I really just don't care for gregorian chant. It's not that I hate it, but I don't necessarily love it. It just is what it is, most of which I happen to believe is fake 20th century music dressed up as 11th century music. But in all these catholic music director groups I'm in, these people fetishize it so heavily. It's the only thing they ever talk about. They love to post screenshots of their gregorian chant pdf collections, or pictures from their binders at the organ showing off that they can read neumes. "Are you guys singing LAUDA SION today? Look at my arrangement!", with the same exact 1970s arrangement everybody else is singing.
So I'm pretty much the only contrarian in the group that thinks "gregorian chant" is fake, is a conflation of various historical traditions recontextualized as one single thing that it never was, often composed in the 19th and 20th century, often utilizing modes ahistorically (like Lydian melodies throwing in B naturals all the time when they were almost always flattened. "Lydian sometimes has B natural, so let's exploit it so people can definitively tell this is not a standard f major scale" is a 20th century attitude), and so on.
I really don't want to beat this dead horse all the time but this one issue is thrown into my face disproportionately almost daily because of my job and my interests. I again reiterate that polyphony is the true heritage of the church, and that gregorian chant is a stripping away of the polyphonic tradition.
And I find it so pretentious, and I am incredibly pretentious myself so that is saying something, when you see catholic bulletins and missalettes notating all of the music in neumes just to show off how catholic they are. Simple plainchant notation with just the note heads and without the stems is sufficient for chant style, you don't need to pretend that you can read gregorian chant, because I know for a fact that 90% of these people can't even read neumes.
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