Everyone once in a while I receive word from a traditionalist congregation that someone has discovered Pope Pius X’s motu proprio on music and insists on imposing it on the parish to the letter, with no knowledge of the long history of controversy in the United States when the document first came out or of any of the qualifiers and conditions embedded in the document’s structure. The press, even when the document first appeared, was full of claims that the Pope had banned all music but chant and forbid women from singing in choirs. Neither was true but confusion was everywhere in the days before one could easily look things up online. Why confusion continues to this day is another issue.
In any case, the following interview with the music director at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York appeared in 1904 in the Kansas city Star (June 12) and it helps clarify matters. I have this from Fifth Avenue Famous, a new book on the topic of St. P’s. Incidentally, note the matter-of-fact mention that chant has always been central to the liturgy at St. Patricks.
“There is nothing in Gregorian music that women’s voices cannot do most effectively,” said Mr. [James] Ungerer, the New York choirmaster of St. Patrick’s cathedral. “The public seems to be laboring under erroneous ideas of the whole subject of Gregorian music and the purport of the Motu Proprio. It seems to think all figured music is to be abolished, and that church music of the future will in consequence partake of requiem – something mournful and monotonous. Unless there come from Rome explicit orders to abolish women they will certainly be retained at the cathedral.
“The cathedral, in probability, will have no more Gregorian chant than it always has had. The Introit, Gradual, Hallelujah, Tract, Offertory, Communion, which change with the feasts, have always been Gregorian at the cathedral. This has not been the case in other churches in this vicinity and elsewhere, and it is to effect this that the pope evidently wishes to make it compulsory. The Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei will continue, as they always have been at the cathedral, to be figured music, but we trust of a higher order of composition. There is a lot of splendid modern music to displace Haydn, Mozart, etc. — music that sustains all the simplicity and solemnity of Palestrina. To bring the figured music to a higher standard of excellence, it would seem, is one of the chief objects of the pope’s decree, and it has not come too soon.”