Thoughts from Concordia

Thoughts that have occurred to me whilst attending the 2011 Lectures in Church Music Conference (at Concordia University, Chicago):

• Good music is, inevitably, about addressing issues, solving problems. The issue/problem may be one about musical form, or color (e.g. instrumentation, texture), or compositional process (canons, fugues), or, in vocal music, text, or other things. Bad music, when it refuses to acknowledge a problem, is saccharine; when it fails to adequately address a problem, it is unsatisfying.
  
• Most defects of musicianship can be fixed, but I suspect that a poor interior sense of rhythm is irremediable. How can you learn something that ought to be inborn? (Well, technically, a sense of rhythm is acquired, but this takes place so early in childhood that it's like original sin: probably not inborn, but as good as.)
  
• Fr Anthony Ruff, whom I admire more and more, gave a presentation on the implementation of the new translation of the Roman Missal, with special emphasis on ecumenism (since this is, after all, a mostly-Lutheran conference). It is hard not to be disgusted with how Rome has bungled the new translation. It's not only that it is fundamentally flawed — after all, the current translation is deeply flawed, albeit in a different way — but far worse is the autocratic way Rome has handled things. From time to time, when utterly frustrated with the follies of Protestants, I find solace in the fact that at least we don't have to put up with the Roman Catholic hierarchy. If "by their fruits shall ye know them", then I fear we know the hierarchy all too well.
  
• Last night we had a concert of seventeenth-century Lutheran music (mostly Schütz, Schein, and Scheidt; no Praetorius, unfortunately). I've said it before: it's too bad that we hear this repertoire so rarely nowadays. One of these days, when I've got an early music consort at my disposal, I shall endeavor to do some of it.
  

Oh, and today is St. Luke's Day, the titular feast (heh) at my Episcopal parish in Dixon. We shall have some good hymns, I think. (I've had the tune Westminster Abbey stuck in my head for several days, now; I'm planning a rather grandiose introduction with the chamades, which should wake people up, if nothing else.)