Yuck. Boring. Repetitive. Banal.

On the other hand, what is already used at Mass in the OF which is simply not fitting, except in the same category as this stuff?

I question whether or not these performers actually have any real talent. Bad music done badly. As for myself, I wouldn't attend there.

I had wondered if those pipes were real or display.

Just add another to the cases of those who tell us to "get with the times" but are actually the ones stuck in the past.

I think I’d actually consider liking it without the electric guitar and just piano, but even that is a stretch. Yikes.

Wonder when they use the pipe organ? Probably for the early Sunday morning “old people” Mass, as I’ve heard it described. Sigh.

This reminds me vividly of a church in the Confederacy for which I was music director for a couple years.

The pastor was completely amusical, in fact, I believe there is a word for his condition - “amusia” - and he resented it because in childhood a teacher insulted him for it. He carried his resentment, which metastasized over the years, into his job, so I guess you can imagine how that ultimately turned out for me.

He started a “contemporary” service, preceding the fusty old mainline Protestant service, and used the talents of two very dear and very kind people who provided the music - piano, guitar and voice - to this service. I came to the job with this already in place. Since it was working for those who attended - and I imagine all who attended did so merely to get “church” out of the way, because I never really discovered what spiritual effects could keep a person coming. The music was stuff from the big copyrighted database of “modern Christian liturgical music” which as we all know consists of praising Jesus in three chords with tubs of bathos thrown in.

I was utterly ambivalent to the type and quality of music, mainly because no one objected and the musicians were so kind and sincere. I valued their work, their support and their talents, and I supported them. I never inserted anything of my own choosing unless I was subbing for them on any given Sunday.

But the music occasionally sounded just like this execrable video clip. I mean, why not? The “congregation” was seated around 10-spot banquet tables covered in white tablecloths, and although the amusical pastor wore his doctoral robe and used the formal words of the Institution, it was all quite casual, otherwise. You could hold and play with “prayer stones” if you wished. There were donuts, fruit, coffee and sugared drinks before and after. And it lasted less than 45 minutes, with a cut-down “sermon” designed just for this “service.”

I understand, though, I am writing this in a catholic blog and your views are generally quite different from those who work in Protestant churches. I’ve played for lots of RC churches over the 45 years I engaged in working for hospitals for souls in which I got assigned to too many psych wards for the criminally insane. But at the same time, I kind of wonder at the approach that rejects this out of hand, despite all the formal directives issued by Rome as to what sacred music in the Church actually is…or *must* be. I for one don’t like this music (the video in question) and would try to never allow it to happen if I were ever to work in a church again (and, having spent my time in hell, have no interest in doing so ever again).

I guess the biggest complain I and others seem to have with this video is that the “style” of music (and I use the term loosely) is by its nature self-centerted. It fails to incorporate the austerity of what one is actually addressing and adoring. Maybe. I don’t know anymore.

But what I do know is that this … this … “music” is of an era that I thought had long ago passed after enjoying an entirely expected metastasis in the immediate wake of V2, but, :::sigh::: it never really died out, did it?

Maybe after all is said and done there’s nothing wrong with gong to sleep with the melody and words of the (simple form of the) Salve Regina in your head, after reading Compline from either the LOTH or the 1962 Breviary (both of which I own and use in private, as in that famous line from Matthew about your room, in secret). Funny thing is, if there’s a heaven, these two fellows will, provided they don’t do anything more egregious to reserve their place in hell, be there when some of us lucky ones (maybe even me) get there, too.

Shalom.

Jeffrey, I don’t follow you line of reasoning. Our Lord drove out the money changers from the temple… just because their atrocities were taking place didn’t cause the temple to cease being the temple. God was still in the holy of holies… his temple was simply being profaned. I would presume the same here.

The music was stuff from the big copyrighted database of “modern Christian liturgical music” which as we all know consists of praising Jesus in three chords with tubs of bathos thrown in.

Punny.