Make a Joyful Chant Unto

Make a Joyful Chant Unto the Lord
Good comments below in the post about chant. I agree there are some chants that are exuberant. Lots are more subtle expressions of the sacred. And nearly all are much more subtle than whole chunks of music in today’s repertiore: from the contemporary back to many english anthems written in the late 19th/early 20th centuries and even back to Beethoven and Bach.
It’s the quietness of chant that many people have a problem with. Liturgists that measure participation in decibels are never happy with chant. People in the congregation, who by no fault of their own are totally ignorant of chant and have never sung it are often taken aback by it. It takes time to get used to simple melodies that are so different from the rest of the music sung in our parishes today. And still you’ll have the “On Eagle’s Wings” lovers say chant is boring.
Chant is quite liberating – it carries none of the cultural baggage that is part of today’s repertiore. Little by little we do more chant at our parish, and people are getting more comfortable with it.