What's with the hippy music? Seriously?

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!

Literary Rant – Part the first

One of the reasons I started this blog was so I could air some of my rants to people other than The Heather (who’s heard them all before).

By way of background, my academic studies were in Comparative Literature. I usually say I have 2.5 degrees in the subject, as I completed my Masters, but ran away screaming a few years into my PhD. My abortive thesis would have been on images of the sacred in contemporary children’s fantasy, which hopefully gives you a bit of a sense of what I like to read.

And here’s what bugs me: people don’t know how to read. I don’t mean they’re not literate, I mean they don’t know how to understand what they’re reading.

A good example of this is the criticism often levied at works like the Harry Potter series. One of the popular complaints against the books is that they contain magic, that magic = occult, that occult = evil, and that therefore Harry Potter = evil. Now I’ll be the first to agree that there are valid criticisms you can level against J K Rowling’s work, but this is not one of them. It also strikes a nerve with me because it’s hard to make the argument above without indicting all of fantasy literature.

Literature builds worlds. Even the most realistic of novels isn’t actually set in the real world; it’s set in a fictionalized version of the world where the events of the story happen. Fantasy (and indeed all speculative fiction) makes this more explicit by creating worlds that differ markedly from the one we live in. Magic is there to set the world of the story apart, to make it clear that this is not our world. There is a great advantage to this, as it lets us see with fresh eyes, and to approach familiar things in a new way.

Whatever else magic may do in a story such world-building is one of its primary functions. When the reader is aware of magic functioning in this way, I think there is little danger that the magic in a story like Harry Potter will lead someone into real occultism.

Readers need to be aware of the genre of what they’re reading because it’s impossible to effectively interpret a work without understanding how it uses its own conventions. Just as we wouldn’t read poetry and prose the same way so we shouldn’t read The Lord of the Rings the same way we read Sense and Sensibility.

This problem doesn’t just effect how we read fiction; it also has a huge bearing on how we read the Bible. Some critics of Christianity, and indeed some Christians themselves, argue that the Bible in its entirety must be taken as literal historical fact. According to this view the moment one attempts to interpret one biblical text as figurative one invalidates any possibility of reading another biblical text as literal.

But the Bible isn’t a monolithic text; it’s composed of 73 books written in a variety of literary genres and forms, each with their own conventions. We need to understand how these genres and forms (some of which are very foreign to a modern reader) use language before we can start to figure out what they mean. Just as we wouldn’t read Psalm 23 the same way we read Romans so we shouldn’t read Genesis the same way we read Luke.