Monday 9 July 2012

David T. Koyzis on Church Practices in Public Life: Communal Singing


This is the third in a series from Cardus on ‘Church Practices and Public Life’, this one devoted to communal singing.
Koyzis suggests that there is ‘an integral connection between liturgical and folk music, which distinguishes both from the commercial popular music that has drowned out our collective voice over the past century’.
He points to three common characteristics:
(1) ‘both can be said to originate within a community rather than with an enterprising individual’.
(2) ‘neither liturgy nor folk music in its purest form has its roots in performance’.
(3) ‘both liturgical and folk music are modal in character, as opposed to the conventional major and minor scales, which we erroneously tend to see as exhausting our melodic possibilities’.

1 comment:

Steve said...

In the history of church music, addition instruments are fairly rare and recent and divisive. Performance even more so. Acapella means: "In the manner of the church" There is no organ in the Sistine Chapel.

"With this work, the last word of a mind and age, which still believe but no longer adore, subjectivism finds its supreme manifestation, and the orchestra its most potent means of expression. The Church has never encouraged, and at most only tolerated, the use of instruments. She enjoins in the "Cæremoniale Episcoporum" that permission for their use should first be obtained from the ordinary. She holds up as her ideal the unaccompanied chant and polyphonic, a capella, style. The Sistine Chapel has not even an organ. " The Catholic Encyclopedia