Bishop Michael Martin of Charlotte has made news with his order, if I may be permitted a metaphor, that the Vetus Ordo be celebrated only in a certain broom closet in Swannanoa. It seems also that he was about to ban some of the features of the TLM that tradition-minded people who attend the Novus Ordo favor, such as kneeling to receive the Sacrament, or facing the Risen Christ as we pray ad orientem. After the uproar about the latter – not the former, Martin has backed away, assuring people that there will be no big changes – until at least October.
Meanwhile, at the website of those music men the Saint Louis Jesuits, I’ve read a short piece in which once-priest Bob Dufford describes how much he loved Hollywood musicals when he was a boy, naming Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Lerner and Lowe, as his most significant influences.
I thought as much. The “folk” music common at Mass has little or nothing to do, in melody or lyrics, with any folk tradition anywhere in the world. Such songs as Dufford’s “Like a Shepherd” or Dan Schutte’s “Here I Am” are show tunes. They are not like medieval plainsong, or the Scottish Psalter, or the Lutheran hymns that Bach arranged, or American revival hymns, or English carols.
Folk melodies are often hauntingly beautiful: Picardy (“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”), Slane (“Be Thou My Vision”), St. Elisabeth (“Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee”). They can be sung by people of all ages and both sexes, together. They are not for soloists. They do not sport bizarre tempos and oddball intervals. Their lyrics come in stanzas with recognizable structure. They are thus easy to remember.
Show tunes! It’s as if we’re all supposed to sing, for Mass, some adaptation of “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story, or of the overblown and narcissistic “Climb Every Mountain” from The Sound of Music.
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