At work yesterday, we had a CD on the spinner of Christian hits from the 50s to today. It was a three disc set, and we had the first disc in, which was the totally retro one. Mostly your basic 60s faux-folk.
The next disc to play was the demo CD of the three new English mass settings in the Celebrate With Song booklet put out by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the only three that will be permitted in English in Canada besides the new ICEL chant.
Why, why, why was there basically no difference in style between the two?
The three new settings are awful, particularly the Glorias. All three are ugly, all three use the annoying gimmick of having the cantor or choir sing the "verses" and everyone else joins in on the repeating "glory to God" chorus. It's a single continuous prayer! An antiphonal style is all right once in a while, if it is well done, but I really don't want to spend week after week listening to one or a few people crooning along to a guitar or keyboard in between repeats of the "chorus."
That easy-listening faux-folk style may have been what all the hip young folks were into when the current generation of bishops was hip and young, but it is stale and dated now. It's okay in moderation, but it's the musical equivalent of white bread: bland, kind of lacking in both texture and substance, and a steady diet of it is dull and unpleasant.
It also adds insult to injury by being both bland and not particularly singable. All three settings involve one or more of the following in the verses to make sure the congregation isn't tempted to try singing along: gratuitous rhythmic irregularities and/or accidentals, weird interval jumps and melodies that aren't particularly melodic, lines that repeat almost the same so that you'll get the second time wrong when it changes, and notes that are too high for the average non-soprano.
If you want to make music for the assembly to sing, make it singable by everyone, which is not the same as taking what some dude with a guitar sang and transcribing it complete with rhythmic idiosyncracies. If you want to make music that's too challenging for the whole assembly, at least make it interesting. We have an amazing heritage of liturgical music. If you want a Gloria sung by the choir instead of the assembly, teach the choir some freakin' Palestrina!
Not a Catholic, but I noticed the same phenomenon at my mother's Lutheran church. They had two services, one with "old" music and one with "new". I much preferred the "old", for most of the same reasons you describe. Nothing against updating things, but seriously, don't lose all the beauty of the old in trying to be current!
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