Yes, it took many years for me to figure that out - that indeed, when people complained about chant in the liturgy, there were three possible valid reasons for it:
1.) The chant was sung badly (by people poorly trained in it or by those who really don't have much a voice to begin with).
2.) The chant was dull (sometimes this came from people who were not used to subtleties, but sometimes it was because what was considered Gregorian chant was nothing more than decorated psalm-tones sung ad-nauseum, often, again, sung poorly.
3.) The chants did not match well with either the other music being sung (OCP, GIA, WLP, etc...) or with the other tolerated but annoying as heck liturgical customs of the last 50-60 years. It's hard to balance a beautiful chant (or even a beautiful Palestrina motet, for that matter) with a legion of EMHC's, a raucous Sign of Peace, an introductory, "Let us turn and welcome Father X", etc...

I used to say things like, "But look at what even Sacrosanctum Concillium has to say about music" and get really worked up about it, but the people noticed something was off and not matching. Now, in the good-taste sense of things and in the traditions and rubrics, it shouldn't be me who has to adjust to the altar girl doing lasso practice with her cincture or Cheryl "blessing" the little kids who come up to her Communion line. But the people notice the discrepancies, and the pastor will blame us, the musicians, if he tolerates all of the other stuff.

I've always found that music from two broadly different styles in the one Mass is ok: it reflects that we are a BOTH-AND community. But add a third and it gets jarring. No idea why the different - that's just what I've observed in own responses.

But I've found that the first musical item sets the tone. If it goes badly, most of the music will go badly. If it is familiar and goes well, then people are brought together, and confident in the rest of the music even if it's not so well known or easy. So even if we had the resources to do propers, the Introit would be the last place I'd want to introduce them.

Yes, it is literally part of the Mass. However, Catholics are so accustomed to emotional, toe-tapping, sacropop devotional songs at Mass, and they have had almost no experience of the Mass celebrated well with authentic, prayerful liturgical music, and they are generally poorly educated about the Mass and about liturgical music, that it is considered out of place in comparison with what is familiar and expected.

That's a direct consequence of the decades-long OCP inertia. A lot of people believe erroneously that OCP songs just are what Catholic liturgical music is and is supposed to be. OCP is trying to keep it that way.

There is an interesting article about young men converting to Orthodox Christianity because they consider Orthodoxy stable, ancient, demanding, and authentic in contrast to fluid, compromising, and effeminate mainstream Christianity.

https://nypost.com/2024/12/03/us-news/young-men-are-converting-to-orthodox-christianity-in-droves/

The Catholic Church in the United States has become wimpy and flaccid and modernist. As a result, many parishes have deteriorated into superficial Baby Boomer Weekend Jesus Clubs that get together for their Sunday feel-good hootenanny and coffee and donut social hour. They and their parishes have largely failed to pass on the Catholic faith to their baptized but lapsed in practice children.

Something needs to be done to beef up Catholicism and Catholic worship. We get that, but we are the few, and we often encounter hostility to our efforts.

This is a disheartening step in the wrong the direction

I used to go to Mass at this parish, and except for the schola Mass propers weren't used when I left about a decade ago.

That is, the introits are a relatively new development and as is normal some parishioners prefer hymns.

It's a very settled parish in an extraordinarily wealthy area. So practically speaking parishioners must be listened to. But I do wish there were a way to at least sing a Psalm during Communion. I've written about an orderly approach to change here https://www.chantcafe.com/2013/03/10-steps-to-the-gradual/

"I was always under the impression that it should be the introit or suitable hymn, not both."

The Stuffed Mass approach to Propers operates on terrain where confidence is not high about long-term success in replacing the suitable hymn with the introit.

But even with incense, the length of the introit each day is fixed, even if you can omit the verse and repetition. It’s simply too much music to stuff a hymn there and then do the full introit especially as it is music for standing around and does not accompany anything silent at the altar.

OK… I’m standing afar off since I no longer have a “Novus Ordo music position…” technically… although I am the DoM for a weekly Friday morning Novus Ordo mass, it is of the “unicorn” variety.

I think the struggle to implement propers into the Novus Ordo, frankly, is a vain effort, a waste of time, and only exacerbates the slow death of the “JP six mass”. (that is how Siri spelt it as I am speaking in the words.)

In my opinion, the Novus Ordo will eventually be completely eliminated.

Why?

Everything about it is antithetical to the TLM tradition, and if I may be so bold, the Roman Catholic tradition, and the Roman Catholic Religion… remember that religion is defined as the “face of the church.”

So for years, much of which I have put forward on our forum, I suspect, has made me unpopular … and that’s OK. Nevertheless, I’m devoutly continuing to express my opinions… and you can hold me to it 20, 50 and 100 years from now.

fk

Matthew, what do you think is the best option when there's an asperges, and therefore the introit can't be used in the procession from the sacristy? Surely hymn-asperges-introit makes sense then, no? Obviously this question doesn't really apply to the O.F. what with the mangling of the sprinkling rite in that form.

What I've done in traditional-leaning NO settings is:

Principal Mass w/ Incense
Processional Hymn and SEP Introit during incensing of the altar
--This is easy to do, doesn't remove the hymn, and the SEP can be truncated or lengthened easily in order to cover the liturgical action

Masses Celebrated w/o Incense and w/o Long Procession
SEP Introit only
--The priest (and server) enter the sanctuary directly from the sacristy. The entrance "procession" can take 15-30 seconds and you're rolling into the Kyrie-Gloria in short order.
--If everybody understands this is a "low-ish" Mass, and the music and liturgy are intentionally less elaborate, I think you can set yourself up to have less resistance and push-back

To follow up on what Irishtenor says, I do the same with the Principal Mass, which the pastor still refers to as the "High Mass", except we sing the full Gregorian Chant Latin Introit. The servers and Father process in with the singing of a hymn, usually done in parts and often with a last-verse descant (in the British style). We time everything so that we don't start a new verse after he gets in the sanctuary. He waits in front of the altar for the verse to finish. After it's done, he moves to reverence the altar and then we start the Gregorian Chant. I let him know ahead of time if the Proper is going to be unusually long, and so he'll just take a little longer to incense.

I wouldn't be opposed to just singing the Proper, but I think that, when well done, there is a "proper" (haha) place for good hymnody. In reflecting on it, they strike me as being a kind of auditory stained glass window - a way of (hopefully) synthesizing some aspects of the liturgical feast in a "of the people" sort of way that gives voice to (hopefully) the same general sense of the Scripture assigned by the Church. I never try to just "do a hymn" to fill a gap. If it's a Marian feast day, we'll sing Immaculate Mary. But I don't just throw that hymn down on the 8th Sunday of Ordinary Time because "people know it". If the Propers speak of "Bless the Lord, O my soul" then I propose that for a hymn. If the Propers speak of "Praise the Lord, O my soul", then we sing Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven, etc... It's not always perfect, but I try to match up the hymnody as close to the readings/propers as possible and then ALSO use the Scripture proposed by the Church in the forms of the Propers. It gives people a voice while still encouraging them to listen well. It has served this parish well and was well-established before I got here.

For the Responsorial Psalm, I have often used Sam Schmitt's partially-harmonized versions, which are really well-loved here. Occasionally I write a Responsorial Psalm based on the day's Gregorian Chant Gradual tune (I'm including a copy of the First Sunday of Advent's rendition here). I try to continue the melody that I have to "snip" in the verses that follow. It gives the people a usually-singable-enough refrain (while still being interesting) and then a more reflective, chant-like set of verses to hopefully keep them from being laboriously banal (*cough Respond with Disdain Respond and Acclaim).

For the Offertory we have started singing the Gregorian Chant proper first, then a choral motet/anthem. We do the same at Communion.

...when that’s prohibited, silence even if you do a long procession. It’s quite striking and prayerful.

A long, silent procession before a High Mass sounds rather awkward to me...

Well you would be wrong and need to get out of the American bubble.

Well, he did say to me. I don't think it would go over very well here, either, but I don't fault you for what works for you. And maybe that's the point. Some of these things have been tried and tested over decades or at least years, and when you hit that sweet spot with your well-meaning pastor and a generally friendly congregation, then you don't have to sweat all the battling and all the rancor happening at other places. Try to be faithful, be joyful, love God and others, and "let the day's worries be sufficient for the day." We can't solve the Pope, all the Bishops, our Bishop, our Pastor, or even Mrs. Smith. Heck, we can't even solve ourselves sometimes! :)

Well, he did say to me.

Yes. Well, my point still stands. Get out of the American bubble.

We did a long procession with no organ or hymn on All Souls. It has a penitential feeling and I would do it again in Lent, but not otherwise.

Well you would be wrong and need to get out of the American bubble.

I've been to the Old Mass in Germany and Poland a few times. Have not ever experienced a silent procession. I'd say Germans tend to pack High Mass even more full of hymnody and music in general than we do at TLMs here in the states. In any case, as Jacob pointed out and as as I fully own, my stance on the matter is subjective.

Francis, you captured the idea very well, thank you. Admittedly it can be difficult, especially in our modern world, to "be immersed in it consistently from day to day" as you put it. But that is really what it takes sometimes to be able to truly love and appreciate chant.

I may have not ever been able to come to that point if I had not spent over a year at a traditional monastery, where I was indeed immersed in chant alone, multiple times a day. I loved chant before that, but after my monastic experience, everything else pales in comparison, even the most beautiful of choral/polyphonic pieces (though I fully support use of those in the liturgy as well, as a *secondary* type of music, rarely if ever replacing chant).

If your pastor has sole responsibility for two parishes 12 miles apart, and is chaplain at a prison, then the difficulty of providing such immersion is self evident.

The vulnerability of the immersion argument as a necessary goal is that has been perfect grist for the counter-argument that Gregorian chant's natural medium/terrain is in conventual communities and perhaps oratories, but *not* parishes: "Chant's for those places; not for the rest of us mere mortals." I have found it to sometimes be a bad-faith counter-argument, but not always so, though I find it unpersuasive; it can, unfortunately, be persuasive enough to pastors.

it's completely unpersuasive, but again, it means that I have to be chauvinistic about the French (when do I get my passport?). If a teen girl in the 1930s can write and ask for chant instruction by correspondence, before the group in question had actually prepared the course that way, and then go on to lead the choir for decades, well, what are we doing? (This is a large part of the Schola Saint-Grégoire and its history, which gets us to the reason why we have Laus in Ecclesia.)

My parish sings the full Mass and Vespers of Sundays; we do the sung Mass on holy days and barring conflicts on all major feasts (plus feasts that I consider major but which aren't ranked that way), the Triduum, a Rorate Mass, a couple of chantry Masses per year… I mean, it does depend on the will of the pastor, but he wanted this before he even knew that he had even one volunteer willing to learn how to sing it; I knew how to do the services, or I could read. But carrying them myself, and teaching others to sing with me, or finding others, that's another story. As much as I like having a second group to carry the burden, that is, to do motets so that I don't have to find Latin hymns or chants from the Liber to do, particularly if there's a lot of silence and we don't feel like doing too many psalm verses for whatever reason, there's something relieving about being able to do the propers and ordinary, and the office, and only that, in chant, without feeling like we're not doing something.

My predecessor used fully psalm-toned propers on nearly every occasion. Since taking over, I've been working on getting the choir to sing the real stuff. After living with new pieces of full chant week in and week out, it surprises me how quickly they learn an introit or communion. What used to intimidate them and take a week or two now takes fewer than fifteen minutes of rehearsal time. Proud of them. Embracing the full chants and living with them weekly definitely makes a big difference.

Embracing the full chants and living with them weekly definitely makes a big difference.

Yes. We have had to basically force the issue for Lent I and Palm Sunday. But “all tracts (and sometimes graduals or alleluias) should be psalm-toned” is ridiculous.

You're distracted to a painful degree by imperfect vowels??

You're distracted to a painful degree by imperfect vowels??

Some of them when they’re held, yes. Some people experience sensitivities to certain sounds. I am one of those people.

Leaving dipthongs aside, a few vowel sounds I've heard scholas make that were distracting:

- "o" as something more like "aw"
- "i" with a really, really long and thin sound with no roundness at all
- "u" with an "ew" type sound that some do for some kind of authentic period performance reason (rare)

Nothing else occurring to me at the moment.

Vowel morphing on melismas is bad technique. Whether monks do it that way or not.