I agree that it hasn't really been written. There is so much research to do. A fascinating aspect of this history would certainly have to treat how the chant advocates dealt with the upheaval and transition. A comprehensive account would have to show that plenty went wrong on all sides.

Milwaukee.

Oakland CA

We are not ready for the history of the problem yet. Wait until 2064 when the now-aged 'hippies' are shuffled off this mortal coil, and the original followers of + Lefevre (RIP) have gone to their eternal rest as well.

At this time, what this history would do, even inadvertantly, would be simply to place the blame, or seem to place the blame, on one person or (in the US) ethnic group. While I own a copy of Why Catholics Can't Sing, and love re-reading it (it's great for a good laugh), it falls into the standard 'blame the Irish' motif; other books tend to the 'blame Bugnini/Paul VI' argument.

Not until the Reform of the Reform has taken place and there is One Form of the Roman Use (NB I would consider the Book of Divine Worship to be part of the English Liturgical tradition, i.e. Use of York or Salisbury, but not Rome), authentically reformed according to Sacrosanctum Concillium, and containing the great wealth of Roman Latin Rite Tradition, as developed organically from the first centuries of Christendom; when there are not two camps in the Roman Use ("pre-" and "post-concilliar"); when we finally achieve the paradigm, rather than trying to re-hash and revive the practise of the Twentieth, or Nineteenth, or Ninth Centuries, as if they were the time of an Utopian Worship, can we write the history of this turbulent time of revolution, and actually see, with hind-sight, what actually occured to create the problem we've inherited.

The history of the "War for Sacred Music" cannot be written until the last battle has been won.

"I'd like a book about the 'liturgical music apocalypse'. No polemics, please." LOL.

I've mentioned before on some thread or another that I'd received a treasure trove of archival documents, in the form of dozens of back issues of a publication called Gemshorn, that came out of Milwaukee. It's crazy stuff, with ads for the albums of Ray Repp, and notes from archdiocesan meetings, and protests from letters to the editor that chant isn't ALWAYS bad for children, after all.

http://www.sanctamissa.org/en/music/books-and-articles-on-sacred-music/a-chronicle-of-the-reform-catholic-music-in-the-20th-century.pdf

You should try out back issues of NPM:
http://www.npm.org/pastoral_music/archives.html

I should think about it. And ask my father's permission.

I remember the advent of the folk group in 1970 in my parish (we had an auditorium for a church...like a lot of suburban parishes in those days). They were musically superior to the baleful Hammond hurdy-gurdy, I mean organ, that had theretofore been the instrumental accompaniment to liturgy (mit lotsa vibrato, to mix 3 lingos, sounding like a bad Hollywood soundtrack from bad pious films of the 1940s).

But, but the mid-70s, they faded in quality. However, by then my mother loved that music (she was in her early 50s), and the younger folks already had mostly dropped out of active practice (which was by then was long common after Confirmation - I think by the time I was a senior in a huge public high school (each class was about 1000 kids; 5 years earlier, it was more like 1400-1500 kids per class), there were less than a dozen of us still in CCD....a milder form of that pattern was already in place by the mid-60s, if I recall correctly what I was told by my parents, who were rather defiantly countercultural, shall we say.

I thirsted for something much better, and had to wait a couple of more years when I could go to a better neighboring parish (formerly run by German Benedictines...) myself. But I was definitely a strange kid in that regard; I cannot recall meeting a single fellow Catholic adolescent who shared my tastes until I got to college, where we had to form a schola of our own under the direction of a wonderful nun who was relatively catholic in her tastes (Gregorian chant, polyphony, shape-note music, good spirituals and some modern sacred music, too).

A book worth re-reading is "Recovery of the Sacred" by Dr. James Hitchcock, a professor of history at St. Louis University. This book is as valid today as it was in the
mid-1970s.

Kathy: that '71 church music event in Milwaukee should be compared to the SAME event in the mid-sixties, with Paul Salamunovich leading the choral seminar/preparations. Or 1965, when Roger Wagner led the chorus in Milwaukee singing H.W. Zimmermann's new Mass (in English) and Bruckner's E Minor for Masses during the V International Music Congress.

By 1971, the biennial event had deteriorated into an apologia for awfulness, and most of Milwaukee's serious church musicians had bailed out--some to another continent, others to "retirement."

That book is available for cheap on Amazon and Better World Books. Snag!