The Sound of Silence

I am not a music man. Jeffrey Tucker is. His blog: The Chant Cafe is a great source of Liturgical Music Wisdom. While I cannot sing, I do very, very  much appreciate the connection of music and the Mass. His recent post is very saddening to me, because I came from a place where there were many parishes with great scholas, choirs, and organists.

An excerpt of his thoughts:

This time of year, the losses in the area of music for Holy Week strikes me. I look through the Liber Usualis and I compare with what appears in the Missalette, and the result is absolutely devastating. Then I compare what is in the modern Graduale - which isn't all that different from the old Graduale - and the effect is the same: a sense of near-total loss. Even our own schola, which strives to be liturgically proper and works hard to retain and revive, ends up singing truncated versions and perhaps 30% of the total music that is given in the books. As for the Missalettes, one wonders if the compilers ever even bothered to look at the normative liturgical books for the Roman Rite.

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