ahahahaha let me gather my music axes! hee. (I have a lot of musical training and therefore have been in official and unofficial musical callings most of my adult life, and I have Opinions.)
(I think this may already have been stated in the thread, possibly even by me, but just in case: in a Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saint ward (congregation), all positions are “callings” where the bishop and counselors (“bishopric”) basically “calls” you to a specific position in the ward. The culture is that you do not say no or ask to be released unless you have a very good reason (which does often happen, of course). Basically everyone has a calling of some sort, and on the ward level all positions, including that of bishop, are unpaid lay callings. Some are wildly time-consuming (especially the leadership roles: bishop, Relief Society (women’s organization) president, Young Women’s president, Primary president – these roles may sometimes be as much as a full-time job; at least a part-time job) and some are less so (nursery leader is time-wise only one hour a week at church, though needs a lot of energy for that one hour). Sometimes people do great jobs in their callings, and sometimes adequate jobs, and sometimes not so great and others end up covering somewhat for them.)
So, Music in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints:
The big pro is that there is a culture of singing and of encouraging singing from an early age. Every Sunday the kiddos have part of their Primary time (what other churches call Sunday School time) devoted to singing a variety of songs. Every year they perform a “Primary program” in which the kids get up and both recite little one-liners/paragraphs (depending on age) and sing a bunch of songs to the entire congregation. They also sing in front of the congregation for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. (This could in theory vary by ward, but in practice I have never seen a Mother’s Day where the kids didn’t sing, and the one time in our ward when the music coordinator at the time forgot to coordinate it, someone else stepped in and was like, uh, of course the kids are singing.) Everyone is expected to sing the hymns. This may seem like a small thing, but when I have gone to other churches I find the singing anemic and I look around and maybe a quarter of the people are singing softly. (The exception has been my sister-in-law’s huge evangelist church as well as the two times I went to synagogue for bar mitzvahs – much more of a culture of everyone singing there too.)
The big con (from your perspective, certainly, although from my perspective it’s not exactly a con, or at least not always a con), compared to other churches I’ve been to, is related to everything on the ward level being volunteer untrained and unpaid labor and from it being a close-knit community of people. The first part means that the ward is dependent on whatever local talent it has; it will not hire musicians to make up any shortfall, as my husband’s Lutheran congregation will do (in addition, his church has a paid music director), and whoever is called as the music coordinator may or may not be very good at it (in particular, it is common for them not to be very good at the organizational part because the bishopric just figures they’ll call someone with some musical talent).
I’ve been in wards that had quasi-professional-quality singers and instrumentalists as well as awesome organists and a music coordinator dedicated to special music; in these wards, the music almost every Sunday was amazing. (Still not the same as at a church with a paid full-time music director, though, in quantity at least, simply because lay unpaid musicians can’t support the quantity that a full-time paid position can.) I’ve also been in wards that had very few “music people” and the ones that were there were stretched thin just to get a choir going, and they just had an extra congregational hymn in lieu of any “special music” at all almost every week, rather disappointing really. Sometimes it’s been the same ward at different times, depending on who had moved in and out of the ward! (I think all the wards I have been since I grew up have been in cities with a large transient-young-people population.)
The second part (being a close-knit community) means that often the music coordinator will go for special music that highlights the “community” aspect rather than the “good music” aspect – getting a family with small children to sing, for instance, or coordinating a couple of teenagers because it would be a Good Experience for Them. Sometimes these numbers are still pretty good (it turns out that family can actually sing!) and sometimes they are rather not so (that family… is not so great at singing…). Having been in the music coordinator role more than once, I can attest that it’s often a balancing act! That being said, my favorite memory as the music coordinator is coordinating a number with one of the great singers of the ward and his 10-year-old daughter who is in remission from cancer after a grueling battle with it. They sang a simple duet (“A Child’s Prayer,” for those of you who know it) and we were all in tears.
Another unfortunate thing that can happen, especially in wards where there isn’t a strong musical presence, is that everyone ends up singing the same 20 hymns over and over again because those are the hymns that they all know and that (perhaps more to the point) the organist can play. The old hymnbook has a hymn written by Bach and another by Mendelssohn, but we hardly ever sing those two.
ETA: I almost forgot to add this! Music is also one of those things where it can be veeeeery conservative, especially as it can depend on “bishop roulette.” I had one bishop who would not allow any music unless it was in the hymnbook or had been sung by the (then) Mormon Tabernacle Choir. (Fortunately they sing a wide variety of sacred music, so that’s a little less restrictive than it could be, but it still was pretty restrictive.) The handbook was changed to allow brass instruments a couple of years ago and my current bishop still had a very hard time allowing a trumpet piece for a single piece of music at church, even just as accompaniment for the congregation singing – I was the music coordinator trying to push it through and it took me several tries. So there’s that going on too. I did have a couple of other bishops who were much more lenient and would allow much more interesting music (obviously still reverent/spiritual, etc., but there was more latitude and you could perform, for example, more overtly classical pieces).
It’s got a wider variety of songs, which I do like. It hasn’t got fully released, so I can’t say all the way yet. I hope it keeps the Bach and Mendelssohn.
BTW, from your writeup:
That’s true of pretty much every ward I’m familiar with. Actually my current ward has fewer kids than average, but they pretty much all have a bunch of little kids running everywhere. When our kids were little, it was hard going to church with my husband because our kids were literally the only kids in the entire church and whenever there were any kid noises, it was clear it was coming from our kids.