MULTIMEDIA-ENGLISH
The Council of Trent in 3 minutes
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3:50
Video page URL
https://multimedia-english.com/videos/esl/the-council-of-trent-in-3-minutes-3887
Description

The Council of Trent was an 18 year religious debate in the Catholic church during the Renaissance era. One of the topics of discussion was music, and this is a parody of some of the points discussed.

Council of Trent, 19th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic church (1545-63), delayed and interrupted several times because of several religious and political disagreements, was the most impressive embodiment of ideals of the Catholic Reformation. It would be over 300 years until the next Ecumenical Council, which took place on today´s date back around 1863. When announcing Vatican II Pope John XXIII stated that the precepts of the Council of Trent continue to the moder day, a possition that was reaffirmed by Pope Paul VI.

Transcript

- All right, let´s get start it. This meeting is to be like thirty minutes tops.
- Yea man, no worries, it should be a breeze which has some quick things to talk about.
- Good, I need to be at home by 7 o´clock, so I´m just thirty rack. Great job.
- I´ve read but firstly I think we´re stabbing people read much more complicated poliphonic music and still move into more simple rhythms, it´s weird to jumble up  and I can´t ever tell what they were singing.
- But the simple music is so boring, people like polyphonic music and it has the potential to be understandable.
- I totally agree, I wanna hear missing Palestrina.... good stuff.
- Polyphonic music is of the devil.
- I second that.
- Now way, man, check this out...
- Yeah, fine. I guess that's pretty cool.
- Oh, fine, maybe we can let some people read polyphonic music
- Yes...
- Ok, but if we´re gonna let them have polyphonic music, maybe we should consider changing the text to a language that people actually know.
- Like what?
- Not Latin, seriously, who speaks Latin?
- Cool people like me and all the priests!
- Yea, but why say something to somebody if they are not gonna understand it?
- Oh, well, they´ll figure it out, they´ve been doing it for hundred of years, why change it now?
- Because nobody understands it? Fine, we don´t change the text to a common language... I´m going to speak gibberish for the rest of the meeting.
- Ah...!!!
- +´`´+ç´`+´ç``+´-¨+^*. Yea, you didn´t like that, did you?
- That was weird, never do that again, ever.
- I still think we should keep the Latin.
- Latin, it is.
- You guys are ridiculous!
- So, what´s next?
- I say we get rid of all instruments, those are supposed to be for dancing and dancing is evil, all of our music should be vocal.
- Yea, that´s sounds good to me.
- Cool beans!
- All right, well, it´s official, no more instrumental music.
- Did we all just agreed on something?
- Yea, that was weird...
- Well, and now that we´re a sort of on roll here, I´ve got another points.
- Let´s hear hit man.
- What if we completely get rid of all of the secular music that is being tied in two seconds...?
- I´m up for it you guys think.
- Oh...
- Oh men, so I won´t be able to listen to Bad Romance anymore!
- No more Lady Gaga, only church music!
- Oh, man...
- All right, well, I think that pretty much wraps it up.
- And it only took two decades
- Yes but now we´all look like ZZ Tap, let's get out of here.

Explanations

interesting/fun facts:
Today most people think that music with Latin lyrics was absurd, since nobody could understand, and that’s also the point made on this video. Nevertheless, we mustn’t forget that at that time Latin was not just the language of the Church, it was also the lingua franca in Europe and also the language of culture and science. Universities used Latin as their teaching language and most serious publishing was made in Latin too. Compare the situation with today’s prevalence of English as a lingua franca and also as the most common language used in music everywhere, which seems just natural.

I still remember a TV interview when I was a kid. They asked a British group how they could explain the fact that their music was so popular in Spain (more than in the UK) in spite of their shocking lyrics. They said that probably Spanish people were much more revolutionary that people supposed. Wrong answer, the truth was that 90% of Spanish people at that time simply didn’t know English at all, and most of those who did, had no level to understand their lyrics anyway. People liked their music, but nobody cared about the lyrics because they were just gibberish to them. Even today, the situation has not changed too much :)