JEWEL A. writes:

I found this version of Silent Night. From what I know about music and Arab culture, the Western scales, chord progressions and harmonies are utterly alien to Arabic culture, having only been assimilated in the last 100 years. If you listen to Byzantine Orthodox or Catholic music from the Middle East, you are listening to something that predates Western music notation and theory by more than a thousand years or so. The adaption of very European musical science into a very incompatible Arab musical science is, well, interesting to say the least.

Now here is Byzantine Orthodox singing in Arabic. Absolutely ethereal and heartfelt. Not alien to its own culture at all. It isn’t difficult to imagine at all that Mary and Joseph would have heard music like this in their own time. 

The interesting thing about this music is the presence of major tones within a quarter-tone scale. Modern Arabic music within Muslim cultures doesn’t really have major/minor progression, which is why it doesn’t appeal to our ears at all. Hearing the major tones within Byzantine music was a pleasant surprise for me. Western music has half-tones, but near eastern music has quarter-tones. It sounds dissonant to unaccustomed ears, but its logic, like the logic of languages makes sense within its own culture. And that is why the Arabic version of “Silent Night” with its Western chords and tones coupled with the eastern quarter tone phrasing is more awkward to me than the more unfamiliar Byzantine hymn.

Ancient music has always fascinated me, because the art apart from the Church’s influence and direction would have simply not developed at all. Without the Church, there would be no classical music. Period.

If you look at society now, secularized and hedonistic as it is, what we have in the culture isn’t really music at all, not in the uplifting way God intended it to be.

Modern music is demonic, relentless and evil. Void of every redeeming quality that edifies the soul. And this is the venom that has corroded the Church for the last 50 years since Vatican II. The insipid, effeminate and illogical music that permeates the [Novus Ordo] Mass today is like poison.

This skit isn’t far from the truth as far as what passes for a typical modern Christmas Mass.

— Comments —

Paul C. writes:

No.  I will not have it. We cannot demean other tastes in music as much as we might find them vulgar.  Music is art and its appreciation is controlled by the brain of the beholder.  The ears, like the nose and the eyes, are close to the brain.  Without considering touch, I expect smell dominates the other two; but I think hearing dominates sight insofar as emotion and memory are concerned.  For example, to many music lovers, opera is ugly.  But we don’t call it demonic, relentless, or evil.  We move on to what our ancient ears and brains prefer.

Rap, the music I love to dislike, is not dislikeable because of its beat (having no melody) but because of its horrible lyrics; ergo, we want to label it as demonic, when it is not the music but the lyrics.  It actually can be danced to with some fun.  And just who says how we are supposed to dance?

Rock is American folk music and part of our culture for over sixty years.  Why is it less deserving than its ancestral roots?  For example, here is Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone (regular version, as it was six minutes, just a minute shy of the Beatles’ Hey Jude), a rock song full of meaning, melody, and  beat.  In seventh or eighth grade, you simply had to step up and ask a gal to dance to it, or you would have had to go home in shame.  It was played on its LP (state of the art at the time), so it was always the regular version, which was great for us boys.  It was an unusual song in that you could dance either fast apart or fast holding your partner, which is what I did because women are soft, graceful, and divine.  Music is so influential that I recall exactly where in the room we danced to it—close to the door and the player.

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