Category: Article by Jeffrey Tucker

The news release came from the Eastman School of Music. A scholar there, Michael Alan Anderson, has found that the full prayer Ave Maria comes not from the 16th century, as conventionally believed, but rather from hundreds of years earlier when composers where commonly experimenting with petitionary supplements to add to the first part of the prayer that comes from scripture.

I wish I could say that I find this mind blowing but I’ve run across dozens of examples of current prayers and songs, particular in the area of chant, that scholars previously believed were of Renaissance origin that really turn up in earlier Medieval manuscripts. It is true, for example, of the song Veni, Veni that is being sung in most parishes this season of Advent. For years I had heard this song put down as a 19th-century fake. Then great chant scholar Mary Berry found it in a 14th century French prayer book.

The lesson of these constant discoveries is that we are too often presumptuous in believing that modern practices have relatively modern origins. In fact, the search for an “origin” often leads to mysterious unknowns. Tradition is often the most reliable guide even and especially if the controversy turns on unknowns. Even the most celebrated authority on a subject can be profoundly mistaken, while the humblest peasant with pious prejudices can in fact “know” more than we give them credit for knowing.

The hubris of modern intellectuals supposes that rationalistic methods can reveal all truth. The idea is that science and study are really the only ways of knowing things, while tradition tells us nothing. Legend is unreliable, in this view; it is just a jumble of superstitions. The evidence of the senses ought to be our only guide for knowing what is true, while truth itself is only a tentative notion that must be constantly subject to revision in light of the latest revelations from evidence.

This apparatus can pose a serious threat to a robust religious faith, and the reason has nothing to do with fear that science will somehow unearth things that we do not want to know or believe. The problem is actually more profound: a science that looks only at evidence of the senses is going to leave out vast amounts of truth, confusing scraps of information with the entire body of known things.

So it is with liturgical studies in general and chant in particular. It’s true that scholars can find vast amounts of musical material that would seem to suggest a Renassiance origin to many modern practices, prayers, and chants. But remember the context here. Printing had only been invented in the modern form in the 15th century. In the 16th century, they were extreme luxury goods like jewels or large houses and super-fancy cars.

Something like a book was not a thing that any common person could have ever hoped to own until the 19th century. It wasn’t until midway through the 20th century when books became totally ubiquitous, and not even until the last twenty years that we can find whole stores that beg you to take books of every kind away at rock-bottom prices. So it makes sense that fewer and fewer manuscripts would be available the farther back in time we look. And there was also a greater chance that the manuscripts would be lost.

Music poses special difficulties. Until innovations in the 10th century, there was no clear way to pass melodies on to the next generation through a manuscript. There was no clear method for writing music down. So even if you had a great song, you simply had no apparatus to insure its long life apart from singing to others and hoping that others will transmit it.

There is a magical property to music in this sense: it is not physical but it still truly exists. It has a form, a shape, an existence as robust and real as any physical thing. It can be transported through the air, and it can be replicated infinitely without depreciating the original in the slightest bit. It can be changed and transformed while doing no harm to the original. This is what allowed music to travel the centuries long before it could ever be written down.

But how is a scientist to account for the transmission of a song through popular use in the absence of written manuscripts? Ultimately it cannot. The evidence is long gone. But does that fact alone diminish the validity of the truth? Not at all. It is for this reason that we should not dismiss pious traditions that date song, prayers, and practice to the first millennium to the first millennium and even to the Patristic or Apostolic Age or to the Holy Spirit. None of this can be proven but tradition can embody more truth and wisdom than science itself can reveal no matter how long the investigations continue.

It is for this broad reason that the application of the rationalist principle – that we ought only to practice and believe the things that experts can defend through cognitive understanding – can never be applied to the dangerous job of liturgical reform. We do not always known why things are they way they are.

No one can be an expert in all things liturgical. No one generation can fully understand simply because every generation exists within a cultural and social context that blinds us to certain form of truth. True liturgical expertise requires the cumulation of many centuries of knowledge, even two millennia of understanding. And that is absolutely impossible.

Thus is there a strong case for a variety of conservatism with regard to liturgy. We are better off deferring to what exists rather than attempting to reform it according to the cognitive comprehension of a single generation. What might, for example, seem like “needless repetition” to us might in fact represent something very profound that was known in the past and might be known in the future. To eliminate that repetition is to cut of a means of transmitting knowledge and truth to the next generation.

Many scholars today, humbled by terrible events in the liturgical world, have come to understand that rationalism was the core error of the generation that reformed the liturgy following the Second Vatican Council. To undo those wrongs today introduces a danger of repeating those same errors, as appointed experts feel the rush of power that comes with the responsibility for rewriting and redoing the texts, songs, and practices. I hope that everyone in that position will pray for humility above all else, and we should also pray for them to practice it.

Now with the third edition of the English Missal one year from implementation we face times that are both exciting with promise and fraught with great danger. Let us always defer to the longest possible tradition rather than attempt to reinvent anything. Insofar as it is possible, we should never stop to listen, learn, and defer. Sure as we presume to know more than what has always been known we will see our work discredited by those who come after us.

It is for this reason that I’ve developed a bias after years of watching liturgical and musicologist pick apart our history and tell us what is and what is not valuable. If we want to know what is true, we are better off talking to the “workers and peasants” about what is meaningful to them rather than depending on the latest revelations from the academic journals. Popular piety may not be substitute for scholarly investigation but it can often reveal the limitations of rationalism as it applies to matters of faith.

My (seemingly endless) article on the topic of the day is up at InsideCatholic.com: The Mystery of the Leaked Missal.

I should add that my language about the lame-duck Missal vs. the corrected Missal is taken from Fr. Z.. Most of the other detail comes from the online leaks and Fr. Ruff. The spin, the judgment, and any errors (and there are surely some because so many details are foggy at this point) are solely my responsibility.

Two chapters of Musica Sacra (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments) published by Ignatius Press, 2010, deserve some special commentary. They are two papers from a 2005 conference at the Vatican that helped spark the current revival in chant – certainly not the two most famous but they are worthy of attention.

Dom Philippe Dupont of the Abbot of Solesmes offers a powerful piece in “Gregorian Chant: Its Present State and Prospects.” He begins by recounting the enormous progress that chant has made within the academy in European, particularly in France and Germany (politely bypassing the problem in parishes). This academic progress is worthy of high praise. However, he cautions that chant should not be relegated to an academic niche: “Gregorian chant is not the music of a particular group in the Church, a sort of club of one spirituality, school or interpretation or rite (sometimes Latin and Gregorian chant have been associated with the use of the missal of Saint Pius V). The interventions of the Church’s Magisterium since the Council have confirmed that Gregorian chant maintains its place of honor in liturgical celebrations.”

He asks a very relevant question. “What sort of song besides Gregorian chant can allow all the faithful of the Latin Church to proclaim their faith together in the Credo or to pay in the same language the Pater noster? This chant is a magnificent sign of unity.”

He continues to illustrate its merits. “The distinguishing feature of Gregorian chant is its unparalleled service to the word of God in close connection with the liturgical celebration itself…. Gregorian chant clothes the word of God with contemplative melody. These melodies, we should recall, were born in the liturgy and for it. They are meant to be wedded to the word of God.”

This extremely practical papers then moves to what he considers two “stumbling blocks” to future progress. I would like to quote the first one in full because, in my own view, this is serious matter.

“The first is competition between schools of interpretation. Instead of contributing to an improvement in the quality of the chant, this leads in some cases to rivalries or mutual snubbing. Besides the damage that this does to unity — of which Gregorian chant out to be a sign, as I mentioned earlier–these quarrels end up discrediting Gregorian chant.”

What can I say but: hear hear! These quarrels have been around for the better part of the century, with each camp claiming to have discovered the Rosetta Stone for the perfect rendering of chant. Two main competitors for the title going back many decades are of course the old Mocquereau school and the new Cardine school (sometimes shortened as old Solesmes vs. Semiology) but there are many gradients within these broad strokes. The original proponents of these approaches were not nearly as dogmatic as their followers, but, as time when on, the camps became ever more divided.

I once had the impression, as many novices do, that it was somehow necessary to choose between them, though I was hardly intellectually prepared to do so. It was many years before I came to realize that these two schools hardly exhaust all possibilities. Each monastic tradition has its own style and approach, some preferring and some rejecting rhythmic symbols, equalist renderings, eccentric interpretations of certain neumes, and the like.

In some ways, none of this would be surprising in any musical field. There are as many interpretations and understandings of Bach as there are serious musicians who play Bach. So it is with the chant, as Guido d’Arezzo’s own pupils reported of the 11th-century diversity in chant styles. We can learn from many approaches, surely. That is not to say that there is not a role for scholarship and ever more subtle understandings of the manuscripts, but, as Dom DuPont suggests, these differences should not be used as a means of fueling acrimony and mutual recrimination.

Whenever I hear these arguments being made today in public forums, I want to invite any of the speakers into the reality of parish life and let them hear what is actually going on in the real world. Clearly this is not the time for such divisions. Dom DuPont is certainly right to regard these competitive rivalries as a source for the discrediting of chant. Tolerance of other approaches is to be cultivated. My strong impression is that in the last five years, and since this essay was written, these rivalries have lessened, as they inevitably will with the expansion of the ranks of chanters and as younger generations get more involved with chant. The tribal loyalties of the previous generation fade from memory.

Dom Dupont goes to to mention a second stumbling block: “weak support and meager encouragement that these choirs sometimes complain of receiving from the parish clergy. It may even happen that they experience genuine opposition to Gregorian chant, which is thought to be outmoded, ‘traditionalist’ or else a kind of concert that does not foster the participation of the faithful, whereas these choirs want nothing else than to sing a liturgical chant of the quality that is recommended by the Church.”

The problem is such a serious one that he wonders “whether the specific directives issued, for example, by the Congregation for Divine Worship might not stimulate the clergy to integrate Gregorian chant better into parish liturgical celebrations.”

Again, hear hear! My inbox receives weekly notes of tragedies taking place at the parish level: scholas thwarted, directors fired, singers harassed, and whole programs once highly developed being brutally abolished by a new pastor who knows and cares nothing about the liturgical value of chant. One might think a remedy were at hand, but there is none that I know of. What the pastor says goes, and after him the deluge. I always counsel patience and finding a way around these people, working within the structure instead of pointlessly fighting it. But perhaps Dom Dupont is right that directives are in order.

The second paper I want to mention deserves more discussion than I can provide here. It is “Sacred Music and Participation” by Louis-Andre Naud. It is not a revisionist account of what constitutes participation but rather a highly conventional account of the Liturgical Movement’s emphasis on the people’s experience at Mass and its supposed culmination in our time.

The paper lacks the subtlety that one might expect. It is written by a theologian rather than a musician so the reader senses that naivete that comes from a romantic view of people joined in song during liturgy, without considering the downside to an unbalanced emphasis on relentless vocal musical participation by the people, namely 1) the subtle devaluing of the schola’s contribution, 2) the inevitable dumbing down of music to the lowest common denominator, and 3) the eventual demoralization of the people as the face a bewildering set of demands that they sing music of every style and with texts that have nothing to do with the task at hand.

What is striking is how the paper ends, with the observation that these precise problems are the biggest ones that confront us today in the parish context, without ever connecting this grim reality back to the unbalanced prescription that the people sung everything and nearly anything as much as humanly possible.

He writes: “in some places the congregation has stopped singing so as to listen to the choir and the principal celebrant. The congregation no longer as the cantors needed to guide the singing… It no longer has the strength to adapt to the excessively wide variety of songs, even the popular ones. The people still have good faith, but the lack of personnel qualified in liturgy and sacred music leads them to be content with the simplest solutions.” He adds a line that made me laugh: “the liturgical assembly is also a motley crowd, particularly in celebrations of marriage, baptisms, and funerals.”

This conclusion is actually a devastating indictment of the very thing he recommends, though he seems unaware of this. When he writes “in some places” he might have said “nearly all.” In parishes where PARTICIPATION is the rallying cry we see hordes of depressed and depressing people who can barely bring themselves to pick up that sorry excuse for a hymnal that sits in the pews, and their singing amounts to pretending to barely open their mouths, and otherwise glare at the amateurs on the altar who are hectoring people to join in singing some silly ditty. The music professionals are long gone, driven out from our parishes after being told that they have nothing to contribute except as campfire-song leaders.

A rule we can observe across the entire Catholic landscape: the more emphasis that is put on participation by the people, the less participation there will be. On the other hand, if all things are in their place — the schola sings the propers, the priest sings his parts, and people sing the ordinary chants of the Mass and not some made-up thing from the outside — we do indeed observe participation. It is a paradox with an easy explanation. This is what Catholics are to do, and what the Church is asking Catholics to do, and the Catholic people sense this in the heart of hearts, while resisting artifice, manipulation, and ideologically driven agendas that contradict the sense of the faith.

Professor Naud’s paper seems to miss of all this completely. On the upside, however, his recounting of the history here does end up highlighting (however inadvertently) many mistakes along the way, by even popes such as Pius XII.

Looking back, it seems that the current revival in Gregorian chant had something to do with a conference in Vatican city, December 5, 2005. Yes, this was only five years ago. I recall the event very well. The conference featured many wonderful speakers, among whom Monsignor Valentino Miserachs Grau, president of the Pontifical Institute for Sacred Music. The speech made the headlines and it provided dramatic encouragement to a movement that, when seen from today’s perspective, seems to have been only in its infancy.

Msgr Grau said:

Gregorian chant sung by the assembly not only can be restored — it must be restored, together with the chanting of the “schola” and the celebrants, if a return is desired to the liturgical seriousness, sound form, and universality that should characterize any sort of liturgical music worthy of the name, as Saint Pius X taught and John Paul II repeated, without altering so much as a comma. How could a bunch of insipid tunes stamped out according to the models of the most trivial popular music ever replace the nobility and robustness of the Gregorian melodies, even the most simple ones, which are capable of lifting the hearts of the people up to heaven?

We have undervalued the Christian people’s ability to learn; we have almost forced them to forget the Gregorian melodies that they knew, instead of expanding and deepening their knowledge, including through proper instruction on the meaning of the texts. And instead, we have stuffed them full of banalities.

By cutting the umbilical cord of tradition in this manner, we have deprived the new composers of liturgical music in the living languages — assuming, without conceding, that they have sufficient technical preparation — of the indispensable “humus” for composing in harmony with the spirit of the Church.

We have undervalued — I insist — the people’s ability to learn. It is obvious that not all of the repertoire is suitable for the people: this is a distortion of the rightful participation that is asked of the assembly, as if, in the matter of liturgical chant, the people should be the only protagonist on the stage. We must respect the proper order of things: the people should chant their part, but equal respect should be shown for the role of the “schola”, the cantor, the psalmist, and, naturally, the celebrant and the various ministers, who often prefer not to sing. As John Paul II emphasized in his recent chirograph: “From the good coordination of all — the celebrating priest and the deacon, the acolytes, ministers, lectors, psalmist, ‘schola cantorum’, musicians, cantor, and assembly — emerges the right spiritual atmosphere that makes the moment of the liturgy intense, participatory, and fruitful”.

Remarkably strong words! We hadn’t really heard anything like this from such a high position in the Vatican. The words seems to kick off a momentum that has not stopped.

At last – and this is a testament to how quickly the times are moving forward — a proceedings volume is published under the title Musica Sacra: A Liturgical and Pastoral Challenge from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. It contains papers of great weight and significance, most of which I had not seen and which were specially translated for this volume. Authors include Dom Philippe Dupont, Martin Baker, Cardinal Domenico Sorrentino, Louis-Andre Naud, Giordano Monzio Compagnoni, and John Paul II with his Chirograph on sacred music. Each offers something special.

Taken as a whole, this a wonderful book that provides something of a background on what is happening today. The rationale, theology, and practical application of sacred music are all in here. The papers in total represent something of a clarion call. It is impossible to say that this conference is what sparked the current movement; perhaps the movement’s time had just come. Regardless, every advocate of sacred music at every level of the Church should regard this book as seminal.

It is not unusual for a conference volume to be in production for fully five years. what is unusual is to find a conference volume that so perfectly foresees and defines a moment in the history of art and faith.

I’ve long suspected that the Catholic world of music at the parish level, by which I mean parish music directors and singers along with priests in charge, can be rough divided as follows: 10% dedicated to a sacred music program, 10% dedicated to a pop music program, and 80% wallowing in unrelenting confusion about nearly everything related to Catholic music. I derive these estimates based entirely on years of anecdotal evidence from visiting parishes, receiving thousands of emails, hanging around on forums, and generally talking with people here and there.

There is no way to scientifically validate or invalidate my claim because no one really knows for sure. But this much I do know. There is no single document in existence that explains with clarity what it is that a Catholic musician is supposed to do on a week-to-week basis, nothing that clearly presents the goal of one’s endeavors, and no monograph or book that can state with absolute certainly what are the core responsibilities and tasks of the Catholic musician in the current climate. This is because there is a major conflict of vision at work today and we are far from having resolved it enough so that such a document can be produced.

Catholic musicians today are like city managers without training who hired to build infrastructure, manage the community environment, and undertake activities that are suitable to the task – with no specific instructions or mandates of any sort. They can read libraries full of books but come no closer to understanding what they are really supposed to be doing. It would not be a surprise to discover that such a person would eventually learn that showing up and doing something, anything, is just about the best one can do. It’s not very inspiring but such is the nature of the job.

The email below is a typical case. I shared the original (which I’ve changed for clarity, grammar, and to hide the affiliation) with several people, and they all responded the same way: nothing new here. To give you an idea of what we are dealing with, have a look:

Music for Mass seems like a subject that drives everyone up the wall. Traditionalists and many young people would like to hear chant, while many pastors believe that to attract youth we must play folk music and some of the newer material, and there is everything in between. I’m trying to sort all of this out. This has recently become much more important to me because I am now the leader of one of the choirs at the student parish. As I strive to learn about the ideals the church has in place, I’m finding the answer to one question and two more will pop up.

Let me start from the top. I’ve seen in a few places that the Church’s ideal for music is

chant. But if that was the case, wouldn’t that severely bar participation from the congregation? Isn’t another ideal to have everyone involved in singing? Even forgetting that, we have another problem. The choir I lead jokes about doing chant, but the reality is that we simply do not have the talent here. We have two singers. Only one of whom can project his voice. No one has any real training.

The natural place to go (for us at least) is to look in the hymnal. We currently use [a mainstream hymnal]. It contains most of the songs I remember from childhood, and most of the songs the lay faithful would probably consider favorites. However, I’ve been much more on the lookout for what the songs actually say, as I haven’t always been so careful about the message as much as the music. The more I scrutinize the hymns we know and love, the more amazement I have.

There’s a few songs which really scare me. Such as “The Supper of the Lord”. “Precious body, precious blood, here in bread and wine…” Isn’t this a bit confusing? There have been a few others which could be argued either way (“Eat this bread, drink this cup, come to me and never be hungry; eat this break, drink this cup, trust in me and you will not thirst”) if you look at them in context. But ultimately I am finding songs I cannot stomach, and I wouldn’t consider myself closed-minded to the newer material (“Let us break bread together on our knees, when I fall on my knees with my face to the riding sun, O Lord, have mercy on me…let us drink wine together on our knees…”).

Am I being oversensitive, or is this really as odd as it seems? If it is not what the Church teaches, why are the publishers pushing it at us? This begs yet another question…in the front of the book, it is printed “Published with the approval of the Committee on Divine Worship, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.” What does this mean, exactly? It’s some kind of stamp of approval, but on what? I also see that many, many of the hymns are post-1970. What happened before that? Where did those songs go?

I’ve also been told that I cannot use the Mass of Light Gloria–because it adds a word to the Gloria. Is this true? Do you know offhand where this directive can be read? I’m not looking to be disobedient on this or any other issue; I simply want to be able to point it out to people in the future if I get questions about it.

I’ve had it up to my eyeballs in the bashing wars towards American Catholics; I do want to restore the beauty that everyone talks about, but I haven’t got a clue where to start, and I have yet to have a productive conversation with anyone about this. Any help or insight, or even a single answer to any of my questions would be greatly appreciated. I know there’s a lot there, but it’s really a huge topic (at least in my mind) and I’m really trying to figure this out.

There is so much interesting about this, starting with its wholly common sense of being completely lost in a thicket of confusion. The writer wants to know who is charge around here. If it is the publishers, why is so much of their material vaguely suspect? I’m also struck by the writer’s innocent query: what kind of music did Catholics sing before 1970, because that historical record seems not to exist. It’s true: there does seem to be some sort of black out here.

Then there is the very legitimate inquiry about the people’s role in chant. Let me just answer this one right here. The Church provides dialogues for the priest and people, propers for the schola to sing, and the ordinary chants of the Mass for the people. Even if the schola sings all the propers, there is still a vast responsibility remaining for the people. Even if the schola sings Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus as well, there is are vast responses and the Pater Noster for the people in addition to any extra hymns one might add after communion or for recessional.

But this much I can guarantee: that paragraph above would be completely lost on this correspondent. And why? Because no one has ever explained the musical structure of the Roman Rite to this person, much less the responsibility of the music director with regard to it. The other problem is that answer I just gave makes virtually no sense in light of hundreds and hundreds of pages of the hymnals produced by mainstream publishers, which are filled not with chanted ordinary settings or schola propers but rather: piles and piles and piles of post-1970 songs that we are supposed to plug in anywhere we want.

I do wish that there were a single book one could use that would provide all things that the educated Catholic musician could use to navigate the prevailing mess but there is no such thing, I’m sorry to say. We are in the midst of a transition that consists mostly in rediscovering Catholic music that pre-dates 1970, and I don’t mean music of the 1950s. I mean music that shares in the sensibility that has always and everywhere defined the idea of liturgical music, music that is holy, universal, and beautiful.

One of the advantages that the publishers have right now is that they can hand a book over to a music, along with a sample CD, and say: sing this stuff. However, this might not work in the future as well, because the new translation of the Mass starting next year is structured to lend itself to chant-like settings and because of the new emphasis on the propers of the Mass (especially the introit, offertory, and communion). The existing model of the “hymn cafeteria”’ cannot and will not hold its firm grip on liturgical music in the future.

A final issue in the note above concerns talent. Where is it? Where are the singers? Where is the musical competence? Frankly, it is a desert out there. Only clarity about mission will make it bloom again.

This article is not a statement of despair. It is a statement that draws attention to the desperate work that needs to be done to educate, create new resources, learn, and put into practice the lost wisdom that this generation is recovering. There is crowd of Catholic musicians out there crying out for answers.

The wonderful film The Secret of Kells (2009) tells the story of the monastic effort to create The Book of Kells, the finest of Ireland’s national treasures, a gorgeous illuminated book of Gospels used for Mass that managed to be preserved all these centuries and is currently on display at the Trinity College library in Dublin. The film sets the forces of light, as represented by the Christian faith and those who practiced it, against the dark forces of Viking invaders who cared not for productivity, beauty, and holiness but instead practiced the more ancient skills of invading, looting, and destroying.

The monks were not satisfied merely to produce books of texts. The conviction was that these books should also be works of art, when possible. It was not too much to spend many years and even several generations to create the perfect book to be light unto all. Words alone would have served the functional purpose but there was more to functionality that mere words. There were also considerations of excellence, skill, and beauty (above all) that must be central to the effort of making a book to be used at Mass. The creation and preservation of that book was worth more than their lives, in their view, because it embodied truth and light and had a longer life than all living people.

The film puts on display a microcosm that represents a much grander effort that stretched from the Apostolic Age to the Renaissance, and that effort involved not only art but also issues of human rights, the dignity of the human person, the integrity and inviolability of human association and spaces, and the centrality of disciplined learning and sacrifice in the process of the salvation of souls. It all stems from that great lesson of the Incarnation: God loved the individual person enough to send his son to become man, who in turn made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of our souls. In turn, we offer praise and thanksgiving through our highest efforts. Beauty becomes, says Pope Benedict XVI, “the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes.”

Today we take the creation of manuscripts and the spreading of knowledge for granted. What took dozens of highly skilled men many years, sometimes generations, to accomplish can now be done by anyone with a laptop computer and uploaded to a server that can create copies for anyone who wants them, many million of times per minute. This is called technological progress. Technology changes; what remains the same, or should remain the same, is the Christian ethos that gave rise to beauty in the modern world. Aesthetics and technology are really two different things; within the Christian ethos, the second can and should be used in serve of the first.

What the monks did to create and preserve manuscripts in the 8th century was also taking place in the realm of music. From the 5th century onward, there are documented efforts to codify liturgical music and build up a culture of teaching and singing that would parallel the efforts made to create and preserve manuscripts. The sung Psalms would become a form of musical illumination for the liturgy in the same way that pictures and beautiful letters would lift up mere text to become a work of art worthy of the act of worship.

In fact, the early theorists made analogies between the notes and phrases of music and the letters and syllables of text. In the same way, says the 9th century treatise Musica Enchiriadis, “the pthongi that are called sounds in Latin are the sources of sung sound, and the content of all music lies in their resolution.”

For the better part of 1500, the efforts with regard to music were focused and serious and appear wherever the Christian religion was practiced. Century by century we saw the composition of chant, along with the spreading of choir schools, manuscripts, pedagogical tools, chant masters with astonishing aural memories who could sing any chant in the Gradual, and also great singers who achieved fame in country after country.

Even after the Reformation, there was let up in the progress of the polyphonic art; it thrived in every country on all continents. Perhaps it was inevitable that the chant went through a period of languishing while the fashion of polyphony marched forward, but even here it was the monasteries that provided the right balance between preservation and progress. When the time came for Solesmes to restore the chant books after several centuries of confusion, they depended very heavily on what the monasteries had done to maintain an uninterrupted tradition of beauty in service of the liturgy.

In the postconciliar period, the idea of excellence, beauty, and preservation all gave way to a new cultural ethos that exalted various ideological aims ahead of traditional Christian aims. Suddenly, excellence came to be depreciated in favor of a manufactured idea of authenticity, and the goal of creating magnificent sounds gave way to the goal of copying stylish sounds from the secular world. God-centered liturgy became people-centered gatherings. Scholas were toppled in favor of folk groups, organists lost their positions in favor of strumming and banging, and the hard work of rendering the chant with ever greater perfection lost to the fashion for spontaneity and improvisation. Beautiful liturgical books with illuminations gave way to felt banners to broadcast to people a sense of comfort and homeyness.

These new trends not only broke a long tradition; they turned that long tradition on its head. In that sense, I don’t think it is unfair to say that the musical ethos that emerged after (but not because of) the Second Vatican Council was fundamental un-Christian, that is, contrary to all that came before. It was the equivalent of throwing out illuminated manuscripts and replacing them with newspapers, or of tearing down great cathedrals and replacing them with halls suitable for civic gatherings.

As we make our way out of this desert that has lasted forty years, we need to look to the attitudes and disciplines that were adopted by the monks of old and have always pervaded the Christian artistic sense. The goal was never merely to make things that are serviceable much less merely fashionable. The idea was to point to eternity as best we are able and not curry favor with the times. We need to have the discipline that led monks to make illuminations on manuscripts used only by one mortal person because these beautiful things were created for God above all else. Yes, they were impractical but sometimes what is practical contrasts with what is principled.

What this means for music is profound.

First, we do well to remember and appreciate the many thousands of holy men and women who struggled long before the age of recording technology and even before musical notation in order to pass from age to age the great music of the Catholic liturgy. It is a mistake to take the tools we have today for granted. These tools should be used for doing an even better job at our task than they did.

Second, we must attempt to replicate the focus on excellence in the service of God that monks of old made part of their daily lives. It is not enough to show up on Sunday, pick four hymns, sing them, and go home, while expecting everyone to value your marvelous contribution to parish life. No. Singing for liturgy requires work, learning, discipline, time in practice, and sacrifice. A true singer for liturgy never seeks out praise, never performs in an effort to elicit public adulation, never seeks to entertain. We work solely in service of the public prayer of the Church.

Third, we must restore a central focus on beauty, which means orderliness, balance, and exalted forms that point to the author, composer, and maker of all beautiful things. Fortunately for us, we are not burdened with the job of seeking out beautiful music for everything that goes on at Mass. The foundation of it all is already given to us in the form of the chant, which we have thanks to the extraordinary efforts of so many dating back to the earliest years of the faith. We only need to embrace it or, at least, see its beauty as a goal and measure all that we do in the interim against this standard.

In the sweep of time, we singers in this generation have very little time to do what we ought, very few chances to sing, as compared with all the liturgy in world history, and praise God in a way that is fitting. There is no time for laziness, no time for the production of unworthy music, no time to take shortcuts or unleash some commercially canned solution on our parishes. We can learn from those who came before and leave something wonderful for those who will come after us.