And now for some happy news . . .

I'm remote-blogging from the Chant and Polyphony Workshop in Auburn, Alabama. It's being hosted by the Saint Cecilia Schola Cantorum.

The guest conductor is a director of music at a very traditional Catholic parish up north. He's an excellent conductor, and I've already picked up a few tips just from watching him rehearse.

It's distressingly easy to slide into a rut as a choral conductor. If you don't go out of your way to sharpen your skills, you only see yourself rehearse, and you can lose perspective. The guest conductor is very, very good about being relentlessly positive, and it's a trait I could really stand to emulate.

Tomorrow morning we're assisting at the early daily Mass (8:00 AM) and then the rest of the day is dedicated to chant. This is what I really came to hear, but I'm enjoying the polyphonic stuff as well.

Chant is definitely the direction we need to go, and it's the direction of the Church as a whole. No matter how many people might prefer beetle grubs, it's best to give them the real music of the Church.

More after tomorrow. I highly recommend this place, this organization and their publications.

WHEN LAWYERS ATTACK!, continued . . .

This case just gets sadder and sadder. Here we have a fine, upstanding member of the community; but because of one tiny mistake, one misjudgement, he might still be alive. And no, I'm not talking about the lawyer.

Consider this little gem from the defense attorney:

"The witnesses, as I indicated in court, are employees at what we can call at best a strip club, so consider the source," he said.

Oh yeah. And lawyers never, ever lie. Heaven forfend!

It reminds me all too painfully of the "nuts and sl*ts" defense used against anyone who had the temerity to suggest Bill Clinton had done anything undeserving of canonization.

I have a prediction to make about the trial: Next year, about this time, the defense attorney will pursue a guilty-but-insane verdict; OR, if he thinks he can bamboozle the jury, he will try to get his client acquitted because he was just so sensitive, and nobody understood him [or his need to have extramarital sexual experiences in the middle of the night while his wife was out of town]; and the poor baby is bipolar [meaning, in this case, that he likes clubs with two stripper poles rather than just one].

What's that you say? They have him on video, caught in the act? Well, who are you going to believe -- me, or your lying eyes?

OH, THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'

Many parishes are struggling with divisions between spanish-speaking and english-speaking members. The divide usually results in a kind of voluntary segregation in which an Hispanophone will not go to the Anglophone Mass unless it's the only way to fulfill his Sunday obligation, and vice versa.

As a practical matter, the use of Latin could solve the problem at one stroke. Conduct the proper and the Ordinary of the Mass in Latin; keep the homilies brief and, if possible, bilingual; and give the announcements (if there REALLY need to be read at Mass) in spanish and english. Hey presto! No more language troubles. Or, more accurately, everyone is equally uncomfortable and has to look in the missal to see the translation of the Latin.

Anyway. That's my proposal and I'm sticking to it.

WHEN IGNORAMI ATTACK

Or, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

Some people just never learn, do they?

It seems a teacher in a rural Colorado school showed a video of Gounod's opera Faust to some young schoolchildren in her class. In fact, it was a half-hour video of an old children's series featuring Joan Sutherland and some talking puppets in a few excerpts from the opera. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem. But here's the catch: you remember who the real star of this show is, right?

Yep. It's the very Devil himself!

This turns out to be a BIG problem for some of the good folks of Bennett.

Casey Goodwin, whose 9- year-old daughter also saw it, called it a "satanic video" during a phone call. Asked about that in a later conversation, she said, "I think it glorifies Satan in some way, yes."

Okay, maybe she's never heard of Charles Gounod. That's understandable for the average philistine. And she's probably never heard of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe either, even though he seems to be fairly popular in Denver, just a half hour away. But it's quite a stretch to think that Faust "glorifies Satan."

I have to concede that Mephistopheles is the most engaging character in the show. He's witty, and he cuts off that bore Wagner and his stupid story about the rat. Then he serenades the, ahem, unwed mother Marguerite with a very nasty little song. But he loses in the end. In Germany, this show is known as Marguerite because the focus is so much on her that Germans feel it loses most of the theme of the original. Of course, Goethe never had to satisfy a demanding audience's need for a prima donna character.

First of all, the themes of Faust are high and lofty. Second (and I realize they didn't watch the whole show, or even the whole half-hour digest), but in the end, Marguerite asks forgiveness of her sins from Jesus, then dies and is taken into heaven by the angels. How does that "glorify Satan"?

I am reminded of the words of the great Mel Brooks:

"You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons.
-- Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles

Sadly, the music teacher in question, who was trying to do a good thing by opening up the ears of the philistines, now says she will "have a hard time staying in Bennett." I bet that's an understatement. What was it Jesus said about pearls and swine?

A SIDE NOTE ABOUT GOUNOD

Contrast this entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1914:

One of the most distinguished French musicians and composers of the nineteenth century, b. in Paris, on 17 June, 1818; d. there, 17 October, 1893.

With this common musicologist's joke:

Q: How can you tell Faust wasn't actually written by Gounod?
A: Because it's too good.

Ba-dum-BUM!

The Catholic Encyclopedia entry also contains this interesting nugget about Gounod's sacred oeuvre:

Gounod was a child of his time and of the France of the nineteenth century. His temperament, emotional to the point of sentimentality, his artistic education and environment bound him to the theatre and prevented him from penetrating into the spirit of the liturgy and from giving it adequate musical interpretation.

This may give us some insight into Leo XIII's words urging against "false sentimentality" in sacred music. Many modern composers might take the same advice today!