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To: ninenot; Kolokotronis; sandyeggo
Well, with due respect to Shakespeare (and Kolokotronis!) -- the first thing to do is to burn all the missalettes. And as a former church organist, the second thing to do is to leave that thing alone. The Western tradition has such rich material, and it all goes unused.

The whole idea that people need to be following along and participating with every single word in order to be praying is a pernicious one. I can tell you that while we have liturgy books available to the congregation (although we've changed to some different translations, so they mostly go unused now), the only parts where there is and ever was genuine participation (and the participation is great on those parts) are the things people learn by heart over time -- things that are unchanging (I think you call these the "ordinary." I am NOT an anti-congregational singing person (there are some of those in the Orthodox Church, and I confess to formerly being one of them. It is just that when people are flipping through books, they generally aren't listening and praying.)

The ideal service is one where there are fixed portions that people know by heart and sing along on to traditional chant melodies, and variable material done by a trained chanter or choir, to whom the congregation listens attentively without flipping through a book.

Having seen the wretched stuff put out by the cabal out in Oregon, and seen the hundreds of copies of material sold to each parish each year of their material -- I quite believe that there is a significant "follow the money" component at work here.

But really, maybe I'm being too simplistic, but an enterprising choir director/chanter and a cooperative priest could put together beautiful services in English and save the congregation a lot of money in the process. The priest would need to be willing to be educated, and be willing to educate the parish.

Most musically educated Orthodox choir directors in the Slavic tradition, anyway, own music-notation software and produce and share their work for nothing with each other. We aren't composing new melodies and certainly aren't composing new text (that is only done if there is a new saint or something). We are applying and adapting traditional chant melodies to English translations of the liturgical texts that have been in use in Greek and Slavonic forever. Then, it's sharing photocopies of photocopies of photocopies....although in the modern era, everything is going to pdfs.

We purchase very little material, other than the original sets of service books, which last forever. The Greek Archdiocese is different -- they produce a book every year for Matins/Orthros that is disposable (text only -- any psaltis will know all the melodies by heart.) But each parish only needs to buy one copy each year for use on kliros!

I guess what I'm saying is that from my simplistic Orthodox perspective, it seems to me that you are never going to go back to the Latin mass and the 1959 hymnal that you talk about. But what you could do that would be truly revolutionary (and in line with what B16 seems to believe), would be to model the way you do liturgics on how we Orthodox do it -- but having all of your source material be from the liturgical history of the Western church. You would be the true progressives, unlike those boring, graying hippies...

Think big! Be radical!

33 posted on 05/05/2005 5:29:18 PM PDT by Agrarian
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To: Agrarian
I am NOT an anti-congregational singing person

BUT, the congregational singing should be quietish and not so loud as to drown out the choir for the person standing next to you.

45 posted on 05/05/2005 6:46:45 PM PDT by MarMema
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