I’m not sure it’s the music ‘ministry’ (we have always had music in the Catholic church) so much as the decline in community singing coupled with a tendency for ‘liturgists’ to ‘fix what ain’t broken’ along with trying to actually work with what should be working.
Back in the day, there were more ‘group and community events’, more small communities, suburbs even to an extent, where people DID get together and sing. There were (even up to around the 1960s) common parties where somebody played the piano, or the guitar, and people sang the kinds of songs ‘everybody knew’, from patriotic songs to stuff like Oh Susanna, Good Night Irene, In the Good old summertime, and from the 20s on popular Broadway and musical tunes, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, etc. In the 1960s we had lots of Bob Dylan stuff, Woody Guthrie, peace songs. . . Most people over 60 could sit down and sing for 2-3 hours all these. Since the 1970s, with so many different genres of music, and so much available (all kinds of electronic personal devices, streaming services, etc) people have more and more developed the idea that Music equals listening, either to albums or concerts, to seeing performing as either hokey karaoke or something that just isn’t DONE because nobody knows all the same stuff.
So you have a few decades of that attitude, coupled with the fact that the over 60s who DO still sing don’t have anything mostly BUT the stuff from the 70s-90s at Mass, and you’ll hear, “We play that stuff and sing it because the people LOVE IT.”
Most don’t. It’s just that older people still can and do like to sing, and if that’s all there is, we’ll sing unless we are thoroughly fed up with the lack of musicality/lack of theology.
