Change in the parishes?

[alan29]

I am getting very confused here. What is meant by chant, exactly?
I am of an age that I went to a Junior Seminary. We sang the Propers from the Liber every Sunday. It took a whole afternoon to prepare, and was usually dreadful, accompanied on organ, drooping pitch, little sense of foreward movement or musical phrasing. Believe it or not, I still love plainsong, and have been to places where it is sung superbly well. Then it presses all the right buttons.
Sorry, I digress. Back to my question - what do we mean by chant?
In my parish the responsorial psalms are sung, by cantors, to a kind of metrical Anglicanish chant. Is that what we mean?
Sometimes we sing some of the responses (mainly Amen at the end of a sung prayer)
We never ever sing the Kyrie or Gloria from the Liber, why massacre the innocent? Is that what we want? (The creed is not a lyric text and shouldn't be sung anyway.)
What about the propers? I assume we could still sing those ecstatic Alleluia verses if we could find anyone good enough to make them sound effortless.
So what exactly are we after here?
Is this topic really about the music at all? I write this having stumbled across a couple of Blogs run by priests in this country who would seem to not belong to the same Church as me. Gave me a nasty fright, I can tell you.
Alan

[docmattc]

We sang the Propers from the Liber every Sunday. It took a whole afternoon to prepare, and was usually dreadful, accompanied on organ, drooping pitch, little sense of foreward movement or musical phrasing

Alan, I think you illustrate my point exactly. Plainsong/chant etc won't suddenly solve the problems of poor church music.

And I mean allude, not elude. There's a reason that I'm a scientist!

[musicus]

I am getting very confused here. What is meant by chant, exactly?

I think most people here use the term to mean plainchant, and, more specifically, Gregorian chant. There are, of course, many other varieties of chant. Try Wikipedia for starters.

[Dot]

From a practical point of view, chant is a flexible method of setting words to music offering a simple solution to the problem of setting non-metrical or irregular texts. Of course, the Church is not promoting "any old chant" but I see no reason for it to frown on composers trying to employ the melodic style and modality of what we hear in Gregorian chant. Some of the more effective (perhaps affective) music that is heard at Composers' Group draws on inspiration from this source. That does not mean that the music has to take on an "ancient" style.

Dot

[nazard]

I am generally in favour of chant in moderate quantities. I find attempts to set English words to Gregorian chant sound silly if the chant is too florid, but simpler styles can work well. The simple styles of psalm chant typified by Gregory Murray are useful, and many (but not all) Taize chants.