Help With Parish Music

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PatThePoet

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I attend a Pauline Mass on Sundays. The church (St. Mary’s) was built in the 70’s, but it isn’t a complete architectural travesty, it has nice stained glass, a fine tabernacle, and beautiful Stations. No, liturgical dancers, no costume masses, none of the wacky liturgical abuses you see on hyper-traditionalist sites.

But I can’t stand the music.

I guess since I grew up in a High Episcopal church with a traditional organist, I’m used to Bach and Isaac Watts. At the Catholic parish I now attend, its the infamous Gather hymnal. I can say that one month “Bread of Life” was sung every Sunday. Occasionally we’ll sing “Crown Him With Many Crowns” or “Alleluia Sing to Jesus” with the choir, but that’s only on Holy Days.

There is a large bookshelf in the narthex there are the red Adoremus Hymnals, but they only collect dust. They isn’t a rotation or anything.

Any sugesstions on how to help the sorry state of parish music?
 
Get involved. If you don’t think you can sing and join the choir, see if you can help participate in a liturgy committee. See if you can even try to start a program to raise money for the classical training of musicians within the parish. Another option is to start a sacred music club. When I taught music at a Catholic school, I had a music club for kids called Palestrina Scholars Club which focused on sacred music starting at Gregorian chant and going through the centuries of sacred music. They learned about the composers, the time period that the music was written, listened to samples of the music, history and reasons as to why the music was written during that period. I made it fun for the kids, having two teams competing with each other. It would be like a game show. I’d ask a question and one kid on each team would try to answer it first. The team that got the most points would win a little prize. Something like that would expose kids to this kind of music and perhaps incite them to study it. I know that a few of my students started to take piano lessons and other kinds of instrumental lessons during and after.
 
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