gone the way of logical discourse in contemporary society. Unfortunately, it seems almost impossible to have a reasonable discussion with anyone about anything. In dealing with this question we have to be careful of the trap often put in front of us whereby we descend into a discussion of whether what I like is better than what you like. This usually develops when someone involved in the discussion claims that good or bad music is only a matter of personal taste and therefore no more definitive answer to the question can be had. I have replied to this by simply saying that if all musical tastes are equal and that, therefore, no objective criteria are possible, then my tastes are equally as good as theirs and that, on the basis that no better criteria than that are possible, we will sing what I say. This usually leads to one of a couple of predictable results, one of which is that we can now settle down to a serious discussion of what the criteria for beauty and propriety in music might be. (We'll forget about what the other consequences of my suggestion might be.)

Some of the criteria for quality judgments could be presented as follows.
Motivation
Craftsmanship
Historical perspective
The work should be the product of an artist (defined by Robert Shaw, who gave this outline to us, as someone who has not only the ability to order his experience, but also the ability to have an experience worth ordering.).

There are other criteria or other ways to address these things, but we must remember that judgments in art are quality judgments, not quantitative judgments. In music these require more than just a little exposure and training in the discipline. Let us not be intimidated into accepting the relativistic foolishness that has taken over the thinking of our time and refuse to give in to the idea that all things are equal.

If you can find a copy of "God in the Dock", a collection of essays by C. S. Lewis, read the one called "Bulverism". Here you will learn why "refutation is no necessary part of argument."

At root in this matter is the age-old tension between 'feeling' versus a holy silence and the tranquil operations of the Holy Spirit, which we may receive not through deliberation and effortful prayer, but purely and solely by grace. The anonymous XIVth century English author of The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling is far from alone in teaching us that God is not known or 'experienced' by or through the bodily senses. He stresses this insistently throughout his profound work. No 'sensational' or 'sensual' experience is nor can be an encounter with the Divine, who is beyond the physical and sensuous, created, universe, yet is close to us and loves us, as the Cloud's author puts it, personally and merrily, as a doting father.

Therefore, music which makes one 'feel good' but is devoid of objective artistic and spiritual value can only be said to be leading its hearers astray - insofar as its hearers believe this music to be of great spiritual value because it makes them 'feel good'. I have even heard some persons go so far as to assert that certain 'hymns' or songs by several of their number are 'anointed'. They are, of course, free to be entertained by these songs, even 'feel good' upon hearing them, but that does not make them 'anointed' - not in any rational sense of the word.

Further, such sensational experience, in itself, does nothing to make these songs appropriate for Divine Worship - the Mass or other rites of the Church, rites whose sole focus is God, the Most Holy Trinity, creator and redeemer of all, who is beyond the created realms of the universe, not on us and our 'feelings' and 'experiences'. Indeed, we are preposterously presumptuous if we go to mass expecting an 'experience' and to be entertained by a certain song that we may like when God may or may not, depending on our attitude (and his ineffable will), have something for us that surpasses anything that we can have thought of or wished for. And, if we (seem to) get 'nothing', that in itself is 'something' and we should give thanks for it.
________________________________________________

...find a copy...

I will second this suggestion.
It is a highly astute 'read' - as one would expect Lewis to be.

M. Jackson Osborn wrote: “It is facetious at best to insinuate that 'modern' church music is anything other than Stravinsky, or Poulenc, or Vaughan Williams, or Britten, and the scores of their colleagues who have penned music that will be sung as long as there are people who sing music that is truly sacred music.”

What a travesty it would be to perform Stravinsky in a Catholic church!

I know he was trying to be avant-garde at the time he lived, but I'm not convinced that counts for much when it comes to Catholic music.

Alas! If only we had a few Richard Runciman Terrys in a few key spots. The travesty is that we have descended from leaders such as he to the level of those religious entertainers who inhabit the pages of a GIA catalogue.

Stravinsky's Mass is actually quite brilliant and the organ transcription is very good indeed. I would have no issue using it in a liturgy.

And, since I have performed it (as fifth flute & piccolo), I post a YouTube performance of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. Not quite apt for liturgical performance, but it could (and should, on occasion,?) be performed in a Catholic church concert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LaUBcBTq3k

Stravinsky re affirmed himself back into the Orthodox Church around 1922 and began writing church themed music again after that. I've played every Stravinsky piece that included bass trombone and have come to adore his Mass and Symphony of Psalms, both sublime and transcending works and I have stories about each one. Lesser known are some of his a cappella choral works which we've done over and over again at Compline. Here are a couple arranged for men down a few steps from the SATB versions.

It is difficult to discuss "propriety" these days. But if we can establish that since music is something and that everything that does not conform to the limits of what that something is is, therefore, not music, we might be able to talk about the suitability of some music and the unsuitability of other music.

I have found that most of the time when this topic comes up, people are sure that I want to exclude the music that they like. Why is that? Perhaps our sensitivity to suitability is greater than we fear.

Regarding Stravinsky, I heard a story about how when he was writing his Mass and working on the Credo someone asked why it was taking so long. He replied, "There is much to believe."

Jackson,

Perhaps you misunderstood the professor all those years ago. Could he have said "properly ordered sounds"? The difference it makes, as no doubt you are aware, is that all sound has some order to it, but properly ordered sound clearly asserts that music has some intrinsic purpose. Like the cockroach, Glory and Praise fulfills some purpose. The cockroach fulfills his purpose by doing what cockroaches are designed to do, not by trying to be a butterfly. That's a butterfly's job. Music exists to glorify God. Some ordered sounds do that by the intention of the composer. Other ordered sounds..... not so much.

CG-Z. Saint Thomas Aquinas for the win!

Cockroaches and Twinkies will survive. Which are the Glory and Praise and the Haugen stuff.

Thankfully Mad Max is a Trad. For realsies. Welcome to Thunderdome, people.

...march to the dumpster...

May he rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon him!
Um - he IS a candidate for saint-hood, is he not?

OCP? I'm not surprised. I had hoped the good bishop would give them a much deserved kick in the behind, but I guess they are too profitable.

I have nothing to add to the discussion regarding appropriate music for the Catholic Church, but regarding the "David's psalms were modern once," and the discussion of instruments: from what I have read, in ancient Israel, instruments were used in the festive processions outdoors as a part of the culture. There were instruments used as well in temple worship for ritual purposes. Maybe they interjected during some singing. But the primary music in the temple was vocal, and that communicated texts of a sacred nature. As for the modern/ancient debate - all music is modern. Even if we do our best to approximate historical performance practice, we drive to the Church in a car, sing with the benefit of electric lighting, with a unique group of singers that never does the same music exactly the same way twice. So it's really ancient and new at the same time.

North American Liturgy Resources (NALR) was the publisher; its works were acquired by OCP in 1994.

Don't tell me about your EPA problems...

While some musicians may advocate for an exclusively chanted liturgy, with no other music of any kind, I am certain that that is a minority view, and would not be present in many locations, if anywhere at all.

Chant is the exclusive form of sacred music at the abbey I'm attached to as oblate. Gregorian chant in Latin/Greek for the Propers and Ordinary, French plainchant for the rest, at Mass. Lauds and Vespers in Latin Gregorian chant, Vigils, Terce, Sext and None in French plainchant (recto-tono) except for Latin hymn, same for Compline, with Latin hymn and Latin responsory and Marian antiphon. Everything is chanted, including the readings. the only thing not chanted is the homily at Mass, and the Intercessions at weekday Mass.

And it's pretty much the case at many monasteries I've visited.

For me, it's a foretaste of heaven. As is the Gregorian schola I belong to.

That said, I also love a quiet, spoken weekday Mass especially very early in the morning.

Ora