Everyone knows that there are musical choices to be made within the ordinary form of the Roman Rite. You can do the normative thing, you can do a substitute for the normative thing, you can do a translation of the substitute of the normative thing, or…you can do something else deemed appropriate.
Who is to decide what is appropriate? Well, there some degree of fighting about this in every parish environment. Every parishioner with a voice has a view about what is appropriate. Sometimes the pastor prevails. Sometimes the music director or pianist prevails. Most of the time, the process of deciding works a lot like democracy: the most well-organized pressure groups prevail. Needless to say, this is not a good framework for the fulfilment of liturgical ideals.
The U.S. Bishops have added what is considered a reliable guide: a three-fold judgement. The music must meet the criteria of being good music, pastoral music, and liturgical music. This famous test was heavily emphasized in the now-defunct document called Music in Catholic Worship; it is much downplayed in its replacement document Sing To the Lord. In any case, I’ve never really been convinced that this three-fold judgement puts much in the way of limits on anything, since all three of criteria can be easily rationalized by whomever is selecting the music in question.
The provision that the music must be “pastoral,” while not technically prejudicing the choice against Gregorian chant, seems to indicate, in American parlance, something that meets the community’s immediate need for some kind of gratification. It doesn’t have to mean that kind of prejudice but the hint is embedded in the long use of the word “pastoral” in the American context. This test, moreover, puts excessive focus on the people who are present at the liturgy without regard to the millions of people who have been driven from the Catholic faith by bad music. What about the pastoral needs of those who have been long alienated by others’ choices of what constitutes an appropriate substitute for the normative ideal?
In any case, one aspect of the process of picking music for the ordinary form is interesting. It leads to a relentless trial and error of various musical approaches, which in turn allows us to compare the merits of many approaches. In this process, I’ve strengthen my own conviction that Gregorian chant (yes, in Latin) is the ideal. Actually of course it is not my conviction but rather the conviction of the Church, which is why it has been legislated at the right music for liturgy in every bit of Papal legislation on record. I only mean that I’ve experienced the wisdom of this teaching in real time through many different attempts to discover some suitable substitute.
In the ordinary form, every music director who has worked for some years ends up trying many different approaches. The usual approach to the entrance for example, prevailing in probably 95% of parish environments, is to sing a hymn in English. The hymn can be a traditional classic, a traditional contemporary (thinking 1970s here), or a praise and worship chorus designed to give the Mass a blasting start that gets everyone into some sort of frenzy. Whatever style you choose, the hymn is the conventional choice, even though it has never been the first choice in the whole of Catholic history. .
The trouble here is that the hymn follows a four-square beat that is not all that different from that offered by the secular world. It has a singable tune. It has a certain familiarity that enables people to sing along with it. There might not seem to be anything objectionable about any of this until you consider the rarefied environment offered by liturgy and liturgy alone. This is not just a time for the community to gather and not just a time to study the Bible and pray together. The liturgy makes dramatic and mystical claims in its forms and language and actions; it seeks the suspension of time and an intimate contact of God and the human soul.
Doesn’t it makes sense that the music should strongly signal the reality of liturgy at the entrance, and the entrance more than any other point in the Mass? This is when the general comportment of the Mass is established. It is the time when people prepare for a long prayer. It is the period when everyone needs to be reminded that this is a special place and a special time, not just for joining or gathering or socializing but for the extraordinary act of liturgy. And yes that might mean just a shade of discomfort, something that picks us up out of the world we’ve been living in all week and plants us in a new place so that we can prepare for the mysteries that will unfold before us.
At the very least, then, the text we sing ought not to be some text composed by someone else but rather than appointed text for the entrance at Mass. Is that really too much to ask, too much to ask that the choir sing the actual text of the Mass called the entrance antiphon? It strikes me that Laszlo Dobszay is correct that single weakest part of the rubrics of the ordinary form is that it permits replacing this text with some other text that could, conceivably, be made up right there on the spot.
Once we have the priority of the propers straight in our heads, there are many other options still, all of them better than a hymn. We could sing the Gregorian melodies to an English text. We could sing the English text with a new chant-like melody. We could sing a polyphonic piece with the English text. We could sing the Latin text with a Psalm tone. We could sing the English text with a Psalm tone. There are editions out there of all of these choices, and all of them have their merits.
Our own schola does not always have time to work up the Gregorian chant for the entrance, so these other options are highly useful for us. And yet when we do have time to sing the real chant that belongs to the Mass of the time, it really strikes me: this is what is perfect. It conveys the right message, has the right sound, make for the perfectly dignified entrance, suggests stillness but upward motion into another realm, and instills a quiet sense of prayer. It is quite something, and doesn’t really have a full explanation. I don’t mean just one introit in particular but rather all of them, each one carefully crafted for the needs of the day. I can only say with full confidence that the best introit in our own experience is precisely the one that the Church recommends: the Gregorian chant.
I wish we could do this every week but it just isn’t possible given time constraints and other musical demands. But when we can do it, we have a strong sense that we did precisely what the liturgy calls for. And after singing this, everything else we sing seems to go better than it otherwise would. The Mass already has that opening lift and is easily carried the rest of the way. The schola itself seems more relaxed, and the atmosphere of the Church more prayerful, patient, and attentive.
There is also something meritorious about leaving our judgement aside for once during the week and deferring to the judgement of our tradition. The tradition is most often more correct than we are. It embodies more experience, more wisdom, a broader outlook, and is less prone to mistakes than a single generation or a single person. In fact, I would suggest that if someone’s judgment about what is appropriate time again excludes the Gregorian chant, there is something very wrong with the method by which the judgement is being made.
Sometimes pop philosophers like to ask why God allows bad things to happen to good people. We might similarly ask why God allowed pop music to takeover the ordinary form of the Mass. One answer might be to instill in all of us a more profound appreciation for the music that the Church has given us to last the ages. As we work through another round of Gregorian restoration, may we never forget this lesson and cling to its beautiful words and melodies, world without end.
