The Requirement of Beauty for Church Music

...music for the Mass, that is. Much as I love my Prot friends and readers, we'll go to the Catholic stuff here.

From Bob Grant, a Left Coast guy:

Q: Isn’t this really just a matter of taste?

A: Nothing prevents us from preferring one form of music to another. What’s more, nothing prevents us from preferring one form of popular religious song to another. But music that is suitable for sacred liturgy must be of a special sort. No longer can personal preference be the sole criterion. “Not all musical forms can be considered suitable for liturgical celebration” (Pope John Paul II, sacred music Chirograph, 2003). He quotes Pope Paul VI: “If music--instrumental and vocal--does not posses at the same time the sense of prayer, dignity, and beauty, entry into the sphere of the sacred and the religious is [thereby] precluded.”Pope John Paul called on musicians to “make an examination of conscience so that the beauty of music and hymnody will return once again to the liturgy. It is necessary to purify worship of ugliness of style, careless forms of expression, ill-prepared music and texts, which are not worthy of the great act that is being celebrated.”

So, yes, it IS a matter of taste. Educated taste. Critical and discerning taste.

In another essay, Grant tells us:

Too often, proponents of the liturgical music we have received since the Council have reduced sacred music simply to a matter of taste and spirit of the time and have thereby trivialized the matter as well as the tradition. This reflects a broader cultural blind spot that fails to recognize in the arts the power to form an individual for good or for ill...

That 'trivialization' is closely related to GKChesterton's honoring of Tradition as "the democracy of the dead." Many have (in fact) 'trivialized' the dead...

The question then, whether one particular form of liturgical music is better than another, is not necessarily a simple question of likes. Rather it is recognition of the formative power of painting, music, and literature. Tastes and preferences do exist, but these are not absolutes. Like moral conscience, our taste must be formed in accordance with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

Benedict XVI, just a couple of days ago, alluded to that 'formative power:'

The Pontiff said that music "has the power to lead us back ... to the Creator of all harmony, creating a resonance within us which is like being in tune with the beauty and truth of God, with the reality which no human knowledge or philosophy can ever express."

(Echoing Plato's 'music moves the soul, we know not how....' but adding the explicit theological formulation.)

Here's the tie-in:

...Gregorian chant [e.g.] might be cast aside as no longer relevant to the modern person. But beauty, truly understood, is not as fragile as this, because it is something rooted in the eternal and transcendent: God.

Precisely. We look at "dated" fashion, "dated" buildings, and notice that they are "dated." But what is really beautiful is NOT. There's an office building in Madison which was designed and built in the mid-1950's, but is absolutely beautiful. It is not "dated," but it does not look like a '30's building, nor a 19th-century building. It IS a '50's building, but its beauty is timeless.