I assume that leenia and her fellow choir members were singing the exact same notes at the exact same tempo before and after her vision somehow transformed first her singing and then everyone's.

Something was suddenly very different, and I'm sure any of us would have sensed it if we had been there, but (if my interpretation is correct) it was so subtle that no one could have described it, and there's no way it could be captured by any kind of musical notation or transcription (although I'm sure that a recording could capture it). We all know what's being discused here ~ feeling, conviction, charisma, whatever ~ but it sure is difficult to nail it down in a definition, or indeed to make it happen at will.

One thing that I found very intriguing: in her first description of the vision, leenia tells us that the little stone church in the pines was somehow recognizable as a Protestant church, but later we learn that her church and choir are Catholic. Is heartfelt hymnsinging more likely to be heard in a Protestant church than in a Catholic one? In the US, at least, that's probably a fair assessment, at least if the Protestant church under discussion is rural and "down-home."

The mandate of Vatican II to effectively recast the liturgy in forms truly accessible to the local people never really worked out, in my view, beyond the change from Latin to the local verancular (language) ~ certainly, the made-to-order pseudo-"folk" music, for the most part, has never really achieved a true resonance with the folks in the pews.

I've been privileged to witness one of the few exceptions to this general rule. St. Frances de Sales Church in uptown New Orleans is an African-American Roman Catholic parish that was given special authorization by the Vatican back in the '60s to develop their own Black Catholic liturgy, and they are still fulfilling that mandate today. The choir is superb ~ they've toured all over the world, singing for the Pope at St. Peter's among other things ~ but the congregation sings like angels, too.

Most of the songs/hymns sung at St. Frances, not surprisingly, come from the Negro Spiritual/Black Gospel traditions, that is, from the overwhelmingly Protestant African-American church. I think that this very rich repertoire simply holds more promise for seriously heartfelt interpretation than does any "guitar Mass" songbook of nouveau-folk devotional ditties composed by well-intentioned liturgical reformers in the late 20th century.

If liturgucal reform had occurred a generation or two earlier, American Catholic parishes might well have developed beautiful and deeply spiritually satisfying musical traditions drawing on Irish, Italian, Polish, and other sources, very similar to what the black folks at St. Frances were able to do with African-Americna traditions. However, the effort to synthesize a musical tradition for fully assimilated American Catholics ~ the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generations ~ has only resulted in some pretty dry and sterile music...

...Except, of course, for cases where a singer or two experiences a vision and is inspired to bring a new level of feeling to a given piece. Maybe this is the kind of thing necessary to create a new (or newly viable) tradition of church music.