This was one of the things that was so heartbreaking about both my childhood Presbyterian churches, as well as the Catholic church, all deciding to "modernize" their music into catchy dumbed-down tunes that didn't require anyone to be able to read music. They found the most *alive* part of the liturgy, and they killed it. There should be trials and sentences for that.
In both the RC and Orthodox churches, any time you bring together the traditional chant, and traditional church architecture, you are *playing the building* as a musical instrument. All those apses and domes and things aren't just bits of old-school engineering. They're soundboxes. Traditionally, in a cross-shaped church, you'd have two choirs, one in the left arm of the cross, and one in the right, responding to each other, waking up the walls and arches and apses and domes and making them ring with sound. The reason all forms of chant have a basic form of *phrase* *pause* *phrase* *pause* is to allow for the "hang time" of all those echoes working their way around the architecture.
There are some really terrible and costly modern architectural experiments that... oof. I have heard rumors of an Orthodox church somewhere up north, built as a simple circle, under a huge dome. The acoustics are nightmarish.
Best of luck with the piano lessons! Now that we've got decent bandwidth, I'm thinking of adopting a lonely piano for the use of my most musically-inclined kiddo. It seems like all the beginner stuff can be got through online for free, and once you've got through that, then you know if lessons are worthwhile ;)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-09-21 08:11 pm (UTC)In both the RC and Orthodox churches, any time you bring together the traditional chant, and traditional church architecture, you are *playing the building* as a musical instrument. All those apses and domes and things aren't just bits of old-school engineering. They're soundboxes. Traditionally, in a cross-shaped church, you'd have two choirs, one in the left arm of the cross, and one in the right, responding to each other, waking up the walls and arches and apses and domes and making them ring with sound. The reason all forms of chant have a basic form of *phrase* *pause* *phrase* *pause* is to allow for the "hang time" of all those echoes working their way around the architecture.
There are some really terrible and costly modern architectural experiments that... oof. I have heard rumors of an Orthodox church somewhere up north, built as a simple circle, under a huge dome. The acoustics are nightmarish.
Best of luck with the piano lessons! Now that we've got decent bandwidth, I'm thinking of adopting a lonely piano for the use of my most musically-inclined kiddo. It seems like all the beginner stuff can be got through online for free, and once you've got through that, then you know if lessons are worthwhile ;)