I recently read that Gregorian chant is music that is totally of the spirit, melody appeals to the emotions, and rhythm appeals to our base instincts (lower gut?)

I don’t know if this is a hard and fast rule, but think of popular music and also Christian Pop worship music… the priorities are upside down.

There is no rhythm in Gregorian chant really. And the melodies, although sometimes discernible are more modal arpeggiations and ornamentations. Gregorian hymns are more recognizable by their melody, but rhythm is almost nondescript in all chant per say.

I recently read Boethius’s fundamentals of music, and it’s an interesting read compared to these observations. It talks about the morality of music and its consequences.

This week’s classes in music with my students was about modes and their effect on the human being. I played a major triad, and I asked them, “How does this make you feel?” They all said “happy.”

And then I played a minor chord, and I said, “how does this make you feel?”, and they said, “sad” or “mysterious”. BINGO!! With no prompts or clues.

Some of the children said “it doesn’t make me feel sad (someone with a defensive attitude) and I told them “it doesn’t matter what you think… it actually effects you in that way whether you want to believe it or not.” They looked at me in disbelief, but with inquisitive eyes and minds.

I read the entire article. The headline is somewhat click-baity. The central thesis of the article appears to be:

“Emotional manipulation in a worship service is like a shepherd leading people to certain pastures without knowing why,” wrote Zac Hicks, author of The Worship Pastor, on the subject of “manipulation vs. shepherding.”

“Manipulation, at its best is ‘purposeless shepherding,’ or ‘partial shepherding,’” Hicks wrote. “A sheep-person waking up from the fog of manipulation will often first exclaim, ‘Wait, why am I here?’”

Music is by it's nature emotionally evocative. Music seems to have a special power to be able to unite the heart and the mind, and I think that's a central reason we sing in the liturgy rather than just reciting the words.

Music has a language to it. Some musical language, like any other kind of language, communicates very strong emotion. The article defines emotional manipulation as being the state where the emotional power of the musical language does not match with what the words are about. I agree that this is a significant problem in Evangelical music, there are lots of terrible praise and worship songs that lack a meaningful/scriptural text. Any good music director knows not to use these songs in the liturgy.

A counterpoint to all this: if your claim is that Gregorian chant is better because it DOESN'T move the heart, you're scoring an own-goal. This would essentially defeat the point of having music!

There’s also a reason why we’re not supposed to be ruled by our emotions and appetites.

Well of course. But we are supposed to recognize and use our emotions and appetites when they are properly ordered and integrated. Advancing in the spiritual life by no means involves turning our emotions and appetites off. And liturgical music that has no emotional movement to it is by no means the highest form of liturgical music.

There is no rhythm in Gregorian chant really.

There is no *meter* in Gregorian chant. Gregorian chant has rhythm because the underlying text has rhythm. As I understand it, Gregorian chant is supposed to be sung speech. And all human languages have rhythm when spoken, as no language that I am aware of is spoken in a monotone.

Meter is hard to work with in liturgical music, because most of Scripture is prose that doesn't consistently follow a meter. So your options as a liturgical composer are either to paraphrase the text poetically in a consistent meter, or find a musical technique that frees you from the constraints of meter. Gregorian chant is one strategy for getting rid of meter. Praise and worship takes a slightly different approach, maintaining an underlying meter, but using syncopations to allow the text to not need to follow the underlying meter.

This was a good read as a former evangelical. I really feel for the author – she seems to want the Real Thing and recognizes the emptiness of commercial worship music’s emotional manipulation, but she can’t really articulate an alternative.

She doesn’t quite get to a central problem with evangelical Christianity in general, and worship in particular: [Unless you’re Pentecostal and willing to claim the Lord told you something verbally, audibly, in English,] God, for evangelicals, makes himself known via feelings. “I felt God’s presence and peace”; “I felt called to be a missionary”; “I felt so close to God in worship today” – these are the normative ways evangelicals talk about and understand God’s presence in their lives.

Did you ask Jesus to be your saviour with sufficient sincerity?
Did you receive forgiveness for the sins you did?
Did you pick the right person to marry?
Did you find a church where the music and preaching brings you closer to God?
Are you walking closely with the Lord?
Is the Holy Spirit leading you?
Do you have the right interpretation of a particular Bible verse?

Your feelings will tell you, and there’s no possible alternative, because there are no sacraments, no one who speaks and acts in persona Christi, no bishops to safeguard right teaching, no supreme pontiff for really thorny questions…..’Tis a pity if you’re dealing with mental illness, in puberty or menopause, or otherwise emotionally out of balance. ‘Tis a crying shame when someone who’s been deeply hurt by a lover or parent or another church comes to the door looking for God only to be told “if you can feel X, you’ll have found God.”

Evangelical worship is typically judged to be successful if it provokes in the hearer a numinous sensation that confirms existing beliefs and what has been/will be taught by the speaker. The only available Evangelical dodges to get away from such an amorphous conception of church music is to focus on the Godward direction of its texts (“It is good to give thanks to your name, O Lord….”) or the difference between the music used and popular music: our hymns with a simple piano accompaniment are set apart, and obviously not like Taylor Swift and her worldly music.

To me, this was insufficient to sustain my faith. It took a new understanding of how God interacts with humans and is present in and through the Church, with Christ as the “worship leader” and chief actor, presiding at the liturgy in the person of the priest. If I wonder if he loves me, he’s given me tangible, sacramental proof. If I wonder if he’ll forgive me, he’ll tell me as much in the confessional. If I wonder if he still heals, he’ll anoint me. And so on. Insofar as my music is the music Christ gave his Bride to sing, and insofar as it draws the faithful into these mysteries rather than distracting them, it is successful worship music.

We have a whole different concept of God and the ways of knowing him. I hope the author finds it one day.

I’ve always assumed I have a Dulciana and Unda Maris for reasons of emotional affect.

I’m not interested in emotion for emotion’s sake, or for donation’s sake, but I find one of the beauties of the emotional resonance of all sacred music — even? especially? of plainsong — is helping people with distracted minds, five kids in pew, or weary with their former toils to experience the inner meaning of the truth of the Gospel and the liturgical year more readily. It’s not artificial, anymore than the work that I do on the strength of a cup of coffee is artificial. It simply helps me to be where, arguably, I should perhaps ideally be without the cup of coffee. But, of course we don’t do sacred music just to be a cup of emotional coffee. That’s a happy affect. Liturgical music is primarily the service of art to divine worship, an offering of beauty.

To have integrity as sacred art, and not be maudlin, the subjective affect must flow from a product which possesses true beauty - harmonious form, proportionality in se and to the liturgy as a whole, meticulous craftsmanship - to adorn the temple of God.

Also, I have always interpreted the instruction of Pius X and those following him that sacred music must harmonize with the Gregorian chant probably in a more simple than mystically loaded way. If a Liturgy itself is, among everything else it is, an integral aesthetic product, then it simply won’t do to have music that is truly and deeply out of harmony with the intrinsic music of the sung liturgy, which is Gregorian chant. Gregorian chant does possess a number of admirable qualities that should inspire sacred composition, but, almost more to the point, music composed for the sung Liturgy should, if things are being done well, have to live side-by-side with Gregorian chant, and not feel terribly out of place doing so. Indeed, it should feel right at home. Because just as liturgical music must respect length etc. in proportion to the liturgy, it also must respect the native soundscape of the liturgy.

I’ve been dwelling on Gamba’s point for a few hours. I think that it’s true, and it exists in the Catholic charismatic movement as well. However, some people use “feel” equivocally, sort of, and others seem to understand that they can be mistaken about their feelings (or of discernment of spirits, as the case may be…), they still use the word to describe these things.

I don’t have a better answer — like, do we not “feel” at peace when, say, we meet the person whom we wish to marry one day? Or when something is resolved (especially in our favor)? But yes, the evangelical way is more than problematic, especially as it can downplay or even exclude suffering and disquiet.

I think it's straightforwardly obvious that God communicates with us through our feelings, and our thoughts, and sometimes both. We need discernment to be able to recognize *when* it's God communicating to us, vs. what is of merely human origin, or of the enemy.

especially as it can downplay or even exclude suffering and disquiet.

Key point: God often communicates to us with these kinds of feelings too. Any theology that's promoting consolation and good feelings all the time, and without any need for personal purification, is highly suspect.

A lot of Evangelicalism flirts with the prosperity Gospel. Hillsong and Bethel churches, which make some of the most influential worship music, explicitly teach a "soft" version of the prosperity gospel (as in, they define prosperity broadly and not just about getting money). Both churches openly associate with Joel Osteen.

I think is possible to judiciously use some of their music without platforming the rest of their terrible theology (similarly, playing Charles Wesley's hymns does not endorse the rest of his theology). But it's all a terrible scandal.

The metaphor is ancient Greek. The binary division of emotions vs reason is overdrawn: emotions are part of human reasoning.

The problem is that there are a couple of different strands that are not really teased out.

The Clarence Thomases want, if not the TLM or the fully-chanted NO, then something with chant and beautiful choral music, incense, Latin, etc. They do not especially wish to have anything to do with their Protestant heritage and above all spirituals, which weren't historically received evenly, apparently. (The TV movie with James Earl Jones about Vernon Johns, the predecessor of MLK in Montgomery, has several scenes where the pianist refuses categorically to play "Go Down, Moses" in the church.)

There are some who want something like the typical NO, but with spirituals mixed in and with preaching that is uniquely African American, where the pan-African colors are included particularly around MLK Day, Black History Month, and maybe Kwanzaa. Where they always get a say in something like the diocesan multicultural office and where there's a token black religious sister (who either doesn't know, doesn't care, or is happy to be it) front and center.

And there are people who are basically like Fr Pfleger who wish for it to be barely distinguishable from black Protestant services except for somehow having the interlude of the consecration. Pfleger goes too far, as he apes Protestant language and norms…

but also, not to put too fine a point on it: "white" gospel music would not be welcome, and I don't think it's wrong to exclude it.

There are also associations that if a white person were to make, he'd be accused, justly, of being a bigot and racist.