Contemporary Catholic liturgical music encompasses a comprehensive number of styles of music for Catholic liturgy that grew both before and after the reforms of Vatican II. The dominant style in English speaking Canada and the United States began as Gregorian chant and folk hymns, superseded after the 1970s by a folk-based musical genre, generally acoustic and often slow in tempo but that has evolved into a broad contemporary range of styles reflective of certain aspects of age, culture and language. There is a marked difference between this style and those that were both common and valued in Catholic churches before Vatican II.