Category: Article by Jeffrey Tucker

I’ve promised to tell the back story of how the contemporary Catholic composer David Haas influenced the creation of the Simple English Propers Project of Adam Bartlett – though neither one of them knows this story. This is a case study in how a huge variety of influences feed into the emergence of new things in the world of art and liturgy, how a symbioses of people and events can elicit the emergence of an answer to a need that no one entirely knew existed until it became apparent through a circuitous route.

I’ll get to David’s influence in just a bit but let me say a few words about Adam Bartlett, the composer who is busily compiling the Simple English Propers week by week in the hope of going to print with a full edition in time for the release of the new translation of the Roman Missal in 2011. My excitement about this project is no secret. I think it could result in providing that missing link in current resources for Catholic liturgy: musical settings of the liturgical text that choirs can sing every week. It can become a collection that can truly transform the sound and feel of Catholic liturgy in this country, both in the near term and in the long term.

Adam has a praise-music background, playing upbeat popular music in parishes only a few years ago. About the time that the CMAA started putting chant editions online, Adam found himself drawn the chant tradition: its solemnity, integrity, and authenticity. He sought out the mentorship of Fr. Columba Kelly, a chant expert who struggled mightily in the 1960s to provide English settings of chant for use in the postconciliar period. Fr. Kelly’s work never went mainstream due to many circumstances of time and place (the champions of English found his work too stodgy and the partisans of chant regarded it as too progressive). But he never dropped his enthusiasm for the idea, and this has been passed to Adam through careful teaching and instruction.

Adam opened the SacredMusicProject to make Kelly’s settings available and provide a forum for development of several projects to push the chant in a variety of forms. It was only a year ago that the two of us argued incessantly and sometimes very hotly in private emails about methodology in chant, its rhythmic structure, its production, and much more I won’t go into here, but those who know about the old “words vs. music” controversies will be able to imagine the details. At some point this past summer, we both came to a mutual realization: what we were arguing about didn’t matter nearly as much as the larger goal.

We set it all aside, and in August 2010, we started brainstorming about what kinds of editions of English chant could actually work in a regular parish as a means of transitioning musicians and parishes out of one paradigm into another that is much closer to the idea.

It was later that very month that I attended the Atlanta Archdiocesan Liturgical Music program as a speaker. David Haas was also a presenter. We met and enjoyed each other’s company very much, and I recall being stunned at the extent of his knowledge on Catholic liturgy (though I don’t know what I should have been stunned). Then we both went our separate ways and did our respective presentations: he on music for the new translation and I on the role of chant in Catholic liturgy.

We both had two sessions. Neither of us could attend the others’ session because they were simultaneous. My first session went perfectly. It was attended by people who had a preexisting affection for chant, who had CDs at home, who might know a passing Gregorian melody, who had a sense that something was wrong and uninspiring about the mainstream model, and were ready for answers. It was an extremely receptive crowd.

I explained my understanding of the musical structure of the Roman Rite (people’s parts, schola parts, celebrant parts; propers, ordinary chants, and dialogues). I gave a sweeping history of Church music to explain how we found ourselves in the current predicament. I spoke of ways to get from here to there, and otherwise inspired optimism about the future. I then passed out the Parish Book of Chant, a book designed to use traditional Mass ordinaries and Latin hymns to revive interest in the fullness of the Gregorian repertoire.

We sang and sang and it was wonderful. There was a question and answer session that was full of energy and excitement. It was like magic. My presentation ended 90 minutes later, and I received a standing ovation. I left full of confidence and went into the break, where I visited with my colleague Arlene Oost-Zinner, who was attending to lead the closing Vespers in chant.

Now, Arlene has been doing work on English Psalms for several years, writing what is, in my view, the most inspired chant settings currently available. Her interest has been much like Adam’s and much like Fr. Kelly’s: providing music to improve the liturgy with a goal of driving toward the ideal. Her resources are extremely practical and accessible to everyone, and, importantly, point to resource ideals beyond her editions alone. They put the sound and feel of solemn chant in people’s ears, providing a wonderful bridge between readings and inspiring a desire for more music along these lines, integrating particularly well with Gregorian chant.

In any case, while my session was going on, Arlene attended David Haas’s session. She gave me a report that was highly favorable. David focused on the practical issues facing Church musicians with the new translation. He calmed their fears, pointing out that it actually affects very little, that most of what they are singing they can continue to use. He listened to the concerns of those present and dealt with their frustrations over those who do not have enough reliable singers, over obtaining music, over meeting various competing demands in the parish.

The audience was very much at ease, and increasingly trusting of the presenter. Haas then proceeded to work through some possible settings of the new Ordinary text, some of his own music and some by other composers that is very familiar with most Catholic musicians. Again and again, he made them feel at ease and confident about what they were doing as musicians and what they will deal with on the new texts. Arlene said that he handled the scene masterfully and did a fantastic job in dealing with people who had come feeling rather apprehensive.

I was very interested to hear the report, but it never dawned on me that he might have been dealing with a different demographic than I had dealt with in the first lecture I had presented. It is obvious in retrospect that the chant people came to the chant thing first and that the Haas people would likely come to my lecture next. As a result of my neglect of this obvious point, I had done nothing to prepare for what I was about to face.

My second presentation began, and I began with more confidence than ever, giving the same presentation with more flourish. I continued on and on with the history, the structure of the ritual, the nature of liturgical chant, and more. Then I passed out the books and I started flipping through ready to sing. I was completely oblivious to the fact that I had already lost most people in the room and that most of them had no idea what i was talking about. Not even the language I was using was familiar. If anything, I had inadvertently re-instilled in them the fear that Haas had tried to take out of them. I should have seen it in their faces but I did not.

In any case, as I began to sing with them, I was rather taken aback to discover that hardly anyone was singing with me. They were starring at their books with their mouths open with frozen faces of confusion. I pushed ahead, turning to this chant and that chant and continued to try to get them to join me. But it was to no avail. They weren’t against what I was asking them to do; they just didn’t even know where to begin. The longer this went on, the more people grew restless.

Finally, a few people piped up and started asking questions. Is this something we have to learn for the new Missal? How can I possibly learn a language that I’ve studied? How can I read these notes? I’ve never had any training in music so how can I read this stuff? And so on. The questions grew more and more pointed. I tried to answer them but nearly an hour of pent of frustration was coming out and there was essentially nothing I could do to put these worms back in the can.

I kept wondering: what happened to the old magic? Why is this going so wrong when the first session went so right? I was not fast enough on my feet to figure out the story here, which was that my first session was packed with chant partisans and the second session was packed with people who ranged between skeptical and vaguely curious.

These were musicians are of a special type. Many if not most are unpaid. They have no advanced training. They found themselves in a local parish that parish was in need so they stepped up to do the right thing. Most have no instruction or training in Catholic liturgy. In some ways, they are hanging on by a thread, glad to serve, curious about how to do it better, but annoyed by extreme demands without a viable answer to the question of what they are supposed to do this coming week. They are not internet surfers. They do not read chantcafe.com. They do not take off time to attend week-long training sessions. They have full-time jobs and families and much more to deal with. To came to this one-day session on a Saturday on the recommendation of their pastors.

Finally someone asked me the question that stopped me dead in my tracks. Someone raised his hand and said the following:

“I’m beginning to understand your point about Mass propers but my choir is not ready for Latin and the pastor doesn’t want that anyway.”

I said, “oh that’s not a problem. Just sing them in English for now.”

“What book should I use?”

I stood there facing an increasingly hostile audience that was looking for practical answers with accessible music, and now I faced the most obvious question ever. I stood there a few seconds that seemed like hours and went through a list of resources in my mind.

There are probably eight editions of English propers available, most of them becoming available within the last 18 months. Of the two in print, one uses the old calendar and King James English and the other sets only seasonal antiphons. The rest are online. One requires musical expertise. One is missing the offertory chants. Most are set to the old calendar so that requires some fancy manipulation to make them work. Two require competent choral singers. One set is designed for seminaries and not parishes. Only one has pointed Psalms following the antiphon so they are mostly too short to fill the time of the ritual action.

And what was I going to do, stand there and rattle off a bunch of domain names and ask people to use calendar conversions charts, recruit new singers, and learn Psalm pointing techniques?

It was at that point that it struck me. I’m standing here up without a good answer to the most basic question. I had no in-print structural model that I could give these people for the parts of the Mass to be sung by the schola. I never felt that before, standing before an audience, just completely stripped bare and vulnerable, unable to provide a compelling answer to the most basic of all questions.

The session eventually came to an end, and mercifully so. A few people came up to me after to either reassure me or further make the point that what I’m proposing is beyond hopeless.

I had the rest of the conference to reflect on the difference between Haas’s session and my last session. He put people at ease and made them confident, understanding their concerns intimately and dealing with them with competence and finesse. He has worked his whole life to minister to these people and make it possible for them to make a contribution. I had not yet even begun to understand them. And what did I give them in the end? I probably rattled these same people and provided no answers that they could wrap their brains around.

The conference ended and we all said goodbye, but I left deeply haunted by what I had been through. Here I am dedicating myself to the task of doing more than just providing an ideal and a book of Latin chants that they might consider singing someday. As I compared Haas’s expertise in dealing with this area with my own naivete, I was stunned at the huge gap that still exists to give life to the chant in Catholic worship again.

Here it is all these decades later and where do we stand? The majority of parishes are stuck in a rut of endless repetition of music that has no fundamental connection to the ritual except in the most tangential sense. Those who understand the problem have worked extremely hard to draw attention to the Gregorian ideal and show it this music is integral to the ritual. But the distance between the current practice and the ideal is incredibly vast and the differences touch on every conceivable aspects of music itself: rhythm, notation, style, language, purpose, orientation.

Reflecting on this in the days following, the Simple English Propers project was born. So far as I’m concerned, the Responsorial Psalms are taken care of with Oost-Zinner’s editions and the others at chabanelpsalms.org. The missing pieces are clear: entrance, offertory, and communion chants with pointed Psalms in English. I approached Adam, with whom I had shared this story, and the project started falling in place. His training had prepared him for this, and his software skills at setting the chant also made the project possible.

We talked about the need to provide both variety (no repeating Psalm tones every week) and also predictability (so that the music did not devour rehearsal time). The answer was to preserve the Gregorian modes from the originals in the Graduale Romanum while maintaining a formula within the modes. We had many email exchanges about language issues. He and others educated me about the limitations of the traditional office tones and Gloria Patri tones for use in English and hence the need for a different tone structure.

Once the model was in place, he went to work. He laid out a formula for the introit, offertory, and communion, one for each Gregorian mode, so a total of 24 in total. He adapted a variation of Fr. Samuel Weber’s own spin on the Meinrad tones to make it possible to sing the Psalms effortlessly in English. We worked through translation issues, choosing a modernized version of the most traditional English translation for Catholics, and recruited an army of volunteers to start typing in the texts.

It was only a matter of weeks before the entire structure was in place, and the posting of editions began in earnest on the first week of Advent and have continued. Many parishes use them and everyone has posted and reported phenomenal success with them. Jeffrey Ostrowski sends notes every few days about how beautiful and well crafted he finds them to be. David Haas has said that he is very impressed by them as well.

To make sure this was not a temporary matter, the Chantcafe raised $5000 in a mere ten days to underwrite the effort, thanks to many excited donors. The plan is to produce a book that will be some 350 pages and included all that is necessary for any parish schola to sing its own contribution to the Mass from beginning to end every week and for every solemnity.

This is how a 40-year gap is being filled in Catholic liturgy, through the influence of a remarkably diverse group of people: Adam Bartlett, Arlene Oost-Zinner, David Haas, Scott Turkington, Frs. Columba Kelly and Weber, William Mahrt (who educated me about the propers of the Mass), Jeffrey Ostrowski (who pioneered online resources), and so many others, especially those who gave money for the effort. It has been a remarkable journey, and we are only one third the way there.

I have very expectations and I’m quite convinced that finally, forty years after the promulgation of the ordinary form, we will have a single book that we can hand to parish musicians and say: this is what you need to sing the propers of the Mass, on the way toward fulfilling the ideals of sacred music, the wishes of the Second Vatican Council, and the pastoral needs of the people for beautiful, prayerful music.

I’m reading the 1976 issue of Pastoral Music, then a brand-new magazine devoted to ushering in a new dawn for Catholic music, sweeping away the old and bringing in the new age of participation, fresh sounds, and excellence.

This first issue appeared not long after the old publishers of the preconciliar era went belly up, the old conductors and directors were toppled from their posts, the parish collections of the Liber Usualis were hurled into the dumpster, organs were mothballed, and dinosaurs who liked Palestrina and Gregorian chant were declared extinct.

Now and in the future, said the editor Pastoral Music on page one, “the musician will be concerned with increasing repertoire, improving technical skills, evaluating and upgrading the total music life of the parish.”

In the bad old days, wrote Edward Murray, Mass was “a static ritual observance. There were some blanks to be filled in, like the name of the deceased at a funeral or the name of the current pope or local ordinary. But, basically, Mass could be ‘said’ like some lines of a play at a side altar with no one there but the priest.” Now, “the music will be worked into and around the ideas of the group: their visuals, their dance, their prayers, processions and meditations. The task of the music minister is to be true to the faith meaning discerned by the group.”

Another writer in this issue, James M. Burns, bemoaned the old days when Church music “was locked into a theology that stressed the transcendence of God… Today, however, with existential theology and philosophy being the intellectual ground for many of the scholars in the Church, a tendency to reduce the transcendental aspect of worship to a more ‘realistic’ concept has appeared. The stress is on the human, the real, the ‘non-God-talk’ approach.”

This is fantastic, he wrote, because the old way “was a veritable dead-end street in terms of artistic development” whereas in the new way “new and inventive planning are manifold, and the truly inquisitive spirit of the church musician has a larger sweep today than ever before.”

Another writer, Stephen Rosolack, celebrated the dawning of the new age for musicians. “The great strength of a musician at the present time may be to recognize that he is involved in all of the styles, but still free to develop personal excellence within a community in the style that he loves the most. The quality of our work will convince our people that we care for them as well as ourselves.”

Lewis McAllister, music director at Mount Saint Mary’s, was just wild with excitement at what the changes swept in. “We are faced, then, with what must surely be the greatest offering of music in the history of the church, and most of it within easy listening access through performances on recordings! Such an opportunity!”

Another editorial said: “The quality of music in our assemblies is the great priority among the reforms. Many people are talking about it; and many are translating their talk into the work of searching, studying and sharing.” Still another imagined that the new dawn affords “the opportunity for enlightened courageous leadership to lay the groundwork for musical skill.”

So on it goes, on page after page, and this is just one issue. The spirit, the anticipation, the optimism, is pervasive, the sense that by wiping out the old and ushering in the new, we would experience a new renaissance of musical quality, competence, and enlightenment across the land. The themes are repeated in nearly every article.

Whatever problems exist in the music program at the parish are due to the atrophied ritual of the past, the stultifying air created by tradition and its supporters, while the guitar-strumming youth will bring a new passion and energy that will end in new heights of musical accomplishment and vigor.

(Not that the magazine didn’t draw attention to what it regarded as the most serious problem: “the present copyright laws are being flagrantly violated by many, many parishes in the United States is a scandal,” wrote the president of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians. This is “to the detriment of good liturgy and good music”)

I revisit this history here for some context to evaluate the present moment. No knowledgeable Catholic today can read the above without a sense of bemusement and incredulity. In the future, thanks to the revolution, there will be new quality, excellence, skill, accomplishment, and vigor? It didn’t quite pan out that way, did it?

I can recall the first time that I walked into a Catholic parish and looked at the music resources. Having an education in music history, I was aware of the patrimony: the greatest choral and organ works ever produced, plus 15 centuries of glorious chant. What I found instead was a floppy missallete on news print with a bunch of pop-like songs. There weren’t even scored parts for singing. It was all in unison. The group that led the singing had less musical ability than the average member of a high school marching band.

Sadly, as I later discovered, this was not an exception but the norm. In musical terms, the Catholic Church was a windswept house. The serious people had evidently given up, fleeing to other worship communities or just deciding that Church was just too much trouble.

When I finally decided to start a choir, I will never forget what a soprano I was trying to recruit said to me. It ran into her in the grocery store and asked her to join, assuring her that we were doing quality music. “I’ve been there and done that, she said. “As soon as you get something of quality going, your group will be pushed aside to make room for the Willy and the Poor Boys.” Ouch!

You don’t have to take my word for it. David Haas, a leading composer in the Catholic world today, a man who struggles to provide marketable music in today’s parish environment, has provided one of the most despairing commentaries on the state of Catholic music that I’ve ever read. He was commenting casually on the prospects for Simple English Propers project of Adam Bartlett, the CMAA, and the Chant Cafe. Even though they are formulas and plainchant, he judged them too difficult.

“I certainly am happy that the amateur choir at your parish is capable of this,” he wrote concerning Adam’s success with his own choir. “I am certain however, that much of its success has to do with your leadership, and your competence in this genre. I am thinking of the average choir director who comes to many workshops that I present, volunteer, not a great musical background, can sometimes barely stumble through “Holy, God We Praise Thy Name.” I see very little possibility of her, and many others in a similar situation being able to even read the chant notation that you provide, let alone present in a way that would be pleasing at all, let alone possible for this assembly to join in.”

So there we have it. The exuberance of 1976 has led us to 2010, a time when a man who is probably more knowledgeable about the nation’s parish choirs than any living musician, says that the average choir director can barely stumble through the most famous Catholic hymn in the English speaking world.

I cannot say whether his judgment is correct here. But I will say this. The right way to address the problem is not by continuing to “meet people where they are” but rather must begin by inspiring them to be more than they are. That is impossible without ideal musical models in mind. I don’t mean abstractions like “arouse the community into a new awareness” or something like that. I mean exactly what the Second Vatican Council said: the Mass itself should be sung with Gregorian chant having first place. It is this chant tradition that is our treasure, the most beautiful gift that Catholic musicians have been given to preserve and make ever more beautiful.

The musical experiment of the 1970s and following threw out the archetype of liturgical music, brutally drove out those who believed that and strove to reached those ideals. It was an experiment that has failed and miserably so, even by the standards that its champions laid out in the 1970s.

If I were to describe the music situation in the average parish today, I would use language very similar to how these writers from Pastoral Music described the preconciliar world: static, uninspired, lacking in competence. It is ritual observance: pick four songs from the Missallete, and, if in doubt, sing the Mass of Creation. That’s about it. Change will not happen by continuing to cater to this level. That only creates the race to the bottom that we’ve seen in operation now for decades.

A new era for Catholic music will require the cultivation of serious choirs that have an important role beyond merely leading the congregation. It will require attracting real talent and inspiring existing singers to upgrade their abilities and challenge themselves to be willing to change. It will require that excellence is newly valued. There will need to be a new dedication to training. There must be stability in the parish music program, guarded over by pastors who are dedicated to solemnity and excellence. And there must be new resources such at the Simple English Propers that make it possible for choirs to take their jobs seriously, contributing in a real sense to ennobling the Catholic liturgy.

I’m so grateful to be living now, especially with a chance for a new beginning in Advent of 2011, with the new Missal translation and a new generation that is not naive and not caught up in the goal of banishing transcendence but rather understands the sacred music ideal and is working toward going as far as possible toward realizing that ideal in our times.

Special thanks to the NCReg and Trent Beattie who seems to have put all this together, but I’m pretty pleased with the interview that appears in this paper this week and also online: Singing the Mass.

I’m talking up the Simple English Propers and chant generally here, and discussing the new Missal among other things. They had lots of biographical questions too. I’ve emailed the editor to make sure they change my title from editor of Sacred Music to managing editor. The editor is William Mahrt and is responsible for its consistent high quality and excellence.

In any case, an excerpt:

Of course my fascination with it began as purely artistic, but when I realized that there was a reason for its structure and sound, my appreciation grew. I realized that it is all a form of prayer, and the musical structure amounts to an attempt by mortals to touch a realm of immortality. It was all an attempt to somehow capture and characterize what the ancients called the “music of the spheres,” which is something like a heavenly sound that might be worthy to be presented by angels at the throne of God. The composers and the tradition heard something true and beautiful and the liturgy absorbed it as its own.

It goes without saying that secular music doesn’t attempt this at all. It is designed to flatter the performers, indulge the composers, entertain the audience, or whatever. There is a place for this approach in the culture at large, but sacred music has a different purpose. To me, to begin to understand liturgical music is to realize this central point that appears in Christian writings from the earliest age: There is a difference between sacred and profane. Many people deny this today, which just amazes me. I consider it so axiomatic that it is not worth debating, only explaining.

Why do people deny it? It has something to do with an embedded agnosticism born of deconstructionist thinking. There is no intrinsic meaning in anything, this view says, so how can we really make such distinctions between what is sacred and what is not?

This morning at Mass, at a very mainstream parish packed with visitors from all places around the country, the entrance song was Puer Natus Est, from the Graduale Romanum. It was sung by two women’s voice alone, without any accompaniment. They sang the antiphon, the Psalm, Gloria Patri, and the antiphon again. The procession of the celebrant and servers took place during this time, along with the incensing of the altar. An amazing stillness settled over the entire place, to the point that one sensed not a single muscle movement from among the hundreds of people in the congregation.

To be sure, this is not entirely what people might have expected. The usual fare is a familiar carol, perhaps gussied up with trumpets and flutes and various other things played by the musicians who mysteriously emerge to be featured at these splashy holiday events, and then vanish once it is over.

This is did not happen this Christmas. Instead, what the people  heard was woven into the fabric of the Mass as thoroughly as the celebrant’s part. As just as the people do not say everything with the celebrant, they did not sing with the schola; they stood and listened instead.

But did they participate? Most certainly. The environment and the music itself nearly compels it. How so? A floating chant this beautiful, and yet strangely minimalist in this world filled with incredible noise and racket at every turn, does not provide the complete experience with its notes or words alone. It is so pure, so comparatively sparse, even stark but full of movement, and where? It is moving toward something and upwards to something not found outside these walls. The chant’s very remoteness elicits something from within us, drawing on our hearts and minds and asking us to provide something to complete the picture.

And what is that something? It is a prayer. That prayer can be for something very personal, for something or someone that has been causing us pain. It could be about terrible things we’ve done or opportunities we’ve missed to do good. It could be a prayer of thanks for the wonderful blessings that surround us. It might be even more vague: perhaps just a sense of having some connection to the transcendent for the first time in a very long time. It gives us a sense of peace and safety even in times of turmoil.

The chant lasts a surprisingly long period of time but somehow not long enough, because this peace we feel is luxurious. It feels right, perhaps not at first but after a few minutes as time itself begins to fade in importance. The discomfort we felt at the outset, when we heard those initial notes that seemed so isolated, has given way to comfort and a realize we are surrounded. We are now used to the sound of still voices singing one line and we realize that there is only one place and one activity that provides us with this sense of transcendence. We have entered the presence of holy things. God is with us. Christmas is not just a history; it is a reality and this reality is being lived in the liturgy.

We don’t sing chant only because it is what is being asked of us; we sing chant because the liturgy loves it and the faith loves it and because it is, speaking from the purely pastoral point of view, exactly what we need and want. Hearing it and experiencing it is a challenge and it does ask something from everyone; and that something is the humility to listen to the Word and to dare to allow our hearts to be changed.

I know a high school group of liturgical singers and strummers that might mean well but makes a terrible mess of the music at Mass, week after week. There are thousands of such groups around the country. I’m sure you too know of a few.

The archetypes are common. There’s a drummer, a singer, a backup singer, a pianist, and a guitar player. None of them can play their instruments well. The singer can’t sing without being heavily miked and without musical emoticons strewn throughout. The repertoire is bubble-gum pop ballads with a Jesus theme. People fear going to Masses where they play, and they are the constant brunt of negative mutterings, though the players themselves are not aware of it.

Of course they have no idea what they are doing. No one has ever discussed with them anything about the musical demands of the Roman Rite. They know nothing about the proper orientation for making music at Mass. The liturgical calender is an abstraction. Terms like propers or dialogues are gibberish to them. Most of the players can’t even read music. To them it is an opportunity to see and be seen, a weekly talent gig, and they probably don’t mind it that people give them credit for their service to the parish.

The pastor and celebrant don’t like it any more than anyone else. But the parents of these kids are important people in the parish. The band doesn’t charge any money for their services, such as they are. The director of music has nothing to do with them, and no adults are really involved at any level. At least that teen Mass slot is covered, so, in the balance, it seems to make more sense to tolerate them and endure. Again, it is well known that they mean well, and surely that is enough.

I’m looking at this situation and it seems like an impossible nut to crack.

Some people might look at this and say that the answer is obvious: toss these ill-educated, amateur noise makers out on their ears. Well, that’s an interesting proposal if not exactly pastoral. In fact, I don’t think this approach really works. It does not foster a stable parish environment. It’s not realistic. It doesn’t draw on the existing talents in the parish – and they are thin indeed – and there remains the question concerning who or what would replace them. The Catholic world isn’t exactly crawling with Gregorian choirs waiting in the wings to sing.

So let’s say you had the opportunity to reform them. Keep in mind that this group is not particularly inspired to do more than show up once per week. I’ve thought about this quite a bit and even after all my writing and experience, I’m not entirely sure I would know where to begin. There needs to be a complete reestablishment of musical priorities. They have no idea what they are. And there is a precondition even to that stage: they need to get away from all the microphones, guitars, pianos, and drums, and come to understand that it is not their machinery that makes the music but their voices.

Once we establish the preeminence of the voice in liturgical music, there is another immediate problem. We need sheet music and we can hope that this would not just be yet another collection of junky hymns in a slightly different and stodgier style. We need real liturgical music that is connected intimately to the ritual. Otherwise, they will never come to understand the weightiness of their responsibilities or feel the satisfaction that comes with providing music for Mass.

Now, let’s say that I marched up to this group and handed them the Graduale Romanum and said: sing this! I don’t think I have to explain to readers that this approach is pretty much dead on arrival. In fact, I would suggest that this is true of any music in Latin. This material is absolutely terrifying to this generation. As tragic as this sounds, Latin might as well be German or Russian to these kids. They are nowhere near prepared for it. They barely speak English as it is. What need, then, is music in English, for starters.

Let’s see where we’ve come so far. We’ve led them to see that their voices are more important than their external equipment. We’ve seen that they need to apply their talents to singing not just any Jesus songs that they like but rather music actually connected to the ritual. We realize that this music must be in English.

Now what? If I worked at it I could probably cobble together enough resources to make it possible. I could print out this proper written in 1956 and this choral offertory written in 1992, plus this communion chant someone uploaded last week, and then also this responsorial psalm from a different website. They would all be 8.5X11” printouts from different files online, hard to find and hard to repeat week to week because the resources are so scattered. And let’s face it: a series of random links to scattered material here and there is no substitute for a coherent musical program.

Can you imagine how these kids eyes would glaze over at my explanation? How long would it take these kids to bail out of my great plan here and revert to their fun garage-style music making that everyone else hates and drives people to avoid their Mass time like their plague?

Readers who have been keeping up with the ChantCafe.com know what I’m getting to. I’m getting to the Simple Propers Project of Adam Bartlett and his coworkers. This is music in English in free rhythm, meaning that it does not play to that secular beat approach to music. It is liturgical chant. The editions provide enough music to cover the entire liturgy. They are propers of the Mass so it means that the kids will be contributing to the Mass structure, not behaving as a side show act. This makes their role more important. The music is entirely vocal. It can be sung by one person or twelve. It is a coherent and integrated program.

I’m absolutely beside myself in anticipation of their completion. As I’ve told many people, my dream is to hold that final book in my hands. With this book, at last there will be something to hand to groups like this and say: this is music that is appropriate for you to sing at Mass. It does require a bit of teaching. But how much? I think I could prepare even the kids I describe above to render all this music competently in a single teaching session, and perhaps one followup. This is essential for short-attention spans.

The Simple Propers will acculturate these kids to understand their responsibilities and to come to understand what sacred music feels like and sounds like. This is without long hectoring lectures and treatises and documents on the subject. We teach best by showing and having people do these. This is the best teacher of all. There is another benefit here: the Simple Propers are not an end in themselves. They point to more. They point to the Gregorian tradition because the modality and rhythmic approach is identical. Once having sung propers, choirs will accept no less, so we have here beautifully prepared ground for the re-introduction of the full Gregorian tradition. At some point, the Graduale Romanum will not seem like a book from Mars.

I’ve thought about this whole subject and this book extensively and I’m not exaggerating when I say this: this one book can be bridge for an entire generation to come to embrace the Catholic tradition of music. In this sense, I hardly think there is any more important musical priority for Catholics than this project right now. I’m so excited about it. I’m counting the days until they appear sometime in the summer of 2011.

Thank you again to everyone who has contributed to this marvelous project. We have glorious things to look forward to this Advent.

I’ve posted the 1988 and 1992 Progress Reports of ICEL on the translation of the Roman Missal, which, according to these documents, seems to have begun in earnest as early as 1982. If you think about it, this is a mere 12 years following the promulgation of the New Mass.

The widespread consensus is correct many times over: it was rushed into existence without problem planing, research, or serious work on the translation. The extent of the problems in that first Missal – the bulk of which is still heard in our parishes on a daily basis – go a very long way toward explaining the probably unprecedented upheaval that followed the introduction of the revised liturgy.

Speaking of musical issues alone – and this blog tends to do that! – there was so much confusion from 1970s onward that musicians themselves had no idea what they were supposed to sing, if there were any rules or rubrics or guidelines. Celebrants couldn’t help them because they didn’t know either. Confusion reigned and chaos followed.

You can get a flavor of that in these documents. The opening document from 1988 states the issue plainly: the goal of a translation is to faithfully represent the Latin original. It seems very clear in retrospect (and it was clear to many at that time) that the original translation did not embody that spirit. You only need to set the current English Gloria against the Latin Gloria to observe that the first round of release gave us something entirely new, an attempt at a unique product, prepared with a methodological priority of making the English preeminent thing.

This could not stand. As the documents here demonstrate, the criticisms were widespread. ICEL placed the Latin next to the English and offered a detailed critique. Here is just one sample of hundreds, offered as a critique of an oration on the first weekday in Advent.

Fac nos, quaesumus, Domine Deus noster,
adventum Christi Filii tui sollicitos expectare,
ut, dum venerit pulsas, orationibus vigilantes,
et in suis inveniat laudibus exsultantes.

The early Missal rendered this as follows (and this translation is what we heard this year):

Lord our God, help us to prepare for the coming of Christ your Son.
May he find us waiting, eager in joyful prayer

ICEL comments on this:

The present ICEL version (1973) is short and succinct, but is so spare that it scarcely does justice to the Latin original with its wealth of scriptural references. It comprises two sentences, which, if the introductory “Lord our God” is ignored, have respectively eleven and nine words only. The committee felt that it was so short and ordinary that it would be over before it had any impact on the congregation and the second sentence in particular conveys nothing of the thought or allusions of the Latin.

Read that again: Nothing of the thought or allusions of the Latin.

Keep in mind: this is not Michael Davies. This is not Cardinal Ratzinger. This is not some editorial drawn from the pages of The Remnant or some other traditionalist publication. This is the International Commission on English in the Liturgy saying that early attempt at translation – and so much of this survives to this day – conveys nothing of the thought or allusions of the Latin.

The translation of the text coming next year reads as follows:

Keep us alert, we pray, O Lord our God,
as we await the advent of Christ your son,
so that when he comes and knocks
he may find us watchful in prayer and exultant in his praise.
Through our Lord.

Here we have it: blessed Catholicism. It’s coming back!

It will be many decades, I should think, before the reality of what we have gone through will be fully processed in our minds. In the end, the striking irony here is that ICEL will deserve so much credit for having led us toward better language and liturgy.

It turns out that ICEL in 1988 offered tremendous amounts of criticism of the existing translation. That criticism can only be described as blistering. Of another Collect, ICEL wrote: “The Latin prayer is built around the concepts of health and wholeness, which the present ICEL text does not mention. In general it so pares down the Latin that it says very little that is marked or interesting.”

Of the initial attempt at translation, ICEL wrote: “there was little time to do research and detailed background preparation before translating the Latin texts into English. The responsible agencies in Rome were also under great pressure at this time to make the revised Latin ritual books available to the worldwide Church and were as a consequence unable to provide those preparing the vernacular translations with the background research and notes that had been done as part of the work….”

There are many reasons for the crisis of Catholicism in our time. But if you are looking for the cleanest and clearest evidence of any crisis in any public faith, looking at the status of its ritual is a good place to begin to discover reasons. If you find an imposition of a new ritual that bears little in common with everything that came before, you might begin to see the problem.

The great news is that this period of our history is ending. The process of healing has begun, and the biggest milestone on this journey begins one year from now. Thanks be to God.

What did the Second Vatican Council intend as compared with its results? The answer to that question is enormously complex because, as with the so-called American founding, it is difficult to compress the intentions of hundreds and thousands of people, many unnamed, into a single body of “intention.”

In fact, there is no such thing as “intention” that somehow emerges from the back and forth of human agency to become a new and immaculate being. To claim a single clear intention from a Church Council is probably just as fallacious as to assert the existence of a Rousseauian single “social contract” to emerge from the give and take of the political process.

Nonetheless, with regard to music, it is easier to discern the main themes: 1) a strong emphasis on the restoration of Gregorian chant as the people’s music, 2) an emphasis on singing the Mass instead of just singing stuff, and 3) a push to see the liturgy as a prayerful and audible song that elicited the involvement of everyone instead of just a private prayer by the celebrant alone.

It became clear very early on following the close of the Council that other priorities, such as new permissions for the vernacular, were in tension with the musical aspects of the reform. There is a long history of liturgical reforms and their failure to fully appreciate the importance of working out the details of the musical component. And this was a case in point. The Council inspired a conflict between groups of musicians that began immediately and has pretty well continued to this day.

I’m thinking about this as I read through a wonderful compilation of documents from the watershed event called The Fifth International Church Music Congress, held in Chicago-Milwaukee, August 21-28, 1966. Here is a snapshot in time. What we find are many musicians in open protest about liturgical trends that were not appearing from on high; they were coming from within and threatening the very core of what most musicians believed would and should emerge from the Council.

Here are some statements culled from this volume. They represent a wide consensus that something must be done to stop the unraveling of all that has come before and a hope that the words of the Council would be heeded with regard to music. Keep in mind that this is all in 1966, long before the promulgation of what is now known as the ordinary form or reform ritual of Mass:

Statement from England and Wales: “The Church would suffer irreparable loss if the traditional Latin sung Mass, suitably modified to fulfil modern liturgical requirements, were to be allowed to fall into disuse. They earnestly hope that the Latin sung Mass will be actively encouraged in those places where it meets the needs of the people, and where it can be worthily performed, making proper provision both for the participation of the people and for the maintenance in use of the Church’s heritage of music. The English form of sung Mass should at the same time be developed on the lines indicated above. In this way it will be possible fully to implement in this country the teaching of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.”

Jacques Chailley, University of Paris, France: “The duty to preserve the imposing patrimony of sacred music, both Gregorian and polyphonic, is laid down in explicit terms by the Constitution (Article 114). This obligation must not be neglected, nor should it be presented in a negative way such as a sterile reticence towards the new and necessary things that are likewise ordered by the same Constitution. We must seek for a harmonious coexistence of the two types of expression that each correspond to a different need, without causing any contradictions unless they are introduced artificially, such as would happen if one were deliberately to reject one panel of a diptych in favor of the other. If one neglects the duty of preservation, one actually compromises the ultimate success of the renewal itself. Any exaggeration in one direction leads to an opposite reaction in the other, creating inevitable divisions that keep multiplying, until one finds that some whom the Church wanted so rightly to attract have finally been left outside. From all this it follows that it is impossible to conceive of the duty of preserving the treasury of sacred music without maintaining in the liturgical functions, in an habitual way and in reasonable proportions, at least some part of the Gregorian repertory… It is obvious that in order to encourage artistic religious composition, especially polyphonic choral works, there must be some assurance given that the choir will be used regularly in the liturgical functions, not just now and then, as has sometimes happened. In other words, there must be a policy for the renewal of choirs and encouragement of them; this is absolutely the opposite of the tendencies that we are witnessing at present. There must not be any brutally excessive elimination of Latin music, since this music will promote the vernacular language, which will inevitably come in due course, but the best way this can be realized is to follow a reasonable, progressively planned program.”

Committee on Musicology of the Allgemeiner Cacilien-Verband: “It is important for congregational liturgical singing that it can be the spiritual and musical possession of the people. At the same time it must be in accord with the laws of art, so that, for example, both the so-called religious ‘pop’ music and the pseudo-Gregorian piece are both excluded from sacred music. Furthermore, with the development of liturgical congregational singing, the characteristics of the various vernacular tongues and lands must always be considered, which means that in the question of forms one is not restricted merely to the responsorial form alone.”

Resolution on Profane Music in Mass: “The present-day, commercially oriented dance and entertainment music is inappropriate for divine services. Music which is directed predominantly toward the sensitive motor responsives of man is not worthy of the liturgy. This music makes its appeal to the performer as well as to the listener only on the level of the purely sensual, even to the possible exclusion of the spiritual faculties. Attempts made up to the present time to combine elements of jazz with the serious music of our Western culture and to use these in the Catholic liturgy have necessarily been doomed to failure, because the audible result offers only music that to all appearances only resembles jazz. The rhythm of this music with its primitive and uniform impulse generates in the listener a sensual, driving excitement. This monotonous, continually repeated rhythm dulls consciousness, but soon even this exciting feature loses its strength and dissipates into mere motor responses which serve to blot out all personal individuality. The prayer of a congregation, which ought to be vivified by the liturgy, is thus rendered impossible by music which evokes in men truly disorderly feelings and serves only to awaken essentially emotional drives. True liturgical community can be achieved only through the participation of the whole man. True liturgical community is accomplished only by impressing the seal of man’s spirituality upon it.”

Rt. Reverend Guilherme Schubert, Representative of Jaime Cardinal Barros de Camara, Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro: “We are shocked to witness, in church and even during liturgical services, performances of music which must be regarded as a profanation of the holy place and a heretofore unheard of degradation. This has happened under the guise of alleged implementation of the conciliar decrees, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, which wished to reform and modernize. Obviously we are dealing here with a misunderstanding and an erroneous interpretation of the official documents. … there is a general and very often quite energetic opposition to exaggerations and abuses, especially when small groups, generally youth groups, attempt to bring music, rhythms, instruments and gestures into the Church which are borrowed directly from contemporary profane music. These protests have very serious consequences in scandal, separations from Church and cult, a diminishing respect for the Church, and increasing religious doubt and confusion…. It is a mistake to think that the faithful would show more interest in the Church if the Church were made to resemble their everyday milieu, their homes, their factories, their offices. It is above all the spirit of religion which must accompany the faithful into the arena of their daily lives. But when they come into the Church, God’s temple, they expect to find something else, something special, something which stands above the everyday, something which elevates them, encourages them, comforts and ennobles them.”

RESOLUTIONS FROM SPANISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES (Spain, Mexico, Ecuador): “1) Fully appreciating the pastoral character the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council attaches to sacred music and in order to stimulate the active participation of the faithful, the national and international commissions are asked to provide for the preservation of existing songs for the people and the creation of a new repertoire in keeping with the characteristics of each of our countries, since songs imported from other places do not always respond to the people’s needs. 2) As prescribed by the same Constitution, let the Church’s patrimony of Gregorian chant, polyphony and organ music be preserved in our countries with all care, and let scholae cantorum be duly promoted. 3) Taking into consideration the nature of Gregorian chant, and also some experiences with the vernacular which lead to a corruption of Gregorian chant, all adaptations of vernacular texts to ancient melodies are emphatically discouraged. 4 a) Since some Masses written after the Council are inspired by profane dances and tunes, and since they confuse the faithful in the Hispanic nations, and since they are radically contrary to the liturgical spirit and to the letter of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, such Masses should never be permitted in any way. b) The nature of liturgical music requires that composers do not use for liturgical compositions melodies which people associate with situations foreign to the liturgy, even though those melodies may have a religious character. 5) Greater diligence must be used in imparting a musical formation in seminaries and religious institutes, so that clerics active in pastoral work will be qualified cooperators and even leaders in the liturgical movement. 6) Taking into consideration the continuous increase of the number of tourists in many places and the pastoral sense of the Constitution, it is deemed necessary that the Mass in Latin be retained fully wherever required for the spiritual benefit of the faithful.”

PROPOSITIONS SUBMITTED BY THE STUDY GROUP OF THE CHURCH MUSIC COMMISSIONS OF ALL THE AUSTRIAN DIOCESES. 1. Austrian church musicians are filled with the greatest apprehension that with the impending innovations in the area of liturgical singing the polyphonic rendition of the entire Ordinary of the Mass is endangered. They are well aware that every restriction of the use of the polyphonic settings of the Ordinary makes illusory the preservation and fostering of the treasury of sacred music. They stress that the exclusion of the liturgical masterpieces of Austrian music which results thereon will not only harm the liturgical religious experiences of the Austrian people, but in a wider way it will be considered in the international sphere as cultural robbery.