Fr. Anthony Ruff has a wonderful article in the new Pastoral Liturgy, which he has helpfully uploaded on his website: The Value of Unaccompanied Vernacular Chant in the Liturgy.
He is so right on this:
Singing is one of the most basic things human beingss do. Since the dawn of time, in the various cultures of the world, human beings have sung. Mothers have sung lullabies to their babies. Families have sung together before sharing a meal. Children at play have sung nursery rhymes. Saint Augustine reports in the fifth century that farmers sang psalms while working in the fields.
In our day, electronic recordings and earphones threaten to silence our singing. It is now possible to hear music all day long without producing any of it oneself. The liturgy calls us back to our humanity. The liturgy reunites us with our forebears. When we sing the liturgy, we are thereby made more human.
Count me in. My general presumption is that all liturgical music chosen should sound excellent if no accompaniment were available for it. It's a high but ultimately rebuttable presumption. But it weeds out a lot without even having to deal with differences in idioms. And, over the years, I've found that it's a lot less ideologically loaded than other winnowing fans, hence it's way more practical!
As much as recordings are a blessing to access the work of others, they have also lead to the erosion of live, performed music. My students will tell that they don't want to sing because they don't sound like the recording. I explain that much of the music done in studios is manipulated electronically much like Photo Shop.
We have moved away from the organic roots of making music into the realm of consumers of music. Pope Benedict had referred to the modern celebration of the Liturgy as "plastic", meaning it had lost its organic connection to the creatures who make it.
We are most fully human when we are connected to the very creation given to us by God. So, I agree that by embracing the chants as given to us by the Church we enter more fully into what it is to be human.
Nice to see AWR being positive about the new translation. I don't rate him as a liturgist but when it comes to music he knows what he's talking about.
"Dance like nobody's watching, sing like nobody's listening etc". A huge part of the appeal of any mass for me when I was at school was that I could sing out with lots of other people who were oblivious to anything other than the joy of doing the same. I feel much more self conscious singing in church now, and I do believe my iPod and my headphones have compromised that confidence. When we catch fragments of someone singing along to whatever they are listening to through their own headphones, on a train or in a similarly public but confined place, there are exchanged embarrassed glances. It's very sad. One of the local guys who sweep the streets in this part of Brighton; and who do a fantastic job by the way; was singing Lloyd Webber's Memory so beautifully last week that two neighbours and myself went outside to listen to him. I was delighted that he finished the whole song, unabashed and with a smile. I realised that apart from buskers, it was the first time in years that I had heard somebody singing while they went about their business, because they could and bcause it brought them joy.