He was a simpleton who only knew how to play melancholy ditties on his harmonium, without ever thinking of enlivening the poor people in the Claverias by playing something to which they could dance, as the niece of Silver Stick had asked him.
The priest and Gabriel walked slowly through the silent naves talking the while; the only people to be seen were a group of the household at the door of the sacristy, and two women kneeling before the railing of the high altar praying aloud.

The early twilight of the winter evenings was beginning to darken the Cathedral, and the first bats were coming down from the vaulting and fluttering through the columns.
"Ecclesiastical music," said the artist, "is a real anarchy; but in the Church everything is anarchy.

I believe there is a great deal to be said for the unity of the Catholic worship throughout the world.
When Christianity began to form itself into a religion it did not invent even a single bad melody; it borrowed its hymns and the manner of singing them from the Jews, a primitive and barbarous music that would shock our ears if we heard it now.

Out of Palestine, and where there were no Jews, the earliest Christian poets--Saint Ambrose, Prudencio and others--adopted their new hymns and psalms to the popular songs that were then in vogue in the Roman world, or possibly to Greek music.

It seems as though that word 'Greek music' ought to mean a great deal; is it not so, Gabriel?
The Greeks were so great in their poetry and in the plastic arts that anything that bears their name would seem to be surrounded by an atmosphere of undying beauty.
But it is not so: the march of the arts has not been parallel in human life; when sculpture had its Phidias, and had reached its climax, painting had hardly passed that rudimentary stage that we see in Pompeii, and music was only a childish babbling.