Except, Mme., that la change de 1973 was a far cry from la meme chose!

As for the lesson which NihilNominus seeks, it is that each generation basically believes that the way things are/were in its youth is the way they have always been and should remain - forever. Few escape such a mind set.

When I was in youth, I, like many today, tried to wean my elders from the mawkish gospel songs to which they were congenitally attached. They cried out that they wanted the 'old songs' and few were converted to the truly 'old' songs which I was trying to introduce to them. Most learned my music. Some grew to really like it. But their love of their 'old songs' was not (much to my dismay) erased.

I think that most of us here (I've witnessed sad evidence of it) would be surprised, even shocked, at the day in and day out listening habits of our choristers, priests, and others whom we think that we are evangelising. They will, in varying numbers and degrees, grow to like 'our stuff', but relatively few will grow to see the cheap badness of 'popular' musical genres.

Few, all too few, are they who 'see the light' in the way in which one gentleman in my experience did. I shall always remember (and savour) the time (sometime in the eighties) when we were seated around my dining room table singing chant, motets, and such. As we were singing a certain Tallis (I think it was) motet, this gentleman, new to our group, suddenly sat up stiff as a board, stopped singing (as did everyone else), got an astonished gleam in his eyes, and exclaimed, 'why that stuff we've been singing is junk'. You see, this man had previously been in an Episcopal church in which they sang faux folk music and sacro-pop. The beauty of it was that he saw the light all by himself. I nor anyone else had said not a word. That man became a good friend and is now a beloved deacon at Walsingham. I spoke with him just this Trinity Sunday morning.