Thanks for the retrospective on the evolution of Catholic liturgical music. Since I did not becpme a Catholic until 1959, most of that was before my time. I know that the hardest thing to get used to in the Catholic church was the DEARTH of music at low Mass. (Remember when Masses were designated "low" and "high"?)
Masses were largely silent in the late '50s and early 60's. Occasionally the priest would sing part of it. At Newman Hall at UC Berkeley we did use what was called the "Congregational High Mass" and (as the name indicates) the Congregation sang the Mass sort of like a Gregorian chant. It was beautiful, but I have never heard it used anyplace except Newman Hall. Of course the words did not fit the music after everything was translated into the vernacular.
Having come from a Protestant background (and former choir member)I really missed the music. On occasion when we would sing a hymn, it was unfamiliar and in Latin. All the great old Protestant favorites were not allowed -- probably because many of them were written by Martin Luther -- at least that is what I was told.
Even after Vat. 2, it was a long time before music made its way back into the church, except for Christmas and Easter. That is when all the "modern" hymns seem to be written. I remember our surprise when a visiting priest from Malta played the violin at Easter services in the late 60s, early 70s.
In fact, in the mid 70s my daughter got her start as a Pastoral Musician by being drafted to play an old pump organ because our church had no one to play and no music. I used to drive her to the church on Saturdays to practice. At the time she had only a piano background, and she taught herself to play the creaky old organ. Pretty soon she was playing for weddings -- long before she was old enough to drive! Then she discovered her beautiful soprano voice and she became a soloist and had to find someone else to accompany her.
But other musical instruments besides the organ were used in the church before. Wasn't Josef Gruber a Catholic priest? Isn't the story true that the reason he wrote Silent Night is that the bellows on the organ sprang a leak and spoiled the planned Christmas cantata? I believe Silent Night was first performed to the accompaniment of a guitar because of the broken organ.
I did know that the Jews used ancient instruments and their voices in worship. Sometimes I wish that there were written records of the tunes that they sung in the 1st century! I would love to know what church music sounded like before the 1500s (a date which represents the oldest hymns listed in our hymnal.)
RE: piano in church. I had NEVER heard the piano used in a Catholic church -- except for practice -- until recently. When my daughter took her Bachelor's in Music Performance and Pedagogy at Baylor U (class of '82)she brought home the surprising news that ALL of the Baptist churches were using both the piano and the organ in their sanctuaries. (She had to perform regulary with various Baylor ensembles so she visited a lot of Baptist churches all over the South.) We both thought use of the piano in church odd at the time because they didn't use it in the Congregational or Presbyterian churches I had attended as a child. By the time she got her Master's in Choral Conducting, all the Catholic Churches where she worked were using pianos -- partly because they couldn't find skilled organists. So, I think it is a fairly recent phenom.
Yah--you missed a great deal.
I'm sorry that your exposure to RC music was so impoverished--here in Mke we had High Masses with music galore. The 'hymn' stuff really began after VatII, and before that hymns which were not specifically Catholic in text were simply NOT used. Now--who cares? Anything goes.
The historians tell us that Jewish Temple music was used for psalmody in the early Church, and that generally the psalm-tones of Chant are based on Jewish chant. Similarly, some of the oldest Gregorian chant (not psalmody) is 'borrowed' from Jewish chant.
If you want to know what church music was like before 1500AD, then get a CD of Chant. It served from about 30AD through 1250+, after which some polyphony was written and used.