"Pop goes the Mass:

"The Curse of bad liturgical music (part one)"


Adapted from this source: Antony Esolen's article by the same name in "This Rock," October 2008.

"Clap! It's a Performance


"If they're not folk songs, and they're not traditional hymns, what are they?

"A glance at the scores shows that the composers are not thinking of a coherent piece of music that can be sung by many people together.

"Rather they compose the music by singing it alone to the key - board or, more probably, the guitar, and then they transcribe what they have sung, with all the idiosyncratic lilts, shifts in meter, pauses, sultry dragging, and strange intervals.

"When you see the written music, you are not looking at what anybody can sing, but at what somebody in particular has sung.

"The difference is critical.

"But the narcissist underestimates the value of rigorous training and patient learning.

"He does not understand how deeply indebted the true geniuses are to the artists they painstaking follow, as Beethoven was indebted to Mozart, Virgil to Homer, Dante to Virgil, and Milton to all three.

"The narcissist trades on his own modest stock of talent, but he will not admit that it is modest.

"The result is not originality but cheap tricks."

bad hymns echo the television commercial


"Some of the flourishes of our bad hymns echo the television commercial - for instance, the furniture - polish ad to which we owe the music to ♫ make you to shi - ine like the sun ☼♪ in On Eagle's Wings.

"Others sound like an arm - flinging finale to an off - Broadway musical.

"I think of the bathetic windup at the end of Let There Be Peace on Earth.

"♫ And let it beginnn, with ME ☼ ♪, sings St. Francis of La Mancha.

"But enough with the bad music.

"In the next issue, I'll show how it is the perfect music for the bad theology of the lyrics."