Ratzinger on Church music. I particularly like this as I sit here - TopicsExpress

Ratzinger on Church music. I particularly like this as I sit here and wish for a parish group that prays the Liturgy of the Hours in Common: In the cultural crisis we are experiencing, new cultural purification and unification can spring only from islands of spiritual concentration. In its essential character, liturgical music should be an appropriate counterpart of the great liturgical texts: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei. This does not mean that it should be a mere accompaniment, but rather that it should find in the inner dynamics of these texts a guide for its own rendition of them. The second guidepost is a reference to Gregorian chant and to Palestrina. This reference does not mean that all Church music must be an imitation of these models. Is it not possible, humanly speaking, to hope that new creative opportunities are still open here? But how will this come about? The first question is really easy to answer, for if, in contrast to every other concept, the concept of man is inexhaustible, then it also offers ever new possibilities of artistic expression, and all the more so to the extent to which it determines the spirit of an age. But it is in this context that we encounter difficulty in answering the second question. In our time, faith has lost much of its significance as a power for forming public opinion. How, then, can it become creative? Has it not everywhere been relegated to the status of a mere subculture? To this we might reply that, to all appearances, we are witnessing today in Africa, Asia, and Latin America a new blossoming of the Faith that can give birth to new forms of culture. But we in the Western world should not be disquieted by the word “subculture”. In the cultural crisis we are experiencing, new cultural purification and unification can spring only from islands of spiritual concentration. When new awakenings to the Faith occur in active communities, we soon see how Christian culture reestablishes itself there, how the communal experience inspires and opens ways that we were previously unable to see. It is important that the way be paved by the existence of popular piety and its music as well as of religious music in the broad sense, which should always provide a fruitful exchange with liturgical music. On the one hand, they will thereby be enriched and purified, while, on the other hand, they themselves will become sources of new types of liturgical music. Their less restricted structure will bring to maturity new forms that can then be introduced into the common possession of the liturgy of the universal Church. This, then, is the area in which the group can test its own creativity in the hope that there will grow from it something that can eventually be adopted by the whole. From: Joseph Ratzinger, L’Osservatore Romano 16, no. 6 (1986), pp. 10ff. Thanks to Rev. John T Putnam