One never knows though. I filled in for our Saturday Vigil and had to make a face and cup an ear before "At the Lamb's high Feast" finally got going.

At my previous parish I served at a university parish Catholic campus ministry. I had recurring issues with students being unfamiliar with even the most basic of hymns.

My suburban parish growing up did not play At the Lamb's High Feast and did not play several other standards, that I had to discover on my own. And that's coming from a parish that was probably above average for its time in terms of the amount of traditional music they sung.

At this university parish I directed a contemporary choir that sometimes also sang hymns and chants. It often took way longer than anticipated for students to learn fairly basic hymns that apparently their home parishes never sang.

Also program Songs of Thankfulness and Praise to SALZBURG in early January to reinforce the tune.

Sounds like a suggestion to sing it every Sunday of Easter in order to make it familiar. Maybe that’s why our MD has programmed JCIRT at every Easter Mass this year...or because it’s trending on social media this year.

I programmed At the Lamb's High Feast four Sundays in a row when I first started at my current parish when the 2nd reading was hitting the "Christ the Victim, Christ the Priest" theme hard for a month. I think that was towards the end of Ordinary Time in Cycle B.

I realized after the fact that ... this did not mean that the congregation for Easter morning would know it.

This year I've programmed At the Lamb's High Feast for Easter Vigil, Easter Morning, Easter 2, and Easter 3. That's probably the end of it for this Easter season although I don't have Easter 5 and Easter 6 all the way planned yet.

We sing one hymn weekly. They get a second hymn at Vespers now.

The upshot is that this will allow for rotation of every two weeks and therefore more hymns, not accounting for feasts where we do interrupt the cycle as needed.

Except for things like LAMBILLOTTE and other unusual meters and therefore melodies or Christmas carols (sorry, I won’t reuse FOREST GREEN) I like having two texts per tune when possible.

Has nothing to do with cahones. Has everything to do with good taste.

I know it could sound like a step backwards, but I've been convinced that in my circumstances this is just more conducive to congregational singing.

I think your decision is prudent. Better to sing 2 or 3 really well, then 4 really poorly. This is why the only gloria we are singing in Latin right now is de Angelis. It's easy, happy sounding, and just as importantly: the only one we are singing, so people can learn it really well.

We're going to be using:

Credos 1, 3, and 4. 4 is the 3x/year one, where I just won't expect congregational participation, and 2 is the one removed.

Masses 1, 8, 11 and 18. 4 and 9 have been removed.

@MatthewRoth I would like to be moving in the opposite direction as well, but there needs to be a culture shift here first or it would only further reduce congregational singing. I view this consolidation as like an environmental modification to support a culture shift.

With hymnody it's hard. When reworking my plans, everything I already had felt like a must-have, and I almost couldn't make any priority distinctions between them. Removing any of them felt a bit like torture.

There is also this Credo

Has anyone used it before?

https://gregobase.selapa.net/chant.php?id=10613

On a more serious note, the cultural decay in our country, and throughout the West generally, is more to blame for the erosion of taste and appreciation for any of what used to be called "high art". Between 1974 and 1997 I taught a general education music "appreciation" course something over 100 times. My classes were large, 35 to 70 students (mostly 40 or so). The students were college students and seldom did I have more than 3 or 4 students who had ever heard a live orchestra, a legitimate singer apart from a parody, or any of the classical orchestral literature except when they were watching cartoons on TV when they were children. Some of them had a whole fascinating world of options open up to them in that class. Most remained where they were. I always told them that I did not want to take anything from them, but I did want them to be aware of a world of great things to listen to if they wanted it. Some did, some didn't. Our parishes are filled with people like them whose schools, churches, homes, and the incredible mass media that we have at our disposal have allowed the bar to drop awfully low. Raising it has become a ponderous task.

This is why I don't think your typical suburban parish can just hit the "RETVRN TO TRADITION" button and expect it to make everything better.

Classical music is in deep trouble right now in the USA, and I would guess the rest of the Western world. The overlap between Classical music and traditional Sacred Music means means that much of this trouble is going to arise if you attempt to force exclusively traditional Sacred Music on a congregation that hasn't already self-sorted into the one destination trad parish in your local area.

Classical music is facing the predictable consequences of destructive decisions made in the 1960s. The avant-garde embraced atonal music and orchestras started playing large chunks of music that charitably can be said to inspire the mind, not the heart (to borrow a from this amazing parody video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzodB0Sp6ZI).

Consequently, the general public stopped going to orchestra concerts. According to a friend of mine who plays in orchestras, in this time frame orchestras became dependent on money from donors who had political motivation for wanting atonal music played but often didn't attend the concerts their donations were supporting. I remember as a kid struggling to understand why our local orchestra programmed so much music from modern composers that I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy (I was blessed to have parents that frequently took me to orchestra concerts). I also remember hearing second hand weird comments that orchestra musicians thought Beethoven and the other old masters were passe, and viewed it as slumming it to program the stuff that brought in big audiences, like Beethoven's 9th.

The generation that donated big money to orchestras is currently dying off. Their children haven't continued the habit of donating to orchestras to subsidize 20th century atonal music. And orchestras have destroyed their ability to generate revenue from ticket sales, for the reasons outlined above. Orchestras everywhere are in budget crises, are slashing paid positions, and are desperate for more donors. Most orchestras would not be anywhere close to profitable on ticket sales alone and are forced to operate as charities, not for-profit businesses.

Meanwhile, artists like Taylor Swift make money hand over fist selling out concert venues sometimes hours after ticket sales open.

It's between difficult and impossible to solve a society-wide cultural challenge by changing what music you program.

Music ministry requires some amount of meeting people where they are at. Many of our local churches are facing the downstream consequences of the above. It's progressively harder to find classically trained people to participate in the music ministry. Most of the congregation doesn't listen to classical music and won't appreciate traditional sounding music replacing their beloved standards. And I hear the shortage of trained organ players is becoming acute.

Christian music is in a similar situation to classical music. Matt Maher, Chris Tomlin, Hillsong, and many others make significant money as touring musicians singing for large crowds who chose to pay to attend. It's much more challenging to get a big crowd for Bach's sacred works, or for Renaissance polyphony.

The two main requests I get at my parish are for more folk music and more praise and worship music. Very few if any parishioners ask me to play more traditional music. That's coming from an audience that's already used to hearing a mix of traditional and contemporary. My two immediate predecessors forced English chanted antiphons on the congregation, and I have not had a single member of the congregation ask for more of these (we still do some of them, and some members of the choir are fond of them). Many members of the congregation have complained that they found the large volume of this repertoire to be dreary and that significant numbers of people left for other parishes over it.

I've always thought there was a double movement here, in that as our culture continues down this route a subset grows that can be engaged by the radically different soundscape found in the liturgy of a musically traditional parish.

And I think we tend to assume that people who appreciate old music carry certain aesthetic standards across the board, but I find that millennials and zoomers are more apt to compartmentalize. What they "want to hear" at a friday night concert and what they "want to hear" at mass can be radically different. At the bar they can appreciate a live band doing 90s pop rock, in the parish hall a youth night featuring praise and worship music, and at Sunday mass an orderly provision of organ, chant and polyphony.

In my experience this compartmentalization difference is very real, and difficult for anyone with a classic "high art" sensibility to grasp. Strange as it may seem, at least some of the people at the pop concert also want masses with traditional music.

None of this is a refutation of @contemporaryworship92, just some nuances I've noticed.

In my experience this compartmentalization difference is very real, and difficult for anyone with a classic "high art" sensibility to grasp. As strange as it may sound, at least some of the people at the pop concert also want masses with traditional music.

I play pop and rock precisely as a distraction. I'm just not gonna fuss about it. I know a lot of trads (Gen X and elder millennial down to closer to my age—Millennial, but on the younger side) who love metal, the rest hate it. It's not like I don't listen to baroque or renaissance and classical music. I do, far more than I did as a child and younger adult, but I really can't do it for everything like some trads would want to be the case.

This is why I don't think your typical suburban parish can just hit the "RETVRN TO TRADITION" button and expect it to make everything better.

Classical music is in deep trouble right now in the USA, and I would guess the rest of the Western world. The overlap between Classical music and traditional Sacred Music means means that much of this trouble is going to arise if you attempt to force exclusively traditional Sacred Music on a congregation that hasn't already self-sorted into the one destination trad parish in your local area.

No...simply NO.As one who has changed 3 parishes from crap folk music to tradition (Im on no.4 now) three things have occured.

1) The clergy have been on board and have preached relentlessly for a "return to tradition." People have followed.

2) Children have participated in this project. And therein lies the future. Time and time again this has been proven.

3)Three orchestras that I have some familiarity with in terms of their internal workings have seen an uptick in young people attending and giving money from young entrepeneurs.

Sorry but I have been hearing the decline of classical music now for 60 years. Meanwhile i attend a major orchestra concert and the place is packed. And the opera...O my the operas I have seen are filled with young attendees and full houses. Consider Tristan and Isolde in NYC of late. Could not get tickets because it was sold out.

Please return to your strumming and yodeling and let the rest of us get on with the work at hand. The era of folk music is DEAD and guitars are dying along with the amateurs who play them. The biological solution is at work.

I have VERY little tolerance from guitar strummers and swooning singers of folk music long ago. If I sound harsh it is because I am. Too much goodwill was given to bad music and bad theology. We have to clean up from the Sh-t shoveled out from the last years and I am tired of standing it. Fortunately I do not have to but for many years I was forced to live in it.

Go shovel it somewhere else. I am old and don't wish to hear it.

Came here to say what @kevinf already said...
The future of church music is with the children. The vast majority of the progress I have made in the three parishes where I have worked has been with the children. The amount of progress has a pretty direct correlation to how much time (and principal/pastoral support) I have to work with the students. I currently teach K-12 music and am a parish music director/organist. My parish choir is intergenerational (but over half are students in Grades 3-8). I live in a smallish town and it is not a destination parish. There is so much hope here.

If you want to make convincing arguments to people outside your subculture, be aware that framing all music that isn't chant or hymns like this won't work

I don't speak like my writing outside of here. But I tire of arrogance like yours in this context. I have written more about this than you will ever know. Your myopia is a reminder to me of the indignities I have have suffered because of people like yourself. 4 degrees and 42 years of experience.

Folk music and its like, contemporary crap are dying. Little by little we are returning to sanity. But occasionally I have to rail at folks like yourself who have the audacity to tell us what to do. In my town are 5 parishes, 4 of which do ad-orientem, chant and good hymnody. One parish stil shovels the crap. Touche!

Termine! I will return to my little place of sanity. Keep shoveling your arrogant attitudes for the rest who wish to visit. As for me, i have no need.

Addendum: I think the music of ServiamScores is of high compositional quality. I would have difficulty implementing most of it in my parish, but I respect your craft.

My comments are directed at publishers whose marketing, graphics design, and software exceed the quality of their music.

I venture to guess that said implementation is done by people who would have trouble implementing anything. Let’s face it, musicians are often not talented in the people skills department.

@davido

Probably, but more specifically it's done by people who, afaik, have not been formed by the TLM. Maybe I'm setting myself up for vehement disagreement here but I think that even now a discriminating internalization of Latin Rite reverence is unlikely to be formed outside substantial exposure to the TLM.

I think some of the unfamiliarity with the more classical music among the younger set comes from not hearing it. After one of my 4 retirements - yes really, I have retired 4 times - I taught a public middle school music course in a rural county. I was told this would never work, but I showed the kids a good video of "Carmen" over a period of days. We discussed the plot and the music as we went along. The kids really got into the story and associated the music with what was happening on screen. In short, they loved it. Some were crushed when Carmen was murdered at the end. They didn't want it to end there. I have said for some time the cutbacks in funding and support for music education in the schools is responsible for the lack of musical knowledge that has bled over into church music. If you want the kids to understand and like that music, you have to teach it and have the funding and materials necessary to do so.