If we had an official hymnbook, it would be dreadful.

As for Gregorian chant, maybe it's perceptual. Your joyful chants may be dismal and depressing to someone else. I am a fan of chant and use it, but even I can find interminable melismas irritating. And all chant is not sung well. Add to that, modern ears don't hear quite what folks heard in year 1400.

And all chant is not sung well.

Probably the cause of 90% of the dislike. But we are assuming that reason is operative here, not just emotion--and that may be an assumption which is foolish.

I think (after only a moment of thought - there could be more) that you can put these people in 3 camps:

1) Those who want music that evokes a certain emotion at Mass. Even the most joyful and playful of the Gregorian repertoire isn't going to inspire Aunt Betty to go dance in the aisle the way her favorite song from the blue hymnal will or the P&W song on the radio does. And Cousins Lucy and Bart really love those Clavinova piano and string solos that bring tears to their eyes - chanting about Job during the Offertory just doesn't bring the same emotional experience to them.

2) Those who have only experienced chant executed badly - lifeless, sometimes but not always slow, and sung with the same value on every note with no attention paid to the text being sung. Neume after neume after neume after neume after neume after neume.

3) Those who have only experienced "minimal" chant - i.e. Sanctus and Agnus Dei XVIII being trodded out every Lent as punishment.

...burned his wig...

I can't add much to what has been said above, which covers the gamut, I think, of 'feelings', 'rationales', and congenitally or environmentally conditioned dispositions.

Amongst reasoning persons it is likely that badly performed chant (of which there is, as there always was, no dirth in our churches) is uppermost in creating negative impressions of chant.

Others don't like it because they never thought about it, they were conditioned not to because of peer pressure (whether the peers were children, adolescents, or adults).

It's not entirely accurate to say that Protestants (as a widely varying group) don't like chant. Many don't, and get paranoid that the pope might be coming or that they would turn into Catholics. Others like it because they do recognise its spiritual depth and value. They like it because it is peaceful, 'spiritual'.

Chant is no stranger to Anglicans of all stripes, Lutherans, and even others. It isn't really accurate to aver that Catholics like chant and Protestants don't. At this point in history it might be more or less half and half. (Which, from the Catholic perspective is sad.)

This gets us to the Catholics who don't like chant. It reminds them of the pre-Vatican Two Church - which they may or may not have personally experienced. It is a hallmark of the ancien regime which they wish to have rid themselves of. It is just too Catholic for them. It is too 'churchy'. Much of the chant which they have likely heard is, indeed, depressing. They are being conditioned in all too many of our churches to equate it with penitential seasons, which equals sadness. Most of all, they have been taught to dislike it from youth up by clergy and teachers who refer to it in negative terms. Such negatives are interiorised at an early age, are unthinkingly echoed throughout life by the various age groups. Such negatives have no relationship to objective reality, but the damage is done by incompetent clergy, teachers, peers, and parents - and, in most cases, it sticks.

It is difficult for us to imagine what chant, or, for that matter, any modal music, sounds like to those who have never heard it or have rarely listened to it. It is strange to ears that hear only tonally. Very strange. Some like it for that reason. Others don't. I can recall how very strange it sounded to me in my Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven imbued youth. But, I liked it for that reason and knew that God was in it. Others dislike it for that very reason.
______________________

Finally (tee-hee), I, um, would like to ask Charles just how it is he knows that Bach would have 'burned his wig' if he had known what was on the horizon. Is this not the merest speculation? Why, much good, after all, transpired between Bach and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen - which is why few, very few, people have heard of Stockhausen and everybody knows about Bach - even those who don't like him. Besides - Bach would look rather funny without his wig (even funnier if it was burnt), as would Mozart - but then, Beethoven would look funny with one. And Stockhausen? Well, it would take more than a wig (burnt or not) to place him amongst the illuminati.

...wondering...

Whatever he would have said it would have been delivered in that faux regional accent of his.
I don't know what 'regional' it was, but it was always fun.

I teach chant to my school kids (grades 2-6). Yesterday, in a revelation that even caught me by surprise, my girl's choir said they wished we would only sing Latin and they preferred chant to all the things we sang. I asked why and they said," because we feel God in the chant better than all the other music we sing." Does that answer your question?

Gregorian chant is, by its nature, unapproachable music. It cannot possibly touch the human heart the way that Puccini can; it lacks that direct approachability to our plane of existence.

Why is it great music, then, if it cannot rouse our worldly emotions? Because it inspires us to a higher plane, one that is purely objective - music relating to the greatest objective force, God himself. One can say the same about Renaissance polyphony and the music of the greatest later Catholic composers (Bruckner, most of Franck, etc.) It draws us closer to touching the wings of angels. There is no room for merely human sentimentality - only the starkness and objectivity of the God-head.

If one tries to approach this music on our level of existence, one will invariably be disappointed. After all, chant lacks the raucous, immediately identifiable melodies and harmonies of modern music that can instantly endear a piece to our ears and hearts. But if one seeks a higher level of understanding, and comprehends the piece on anything deeper than a surface level, there is an inestimable level of depth and beauty within the Gregorian and polyphonic repertoire.

Unfortunately, both our modern ecclesiastical and secular cultures abhor this kind of deeper understanding. It is ultimately not merely a sickness of church music, but of the Church herself. Nowadays, the liturgy has to be dumbed down even further from the prescriptions of the Novus Ordo so that it is instantly recognizable and understandable to the C & E Catholics, and reaches them through secular means of expression. Music must engage the congregation on their level and not on God's level. Anything other than the vernacular is seen as unacceptable, because it fails to engage the congregation on terms they can immediately understand.

Yet none of this is unattainable for devoted Catholics. Though they may not speak Latin fluently, they can make their way through a Pater Noster or a Salve Regina after a few gos at it. Though they may not be trained singers, they can easily get through Mass VIII with some guidance. We all possess the ability to engage with ideas and art of a higher level than ourselves; we just have to be pushed towards it.

So, to answer your question, the reason people hate Gregorian chant is because the Church has moved towards immediate comprehension of everything, along with the secular world, and the only method of curing this illness is to return to our older philosophy of the Church engaging humanity at a level higher than we normally operate at; in other words, returning the influence of God's plane to our religion.

Unfortunately, it would be put together by committee. That would mean the best sellers from OCP and GIA and the greatest hits of Haugen/Haas/Joncas and similar.

So sing it slowly and softly - so softly I can't hear it. ;-)

I thought the Graduale was the official book.

"I thought the Graduale was the official book."

One might think that, but if that were applied restrictively, I suspect it would be a trigger for the eventual attrition/elimination of most paid musician positions at Catholic parishes.

Rather, it's that pastors won't want the bother of being forced into a transition into using chant, especially to pay for it, and would probably settle for music-free Masses - in other words, it would be another nudge in the direction of the McMass.

All of the comments have been focused on aspects of the issue here and are good observations. I have heard a number of interesting responses to chant.

"It isn't cool."
"It doesn't have a beat." This reminds me of an ad for a Catholic church music position stating that the "vibrant" church in question used music that was "lively and had a beat".
"When I hear chant, I feel fear."
"Do we really have to sing that dirge."
and on and on.

The apprehension of beauty seems to be difficult for some folks. This has always been so. However, there are things that warrant a particular kind of response because they are worthy of it by their nature. To those who are open to this and will listen, much of value will be revealed.

It cannot possibly touch the human heart the way that Puccini can; it lacks that direct approachability to our plane of existence.

Errrmmmm.....not Puccini....but not strictly 'majesty of the Godhead', either. Of course, the objective is to raise the minds and hearts of the faithful to God, and to glorify Him. Raising the minds is a challenge, yes.

The conventions of opera, the tropes and cliches, remind us that music inspired by opera is music inspired by the world of entertainment. Entertainment is a legitimate but secular (that is, non-sacred) purpose. So following the conventions of opera gives the music a secular style. That by itself is a reason to avoid that music in church. One of the principles enunciated by Pope St. Pius X in his foundational document on church music, Tra le sollecitudini, is that the music of the liturgy should be recognizably sacred in style.

It must be holy, and must, therefore, exclude all profanity not only in itself, but in the manner in which it is presented by those who execute it.

And by "profanity" he doesn't mean crude expression: he just means secularity.

[edited 10/14 to fix jumbled word order]

Jackson,

Do you mean to suggest that the ignorance and hatred of chant which some of your colleagues here report is the result of intentional neglect and false reporting?

Anything other than the vernacular is seen as unacceptable, because it fails to engage the congregation on terms they can immediately understand

Or as Chesterton might have put it: Chant has not been tried and found wanting, chant has been found difficult and therefore left untried.

So it's usually not a malicious hate. The hate is real however. I'll never forget a lady coming out a parish classroom an remarking that she might have to leave the church if more Latin kept creeping into the liturgy. What triggered her? At Mass we sang "Angels We Have Heard on High" which features a Gloria in excelsis Deo. Oh noes! A carol virtual every Christian and even most scoffers know is proof of Latin tunneling under our house! Ok, that's just Latin and not specifically chant, but who would doubt that a Jesu Dulcis Memoria would have set her hair on fire?

who would doubt that a Jesu Dulcis Memoria would have set her hair on fire?

That would be a feature, not a bug.

If one views church music as a living tradition, and the chant along with it, I cannot help but view the upheavals of the beginning of the 20th Century, instigated by the Motu Proprio, as in part causative of the break with plainsong in its entirety in the minds and hearts of so many of the faithful.

It's tempting, in a modern "EF" milieu, to return to the immediately pre-conciliar music and view this as "the" tradition, stretching back to St. Pius V, and then only having been very gently pruned and weeded of some occasional poor tendencies, small in degree and short in their reach. On that view, the only major break in that tradition in recent memory would have been that of the 1960's. But that would simply fail to be true.

The post-Motu-Proprio upheaval in Catholic music was extraordinarily far-reaching, ambitious, and only partially successful. The chants that would have been familiar at the time, representing by then centuries of the tradition received, organic, imprimatured, and living -- that is, the Pustet editions of the Medicean Gradual -- were replaced summarily with a new book of much more complicated restored medieval chant, unfamiliar in both design and interpretation, which was made binding on the entire Church. Simultaneously in "figured" music, much of the favorite music of the age, however unpleasant it may be to think of it in that way, was judged unsuitable, and "appropriate" compositions, by mediocre composers of that age, judged more decorous, were brought in to replace it.

So, there was a clean break with the received chant tradition, replacing it with a (very high-quality and meticulously researched) archaeological reconstruction. Thus, the new chant books already received a certain amount of resistance, including nationalist resistance from non-French Europeans, and were intrinsically not all that easy to implement at a parish level. This was coupled, too, with an abandonment of what had been an all-too-well-loved tradition of ancillary music, and its replacement with the music of unremarkable composers whose highest musical achievement lay often in their dogged ability to follow rules and satisfy scowling liturgists by being suitably short and uninteresting. And so, the implementation of such reforms, understandably, was spotty, at best.

Possibly the best work was going on, through the ministrations of Justine Ward [*profound inclination*] and her Method [*reverence*], in the grade schools, but I just don't think enough time passed before the deluge for that to take real, intergenerational root.

So, with the living taproot, however corrupt, that tied in an organic, decentralized way to the broadest sense of the tradition, uprooted in '03 and '08, and with the "new-old" ways having had insufficient time to take root between generations, it was perhaps inevitable that the attachment of the broad sense of the faithful to plainsong in its present Graduale form was tenuous at best. Since the attachment to any other sort of plainsong had been carefully uprooted by the Church, come the reforms, it was perhaps all too easy to sweep away entirely.

And, without that visceral sense of "this is how we did things" (just ask my 60-year choir veterans, in a very musically conservative [non-partisan sense] parish) applying to Gregorian plainsong from the Graduale, an attempt to graft it onto a vernacular liturgy without a real powerhouse of an education program to accompany is going to seem weird at best, hopelessly out of touch and alien at worse. A suggestion, as it were, from another planet.

(And speaking of planets, what's with the traditionalist attachment to the abridged planeta, anyway? Gothic is great...)

If one views church music as a living tradition, and the chant along with it, I cannot help but view the upheavals of the beginning of the 20th Century, instigated by the Motu Proprio, as in part causative of the break with plainsong in its entirety in the minds and hearts of so many of the faithful.

I think you nailed it accurately. Sometimes it seems appropriate to say, "God save us from reformers." We had one in Pius X and another in Paul VI. Reformers never seem able to see the logical consequences of their reforms. It is the law of unintended consequences at work.

Was the Ward Method used beyond the United States?
How did World War One and World War Two
affect the European implementation of the 1903 Motu Proprio?

Thanks, eft94530,

I should note that I took the question in context of the USA, which is very much the scope of my researches.

Sorry!

I think that sometimes musicians who love chant - and I am one of them - can overdo it and beat the congregation over the head with it. Balance, folks. It's essential.

Aquinas talks about ..
Ignorance
Weakness
Malice
Concupiscence

True story.

Years ago I was the part time director of music in a parish. For the folk group which was under my administration ("control" would be far too hyperbolic a word), I planned (I think) I am the bread of Life, and planned it to be sung out of Worship III The folk group was up in arms because I had planned to use the red book at their Mass. Thing is,.... there were more red books than blue ones (Gather), so by choosing the red book, I had enabled more eyes to be on a book. ONE member of the group recognized that I had done the group a favor.

Association may be correct as an analysis, but it's a learned association often, not a natural one.

Catherine,

I've met two of the kinds of Catholics you mention. The cross-pollinated kind who don't realize it are usually claiming one of two things: we want more people to come to the Traditional form, so we have to make it..... less traditional! ; or my parish in the 1950s used (some substitute) and our priest said it was perfectly ok, so we (usually self-identified) blue-collar Catholics don't need any of that frilly stuff to be good Catholics.

The other is the one who won't compromise to let anything other than chant in -- and so, for example, they shun polyphony.