Yet another reason Bach rocks
  • Kathy
    Posts: 5,515
    The other day I was trying to relax to the B-minor Mass, and it didn’t work. Bach is not relaxing. I think this is an important quality in sacred music: it doesn’t make you drowsy. Medieval Latin hymns refer to languor regularly. Christ comes to wake up the world. Bach wakes up the world. It’s not going to stay in the background. There is no I’m-ok-you’re-ok all-are-welcome vibe.

    If you’re going to worship, then worship. If you’re going to sleep, then sleep. Don’t try to do both at the same time.
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    I agree. There should something inherently unsettling about music set apart for sacred use.

    Either it's so chaste and prismatically beautiful that the everyday-ness of your existence is thrown into sharp relief, or it's so sublime in its majesty that you're, again, led into the awareness that your life is held in existence by some infinitely vaster Power that you feel intimately but cannot completely comprehend.

    For me, Palestrina and Byrd are in the former category; Bach and Arvo Part are in the latter. (I could add many more.)

    Sacred music is never familiar, trite, or merely pretty. If it's doing its job properly, it is strange, beautiful, powerful, and sublime. This can be accomplished by any number of means.

    The bizarre thing is to hear people actually *agitate* for everyday banality in sacred music, as if that's the best collective thing we can offer to God.
  • JamJam
    Posts: 636
    I fall asleep to Gregorian chant sometimes. It can be peaceful, chant... if you are well-rested, then that peaceful feeling lifts you to God. If you are sleepy, that peaceful feeling puts you to sleep. It doesn't *make* you feel sleepy, though, which I guess is the difference; it only allows you to sleep if you already are sleepy. Unlike, say, really boring lectures or the sound of beach waves or something that just make you nod off.

    I have heard several stories from friends about being very sleepy and nodding off in Mass... (college students; we're hopeless). But then right before the Liturgy of the Eucharist begins, they snap awake and are awake till the end of Mass.
  • Joseph Mansfield
    Posts: 113
    One day I was in the church practicing something in a minor key by Bach. The sacristan, who knew nothing of music, was also there working. As she walked near the console to leave I asked her what she made of the music, what she thought, felt. She replied that the music made her think that something was about to jump out and get her.

    Well, yes. When we go to mass with receptive hearts, something does jump out and get us.

    Whatever else a prelude says, it should always say that something very serious is about to happen. Subsequent music should reinforce that opening statement.
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