The dark teatime of the soul

I don't think that I'm spiritually advanced enough to have a dark night of the soul, but lately the most dispiriting hour of the week is the time I spend at Sunday mass. The almost oppressive lack of beauty in our liturgical music, especially, is wearing me down week after week. Recently our choir introduced a new Holy Holy Holy that just makes me twitch everytime I hear it, and even when I try to concentrate on the words we're singing I can't block out the ridiculous melody, irrational phrasing, and excessive length. (Fortunately, the last piece of liturgical music that made me feel this way -- an appalling saccharine "Our Father" -- was phased out a year ago in favor of a much more dignified and shorter chanted version.)

I'm about to start a petition calling for the abolition of seventh chords in liturgical music.

I loathe the thought of shopping around for a new parish. We've attended the same parish ever since we moved here almost four years ago, and we have many friends here. Our regular mass is the parish's musical best, and I know that the choir director and members are genuinely devoted to singing beautiful music to glorify God. Still, it's been weighing upon me how responsive humans are to their physical surroundings. I know that Christ is present in the Eucharist regardless of the aesthetic quality of the liturgy, but His presence commands a level of dignity and beauty sorely lacking in most liturgical music.

I've been pondering something Scott Carson wrote about beauty and the Mass:

Having said all of that, I must now point out that mere conformity with doctrinal purity is not the same thing as perfect goodness, because just as true beauty cannot exist without true goodness, so, too, true goodness cannot exist independently of true beauty, since The Good and The Beautiful always go together, like the convex and the concave. So when a liturgy is celebrated that is objectively ugly, it is not as fully good as it could be, any more than a beautiful Episcopalian liturgy celebrated around an empty altar is as good as it could be. Truth and Beauty are both of them necessary conditions on Goodness. In many Episcopalian churches you often have Beauty, but you never have Truth; in Roman Churches you always have Truth but you rarely have Beauty. This is a problem.

Increasingly, it's becoming my problem.

*Addendum* I should clarify that (as Tex noted in the comments) the choir quite often tries to include traditional hymns and some quite lovely choral pieces. It's just that lately the Glory and Praise stuff has been predominating, and the latest round of service music is a few steps down from the previous fare (of which I wasn't too fond in the first place). During Advent and Easter, we use Latin for the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei, and a more restrained style predominates. But that's like eating nourishing food twice a year and subsisting on Wonder Bread the rest of the time.