I was tired of listening to what I was hearing from the local gene pool of throw together music at mass so I decided to volunteer to at least start a path of a more sacred nature.
I am also volunteering on the building committee and hopefully soon will be running for the council or at least the budget committee so that I can effect change in the correct direction.
Plus I hold down a full time job (not music related).
It is very difficult to maintain especially with a small family who also needs my attention but the payoff should be huge to church music in our area for years after I'm singing with the choirs of Angels.
There is only one way to affect change and that is to be come involved.

That is exactly why we need to infiltrate the "enemy" as it were.
If the finance committee is your problem work toward changing the committees mind or its members. The same for the council. I'm not saying its easy and it may take many years but well worth the effort.

So what do we volunteers do? Stay at home and not bother?

Best wishes,
Padster

@Wendi, that may very well work: when the congregation doesn't have anyone to do music for them, they're more likely to actually try themselves.

My general rule of thumb for life in general: you are very lucky if you get what you pay for. Generally, you don't get it.

I serve two churches, and the most complaining that I get revolves around change. There were some older ladies talking about a bungle made by a guest organist a few Sundays ago (he didn't start on time and Fr. started Mass without him, singing a completely different hymn than planned), and their most energetic comment was that they went back to the old Mass setting for that service "oh, I loved THAT" was the exclamation. I am learning that people just want what is comfortable and familiar when they come to church. The problem is that the mediocre and banal have become comfortable and familiar. Chant , Latin, organ, and what we would consider good and beautiful is alien to them, and they reject it outright. I also have the suspicion that we are dealing with identity politics.

"How long will we accept mediocrity or worse ?"

Regarding Sacred Choral Music:
Good choral music will stand the test of time. What might be considered mediocre now, might really become a classic with time. Don’t be too hard on our modern choral composers. Bach and Mozart were once the new kids on the block, and not all that well received in their time. I wonder how many modern choral composers will stand the test of time ?

I've tried telling people that here too...sadly they don't believe me, or they don't care.

...is now attending an Episcopal church, sometimes the Catholic church in your town isn't Catholic so it's a choice of staying home or finding another place to go on Sunday morning

.

Being Catholic has nothing to do with the music. Even if the church switch completely to rap I would have major concerns and be very disappointed but I would never trade the Eucharist for a different service because the music was better.
I will and I hope we all pray for this "list member".

I have mixed feelings on playing for Protestant churches. I did play for them for a number of years when younger. Although they can have some advantages, they also have their own problems. There is no heaven on earth.

Being Byzantine often colors my perceptions. I keep in mind that there are 22 or 23 churches (depending on who is counting) within the Catholic Church, all fully Catholic and many with liturgies older than what is practiced in the west. I find a Byzantine mind set is a good thing to bring to Latin rite liturgy, since I am not distracted by fads or what is currently popular. Liturgy should be above such things anyway. If the local Latin parish is too rotten to tolerate, look for other Catholic alternatives to see you through until things improve - easier in some areas than others.

Are you a lay minister of the CHURCH or not?

I prefer not to think so - at least not so much. I perform a function, but there is no need to clericalize it. There is too much of that already. Whatever you call me, don't call me a pastoral musician. I don't even know what the hell that is other than NPM speak.

Good choral music will stand the test of time.

That is thankfully true even though we are currently in a season where junk is artificially propped up. Non-Catholics, agnostics and even atheists all over the world own recordings of plainchant. It's a safe bet that practically no one has or wants a copy of Dan Shutte's Greatest Hits. Without the captive audience Sunday obligation and a cabal of Kapellfluffenmeisters calling the shots, this stuff would die a merciful death.

At that time people came and heard Mass. My German friend reminded me that when she said that she was looking forward to coming to church and hearing Mass.

The priest did all the readings...It was very rare to have a Mass with three priests or deacons, so I don't recall who did the readings in that situation.

People's total contact with the church was sitting at Mass and listening. In the 1960's people began saying the responses (and singing them, as I recall) and lay people began doing the readings at Mass. But then publishers began offering to sell you Worship and misallettes for the entire congregation with the readings - for more money. The priests struggled with the decision, knowing that people would just read along. But they went ahead and did it.

The permission for letting lay people do the readings let lay people into the sanctuary. Up until them you had to memorize the Latin Mass responses to be an altar boy and be near the altar during Mass...unless you were getting married.

There was an invisible wall. One of the biggest shocks of my life was going with my father to church to fix the sound system and having Father Gaffney walk out of the sacristy in the empty church and hearing him say, "Hi, Russell, how are you?".

While lay people doing the readings pierced the wall, you still, unless you had a missal, which was rare, sat and listened. Or day dreamed or prayed the rosary.

Putting the readings and songs in your hands I feel changed things - suddenly you could sit and read instead of watching and listening. You also were expected to follow along and participate by saying or singing responses and hymns and the psalm.

It went from being a meditative exercise which everyone - except the smallest infants - participated in fully, to an experience in which you had to decide how fully you wanted to participate. You had to stand, sit or kneel unless very old, like before, but know you had to affirm your participation verbally and some do and some do not.

If the readings - and the psalm response - and the hymns had not been put in the hands of the people, the participation level would have remained where it was.

I think that that would have been a good thing. It's like a country club that decides to tear out half the golf greens to make a skateboard park. People did not create and join the club to skateboard. As a result, many quit.

The Folk Mass in the gym was a great marketing ploy to preserve Mass in the church and I believe was never intend to make the changes that took over the sacred Mass in the Sanctuary. Thinking and leadership in the church then destroyed the structure that people accepted.

So, it wasn't putting the readings in the hands of the people, but that was an element that can be viewed as one of the icebergs, in my mind a large one because of how it was struck..in the weather of that time.

Engaging in warfare against "NPM speak," is, in my opinion, a knee jerk reaction, usually promulgated by folks such as those who frequent this forum.

The USCCB and in recent years the Vatican have made clear that there are legitimate lay ministries, which are indeed psudo-clericalized. I mean this in terms of the type of training and professionalism expected of those who engage in these ministries.

Now, if you think that this is absurd and don't like the fact that all sorts of people in the Church have begun endorsing this since Vatican II and what not, then you can go ahead and have that discussion - but frankly I find those issues to be above my pay grade.

As for "Pastoral Musician," I don't find the term ridiculous. It's not hard to see what is meant by it. Bring in someone with the highest level of conservatory training, who has won the most prestigious competitions in their discipline across the world, but has ZERO liturgical or theological training, and plop them into a Catholic church music directing job and you've got a a world class musician, but not a pastoral musician. Now take someone with formation in the basics of theology and liturgical documents, plus good musical training and formation, as well as a sense of how to balance the ideal of the documents with the realities on the ground, and you've probably got a pastoral musician. (It's not a dirty term!)

I will leave the "pastoral" ministry to the pastor - it's his job. I am a musician, organist/director, or organist choirmaster - pick the term of your choice - adding support to the liturgy and priest, while not consciously drawing attention to myself.

Well what you are referring to is pastoral. A rose by any other name ...

We live in the age of euphemistic language where we can not bring ourselves to call a spade a spade, or a shovel a shovel. I call it Paul VI syndrome, since he suffered greatly from it. I have no need for titles, earned or assigned. I already have more than many would want and it is questionable what any are worth in the final analysis. Good old Popeye said it best, "I yam what I yam."

Did you really just say that you are at war with those in the pews?

Well yes, I guess that is a different view than one which suggests you are there to serve and minister to them.

Well at least "some" of them.

No but I wouldn't be so quick to attribute everything to the "enemy." They might hate what you do for a lot of complicated reasons, not limited to the psychology of music, modern media, people's tastes, etc.

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/pope-francis-calumny-is-of-the-devil

extra ordinary ministers of sacred music"

Love it!

I'm not ordinarily exceptional.

There is mention above of making what is "beautiful" to be "familiar". While it is true that people should be comfortable with it, I think that part of the concept of sacredness has to do with making it "otherworldly."

Part of what keeps bringing me back to the Byzantine liturgy after three years of attending is that it still manages....for me, at least.....to have a different feel than any other worship I've been to. It has never really become familiar, if you will, to me. (Yes, there is a Christian concept of "otherworldliness" which has nothing to do with the New Age)

I'd settle for HAVING that reaction.