"The market for professional liturgical musicians, as opposed to secular musicians who perform occasionally in churches, is so tiny that it is only by some musicians’ extraordinary dedication that skills can be passed on at all."

Perhaps not for organists, but for singers, this is undoubtedly true. I can count on one hand the number of expressly liturgical professional singers that I know.

Joseph Shaw often comes out here and there in defense of some tiny segment of Catholics trying to live a Catholic life, and demonstrates a good grasp of what he's talking about. In this case even taking note of the non-contract and week-to-week musicians. I appreciate him for it.

That notion of the separation of sacred and secular music styles as being a reaction to loss of cultural hegemony intrigues me. It opens a line of thinking which allows for the use of ALL the Church's cultural expression (NONE of which is part of the current culture).

This runs counter to records of musicians in the early Church. The notion of amateur musicians arising 'out of the congregation' and offering their services for free is a peculiarly Reformation one which persists in some quarters to this day. Archeaological and literary evidence of music in the early Church tells of highly skilled, highly trained cantors. Their most prized possessions, their cantatoria, were books of the texts that they chanted, complete with markings not unlike Carolingian notation telling them how to inflect their voices. I have not seen mention of them being paid but would suspect strongly that they were compensated in some manner, be it monetary or in goods or lodging. Nor, apparently, did the 'congregation' itself do much singing. There is no record of such singing. The notion of spontaneous singing by the congregation without any paid or trained singers is a fond myth current mostly in the Protestant world, but, as well, in some Catholic circles. Singing in the early Church, again, was done by highly skilled and trained cantors, and, later were added scholae cantorum.

Congregational singing was very likely restricted to responses to prayers and dialogue and little else. There were no hymns in the modern sense, and the ordinary was as yet not developed as fully as we know it. In the very very earliest of times there were hymns such as are recorded throughout the New Testament, e.g., 'Worthy is the Lamb that was Slain', etc., but these, too, were not likely to have been congregational but restricted to a cantor or a few specialist soloists.

Sorry - the robust congregational singing which Luther and his modern heirs thought was 'taken away from the people' never existed. Later, of course, Ambrose, Hillary, and others developed the strophic hymn of Eastern origin as means of catechesis. These were quite popular amongst the people, and found a place in the monastic offices, but they did not form a part of the Western mass.

(A bit of humour - vanity was apparently a problem in the early church as well as now. Edward Foley, in his brief book about church music in the pre-Constantinian church, mentions that a curious rule was made to the effect that cantors may not use curling irons in their hair. As the law is the mirror of our sins we may just imagine the elaborate 'hair-dos' that were sported by some cantors.)

In my area there have been workshops (AGO usually) in the past that dealt with how to sing hymns. Nothing on chant in this Protestant area. Someone Protestant always showed up to lead the workshop and tell us how Presbyterians sing hymns and other music. I agree the Presbyterians often have good music but their practices are not necessarily a good model for Catholic parishes. Their hymnals are quite different, as well.

The invention of hymn singing by Luther fits in very well with protestant views of the Reformation, but are we really being 'data driven' or accepting a myth? One of Thomas Day's points is that one can't even generalize about Catholic singing across Mexico, Austria and the US, let alone past ages.

What I remember about Notre Dame de Paris is what a trial it was to listen to César Franck swimming in the modern acoustic, let alone polyphony. For all the documentation of veils, scrims, rugs and tapestries in Craig Wright's book, what I found eye-opening was the rood screen's division of the sanctuary, where the liturgy was carried on by Pérotin's schola, and the secular nave, into which the organ spoke to accompany crowds in the Te Deums sung on public occasions.

To be clearer I do not mean non-sacred: cathedrals are 'secular' institutions. At NDdP the monastic worship of the school went on side by side with public liturgies.

Were not the Colleges of the Hours active in various Dutch cities (Leiden etc.) made up of laymen? Though even then, they were acting as surrogate canons.