They’re also really ignorant. One thing that I have noticed, moving among them (I’m not a musician but am related to one!), is that many of them have no background in music and those that do are often former elementary school music teachers or even simply former teachers who happen to have played the electronic keyboard for the 4th grade pageant.
Seriously, I know that several of the churches around here have such people, and from what I have heard from people who have attended the NPM conference, that’s pretty typical.
So it’s no surprise that our music is at 4th grade level at best. The bizarre thing is that in most cases, these people are not volunteers but are actually paid by the parishes for doing this amateurish garbage. Also, some of them aren’t even Catholic and don’t even pretend to know anything about the Catholic musical tradition.
They seem to be more comfortable with show-tunes.