Again, Abbot Gerbert, in 1750, complains so deeply of the degradation of the church music of his day as to say, in the preface to his learned work De Musica Sacra, that the evil had grown to so great a pitch that, unless God in his mercy applied the remedy, which he had daily besought him to do, all was over (actum est) with the decorum and solemnity of the Catholic worship.
Yet this result ought really not to be a matter of surprise; for how can it be expected that the majesty and solemnity of worship should long survive when its music is left to the control of individual tastes?
Musicians, therefore, when they plead for modern music, must plead for it as it exists in an ideal form in their own minds; and the advocate for the use of the Ritual Chant objects to it, not as it might be if every organist and company of singers were other Davids and the sons of Asaph, but for being what he hears it to be with his own ears wherever he goes; for being what he knows it to have been, and still to be, from the testimony of writers and travellers; and, lastly, from what he foresees it will be to the end of time. The one has before his mind’s eye the harmonies of heaven and the choirs of angels, and hopes to attain to these with the elements of earth. A vision of glory flits before him, and, forgetting that the earth is peopled by sinners, he thinks it may at once be grasped. The other remembers the sad reality of what it is; he thinks of the churches in which he has been present, where he has heard the sounds of the theatre—the fiddle, the horn, and the kettle-drum; where he has heard the song of dancing-girls rather than of worshippers, and choruses rather of idolaters than of men believing in the mysteries at which they were present.
Ἠΰτε περ κλαγγὴ γεράνων πέλει οὐρανόθι πρὸ,
Αἵτ’ ἐπεὶ οὖν χειμῶνα φύγον καὶ ἀθέσφατον ὄμβρον.
Κλαγγῇ ταίγε πέτονται ἐπ’ ὠκεανοῖο ῥοάων,
Ἀνδράσι Πυγμαίοισι φόνον καὶ κῆρα φέρουσαι.
Iliad, b. iii.
Or, in the more humble words of an English poet—
“As if all kinds of noise had been