Category: Article by Jeffrey Tucker

Anywhere in the Catholic world you go today, you can high hear praise for the wonderful things happening at the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School. Their new director since 2010, and only the fourth in the history of the institution, is John Robinson, a young organist and choirmaster from John’s College Cambridge and Canterbury Cathedral.

He seems to be exactly the right person for the position at this stage in the history of the the BACS. He is shepherding the school from being not only an outstanding local institution but one to provide national leadership in Catholic liturgy and musical excellence. The new public profile of the school seems to be making the point that needs to be made right now.

The BACS was founded in 1963 by Theodore Marier, an American composer and musician – a leader in the Gregorian chant revival – who saw the need for the English choir-school model to finally make the treck to the colonies. An expert on sacred music for Catholic liturgy, Marier was in so many ways a visionary who took on the impossible task what might have seemed like the worst time.

Theodore Marier

Sacrosanctum Concilium had just been promulgated, and there emerge a tension between its mandate to preserve the Latin treasury of sacred music and its permission for the vernacular. What neither he nor anyone fully expected was that Catholic music was on the verge of entering a long period of upheaval. Marier never relented in his hope that this new institution would be devoted to bringing Gregorian chant to the postconciliar age.

Through sheer tenacity and creative composition and director, Marier built the school and saw it through this period until his retirement in 1986. John Dunn took over as director and headmaster in the years after, maintaining the tradition and continuing to build in the context of daily sung Masses and the performance of outstanding liturgical music at St. Paul Church in Harvard Square. Jennifer Lester served in an interim role.

One can imagine how difficult it must have been to find a successor after this history. The choice of Robinson was wise indeed. He turns out to have all the right skills to both build on the past and go forward to a bright future . An outstanding musician with a clear sense of mission (he was raised in the very type of system of choral education that he now heads), he is also a brilliantly diplomatic person whose quiet erudition and attention to musical excellence has inspired students, donors, and parents.

He has led the way with a clear focus on the best of the Catholic choral repertoire, the fruits of which have been on display in public concerts and liturgical services. The goal is not just to create outstanding musicians but also to provide an exemplary experience of liturgical music – with attention to both musical and liturgical precision. The BACS is headed toward an ever larger presence on the national Catholic scene, and very well could emerge as a example to many other dioceses around the country.

The BACS is only one of two Catholic choir schools in the whole of the United States. The other (equally impressive) one is in Salt Lake at the Cathedral of the Madeleine accepts both both and girls.The BACS accepts boys from the fifth to the eight grade and trains them in all subjects with a specialization in musical skills. Every student learns piano, music theory, recorder, and perfects the skill of sight singing.

It is not widely understood that over the centuries there have been dramatic changes in the age when the boy’s voice shifts from soprano to tenor or bass. Johan Sebastian Bach sang as a boy soprano at the age of 16, and, in the late middle ages, it was not uncommon for the boy soprano voice to survive until the late teen years. That all began to shift in the 19th century with a change in diet and overall health. Today, the boy soprano voice is gone by the age of 14.

I can recall reading a manual on training boys to sing that was written in the early 1930s, and being struck by what a gigantic task it is to train boys to sing in any historical period. It requires vast experience, a good ear, a great sense of diplomacy, and a huge bag of tricks. Today the challenge is intensified because they must be trained earlier and the trained voice doesn’t last very long at all. Then the voice goes through a time when it seems nearly unusable only to emerge later as something completely different.

John Robinson

This reality is part of daily life at the Boston Choir School, and Robinson and the rest of the faculty must deal with not only the musical difficulties of the boys but the psychological ones as well. I can only imagine what it must be like to develop a wonderful skill at the age of 11 only to have nature take it away two years later. So part of the job of the director is to carefully migrate the acquired skills from childhood into early adulthood and to do this one child at at time.

Robinson himself went through this period and it was during this time that he developed his skills as a pianist and an organist, furthering his educational as an overall musician. So he has an intrinsic sympathy with the plight of all of his students. And even as this constant circulation of vocal timbres is taking place, the choir sings every daily at St. Paul’s for Mass, with an incredibly demanding repertoire ranging from Latin chant to Tallis to modern choral works.

It is a deeply tragic aspect of modern Catholic life that most parishes and even many cathedrals have no program at all for children choirs, or only paltry ones that sing on Christmas. Catholic Children these days learn to sing by listening to pop music on the radio or on their iPods, and this is a serious problem for the state of Catholic music generally. Directors of music in parishes find themselves without any singers among the adults. People don’t know how to read music much less perform it in a way that is suitable for liturgical services. Nor do they know the repertoire.

The best and most fundamental way to bring about long-term change is through the children’s choir. In the year’s ahead, it is clear that the new generation that will lead to a rebuilding is going to emerge from within comprehensive systems of education such as we find at the Boston Choir School.

In this way, every day that Robinson and the faculty there teach, an investment is being made in the state of Catholic music that will bear fruit for decades to come. In the future, you might find that a graduate of the BACS will be leading music at your parish and bringing the glorious treasury of sacred music to Masses and the sung office experienced by you, your children, and your children’s children. This is the gift that Robinson has brought to our shores. For this reason, the administrators, board, parents, students, and director are fully deserving of all the support that Catholics can give them.

We have not one but two great new books for the ordinary form. The second is Richard Rice’s Simple Choral Gradual. Parishes have been using this book for years, but only from online downloads. At last it is print. We viewed it for the first time yesterday. Again, given how much music is in here, it is rather surprising just how compact the book is. We chose spiral for the easiest possible format. Congratulations Richard Rice! This is an essential book for any parish. We will hear some of the music today at the Colloquium Mass.  Here is the Amazon link. Again, the links says out of stock but that is not really true. It is just how Amazon describes things will they have run out but there will be more in a day or two, so you can order now. And by the way, I’m certainly NOT the editor. The person who posted this just got a bit carried away and so that will be fixed.

Sandro Magister of Chiesa is a very popular writer among Catholics who follow and love the pontificate of Benedict XVI. His journalistic work is distributed online in many languages, and he is usually a valuable source of information about goings on in the Vatican. He has been an excellent champion of the pope who never fails to defend him against critics.

But as a journalist, Magister has one big blind spot: music. He is not a musician, doesn’t follow this beat very closely, and must rely on the judgment of others within the Vatican to alert him to trends and changes. This is always a dangerous method for any journalist who aspires to be an independent voice. He has good instincts that favor tradition but lacks the competence to seriously evaluate whether and to what extent it is being realized.

I’ve usually ignored his writings on this topic, and declined to correct them simply because they haven’t done too much damage so far. But on May 30, 2011, he sent out a column that made the following claim: “Benedict XVI…has declined to act and to make decisions in the field of sacred music.” In the area of sacred music, “Benedict XVI’s grand vision is not being backed up by actions, which are even moving in the opposite direction.”

Now, this is just startling on its face. It comes close to being a smear of the pope himself, and it is outrageously unjust. If you visit Rome and attend the daily sung Office in St. Peter’s, you will hear beautiful Gregorian chant and polyphony of the highest caliber. The music of the Renaissance has been revived, and the choirs in St. Peter’s are cooperating with the Solesmes monastery. At Vatican Masses, we hear the Gregorian introit and communion chants with regularity, and sometimes even the offertory chant. The ordinary of the Mass is scrupulously derived from official chants books and sung with great care.

This is a dramatic change from the past, even from the preconcilar past. The progress has been rapid and thorough in St. Peter’s itself. Right now, the music is better than it ever was under John Paul II, Paul VI, John XXIII, and even Pius XII, and going back in time, perhaps even to the 19th century and before. The Vatican has long struggled with the music question. Benedict is bringing clarity for the first time in very long time.

It’s true that one cannot always discern this from televised occasions but there are several choirs that provide music and the progress in the sound itself is uneven. As regards repertoire itself – and this is the critical issue – there has been a dramatic turnaround. And even when the pope travels, the advance team works with the choirs on the ground to push them into the best possible performance of music. The results are not always great, but we must remember what is possible right now. We are coming out a half century of near chaos, a time when the musical capital of Catholicism’s outposts has been almost completely depleted.

Benedict’s changes have not only transformed music at the Vatican and a papal liturgy. The changes (which include Summorum Pontificum and also pushing for a new English missal) have unleashed a global revival of chant and polyphony – and a new comprehension of the very meaning of liturgical music itself.

The idea of the new ethos is to use liturgical texts to accompany liturgical action, and, further, to use musical settings of those texts that are organic to the ritual. I know that this doesn’t sound too complicated but consider that this single point has been lost on nearly everyone in a decision-making role in Catholic music for many generations.

Benedict XVI is working to restore this understanding. One might go so far as to say that the shift in liturgical music that has occurred under him is the single most conspicuous change that has taken place in the Catholic world in the last 10 years.

My reminder of this obvious reality is only necessary given Magister’s amazing claim that the music question has been somehow neglected. This approaches being an jaw-dropping claim. So what is his evidence? This is where he gets petty. Magister says that the Pope did not pay enough attention to a conference held by the Institute of Sacred Music in May of this year. “The prefecture of the pontifical household made it known that there would be no audience, nor any apostolic letter.” This, says Magister, amounts to “ostracism.”

And yet, in a letter dated May 26, the Vatican released a letter from Benedict that celebrated this very institution. “In the span of the last 100 years, this Institution has assimilated, developed, and expressed the doctrinal and pastoral teaching of the pontifical documents, as well as those of Vatican Council II, concerning sacred music, to illumine and guide the work of composers, chapel maestros, liturgists, musicians, and all instructors in this field.”

This is hardly ostracism. In fact, the whole tone, approach, and thesis of Magister is utterly preposterous. So why is he making these claims? A hint about the source of his poor information comes in his article’s attack on the appointment of the position of director of the Sistine Chapel choir. Magister says it went to the wrong guy, Don Massimo Palombella. Magister says he is “clearly not up to the role.” So he says.

This is the third time that Magister has made this claim. I knew nothing of Palombella when he was appointed, so I quickly looked him up. It turns out that his a specialist in the Roman school of polyphony in general and Palestrina in particular, and this is what he is emphasizing in his work with the Chapel. The singing style is not to my taste – this is due to a conflict between the Roman and English schools that dates back to the 19th century. (Some people have said that St. Pius X’s interventions in the area of music were motivated by his desire to reform this choir, which he couldn’t stand; it didn’t work.) But the repertoire itself has been first rate.

In other words, there is no basis for trashing Palombella this way – and Magister is not competent to judge. And who does Magister like instead? He likes the old director Domenico Bartolucci, who was supposed to have the position for life but was booted in 1997 under John Paul II. As a way of expressing support, Benedict made him a Cardinal and has written glowing tributes. But that’s not enough for Magister, who apparently thinks that Bartolucci needs to be reappointed.

Now, Bartolucci might be a great man and a great musician. I enjoy his interviews, in which he routinely attacks all pop music in satisfyingly vicious terms but also trashes the sound of Solesmes-style chant, which he regards as affected and effete. Bartolucci says he favors a manly and warrior sound for chant. These comments always strike me as hilarious, especially given that the Sistine choir under his rule was not exactly an exemplar of excellence (and many readers who know the truth are right now laughing at my understatement).

In other words, it seems very clear to me that Magister is the victim of some kind of strange Vatican-based bureaucratic struggle. He has been manipulated into presenting a series of petty issues as some kind of giant struggle for the soul of sacred music. And his involvement in this tiny world has led him – even with all his long journalistic experience – to overlook the most exciting and wonderful development in the Catholic world in many generations.

Yes, this is very disappointing. My biggest worry here is that this one Magister column has misled many, many people. I hesitated to say anything about it but after the twentieth or so email expressing disappointment in this papacy as a response to this article, I had to clarify. I hope we can put Magister’s preposterous claims to rest.

A new singer came to our schola this week. At his first liturgical experience with us, he read the Gregorian communion chant beautifully. We didn’t give him a crash course. He already knew how to do this.

How did this happen? He is from another section of the country, and is only visiting our area for the summer. He had been taught how to read and sing chant by a person who had attended the Sacred Music Colloquium, as sponsored by the Church Music Association of America. The skills had passed from person to person, eventually landing back in our own parish. This is a beautiful illustration of how the passion and fire for sacred music can spread, potentially without limit.

Note, however, that there must be an infrastructure in place that teaches and trains in the first round, one wholly dedicated to the task of rebuilding the chant tradition and helping it to live and thrive in the real world of parish life. This is the primary task of the Colloquium.

At a time when conventions, conferences, and colloquia all over the country are being scaled down or cancelled for economic reasons, the Colloquium thrives as never before (thanks be to God). And this is not due to resources (as ever, the CMMA runs on a wing and a prayer) but to the passion and drive of organizers and attendees.

A major problem I’ve experienced when trying to raise money for the CMAA is that people don’t see how training musicians outside their own parish can really be of any help to themselves personally. They know the musicians who rule the roost at home and potential donors often consider them to be tenured people with limited imaginations, essentially beyond hope. Potential financial backers of the Colloquium have no interest in giving money to help other parishes improve while their own parishes are stuck singing Carter-era classics.

This is an understandable perspective but it is rooted in a superficial understanding of how musical change happens. Music is unlike physical objects like pews, statues, buildings, or even books. Training one person to chant in another part of the world can make it possible for this person to train someone else, and then this person influences another, and so on, until the skills and love associated with authentic liturgical music eventually lands back home again.

There is no way to promise this or guarantee that this will happen, but it can and often does. And there is another point too: parish music programs often adapt to the changing culture of Catholic aesthetics in a broader sense. And there is no surer way to change that culture than through a large-scale annual program that is continuous year to year.

The sponsoring organization of the Colloquium has an incredible history. The CMAA was formed in 1965 as a coming together of the two Catholic music organizations in the United States. They Society of St. Caecilia was founded in 1874 and served mainly a German-speaking Catholic population. The St. Gregory Society was formed in 1913 and became the primary organizing infrastructure for the whole country.

During and immediately following the Second Vatican Council – which solidly affirmed Gregorian chant to be the preeminent music of the Roman Rite, never to be displaced from that role regardless of circumstances – everyone knew that the postconciliar scene would need assistance to achieve the ideals.

What if the two organizations united into something new? Surely that would create an fantastic new organization that would provide direction and leadership into the future. With the encouragement and official approval of the Vatican, the Church Music Association of America was formed in 1964/65 to bring Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony to the whole of Catholic life at all levels. It was to steer the musicians through the coming liturgical changes with an eye toward the promising goals and ideals of Vatican II.

Well, I don’t need to tell readers that it didn’t turn out this way. A struggle for control ensued immediately, with factions forming along personal and ideological lines. The faction that backed the founding mission won the day but it was unclear what they had won. These were tumultuous years of upheaval, and the old forms of organizing in a top-down manner no longer work.

By 1968, the organization found itself strategically outrun and financially bankrupt. The new Mass was promulgated at a time when the organization was at its weakest. The folk Mass was spreading. Non-liturgical music was sweeping the country. There was so much confusion that people were not entirely sure what they were supposed to sing. The Graduale attached to the new Mass did not come out in print for another four years. The prevailing attitude was: tear up the pea patch. Down with chant. Down with anything old. When the Vatican sent a scaled down chant Mass packet to all Bishops in 1976, it was virtually ignored.

At that point, the goal became the survival of the idea, and the survival of the organization itself. The list of heroes here is Msgr. Richard J. Schuler, Fr. Robert Skeris, Cal Shenk, Paul Salamonovich, Kurt Poterack, and many others who worked to keep the colloquium going on a small scale and keep the journal Sacred Music coming out as regularly as possible. This was certainly a period of near hibernation for the lovers of sacred music. It would have been easier to give up and move on. They didn’t: the work to build for brighter days ahead.

In the minds of those who defined progress as moving as far away from tradition as possible, an organization like the CMAA was not even supposed to exist. To them, it was just a waiting game for final extinction. The CMAA was a remnant, a holdover, the last of a dying breed, a bad reminder of what once was, a corpse in need of burial. In fact, what was happening was profoundly important: the candle was being kept lit and burning. Those people taught new people, and the distance between then and now was being bridged.

The revival was an extraordinary thing to live through. It began sometime around 2005 as more and more people were attracted to the offerings both at the CMAA’s conferences and through the organization’s online distribution of chant. People came crawling from every direction, all kinds of people of all ages. Some were very experienced in chant but had been in hiding; others were novices. Many were musicians who had taken the “glory and praise” and “praise and worship” models as far as they would go. Each year, half or more of the attendees were new to sacred music.

From a boutique meeting of dedicated chanters, the conference more than doubled in size each year until it has been capped at 250. A reason for that is that this program is not like a trade show, something you attend to hang out with friends and shop for goods, and only pretend to attend sessions. There are plenty of friends, but absolutely everyone sings in a choir that prepares chant and another choir the prepares polyphony – and there are five choices each for choirs. The conductors and teachers are world class. It is very hard work. The atmosphere is unbeat and productive — dare I say progressive!

And this year, once again, it is full — again, despite every prediction that this music would die at long last and be replaced by 100% non-liturgical pop music. The program seeks to embrace the liturgical ideal with Masses in the vernacular and Latin ordinary form as well as extraordinary form, each giving close attention to the propers of the Mass. Within this framework there is huge diversity. It appears that the singing packet this year is going to be some 275 pages! And there’s no question that the highlight of each day is the Mass that uses the music we’ve work on.

The program is a humbling experience for everyone there. Everyone feels a sense of inadequacy as compared with the greatness of the music we are singing. We are all surrounded by people who are better readers and better singers, and this can sometimes be a bit painful. But you can notice yourself improving as the week goes on. When you return home, you have a new sense of confidence in singing and conducting. It ends up as a gigantic musical upgrade in the lives of everyone who came.

And this is just the beginning of the activities of this unlikely story of the rise, fall, and rise of the CMAA. The new books that will be distributed this year are going to change many things. But, in the end, it isn’t really about an organization. It is about a vision and a dream – that of making the sounds of eternity a perpetuating part of the temporal order during that liturgy that alone causes time and transcendence to touch.

The Sacred Music Colloquium has no “sugar daddy,” no money bags donor, no access to a lucrative foundation somewhere, no connections to powerful people, or anything like that. Can anyone be surprised to know that the entire enterprise is sustained by equal measure of hard work and relentless faith that the impossible can happen.