Catholic Worship Music

Listening to the music at Mass these days, even in Ireland, I was struck by how frozen in time the style is to mid-60s folk music. Even things written later have that feel. So when Vatican II came in the music must have changed, along with the other elements of the worship. For Boomers growing up in that, plus the Irish folksingers who came up and performed in Kingston Trio/Limeliters era coffee houses in the decade plus before that, there was an immediate comfort in the style.

And so it became the new holy music and stayed forever. Weston Priory. John Michael Talbot (of the old folk duo the Talbot Brothers), Even Taize music owes as much to that era as to the chant it patterns itself after.

It's comfortable for me, but that Peter, Paul, and Mary style, those Joan Baez voices was a lot of what I grew up on. It's easy to harmonise to and I fit right in.  Musically, I fit in better that the other hundred people there who are actually Catholic.

I wondered what the music was like just before Vatican II and went looking. I will not be exhaustive, just giving you a couple of things. Hymns before Vatican II included more chanting.  Not shocking. They were also much more used in the Divine Office and the Low Mass, not High Mass, which relied on external rather than participatory music more.

But the best commentary I ran across in my brief research was from a Reddit thread.  Not where I am used to going, but this was fine.

Italian, Spanish, and Mexican parishes have long had boisterous vernacular hymns, but these "ethnic" Catholic cultures were never really mainstream. Standard Catholicism was Irish American Catholicism, which hated high church innovation and had a very weak, very new repertoire.

In.. the '40s? '50s? A liturgical revival started, which enthusiastic lliturgists started assembling little boys choirs and scholas. They started trying to reintroduce chant and polyphony into masses. This was cut short in the '60s by Vatican 2.

After V2, a new liturgical movement started which based its stance on the idea that the mass was a "community celebration", and that the Church is "the people". This music was much more about affirming the community ("One Bread, One Body"; "Who Shall I Send"). It also tried, as many Catholics have for centuries, to bring in the sounds of popular music. This is what created folk masses. Hymnals drew from the same handful of contemporary Catholic composers or borrowed wholesale from Protestants. The issue here, though, is that you can't just import an entire culture. Protestants have had strong musical traditions for centuries, but Irish American Catholics had a culture with a stunted, infantile musical limb AND a sense of stoic "we don't need musical frills to worship, unlike those protestants".

Fun stuff.