Tea at Trianon: The Problem with Catholic Church Music

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, December 1, 2013

The Problem with Catholic Church Music

From James MacMillan:

Some Catholic dioceses run courses for wannabe composers to perpetuate this style. It is a scandal. People with hardly any training and experience of even the basic building blocks of music have been convinced that there is a place for their puerile stumblings and fumblings in the modern Catholic Church because real musicians are elitist and off-putting. A whole industry has grown up to promote this material, mainly in the USA, where, it is alleged, there is sometimes dodgy publishing and promotional carve-ups between "composers", specialist publishing houses and Church authorities.

My writing for choirs will continue, but I want to help in the development of music for the assembly – the ordinary Catholic man and woman in the pew, the musical non-specialist who needs to be able to sing their prayers. Rather than adding to the huge and unnecessary load of modern congregational material, musicians would be better employed in the careful curating of a traditional reservoir of beautiful chant that can be adapted for the reality of the contemporary church. The alternative is terrifying.

There is clearly something wrong with an organisation that has allowed this to happen. Opening up the Church to the modern world was not an invitation to commercial populists in full lounge-lizard mode. (Read more.)