Vic the Vicar is depressed

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1. Ronald Richard Duquette says

   July 28, 2011 at 10:48 pm

   Oh, Edward, you don’t KNOW how close to the mark you strike!  The courage you speak of is that of culture, of recognizing that in certain places and at certain times there are acts and sounds and sights that do NOT belong to that place and time, and that there are other acts and sounds and sights that do – and that’s because there is a recognition that what is being done and sung and what is seen has to do with something beyond ourselves.  Some months ago, I recall a series of comments here on ChoralNet that were started by a music minister in a large Methodist church out in San Diego (I think) who was concerned about large-screen TVs being brought in and amplification beyond belief during the service, and, and, and…. Of the first seven responses, six focused on copyright and performance rights issues.  But yours truly, contrarian that I am, focused on the fact that all of this hoo-ha going on in the church was entirely beside the point, which is the worship of God – not ourselves.  Come to find out, that’s what this good fellow was also concerned about.  What was interesting and even frightening was that he commented that when he brought this notion up in the liturgy planning sessions, the attendees, not least of which the clerics, looked at him as though he had fallen from somewhere on the other side of Pluto.  When the clerics don’t get it, can we honestly expect that the congregation will get it as well?  For that matter, it is up to us to tell the clergy when they’re out to lunch, liturgically and musically speaking, because for the most part the music minister is the guy or gal who’s spent most of his/her life wrestling with the issues involved in blending liturgy and music so that Beauty and Truth can be found together before God.  I’ve lost jobs because of that, and frankly, I would do it again; the horror stories I’ve heard in my 40 years in church music about clerics who come in and run like wildfire through a music program because they have some bee in their bonnet about music and musicians in the Church, and they can’t wait to act out their distaste for both.  I’ve told people that a cleric who is musically adept can be either a real help (and I’ve been lucky the last five pastors in this parish at Ft. Belvoir have been not only good men, but some were outstanding musicians, and not one was less than musically adept and very supportive) or a real misery.  One is sometimes tempted to pray for a musically indifferent pastor, because at least you stand a chance to get them “trained up” in what can work and what might and must be done.

    

   But you’re so right that the secular world is very successful at forbidding the presence of the sacred (with a few carefully scripted exceptions, and those tend to be so modified for public consumption that they tend to be not recognizably sacred) and is equally successful at invading the sacred precincts of the church.  “Dignity” and “reverence” are words that are mysteries to the modern mind and ear – and those elements are essential to sacred worship.  In addition, cultural elements such as Tom Day wrote of in “Why Catholics Can’t Sing” are also primary contributors to the demise of music, not only in the Catholic Church, but in many churches today.

    

   And so, let us be courageous – but not surprised when our courage lands us in deep soup!

    

   Ron

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2. Edward Palmer says

   July 27, 2011 at 11:45 am

    

   Philiip, et al.,

    

   I may have related the following previously. A visiting priest and I were discussing the demise of good music in Catholic Churches. He gave me ten guesses as to who is responsible for the loss of meaningful music. He was surprised when my first guess was, “the clerics.” Now, if he knew that, should we not think that most, if not all, religiious leaders have the same awareness?

    

   When have bars, casinos, night clubs or rock concerts allowed sacred music performances to “invade” their venues and thrust a new style upon patrons?

    

   Where is courage?

    

   EP

    

    

    

    

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3. Ronald Richard Duquette says

   July 24, 2011 at 7:59 pm

   John – A wonderful rant, and I couldn’t agree more, though my tastes don’t run to a lot of the newer stuff – but then, when we think that people in downtown Vienna in 1785 were probably going, “Mozart?  Him?  That modern stuff he writes?  Good God, I wish we could go back to….” (fill in the blank!) – and now we consider him one of the all-time greats.  So I don’t get too exercised about the “stuff” that’s being done today – what’s good and stands the test of time (isn’t that the definition of “classic”?) will survive, and the rest, well….

    

   Oh, and John, it’s “Taizé” – it’s an ecumenical Christian community in France that was started (I believe) after World War II, and the music is supposed to be, well, if not “boring” exactly, designed to take one out of the moment and focus beyond the music itself – chant has something of the same quality, to look at it critically, and Taizé’s music was basically designed with that repetitive element that allows one (just like the Rosary – really!) to “lose oneself” in the experience.  I’m not a real fan of it, but some of it is nice enough, and in certain contexts can be tremendously useful – such as, for example, the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, when people come forward to venerate and really ought not to be carting hymnbooks along – this type of chant allows people to sing with only a small part of the mind, and focus more completely on the total experience – something the Catholic Church, in its wisdom, understood very early on.  Eastern religious communities do the same thing – constant, repetitive chant as a form of prayer and as a vehicle allowing a more complete religious experience.

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4. John Howell says

   July 24, 2011 at 3:21 pm

   Philip et al.  Ron has it right.  This is a consant complaint, and is DIRECTLY belied by the huge number of (a) concert announcements, (b) classified ads for both conductors and singers, and (c) audition announcements right here on ChoralNet!!!

    

   But if I might, I’d like to bring up a totally different situation which nevertheless provides us with a valuable lesson.  Around 15 years ago or so, a school here in Virginia came under intense scrutiny and criticism because it was (a) a state-supported college, but (b) absolutely denied admission to women.  This was the Virginia Military Instute, or VMI.  And while staying with host families when I played with a regional orchestra I got more than an earful from passionate graduates of VMI, while the daily news reports kept us apprised of the legal and sociological developments as their case made its way to the Supreme Court.  (A case which, by the way ended the political career of a very bright woman who, as state Attorney General, felt that she had to defend the indefensible policies of VMI for political reasons.)

    

   And what it boiled down to was this:  The school and its graduates and students defended its policies on the basis of Tradition.  (Exactly the same kind of tradition that has kept women out of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and that kept women out of US orchestras until well after WW II.  And of course that kept women out of church choirs for centuries thanks to one misinterpreted sentence in I Corinthians!)  The lawsuit, on the other hand, was based first on the requirements of law, but even more fundamentally on the sociological changes that had taken place starting about 30 years earler, based on equality of opportunity.

    

   And here’s the thing:  Tradition teaches that nothing SHOULD change and nothing CAN change–that change is Bad and tradition is Good.  But history teaches a very different lesson:  Everything DOES change, inevitably and uncontrolably, unless very wise men and women find a way to control and guide those changes.

    

   Choral music is not exampt from the laws of history.  Things DO change.  And things HAVE changed.  “Every day, in every way, things get …” different!  Not necessarily better and not necessarily worse.  Just different.  And it’s inevitable.

    

   So while I can “feel Vic’s pain,” I can’t see the changes he describes as necessarily being the same as going to you-know-where in a hand basket!  Yes, music has become consumerized (if that’s a word).  But what that actually means is that it is available to more people in more ways at more times and in more different forms than ever before in history.  Which in turn means that there IS a “lowest common denominator”–a niche in the musical world that might have been filled in previous centuries by folk songs or popular songs of a more “semi-classical” nature like the songs of Stephen Foster.  But as anyone who has been involved in the popular and commercial side of the business knows (and I readily admit to being one myself), there’s good and bad in everything, and inevitably there is good, creative, communicative, meaningful and uplifting popular music just as there is repetitive junk-food music.  After all, real talent follows the money, and there’s money to be made in creating and performing good, creative, communicative, meangful and uplifting music in ANY genre!

    

   And perhaps the most telling sentence in Vic’s rant is this:  “My girls (have a houseful) sing all the latest songs and they are musical, but if it wasn’t for the stuff we play and the fact that they sing in church, they’d merely be like the rest of the one-dimensional musical experience kids that walk past our doors.”

    

   I have 4 kids, now grown and out of the nest.  They were all (and still are) avid consumers of commercial pop music, although they are very selective in what they like and what they don’t like.  (The latter should not surprise anyone, but I suspect that it does.)  BUT, they were all involved in music at church from a very early age, some (including 2 Head Choristers) more than others, and those two asked permission to join our local community Master Chorale even before my wife had joined it.  One is now a very fine professional countertenor–about as traditional a career as anyone can imagine!–but at another time in his life ran a jazz band, ran an Island Band to earn money, and ran and wrote songs–very GOOD songs!–for a contemporary folk band.

    

   I guess what I’m arguing is that NO one-dimensional viewpoint of ANYTHING is really valid, because few things in life are actually one-dimensional.  I’ve been a full-time entertainer, I’ve been a full-time educator, I’ve been an arranger, a composer (in a wide variety of genres), a producer, a recording artist, a conductor, a singer, an instrumentalist, and oh yes, something of an expert (if there is such a thing) in popular, classical, and early music.  In other words, I’ve been a musician, no hyphenated adjectives needed.  My college ensemble does the music Vic wants to hear, and on occasion we even do it in a church!  Other ensembles I’ve directed have been very fine entertainers. 

    

   “Serious” sacred choral stuff is being done every day.  True, a great deal of it is being done in educational settings rather than worship settings.  That’s simply because there IS a museum function that every educational setting has to be part of, and like any museum we have to allow the public to enjoy both the art of the past and the art of the present and what MIGHT become the art of the future.  And we do.

    

   Oh, and the music my wife used for her children’s choir and youth choir at church?  Strictly (but not exclusively by any means) in the American Episcopal tradition of the Church of England, using RSCM materials and approach.  (Sorry, no “praise teams,” although our priest did like “taise,” whatever THAT is.  I found it boring.)

    

   All the best,

   John

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5. Ronald Richard Duquette says

   July 24, 2011 at 6:58 am

   We hear this plaint at least every other year (if not month or week or day) – “The state of choral music is terrible”; “Our choirs are getting old”; etc., etc.  I’m not going to suggest that these aren’t the case, because they are.  However, if one throws up one’s hands and says “Despair, all ye who enter here!” – well, nothing’s going to get any better.  The first step in the solution is to believe that a solution is possible.  Almost ten years ago my wife and I joined a choir locally that had, as she put, “two walkers and a cane” and consisted of eight lovely but elderly (mostly) folks who only sang in unison.  The director would hire ringers to come in for the great feasts and provide music in parts.  A number of us (9, to be exact) had fled from our church because the parish administrator’s attitude towards the wonderful music and musicians we had was, “A pox on all your houses!” and had made it very difficult to stay.  So from one Sunday to the next the director went from eight people singing unison to seventeen people, which included three tenors, two basses, three sopranos, and an alto.  She adjusted (slowly) to the changed reality, realizing that we had come from a circumstance that had done good, even great, music – and to keep us, she had to start doing part music.  Not quite three years later she left (over entirely different issues).  We had lost three of the singers – two went back after that priest left, and one was in the military and rotated to a new assignment.  Of the original eight members, one had died, two had retired because of age and physical inability, and one moved.  So that left us 11 of the original 19 – kinda discouraging, right?  Well, in the meantime, we added a number of different people, recovered some members that either didn’t sing regularly or had left for different reasons but decided to come back, and so on – and now we’re up to 22 (if all show) – we’re doing a cappella music (completely inconceivable when we first arrived), we recruited – and because our circumstances in this military post are different than the general civilian population, the challenges are also different – but we remain open to possibilities and continue to recruit, recruit, recruit.  We do lovely – if not vastly challenging – pieces of music that are “focused on the prize” of worshiping God – and remembering He’s the FIRST reason we’re there.  Our organist’s abilities are not as great as I would wish at times – but he’s there and faithful.  I understand and appreciate the Vicar’s depression – but I’m sure that Palestrina (even with an establishment many of us would envy) must have thought at times, “Madonna mia, la vita musicale e imposibile!” – and remembering that most of us are artists, nothing is ever perfect and we’d be unhappy if we couldn’t complain!  So, I take heart every Sunday that things can get better if we continue to work at it, and that if it WERE ever perfect, we’d bellyache twice as hard that it’s just TOO perfect!

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