I created the following video to address the question: What should our music sound like for Mass?
There seems to be an unclear answer from our Church, since it’s difficult to draw hard lines in an art like music. Should we ban or allow particular chords, certain intervals or rhythms, or even entire genres? Can we say that the music has to have an objective purity, like perfect pitches and intervals? Well, that would exclude much of what we actually find beautiful about music. For example, a singer’s vibrato creates an imperfection in pitch, but creates beauty with the variation. Beauty can be found in a dissonant interval resolving to consonance. Beauty can be found in varying dynamics, moving from soft to loud and soft again. It’s almost that what makes music beautiful is its humanness, its expression of the creator. After all, we are most beautiful of all art, made in the image of our Creator, God.
In this video, I provide our Church’s teaching on what music is ideal for the Liturgy, what is not permitted, and how we can create art with the in between.
