History on the liturgical music apocalypse of the 1960s
  • Has the definitive work been written yet? That is, something not steeped in polemics, backed with some solid scholarly analysis. (Trojan Horse in the City of God has too wide a focus, and Why Catholics Can't Sing is largely anecdotal.)
  • marajoymarajoy
    Posts: 781
    Have you read "Keep the Fire Burning" by Ken Canedo? You can guess his perspective, but I found it to be a very enlightening historical perspective, helping me to answer the question "what the h*** happened."
  • I agree that it hasn't really been written. There is so much research to do. A fascinating aspect of this history would certainly have to treat how the chant advocates dealt with the upheaval and transition. A comprehensive account would have to show that plenty went wrong on all sides.
  • Which archdiocese would make a good case study? St. Louis? Portland?
  • Kathy
    Posts: 5,507
    Milwaukee.
    Thanked by 1Ally
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,080
    And the problem would be to capture the wide range of local circumstances before the Council. There were parishes and oratories where the Liturgical Movement had significant positive influence on music before the Council, but in many areas outside the Great Lakes and Midwest it seems they were islands in a sea. The rapid expansion of suburban parishes after WW2 in the US - where there was a premium on building schools before churches - played a key delaying role that may have been fatal.
    Thanked by 1Gavin
  • Oakland CA
  • Is there any serious scholarly effort to examine this problem yet?
  • SalieriSalieri
    Posts: 3,177
    We are not ready for the history of the problem yet. Wait until 2064 when the now-aged 'hippies' are shuffled off this mortal coil, and the original followers of + Lefevre (RIP) have gone to their eternal rest as well.

    At this time, what this history would do, even inadvertantly, would be simply to place the blame, or seem to place the blame, on one person or (in the US) ethnic group. While I own a copy of Why Catholics Can't Sing, and love re-reading it (it's great for a good laugh), it falls into the standard 'blame the Irish' motif; other books tend to the 'blame Bugnini/Paul VI' argument.

    Not until the Reform of the Reform has taken place and there is One Form of the Roman Use (NB I would consider the Book of Divine Worship to be part of the English Liturgical tradition, i.e. Use of York or Salisbury, but not Rome), authentically reformed according to Sacrosanctum Concillium, and containing the great wealth of Roman Latin Rite Tradition, as developed organically from the first centuries of Christendom; when there are not two camps in the Roman Use ("pre-" and "post-concilliar"); when we finally achieve the paradigm, rather than trying to re-hash and revive the practise of the Twentieth, or Nineteenth, or Ninth Centuries, as if they were the time of an Utopian Worship, can we write the history of this turbulent time of revolution, and actually see, with hind-sight, what actually occured to create the problem we've inherited.

    The history of the "War for Sacred Music" cannot be written until the last battle has been won.
  • JahazaJahaza
    Posts: 470
    We are not ready for the history of the problem yet. Wait until 2064 when the now-aged 'hippies' are shuffled off this mortal coil, and the original followers of + Lefevre (RIP) have gone to their eternal rest as well.

    It may be true that the real history can't be written yet, but the real journalism can only be written now. We may not be ready for the Eamon Duffy of the problem, but we need the Bob Woodward, the Willa Baum, and the Lou Cannon of the problem so that there's more stuff for the future Eamon Duffy to work with.
  • "I'd like a book about the 'liturgical music apocalypse'. No polemics, please." LOL.
  • Jahaza: Is there such an archive already, impartial to paradigm?
  • Kathy
    Posts: 5,507
    I've mentioned before on some thread or another that I'd received a treasure trove of archival documents, in the form of dozens of back issues of a publication called Gemshorn, that came out of Milwaukee. It's crazy stuff, with ads for the albums of Ray Repp, and notes from archdiocesan meetings, and protests from letters to the editor that chant isn't ALWAYS bad for children, after all.
  • kevinfkevinf
    Posts: 1,189
    My grandmother kept a diary from about 1962-until 1975. As the Church was very much a part of her life, she wrote about the changes extensively, if not but from a person in the pew perspective. The consistent thread that is woven throughout her writings is two-fold.
    1)The changes were a shock and were explained very little.
    2) Music was a primary source of her frustration, as if we had let "the people from off the streets" into the church and were told that this was a good thing.

    Her writing is anecdotal, but fascinating. I read it to get the perspective of the time.
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,471
    You should try out back issues of NPM:
    http://www.npm.org/pastoral_music/archives.html
    Thanked by 1Kathy
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,471
    Kevin:

    Is there any possibility that these diaries (the relevant parts at least) could be digitalized and made available? More than scholarly accounts, history is usually contained in personal writing- Civil War letters, Pepys' Journal, my grandfather's waffle recipe...
  • kevinfkevinf
    Posts: 1,189
    I should think about it. And ask my father's permission.
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,471
    My favorite quote from the NPM archives, is in Vol 1, Issue 1 (and remember... the year is 1976... let that fact sink in for a moment, and then read...)

    The pop-folk style was a token nod to youth in its initial stages, but now its biggest enthusiasts are middle-aged worshippers.
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,080
    I remember the advent of the folk group in 1970 in my parish (we had an auditorium for a church...like a lot of suburban parishes in those days). They were musically superior to the baleful Hammond hurdy-gurdy, I mean organ, that had theretofore been the instrumental accompaniment to liturgy (mit lotsa vibrato, to mix 3 lingos, sounding like a bad Hollywood soundtrack from bad pious films of the 1940s).

    But, but the mid-70s, they faded in quality. However, by then my mother loved that music (she was in her early 50s), and the younger folks already had mostly dropped out of active practice (which was by then was long common after Confirmation - I think by the time I was a senior in a huge public high school (each class was about 1000 kids; 5 years earlier, it was more like 1400-1500 kids per class), there were less than a dozen of us still in CCD....a milder form of that pattern was already in place by the mid-60s, if I recall correctly what I was told by my parents, who were rather defiantly countercultural, shall we say.

    I thirsted for something much better, and had to wait a couple of more years when I could go to a better neighboring parish (formerly run by German Benedictines...) myself. But I was definitely a strange kid in that regard; I cannot recall meeting a single fellow Catholic adolescent who shared my tastes until I got to college, where we had to form a schola of our own under the direction of a wonderful nun who was relatively catholic in her tastes (Gregorian chant, polyphony, shape-note music, good spirituals and some modern sacred music, too).
    Thanked by 1Gavin
  • My history is documented at m'blog, Liam, so I won't redux it here. But there are similarities with the exposure to genres whilst in college and involved in cathedral liturgy. The thing that makes me winsomely laugh as I type this is I'm listening to the Pandora "Machaut" channel incessantly. Of all the musics I love and know will be magnified brilliantly in heaven, in this veil doth the Ars Antiqua still this savage's heart.
    Thanked by 1Gavin
  • A book worth re-reading is "Recovery of the Sacred" by Dr. James Hitchcock, a professor of history at St. Louis University. This book is as valid today as it was in the
    mid-1970s.
    Thanked by 1E_A_Fulhorst
  • I know it is a book I would like to read but sadly I don't think I will be alive in 2064.
  • dad29
    Posts: 2,229
    Kathy: that '71 church music event in Milwaukee should be compared to the SAME event in the mid-sixties, with Paul Salamunovich leading the choral seminar/preparations. Or 1965, when Roger Wagner led the chorus in Milwaukee singing H.W. Zimmermann's new Mass (in English) and Bruckner's E Minor for Masses during the V International Music Congress.

    By 1971, the biennial event had deteriorated into an apologia for awfulness, and most of Milwaukee's serious church musicians had bailed out--some to another continent, others to "retirement."

    Thanked by 1Kathy
  • I think to write this book now would be like writing a World War II history book right as the tide is turning towards the Allies. There is so much more that needs to happen before this unfortunate chapter in the history of Sacred Music is put behind us. I will echo the excellence of Dr. Hitchcock's "Rediscover of the Sacred". A lot of the reason for that is, although we are specialists in Sacred Music, the destruction and abandonment of true Sacred Music is just one of the symptoms of a dreadful illness that we're just now beginning to recover from.
    Thanked by 2E_A_Fulhorst Salieri
  • That book is available for cheap on Amazon and Better World Books. Snag!