The chants today XV Sunday, (one of the rare green Sundays for us this term) are beautiful, I really enjoyed singing them. I did not think they sounded mournful.

Even with a choir short on numbers I think we managed well enough. 1 lady, 4 Men and my daughter 14 y.o. singing with us today.

Any unfamiliar music can seem strange. The intervals in chant are quite different than in your typical hymn. People often associate the beat of music with mood, too: sing a hymn slowly and it sounds sad. Give the same hymn a good galloping beat and it seems jollier. The agitation caused by loudness, rhythm, high notes, etc is sometimes confused with happiness.

It needs to be pointed out that in many many cultures and cultures, that minor and modal keys / tonalities throughout the ages, were considered the more expressive tonalities and this more joyful / happier. It is our modernistic culture that has thing pervertedly misunderstood. This is a golden opportunity to educate and explain, to teach and inform. Even many of the great composers of the western civilizations knew this and used minor / model tonalities to express a more full range of emotions.

Ken,

I wouldn't call it perverse. It's really the development of harmony that has reversed our impression of tonality and mood in melody.

And that's not addressing that some people like chant because it sounds subdued, sad, falsely 'meditative', falsely 'mystical', etc., it mopes and is truly depressing.

I've encountered a number of amateur chant aficionados and scholas who seem to aim for such a depressing sound deliberately as a misguided contrast to the sentimentalism and pop-styles of so much popular liturgical music, as if to say pretentiously, "This is sacred music, your crap isn't." But they shoot themselves in the foot with congregations by singing chant in such a way and being snooty about it.

Country music, folk music, jazz and "world music" deploy much in the way of modal melodic shifts and harmonies. (The Blues - of divers kinds - be popular, folks*.) When modal melodies and harmonies are complained of, one should be wary that the complaint is relying on something that is merely easier to describe than what is actually the issue. Chant can be delivered less than well. Also, unaccompanied monody tends to be unflattered by spaces with dead acoustics.

And, for choristers, having to work hard on unfamiliar melodies (an occupational risk of doing propers, as it were, where the repertoire repetition is not very frequent to support familiarity for folks who lack excellent memory skills) can make something less than pleasant just because of the effort.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsvK8WCPj1Y . This example (which, in its looseness with rhythm belies the sometime notion that popular music of the last century is necessarily based on hard, insistent rhythm) suggests that one way to frame "blue" chant melodies may be . . . as a form of intimacy, delicacy and tenderness.

I'll add to Charles' point that, when things are being raised from the dead musically, the Sunday Mass is typically the last thing to give.

When a new liturgy, not the Sunday morning Mass, but a special event, is begun in a parish, and the music is plainsong or polyphony, the results have often been amazing. We do, for instance, Solemn Vespers periodically, sung by a vested men's choir, in Englished Gregorian, and the night of Tenebrae pastorally adapted by Fr. Weber. Very well received. Tenebrae, especially, has gone in 3 years from ~60 attending to ~200-250.

Or, indeed, an EF Solemn Mass with Mozart Ordinary and full propers, which filled the church with many non-EF people, who loved every minute of it.

Or, at my last parish, Stations with a 12-voice choir singing polyphony, chant, and some 19th-Century works between certain stations and for Benediction every Friday in Lent, which grew in attendance rather spectacularly over my three years there.

In these contexts, no one minds -- people go to something new with an open mind. The Sunday crowd, however, takes all comers, and is a personal, family, and community ritual whose external particulars have been decided upon by years upon years of practice and familiarity. The strategic use of the volunteer musicians, singers, etc., that have been empowered by the extraordinary events, such as above, and the goodwill fostered towards that repertoire in the PiP's that came to them, are often key to making the inroads necessary to improve the general practice of the Sunday Mass (e.g., the Vespers choir and the things and way we sing at Vespers becomes the fully-unaccompanied Men's Choir for Good Friday).

Also, since these special events can be "done right," with complete aesthetic and liturgical integrity, the first time, they can manifest the "vision" of a pastor and music staff to the parish in a non-threatening, more holistic way than can be achieved by making gradual improvements to the Sunday Mass alone.

Beyond all of that, from my point of view, making a point of providing excellent sung liturgies outside of Sunday, especially when the Sunday Mass is difficult, can help with some of the psychological pressure and stresses that often accompany church work, and musical leadership for reform in particular. Being able to sing, in your own parish church, a liturgy with whose music you can be entirely and justly satisfied, regularly, helps the musician "fight the battle" for the Sunday morning from a place of peace, rather than agitation. You become aware that these things aren't impossible, but rather the goal is in sight, and the people who can help you achieve it are in place. Then the issue isn't trying to force people to do or to like these things, but simply to find a more generous place for them in the regular life of the parish, and continue to educate people, through these events, about sacred music.