As it is written, “There is nothing new under the sun”, I would imagine that people have complained about songs ever since the first song.
Too old, too new, too catchy, too mundane, too direct from the psalms, too changed from the psalms, too (whatever).
Maybe what is “so wrong with the hymn…” is us, we, God’s family, can be a bunch of cantankerous complainers, can’t we?
By the way, I include me in the we since all of us are part of God’s family.
Permit me to quibble with you just a bit. Among all of the works of art, literature, music, some have stood the test of time and many, many more have not. The ones that survive do so because there is something in them that resonates with the human mind. Some of it is sensory. Some of it conceptual. Some of it meets a “test of symmetry”, that has a resonance we can’t quite explain, like the “golden mean” for example.
One of my favorite movie scenes was in “Amadeus” when old Solieri asked the priest if he remembered a particular tune. The priest listened and said “no, he didn’t”. Solieri said “I wrote that”. Then Solieri asked him if he recognized another. “Oh yes! The priest said and hummed along. Is that yours?” “No” said Solieri, “that is Mozart’s”.
Why are Mozart’s works remembered and still heard while many, many composers have been forgotten? If I were an expert I could answer better than the following, but it is my understanding that there is something about the way Mozart put melodies together that the mind follows, almost anticipating the next notes, but then being pleasantly surprised if there is a variation that still “rings” with what was anticipated, but in a different way, evoking an aesthetic response. There is an “aha! That’s what came next!” to it.
In literature, some survives while most doesn’t. Why is that? Because the ones that survive manage to communicate something that resonates at a very deep level, whether emotionally, philosophically or psychologically or all of them.
When “change” comes to anything (like church music) some good things are written, but most of it is really not worthy of long preservation. And it really is true of church music. Maybe the music director has the congregation sing “song A”. If it really flows and almost makes you want to hum it later, it’s likely something pretty old. It has stood the test of time, and that’s why it’s in a modern hymnal. If we sing 'song B" and it’s hard work in some way…notes too high, too many sudden transitions that don’t seem “necessitated” by what went before, an uninspiring melody, it will inevitably be something written in the 1970s or 1980s, and by a small handful of people that suddenly got commissioned to write a whole boatload of songs. And the result was fairly predictable. Some of it is fairly good, and a whole lot of it isn’t.
100 years from now, will anybody know who Marty Haugen or Dan Shutte or the St. Louis Jesuits were? Hard to know, but one tends to doubt it. But they will know who Mozart is, and they will still sing some of those hymns put to catchy old Irish or Scottish or German melodies. And they will still probably sing some of the Old Protestant “greats” we find in our hymnbooks along with the rest. They have stood the test of time and are worthy of their place. Some newer hymns will too, but not many.
Personally, I think it’s high time the U.S. Catholic hymnals were weeded out. The Church is not a 1970s time capsule dedicated to the preservations of faux folk music. Time to move on.
