Catholic Christmas 2009: Christmas carols are yuck
All through Advent I was wondering why we weren't singing Christmas carols at mass. Turns out Christmas carols, kind of like GW Bush and mainstream conservatism, don't quite cut the Catholic mustard. They're just not special enough. Nevermind that their lyrics are theologically appropriate and consist of melodies that have stood the test of time -- the fact that these carols are played at hall in the dens of iniquity known as shopping malls makes them inappropriate for mass. So no, your kids won't learn these carols by singing them in church. Instead, said carols will be familiar only as tinny piped-in music at your local Target (should you be confused enough about the true "reason for the season" as to take your children to a big box store).
OK, so Advent is off limits .... I thought maybe when Christmas finally arrived we'd get to sing "O Come All Ye Faithful". But no -- my local Christmas mass (the "children's mass") was turned into a Suzuki violin recital. Four children violinists played all through a very lengthy Christmas communion with no congregational singing. And throughout the rest of mass the only kids allowed to sing were the ones who joined the "children's choir". Everyone else had to sit silently because they didn't pay obeisance to the music director gods by hauling their overscheduled kids to "choir practice" or violin lessons at the local Suzuki mill.
As a violin teacher myself, I was left to wonder a) why the particular violin students didn't sound, um, better, b) why the leader of the student violinists thought music from Suzuki Book One had anything to do with Christmas, and c) who decided that Christmas mass is a great opportunity for a violin recital. But the church and our musical/spiritual betters are always a step ahead. Glad someone is thinking about this stuff.
Lutherans sing lots! ;) And we have Advent hymns for Advent, and Christmas hymns for Christmas.
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm blessed to be at a good parish. We've had O Come All Ye Faithful, Joy To The World, Hark The Herald, Silent Night, and other standards.
ReplyDeleteMy personal peeve, however, is that our hymnals have music only for the melody, not the bass or alto parts. And then they wonder why the men don't sing.
Well, we have a good parish for traditional Christmas carols as well. During advent, we sang "O Come Emanuel" and "Lo, how a rose" a lot, then when Christmas comes we do all the favorites. I think one of the reasons is that our pastor is a great singer and music lover. There was one really bad Christmas number this year--a schlocky contemporary piece that's supposed to be St. Joseph meditating on Christ's birth but ends up making him sound like a pussy. My guess is some lesbo nun penned it. But other than that I'm not complaining. Happily, I haven't heard that "African Noel" shit with the bongos in quite a few years.
ReplyDeleteWhen I sang in the Latin Mass choir in Pittsburgh, we started singing a full hour before the Mass started so we could get all the favorite "English carols" in. Then we'd do a Polish one plus Silent Night in German. Then after the Mass we'd do "O Come All Ye Faithful" in English. My point: don't tell those people they're not traditional Catholics. (We even did that bombastic W. H. Neidlinger number "Birthday of a King" which all the 60-something males loved to belt out. I developed something of reluctant affection for it because those cats dug it so much.)
So I don't have Kathleen's experience as she relates it vis-a-vis replacing traditional forms of Christmas music with the bizarre. My theory would be that sometimes church music folks are to musicians what grade school gym teachers are to sports: people who didn't "make it". So they may despise popularity as a result. But the reason the traditional English carols are so popular is that they are so good, not because they've been blessed by the credentialed know-it-alls. Substituting something of their own making, e.g., an amateurish violin recital by untalented children, for a church full of folks happily belting out familiar carols with many more years of practice seems like a way one might inflict his/her bitterness and narcissism on a large group--this is just a theory at best, or maybe a guess. Remember, in the Grinch TV show the villagers singing together was the thing the Grinch hated the most.
Our parish (actually a mission) did all the traditional stuff, throughout Advent and Christmastide. It was not always thus. When we first joined, some 19 years ago (yipes!), the hippie-dippie music director refused to do ANY traditional stuff at all, ever. Even for Christmas. (Once, when I asked him--with great trepidation--whether we could occasionally interject a traditional hymn, just for the sake of variety, he curtly answered, "No" -- a response that stunned me into silence.)
ReplyDeleteHowever, Hippie-Dippie Dude didn't stay on as music director very long after we arrived, and the music has been getting steadily better since then. Well, apart from the occasional Marty Haugen dreck.
But the reason the traditional English carols are so popular is that they are so good, not because they've been blessed by the credentialed know-it-alls.
ReplyDeleteEGGzackly. The good stuff has stood the test of time. The bad stuff drops by the wayside; pretty much only the good stuff survives.
Another thing re the traditional stuff: It's singable. Which is a lot more than can be said for some of the contemporary crap we used to sing at our church.
Wait! Diane, what a concept--a SONG that people can SING!
ReplyDeletesong + singable = good song
Our previous pastor played the last verse of Silent Night solo, on his harmonica. Not a dry eye in the house.
ReplyDelete