Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Balancing a naive consensus with competence
Loudon (who is hardly a fool) offers the problem of a committee making naive decisions (about liturgical music, say) and overrunning the more expert opinions of music staff. In all but the best places, this is indeed a problem.
In my parish, selections are not done in committee per se, but rather by a few willing volunteers who happen to be deeply involved in parish music ministry. They balance the parish repertoire list with the readings and liturgy and make generally good choices. We have yet to develop a good mechanism for discerning new music. Prior to me, the pastor did all this.
In my ideal parish, a small group of music people would review the hymnal and other resources and make plans for introducing 6-10 new piece of music per year, possibly by a reading session or a hymn fest. These 6-10 would be mostly hymns, maybe a few psalm settings or other service music. Committees haggling over music can be deadly. I would prefer to give it to people to take home, pray about it, then have one person sift through the sets of choices and come up with a final plan.
Presumably planners have sung plainsong, hymnody, classical and contemporary music (preferably sung all of them) and bring a desire to sing the best texts to their music planning. I think I might be another year or two from hitting the ideal at my parish. But I think some trained musicians might have to leave considerable baggage at the committee room door for this to work. It involves incredible trust as well as a commitment to forming parish musicians so good choices come easy for the naive, or hopefully, the formerly naive.
