Word: palestrina
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...what is going on throughout the U.S. in church music. For the past decade, music directors and organists of big city parishes have been vigorously campaigning to throw out the oldtime Victorian anthems and Gospel hymns and substitute the works of the so-called "pure classicists" like Bach, Palestrina, Victoria and the modern imitators of their polyphonic styles. Most ministers and congregations are either indifferent or hostile to change. Volunteer smalltown choirs, unopposed by professionals, are still enthusiastically flatting their way through the complicated, sentimental standbys. And even in Manhattan-hotbed of the classicist movement...
Main reason the ardent purists have not been more successful is that congregations like to sing. Listening to Palestrina, however purely performed, is not the same thing at all. Many a churchgoer has come to feel that the service is already less for the congregation than for the choir, and he resents any fresh attempts to turn his place of worship into what is beginning to look like a mere concert hall...
More lenient, Czech Composer Bohuslav Martinu and Italian modernist Composer Vittorio Rieti hedged. So did Austrian Composer Ernst Krenek, who philosophically noted that the great 16th-Century Italian Composer Palestrina "collaborated" with the Pope and the Council of Trent, and that Russian Composer Dmitri Shostakovich is unquestionably "collaborating" with Joseph Stalin. Concluded he: "Anyone called upon for advice will have to search his conscience: does he wish to lend his hand to the political game, or does he prefer to live by the word of the Gospel: 'Judge not, that ye be not judged...
...church music written since the beginning of the 18th Century - including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Verdi. Since 1904, when Pope Pius X pronounced on the subject of sacred music in his famed encyclical Motu Proprio, the use of "modern" music by the Catholic church has been sharply restricted.** But Palestrina's 16th-Century creations (best performed recently by the Sistine Chapel Choir of Rome, the Westminster Cathedral Choir of London and Father Finn's choristers) are regarded by Catholic authorities as liturgically flawless...
...Finn rehearses his chorus in a polo shirt instead of a cassock, and can spur a choir boy to a Palestrinian high E with a flick of the eyebrow. Born 62 years ago in Boston, he became organist there at the Carmelite Monastery as a child. He began conducting Palestrina in Chicago's old St. Mary's Church in 1904, a year before he was ordained. "I was 25 years trying to find out how to conduct it," he says. In the meantime his Paulist Choristers became world famous. In 1918 Father Finn left Chicago for Manhattan...