[deleted by the author]

I find Dom Murray (is he still alive?) very interesting because he seems to pop up everywhere:

1. I knew him first as one of the better contemporary composers of church music intended for congregational use, along with Gelineau. Not that his compositions are particularly brilliant, but they are charming in their own way and far better than what came after and superseded them in popularity. His setting of the first responsorial psalm for the Easter vigil is in the Canadian national hymnal and I associate it with the beginning of Easter. He has written some very useful and worthy organ music. I have often made use of his modal psalm tones for English.

He is perhaps the only contemporary composer to have made it into the Parish Book of Chant (that's his Alleluia on p. 84, the second "simple setting").

2. From reading those issues of Caecilia from the 50s recently posted here, it seems as though he was at one time a rock star (or bete noir, depending on your perspective) in the world of chant scholarship, stirring up admiration and controversy for his aggressive critique of the Solesmes method. These days his stature seems somewhat diminished, and he merits a mention in the textbooks mainly as an example of an exponent of a marginal theory (mensuralism). Cardine has left him in the dust and made proportionalism seem passé.

3. Here he is in this book excerpt you post advocating the Joseph Gelineau/ Clifford Howell either-or view of beauty and congregational participation. Another member of the musical elite telling us to have his courage to sacrifice aesthetic considerations for the good of those poor ordinary folk and their limited attention spans who do not deserve to be challenged. Or as Howell succinctly put it:

I concede that any truly effective reform would involve serious losses in the aesthetic sphere, but maintain that the spiritual good of "God's holy people" should come before all else. I love Latin and I love plainsong; but I would prefer that every copy of the Liber Usualis be sunk in the depths of the sea rather than that the Mystical Body of Christ as a whole should be debarred from that "active participation" which is the "primary and indispensable source of the true Christian spirit".

Was this book of Murray's written before or after Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing? I should hope it was written before, because otherwise he has no excuse for not recognizing the dismal failure of the idea he endorses: that the people will participate with gusto as long as they are given something simple to sing that can be learned on the spot. I keep thinking of the quote from the Caecilia editorial Jeffrey T posted here the other week: "in the end, whatever form [congregational singing] takes, it will be based on, and it will be the result of, a whole culture, and not the inane notion of three minute rehearsals and shouting down the congregation."