The summer of 2014 . . .

marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Church Music Association of America and its journal Sacred Music. This will be the focus of celebration at Colloquium XXIV  in Indianapolis, June 30–July 6, 2014.

It is not as if this were a new society, even then, far from it. It was an amalgamation of the Society of St. Cecilia (1874) and the Society of St. Gregory (1913). In view of the importance music played in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy from the Second Vatican Council, church musicians of the two societies saw the need to join forces to take advantage of the directions the council had indicated for the integration of the treasury of sacred music with substantive participation of the people in the sacred action: the great heritage of Gregorian chant and classical polyphony should enhance the participation of believers in the action of Christ in the Mass, and this should form a precedent for the composition of new sacred music. And so at a meeting in late September 1964, at Boys Town, Nebraska, members of these societies together established the CMAA as a continuation of their groups.

Soon after, new directions in Catholic Church music emerged that were not entirely in accord with the prescriptions of the council: the use of styles borrowed from popular music and so-called “folk music”