Wildly Inappropriate Unrubrical Liturgical Daydreams
  • NihilNominisNihilNominis
    Posts: 986
    Mine is a funeral Mass for a lifelong aviator. Specifically, actually, my father. I must be clear, I would not actually do this.

    The casket is carried to the rail of some glorious Gothic pile while the Introduction of "Thus Spake Zarathuatra" by Strauss is played. It is timed perfectly. Immediately after the organ lets off the final, lingering chord, the priest (and this must be spoken, not sung, in the very reverberant space) makes the Sign of the Cross. Makes me choke up thinking about it, actually. Without a very deep understanding of the musical, historical, or ritual context, it would be incredibly powerful.

    Liturgical abuse so often lacks all creativity and flair...

    Anyway, what's your, "I almost wish I had no principles, so that I could..."?
    Thanked by 1CatherineS
  • Chrism
    Posts: 868
    Can anyone think of a more romantic processional for a bride(zilla) than Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet"?
    Thanked by 1CCooze
  • Kathy
    Posts: 5,500
    O Fortuna. Almost any time. Think about it.
    Thanked by 2CCooze MaestroMark32
  • matthewjmatthewj
    Posts: 2,696
    I always thought Limp Bizkit's My Way (not a cover of any other song by that title), which was vaguely popular in my social circle when I was 16, could have a good beat for incensing the altar.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,368
    I have never, not once, dreamed of doing anything inappropriate at any liturgical event. I have, however, once upon a time, been gently coerced into playing something inappropriate, namely OEW, at a requiem for a new Episcopalian deacon who had died. I had been teaching him how to chant his parts of the liturgy. It came time for OEW and I began playing it. After a few bars I became extremely anxious and my entire being rebelled and I stopped playing it. The congregation, mostly priests and deacons, continued singing it with vigour. Oddly, after the service one priest was heard to say 'whose brilliant idea was it to sing OEW a capella?'
    ___________________________________________

    I'm ashamed to say that many years ago during my practice sessions I would very infrequently (only two or three times) take a schmaltzy hymn and for my amusement play it in a very 'evangelical' style with 8, 4, and 2 principals complete with 4' coupler, tremulant, all manner of passing notes and chromatic slides as I imagined it might be heard in some evangelical church. I found this (at that distant time) to be quite amusing. However, one day when several ladies passed through the church one of them commented on 'how beautiful it was' - I never did it again.
    Thanked by 7WGS NihilNominis Carol m_r_taylor CHGiffen Joseph Michael JonathanKK
  • Carol
    Posts: 849
    I am sorry to say I have heard what I call "Lounge Lizard" organ music played in my parish. A few years ago someone commented on how good the player was because he used "nearly all the keys." It took a lot of self-control not to act on either of my knee jerk reactions: (a) wring her neck or (b) collapse on the floor in a fit of hysterical laughter!
    Thanked by 2ServiamScores CHGiffen
  • ServiamScores
    Posts: 2,724
    I'm ashamed to say that many years ago during my practice sessions I would very infrequently (only two or three times) take a schmaltzy hymn and for my amusement play it in a very 'evangelical' style...

    I turned Silent Night into a polka once... lol
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-b6x3EIGIY
    Thanked by 3Chrism CatherineS MaestroMark32
  • ServiamScores
    Posts: 2,724
    I'm not going to lie, just once or twice, I'd like to have a Mass with dramatic, angry music to emphasize God's justice. Hellfire and brimstone set to music. I'm so tired of all this "squishy church" (as my friend calls it) business that I would find it refreshing.
    Thanked by 3CatherineS Carol MaestroMark32
  • Carol
    Posts: 849
    Like the "Dies Irae" from Mozart's Requiem? I think that is the best match of text and music ever!
  • Casavant Organist
    Posts: 800
    Verdi Requiem.
    Period.
    Thanked by 2NihilNominis Carol
  • Jeffrey Quick
    Posts: 2,048
    If I ever found my current position untenable, I'd be tempted to go out singing "All are welcome."
    Thanked by 1Carol
  • Carol
    Posts: 849
    I just saw this in my computer news feed and immediately thought of this discussion. Sorry for my poor attribution, but there was no link, etc.


    The Saint Burchardi Church in the city of Halberstadt started playing "As Slow as Possible" by U.S. composer John Cage in 2001 and the last note change took place in 2013.
    The church is taking an extreme interpretation of the composition's title: the piece is expected to last 639 years, coming to a painfully slow end in 2640.

    Sand bags were attached to the organ on Saturday, which coincides with what would have been Cage's 108th birthday, setting it to play G sharp and E for the next 2,527 days.
    "The sound from October 5 2013 until today, September 5, Cage's 108th birthday, is the longest uninterrupted sound," said Rainer Neugebauer of the John Cage Organ Project in Halberstadt.

    (Reporting by Reuters TV; Writing by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Ros Russell)
    Thanked by 2M. Jackson Osborn CHGiffen
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,368
    Carol -
    Was John Cage a genius or a charlatan?
    Thanked by 1Carol
  • CHGiffenCHGiffen
    Posts: 5,151
    Yes.
    Thanked by 1Carol
  • dad29
    Posts: 2,217
    On parish-picnic day, "Roll Out the Barrel" as a recessional after the last Mass.

    One can do that, very carefully improvising. A friend told me that.
    Thanked by 1Carol
  • Nathan_the_Organist
    Posts: 434
    John Cage is a unique composer. However, I think the interpretation of the title by the Saint Buchardi Church is taking things to the extreme. I am of the opinion that when a composer gives vague musical directions, performers must follow those within a reasonable context. I would say that a performance that takes so long that no one who is alive at the beginning will be able to see the end is an unreasonable context.
    Thanked by 2a_f_hawkins Carol
  • IdeK
    Posts: 87
    I sometimes think of making a "will" including precisions about my funeral mass.
    I'd rather like my coffin to be carried away, at the end of a very penitential mass (I'm not a saint by any means and I'd rather have people praying for me at my burial !), by porters marching militarily, while a choir of men would sing "Marching to Zion" a cappella. (Yes, in English, in France).

    (I hope to live for a very, very long time and to see the children of the children I'll have when it will please the Lord).
  • Schönbergian
    Posts: 1,063
    Any music which can be summed up in a paragraph so that the reader has absolutely no need to hear the work itself is worthless, in my eyes. At my university last year they exhibited some modernist piece written for a metronome ensemble. Once more, reading about the work left me with absolutely no need to hear it; I had already experienced everything it had to offer.

    Even the most intricate technical description of Beethoven or Bruckner pales in comparison to what simply hearing them can tell you or make you experience.
    Thanked by 4JonathanKK CHGiffen M. Jackson Osborn Carol
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,368
    .
    Thanked by 1Carol
  • Carol
    Posts: 849
    I am not learned enough to make a worthy comment, but the story "The Emperor's New Clothes" does come to mind.
    Thanked by 1GerardH
  • m_r_taylor
    Posts: 317
    I imagine rather that the most out-there "compositions" were to challenge the notion of what music could be. How Promethean, perhaps...yes...

    Thankfully most people ignored it or laughed at it and moved on.

    Unfortunately some people took it with deadly seriousness and taught it to the next generation instead of mentioning it as a cautionary tale.
  • JonathanKKJonathanKK
    Posts: 542
    Blank verse is not a good sonnet; and a sonnet may be a higher art form than blank verse.

    Music is organized sound, sound is vibration or movement. The physical world, when you break it down, is all moving and vibrating according to certain laws. So the physical world is music.

    Someone was telling me once that Scriabin had planned some mystical monster-work, that when it was performed it would be the end of the world. He was nuts, of course. But I think it was hearing that idea described that gave me the thought: the liturgy is the great musical work. The composition is written down in our liturgical books and so forth, the church's calendar gives its permutations over time like a peal of bells, we all the members of the church contribute to its execution, for better or worse. Scriabin, John Cage, and all their ilk are thus blown out of the water: the performance of the church's liturgy has been underway for about 2000 years; and it is also the fulfillment of what came before.

    By the way, have you all read the account of the creation of the world which begins Tolkien's The Silmarillion ? (Please don't post it here, it should be read out of a book.)
    Thanked by 1CharlesW
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,368
    Very well put, Jonathan -

    The notion that it was by music that creation was brought into being is at least as old as the Greeks. You are spot on about vibrations in nature and throughout the universe. All, or most, animals respond to these vibrations as well as contribute to them.

    St Isidore of Seville wrote in the VIIth century that 'Without music there can be no perfect knowledge, for even the universe is said to have been put together with a certain harmony'.

    It is worth noting here that all sounds are not equal. A musical tone will emit sound waves that are beautiful to look at and have quite regular and symmetrical beats. Noise, on the other hand, produces very random and wildly irregular waves that are really quite ugly - which raises the question, can one make 'music' out of noise, as many moderns think that they have done? I would say not. Noise is noise (as in Stockhausen's helicopter and Cages 'prepared piano'), and music is music. (Incidentally, Schopenhauer asserted correctly that 'intelligence decreases in inverse proportion to one's ability to withstand noise undisturbed'.)
  • Schönbergian
    Posts: 1,063
    In my mind, the debate about whether one can twist the definition of "music" to encompass these works is less important than the fact that, as art, they are simply lousy. They exist to challenge the definition and that is it. One neither derives enjoyment nor insight from experiencing them, and they have no artistic purpose other than to challenge the definition of art itself.

    They're nothing more than a waste of our time.
    Thanked by 3M. Jackson Osborn Carol CharlesW
  • GerardH
    Posts: 411
    Detractors of modernism and John Cage might find much food for thought in this interview of Sir James MacMillan by Frank La Rocca for the Benedict XVI Institute.

    But you know the curious thing about that piece 4’33”, that four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence which was a kind of provocation to the culture and their listening sensibilities or lack thereof? The original title for that was: Silent Prayer. So that was Cage’s initial concept. And there are academics pushing the idea he got the idea for Silent Prayer by wandering into an American Catholic church in the 1950s. And of course, as you know when silence descends in the Extraordinary Form Mass, it’s at the moment of Consecration, which usually lasts about four and a half minutes.”


    I, for one, would love to see an Extraordinary Form Mass accompanied by Will Todd's Mass in Blue
  • CatherineS
    Posts: 690
    I'd love to see more parishes use John Cage's lesser known work, 58'00", at every weekday Mass. ;)
  • GambaGamba
    Posts: 539
    I’m still waiting to hear BWV 232 some Sunday.
  • Carol
    Posts: 849
    I am not against modern music, but it should be musical. I once heard a solo piece called "The Loon" played on the bassoon. The composition included blowing air through the body of the bassoon which did sound like the wind and playing only the mouth piece mimicking the call of the loon. It also had beautiful, haunting melodies that were more conventional.

    Most of those pieces with "prepared" piano or a composition that consists of vague instructions don't do it for me.
  • Richard MixRichard Mix
    Posts: 2,768
    Once more, reading about the work left me with absolutely no need to hear it; I had already experienced everything it had to offer.

    One might suppose. I admired some early works (especially the String Quartet in Four Parts and the Sonatas and Interludes) but found Cage's later philosophy highly provocative. He was so obviously someone to be reckoned with that I made a trip to Middletown for his 80th birthday festival, hearing 14 concerts in 6 days. It was a life changing experience, so perhaps you know what you're doing in not making the actual experiment.

    Like Ives and Ruggles, he is better regarded as a prophet overseas. I was astonished as well as touched when a bookstore clerk in Düsseldorf, on learning I was a American, offered condolences on Cage's recent passing.
    Thanked by 3M. Jackson Osborn Carol Jeffrey Quick
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