Category: Article by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Why We Must Chant

It was 5:00am and I’m sleeping in a hotel in Bodrum, Turkey, a secularized Islamic state as far from fundamentalism as one can imagine. This is a thoroughly modernized country with universal rights. I heard something strange and mysterious, a voice of some sort, a song. I rolled over and went to back to sleep and woke an hour later to the sound of a rooster. I figured I had dreamed the whole thing.

The next day, however, the same voice came on at 5:00am and this time I listened. It was chant of some kind of religious nature. Then I realized. This was coming from the local Mosque. The cantor was singing on the loudspeaker and it was heard through this sector of town.

At first, the sound puzzled me. Too foreign. I couldn’t understand the words. But then I became curious and heard melodic and textual similarities to the Gregorian chant. Surely there is a common ancestor between Quranic chant and the Gregorian tradition. They both use scripture. They both proclaim the word. They both date from the first millenium. They are both unmistakably religious.

By the fourth day, I was hooked. I got up just to hear it.

Come to prayer
Come to success
Prayer is better than sleep
Allah is the greatest
There is none worshipable but Allah

Every day, it is the same. It sung with great power and lyrical interpretation. The better the cantor, the more elaborate the embellishment. To the ear of the faithful Muslim, it must be incredibly familiar but also essential. It is the chant that starts the day. It is the chant that ends the day. The word is with the faithful throughout the day, and throughout their lives.

The manner in which it is chanted is unchanged from the 8th century. It is chanted in a high version of Arabic, a form of the language studied in school and understood by everyone. It is a language that is technically dead in the sense that it does not change. The vernacular is different because it adapts to changes. The language of prayer is stable like the faith itself.

So prominent a role does this chant play, even in secular Muslim countries, that it is broadcast everywhere, like the bells of the local church that play on Sundays. The chant shapes the culture. It instills the faith. It gives evidence of belief that the word that came down to us so long ago still speaks to us in daily life.

The people might leave the faith but the faith never leaves them. The chant is a major reason.

The people who sing are enormously talented. They train. They take pride in what they do. A Mosque would never exist without the cantor, who, according to Wikpedia, is called muqri’ , tālī, murattil, mujawwid, or most commonly a qari. They obey the rules of chanting. It would be inconceivable to simply make something up or replace the chant with a popular song. In private life, Muslims can do that, but not at public worship.

There is no demand that the people sing along, as if only the collective makes it worth doing. The demand is that people participate in the prayer through listening and praying.

I can’t but help but compare to the Christian world. We have chant. It is fixed and unchanging, though scholarship to perfect the editions continues as befits the Western idea of progress. It was stabilized as early as the 8th century, the same period in which Islam developed. The language is from scripture. The language is liturgical. The chants are assigned for a reason. They give music to prayer and thereby ennoble it.

Christians today are inclined to think that the Muslims are religious freaks because they have regular prayer throughout the day. Don’t they know that religious stuff is only supposed to go on one hour per week on Sunday?

Even most Catholics are oblivious to the fact that Christianity and Islam share this idea of prayer throughout the day — sung prayer. But apparently the new version of such prayer that was cobbled together in a reformed way after the Second Vatican Council still doesn’t have music. The reformers forgot or delay that point. And we are still without, 50 years later. Fortunately we do have all the chants for Mass.

We all live in what might be called a secularized Christian country, meaning that the clerics do not run the government but the overwhelming majority adhere to some Christian idea. But strangely, people use this fact — and I heartily approve that the clerics do not run the government! — as an excuse to not practice their faith at all except in the most superficial possible way.

We have chants in the Roman Rite. They are embedded in our tradition. But we hardly hear them except in movies and on CDs. We heard them torn from their natural habitat. Then we go to Church on Sunday. The first song we sung does not announce the day or even come from scripture. It was put together by some guys writing stuff in the 1970s. We call these hymns. For many people, when they hear them, they think the opposite of the Muslim call to prayer: it would have been better to have slept in.

But then we look at our official prayer books. What’s this? There is an entrance. It comes from Scripture. It is chant. It is complex but distinct and beautiful. When you hear it, you know where you are. You know what you are doing. This is about giving praise to God. And you prepare yourself for what is going to happen. Then there are the unchanging chants like Kyrie and Gloria, followed by a reading, followed by that the glorious thing, the Gradual Psalm. This is the piece of music that has the most in common with Quaranic chant. Islam too embraces the Psalms.

Each piece in the official books serves a distinct liturgical purpose. To live with these chants is to live the life of faith through them. They become the theme song of our prayer. The melodies mark the seasons and the passage of time as seen through the life of Christ.

And yet: we’ve thrown it all away. Not entirely, but almost. And the faith suffers as a result. Somewhere along the way, we got this idea that the music at Mass is not really prayer and not really the word of God. It is just music. So of course if it is just music, we should play and sing music that we like most, music that makes us happy and feel just the right way. Nothing is given, everything is chosen.

Then we look around the world and see Islam making huge advances. We wonder why. We blame crazy people and crazy governments. We call out the troops. We impose restrictions. We sit at the dinner table and wring our hands about the coming of Sharia law.

Here is a better solution. Let’s shore up Christian tradition — particularly our public prayer. Let’s rediscover our own native chant, the sung prayer that built civilization. It’s right there waiting for us. We too can make a joyful noise when we pray. We too can chant praise to God. It can become part of our lives. It can make us more faithful. And it can attract more people to the faith.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

The Madness of the Method

credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/feargal/5587810025/

Every weekend or so, some name composer of mainstream Catholic music is out and about giving a workshop in a parish somewhere. I’ve been to enough of these to pretty much know what they are going say in advance.

They stand in front of parish musicians and repeatedly tell them that the most important job is to engage the congregation to the point that people feel like singing, and that means catchy tunes and simple words.

And how to decide between the hundreds of such songs in the mainstream pew resources? The answer is to look at the theme of the week, which is given by the readings. Flip through the book and find a song that seems to match in some way. Check out the theme index. Then consider and anticipate the congregation’s reactions the pieces of your choosing and give it your best shot.

Sadly, nearly everything about this is wrong. In this model, the musicians are being charged with making the liturgy happen on a week-to-week basis. The Church struggles with provide liturgical books with deep roots in history, but the musicians show up and put five minutes of thought into making decisions about styles and texts that have a gigantic effect on the overall liturgical ethos. It is too much responsibility to put on their shoulders, and no one is competent to pull it off.

What is restraining and constraining the musician’s range of play in this model? Only their own subjective view of what’s right and what works. in practice, this is no restraint at all.
The liturgy itself is being held hostage to a few people’s on-the-spot views of what the message should be and what should take place. A major aspect of the Mass, one that can make or break the entire point of the ritual, is being put in the hands of people who have little or no substantive guidance or basis for their decision making.

To be sure, it is flattering for the musicians to hear that they have this power. When the workshop leader comes and tell them this, their egos get a boost. Most aren’t paid and most are really trained, so this kind of responsibility can be welcome in lieu of material reward. It is to be accept a job that is almost priestly but without the trouble of six years of training and ordination. But the truth is that no actor in the liturgical world should have this level of power and discretion, and it is wrong to expect this of anyone.

What’s more, from what I can observe from parishes I visit, it doesn’t actually accomplish the goal. What actually happens is that people feel as if the musicians are overreaching and asking something of the congregation that the people don’t feel the need to give. Mandatory enthusiasm for someone else’s project doesn’t go over well in any aspect of life, especially not in music. Many just sit there vaguely and habitually protesting in their minds. So the musicians end up with a feeling of failure and confusion. Or they blame others and end up getting mad about the people and their refusal to go with the program.

What, then, is the constraint? Where are the boundaries? Where are the guidelines? The second Vatican Council plainly stated: Gregorian chant is to have first place at Mass. This statement has profound significance if you understand something of the structure of the liturgy and the purpose and applicability of Gregorian chant within it.

The trouble is that hardly anyone does understand this. Most everyone today think that Gregorian chant is a style or a genre, one marked by a monkish solemnity. They figure that, given that, it is enough to sing Pange Lingua on Holy Thursday, or sprinkle in a bit of Latin during Lent. Surely that is enough.

But this characterization completely misses the point. Gregorian chant’s distinct contribution is that it is the most complete and robust body of music for the ritual of the Roman Rite that elevates and ennobles the word of God in the liturgy itself. The point is not to sing chant but to sing the liturgy itself, meaning the text that is assigned to be sung at the place in the Mass where this particular text is intended to be sung. The notes are important but secondary to the word.

In other words, it is not our job to discern themes of the day and take over the job from the Church of pushing texts that we find appropriate. The texts for singing at Mass are already given to us. There is an entrance text, a Psalm text, an offertory text, and a communion text. These are in the liturgical books. The counsel to pick and choose whatever you want amounts to a counsel to ignore the liturgy of the Church and substitute something of your own making.

(If you want to know more about these points, there is no better source that William Mahrt’s The Musical Shape of the Liturgy (CMAA, 2012). Here is the fully presentation of the bracing but uplifting reality.)

So we can see that the Council’s embrace of chant was not about some old men who wanted to hear old-style music rather than new music. People who ignore chant and diminish its place in liturgy like to think this is true, but personal or generational preference has nothing to do with it. Nor is tradition the whole story. The embrace of chant is really the embrace of the liturgical text that is to be sung, and a drawing attention to the most complete and ideal musical model for presenting that text.

Of course musicians do not know that they are throwing out whole parts of the liturgy that have been integral to the musical experience of the Mass dating as far back as documentary history. Nor do the workshop leaders intend to do violence to the liturgy in this way. Most just don’t know about Mass propers and the role of the choir. Or if they do know, they find the project of singing propers to be unviable because…well…the project really hasn’t been picked up much over these last fifty years.

To be sure, this last point has been a serious problem. Musicians have not really had any really means of singing Mass propers. They are not in the hymnbooks. Bishops haven’t really insisted on them. Confusion about these points has been everywhere. The official chant books of the Church, to the extent anyone knows about them at all, seem forbidding. And as self justification for not following any guidelines, people could always point to the can-of-worms-opening clause in the General Instruction that permits “another suitable song” to replace propers when necessary.

But thanks mostly to the efforts of the Church Music Association of America, we now have the beginnings of a growing repertoire of music that is both accessible to parishes and seeks to do what the Church intends with regard to the liturgy, which is to say that these new resources set the liturgical word to music. The idea is to provide a bridge to the ideal, to re-root the singing at Mass in a coherent framework, to restrain the wandering power of the subjective imagination of musicians, and to unleash a new kind of beauty that comes with following both the letter and spirit of the liturgy itself.

For most Church musicians, this is a completely new way of thinking. It is an amazing thing to discover. It also comes with a new mandate, not to rule but to serve, not to invent but to re-discover what is, not to impose but to submit in humility to what is bigger and greater than ourselves. To discover Mass propers as the musical mandate is also a liberating experience because it frees us from implausible and unworkable tasks and gives us a means of truly contributing to the life of the liturgy.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Psalms at Mass: Tragedy and Solution

Scholars tell us several critical points about the Psalms as they relates to Christian liturgy. The early Christians had no question about their suitability as texts for liturgy. They were the very first text used for Christian song in all lands. What later emerged as the various liturgical rites all used the Psalms and the basis of song. The Psalms were the basis of what became the Divine Office. And the earliest and most developed of all the Gregorian chants at Mass were the Psalms.

The most prominent place for the Psalm at Mass was between the readings of scripture. Their performance was a time for prayer and meditation. They were the most elaborate chants of the entire Christian songbook. This Psalm between readings was called the Graduale, as a reference to the position of where it was first sung. This tradition of elaborate chants between the readings is preserved in the liturgical books to this today, particularly the book named after the Gradual itself, the Graduale Romanum.

In short the chanted Psalm, the crown jewel of the liturgical books and the foundation of so much musical development for centuries, is the foundation of song at Mass.

Sadly, anyone reading the above today, would find this entire history completely unrecognizable based on their own experience at Mass. Even people who have been attending Mass weekly for decades would find this history to be implausible. What mostly happens between the readings at Mass sounds and feels like nothing history, contemplative, reflective, and beautiful.

The question arises: what happened to the Psalm?

Contemporary reports show that before the reform of the Mass in 1969, the Psalm was not usually sung in its original form. The true chant was mostly too difficult for most parishes. So most parishes took recourse in the Psalm-toning technique, meaning that the text was rendered in a simple formula. It was dignified by comparison to what we are likely to hear today, but not what it should be. One can understand how people could have gained the impression that it just wasn’t that important.

But in 1969, something more dramatic happened. The Psalm was rendered in the vernacular, thereby making the older form awkward for any but the most enterprising music programs. Even more substantially, its form was changed from being a solo chant to necessarily involving the people. As William Mahrt was once told in the defense of this approach, the people needed to “have something to do.”

The people-involving form chosen was based on the chanted structure for the Divine Office. There would be an antiphon. The antiphon had to be easy for the people to sing. It had to be extremely easy to sing because people had to hear it only one time and then sing it back. Then it was followed by Psalm verses. The antiphon would be repeated after each verse or at the end.

Monks knew well how to accomplish this task because it had been part of their liturgy for more than a millenium. Sadly, lay people had long ago ceased being exposed to this approach to song, and they were the ones charged with writing music for the new approach. They had no clue about how to do this, and instead took recourse to the beats and tunefulness of music in the culture at large.

In other words, there was nothing inherently wrong with the Responsorial Psalm structure. It is not as perfect as the Gradual but it was not fundamentally flawed either. One can make a case for the new approach based on some scraps from history and also from the general sense that it did take place within the “Liturgy of the Word” so a borrowing from the Divine Office is not entirely outlandish.

But composing for it would be tricky, and require a great deal of subtlety and compositional sophistication. A handful of people accomplished this in the 1970s and 1980s. Theodore Marier would be primary among them. But his book in which the Psalms were published did not reach a wide audience. What did and has reached a wide audience were the Responsorial Psalm based on popular music. Forty years went by. Readers who have experienced these can provide their own assessments of their musical merit.

In any case, let us moved forward in time to the way in which this problem came to be addressed in a competent way. Five years ago, Jeffrey Ostrowski opened up a new website called Chabanel Psalms that provide free Psalm settings for download. He offered them to the world. Why? He was so upset about the poor quality of the standard Responsorial Psalm that he just had to fix it. This was his fix.

The website was a smash hit. Finally, after decades of waiting for something, people could freely download a dignified and fitting setting of the Psalm to sing between readings. It was marvelous. And it was just the beginning. Immediately others began to come forward. It turns out that many Church musicians had been composing their own settings for years! They began to send them into Jeffrey and Jeffrey very graciously and enthusiastically began to add those to his collection that he was offering for free.

Among those who were sending in sending was the director of my own Gregorian Schola, Arlene Oost-Zinner. She was insistent on retaining the Gregorian psalm tones for the verse. Her Psalm antiphon was composed in the Gregorian style. It was simple but sophisticated, paying careful attention to the text and the flow of the words. I had noticed in my own parish (in which these were a real godsend) that people were able to sing them very quickly (and, most impressively, not feel ridiculous for having done so!).

There are three years of Psalms that had to be composed — three times the whole liturgical calendar. In other words, this task is not for the faint of heart. It requires being creative on schedule, and sticking with it no matter how you feel that week. And you must do this for three full years, without seeing a dime in revenue for your work. After all, these were being given away and there was no revenue stream to compensate anyone at all.

This whole project is culminating in a number of new resources. The Vatican II hymnal is one example. My personal favorite is of course the ones I have known in my own parish and are loved by the parishioners in my parish. These the ones that have been among the most downloaded, the ones by my own schola director.

I’m pleased to say that these have all been typeset in a single book and made available as the Parish Books of Psalms, as published by the Church Music Association of America. This book allows anyone to have one resource that captures a good part of that original sensibility of the Psalm while retaining the Responsorial structure.

The antiphons are simple but dignified, and the verses are entirely written out for the singer, using traditional Gregorian Psalm tones. You only need to open and sing. It can be done by a single cantor or a full group, but I’ve never seen a case when the people do not sing along while maintaining an atmosphere of contemplation.

A point I find rather interesting about this music publishing business: once these resources come to be, people tend to take them for granted, as if they had always been here. But think about it: the problem of the Psalm dates back decades in the midst of a time when such resources were nowhere to be found! Generations have suffered and this suffering can now end.

It was this way with the Simple English Propers. No one seems to even remember what life was like without them. It will be the same with the Parish Book of Psalms. The remedy arrives and all is forgotten and forgiven. So let me just say this from the heart: it was a gigantic struggle to get to the place. Thanks be to God, the future will be better than the past.

This book will become available within two weeks.
Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

The Preconciliar Rite in Our Time

The parish schola to which I belong had signed a man’s spiritual will that requested a full Requiem High Mass in the extraordinary form upon his death. The time came much sooner than it should have. He was only 57 when he died.

We had only three days between hearing of his death and the scheduled date of the Mass. We practiced for a total of 5 hours, and this was pushing it. The schola sings the chants from the Graduale Romanum every week at an ordinary form Mass but the elaborate form of the extraordinary form makes special demands on the schola, with very few options. There was a Gradual Psalm and Tract, plus offertory and verses, plus the Sequence, as well as Libera Me and the chants for the final exit, in addition to the chanted sections that we already knew from the ordinary form Requiem.

We knew that it had to be beautiful. There was more at stake here than met the eye. The parish in which we sang was in a town where there had not been this form of funeral Mass in at least half a century and perhaps even longer. Even before the Council, it is likely that the Requiem adhered to the convention of the time, which was a low Mass with vernacular hymnody. The high Masses tended to use Psalm tone propers and not the propers from the Roman Gradual. So this presentation was highly unusual, perhaps never heard in this parish or even in this town.

The celebrant, who did an outstanding job, had never said this particular Mass before. The servers and MC had to come from across the state. Our schola was imported. As for the congregation, it was split between Baptists — the faith tradition of the deceased’s family — and Catholics of the parish who are used to the common form of funeral Mass seen today. In other words, we had something here that was completely artificial from a human point of view, not part of a known tradition or experience in any way.

There were very few hooks to help people. We could have printed an encyclopedia of explanations and people would have still be lost. They expect a hymn and they get a chant in a language that is not their own. They expect readings in English but get them in Latin. They expect a Psalm but get a long melismatic piece. No Catholic in the pews today has even heard of the tract. The Sequence is known from movies but not real life. Not even the Angus Dei follows the same familiar text. The Pater Noster might have been known but it is said by the priest alone. From my observation from the loft, it struck me that the only familiar moment in the entire Mass was the Sanctus; we used the Requiem ferial setting that has become standard in many parishes and the only bit of Gregorian chant heard at all in most places.

So you can imagine that I had a full expectation of a sociological disaster. That did not happen. We did sing beautifully. The celebrant was amazing. There were moments of breath-taking beauty at the altar. The liturgy in general moved at a clip, taking in total about 80 minutes. It was absolutely wonderful, and well received. How and why did it work? No matter how much we work or how much all the actors believed that it was up to us to make this happen, we did not make this happen. The Divine took over. We merely needed the will to be guided by the spirit.

The Divine took over from the perspective of the pew as well. I heard reports of how people were enormously impressed at the solemnity and beauty, the quiet and the seriousness. No, people could not follow along despite the aids we handed out, and that’s fine. Remoteness is a feature of mystery and mystery is a feature of the liturgy. Immediate cognition is not the point. The penetration of the heart and soul, areas of our being we try to avoid on a daily basis, is made possible with the remarkable voice of the purest form of the Roman Rite.

The experience led me to some additional thoughts. Did this liturgy work as some kind of advertisement for the proliferation of the extraordinary form? Maybe and maybe not. People were very pleased to be part of the history and the significance of the occasion. But it did not and will not cause a clamor to have this form of the ritual become the mainstream much less the exclusive way that funerals take place. This cannot and will not happen. Not one person in attendance walked away thinking: all Catholic funerals should be required to be this way.

The periodic appearance of this rite in the mainstream of Catholic life is to be valued. But its continued life in our culture is ironically dependent on the the ordinary form as a means of bringing the liturgy to the people in the most direct way, as a teacher and guide. The ordinary form is and will remain the liturgy that Catholic culture knows best, and through it Catholics can grow to develop a special appreciation for the magnificence of what came before.

Pope Benedict XVI was extremely wise in institutionalizing these names: ordinary and extraordinary form. We can take these terms literally and use them in the modern sense to understand what the future holds as regards the two forms of the Roman Rite. I can foresee no circumstances under which this will change in our lifetimes.

To be sure, there are some changes that could be made to the extraordinary form that might give it a welcome boost in Catholic life, small changes that could cause it to become more integrated with the Catholic experience. Please understand that in saying this, and naming these changes, that I am not actually advocating these changes; that is the job of the Church, not laypeople who are writing articles. I would never presume to say that I know exactly what needs to take place to make the extraordinary form more accessible and prevalent in the modern world.

But based on my experience so far, the introductions of some options could make a big difference. If the readings could be in English, not during the homily but during the liturgy itself, that would dramatically increase the engagement of the congregation in the liturgical action. If some vernacular motets or hymns were permitted, and the music were not strictly limited to Psalm tones and Gregorian melodies in Latin, people would not have such a sense of being outside spectators of what is happening. I might further suggest that permitting English sung propers as options could advance the cause of the extraordinary form as well.

These are three very small options that could be introduced that would make a giant difference. If we look at the spirit of Vatican II’s mandate for change, I’m imagining that these are the types of changes that Sacrosanctum Concilium suggested should take place. The idea was not a wholesale revolution but the introduction of options that would fulfill the hopes and desires of the liturgical movement.

It is one of the great tragedies of Catholic history that in the six years after the close of the Council the cause of liturgical reform fell into the hands of a small cadre of rationalistic intellectuals and activists who used the opportunity for change as a time for exercising their wits and trying out their experimental ideology on the Church. We are still working to recover from this disaster.

For forty-five years, we have faced the choice between a reformed rite that often seemed to have nothing to do with our history, on the one hand, and, on the other, going back to repeat that history as if it had to be frozen to an absolute standstill in 1962 and the Council’s desire for marginal improvement completely ignored.

It is the task of this generation to carefully work toward bringing about a Catholic liturgical culture that is not so divided between old and new. There must be give and take on both sides of this spectrum, and the resistance is proportionally strong in both directions.

But let me mention something that gives hope here. Five years ago, no one would have believed that we would have a new Missal with such elegant language and music that is part of the Missal itself. It seemed like an impossible dream, and it too was doggedly opposed by the extremes on both sides. And yet here it is. It exists. It is beautiful.

There is still a long way to go, but so long as we have the example of the extraordinary form before us, and we are willing to consider that the ordinary form does have things to teach us, there is no reason to lose hope for a more integrated Roman Rite in the Catholic liturgical world in the future.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Is the Liturgy a Stage?

A text message arrived on my phone: “the end is near.”

I stared at it a few minutes and then texted back the only thing I could think to say: “Context?”

The message became more detailed. An older gentlemen whose Mass that my parish schola had contracted to sing was dying. Our schola needed to prepare.

Only then did I recall something I had forgotten about that dates back some six years ago. A gentleman in a neighboring town had attended the funeral of a friend. The music was the usual material we’ve come to expect from funerals. There was eulogy after eulogy. The priests wore white. People were encouraged to think of the deceased as being with God already. There was no chant. No Dies Irae. Nothing looked like a Catholic funeral as he understood it.

He thought to himself: I do not want this to happen when I die. So he contacted me, made up an extremely detailed list of do and don’ts for his own funeral, and had me sign the paper to guarantee that his own funeral would be thoroughly liturgical. He put it away among his things and made sure that his caretaker found it in the last hour.

Why would he do this? He would be dead, so what’s the point? He never put it this way but I suspect that he wanted to leave a gift of praise to God and a gift of beautiful liturgy to his family. I don’t think it was really about him. It was about God and others, very beautiful motivation.

A week later, we found ourselves in a peculiar situation. We don’t usually sing funerals. So we gathered for a just-in-case rehearsal, and took a very long time doing a crash course on all the chants of the purest form of Requiem Mass.

Three days later, he died. The funeral date was set. Then the call came from the Celebrant with news that I had not expected. This would be an Extraordinary Form high Mass. All along I had assumed this would be ordinary form. The change meant that the Gradual and Tract had to be sung as they appear in the liturgical books, and could not be replaced by the Responsorial Psalm and Alleluia verse. There would be the Responsory for incensing. The Sequence: required.

This meant more work for us. We cancelled regular rehearsal and gathered those who could come to the Requiem and got to work. Two hours later we had it mostly completed. This would have been an impossible task for a schola just starting out. We have been together for twelve years but, even so, it was not easy. We all felt that sense of being stretched to our limits.

The celebrant felt the same way. He has said the old form in a Low Mass context and some sung Masses but his experience is very limited. The servers were in a similar situation. It’s all new. I suspect that a high Requiem Mass has not been sung in the parish where the funeral is held in half a century, or, perhaps ever.

In some ways, this task is liturgically unnatural. Liturgy should be part of our lives. This level of work and struggle should not have to happen. We should know these chants as part of our apostolate. We should not have to be in a position to recreate anything. It should just happen. But, alas, we must accept the times in which we live and do the best we can. We’ve been given an amazing opportunity . We dare not let this slip by without doing everything we can do to let beauty live again in our liturgical lives.

I found myself thinking of the people in the pews. The deceased’s family is not Catholic. He is a convert in late age. The extended family is Baptist. The parish is a fine one but has no extraordinary form. The music is mixed, traditional in many ways but there is no singing of the Mass propers, no chant schola.

It is at the Requiem Mass where the difference between the two forms, as they emerge in real life, is most stark. The EF gives no choices. A high Mass is highly scripted. Our English motets are completely out of the question. There cannot be English adaptions of anything. The music is substantial and plentiful. The section of music between the readings consists of three separate and very long pieces of music, all sung in Latin, without instruments.

I’ve been wondering how it will come across. It is not likely that a single person attending this Mass will have ever experienced anything remotely like this. Most everyone will be lost the entire time. We could pass out hundreds of pages of guides and notes but it will not help. Nothing will be familiar to anyone there. There will be very little with which the people can connect or identify. It will last more than an hour but less than two, and people might leave mystified and probably a bit confused.

I’m not expecting anyone to walk away and say: wow, this was just fantastic!! I fully expect the results to be otherwise. I’m expecting grumbling and disappointment and disorientation. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. Maybe lives will be changed on the spot. But I doubt it. I suspect that most people will be confused and even a bit annoyed.

The question is: what makes a liturgy successful? And a deeper question: what is the standard by which we are measuring success? I suggest that in our times, it is nearly impossible to get away from the standard that is the worst possible standard: we tend to judge liturgy as if all the performers are on a stage performing for us. We want to entertain and be entertained. We want to “reach” people so they can have a emotionally satisfying experience, a rich and memorable encounter with something we define as meaningful. If that doesn’t happen, we are inclined to think we failed.

This Requiem we will soon sing challenges that idea in the most fundamental way. By standards of entertainment and staging, it will be a failure. But judged from the point of view of praise and prayer to God, matters change. In this sense, it will be absolutely perfect. The profundity will be lost on many if not most. I know this. I would love to be proven wrong but I suspect otherwise.

And yet: the encounter with the Divine should not produce obvious and expected results. To have something reach a part of our hearts and souls that the modern world leaves untouched is a remarkable thing. It brings about lasting change. It leaves us with memories that increase in significance over time. The graces are planted and multiply. As the years pass, the people present may eventually come to realize that in this experience, they were presented with a vision of timeless truth, and that they did not and could not recognize it at the time because it was unfamiliar and unrecognizable.

The extraordinary form does this. It is the liturgy for the long term, the liturgy that speaks to something that escapes our immediate cognition but penetrates to the part of ourselves we don’t often access or even think much about. It speaks a language we do not speak. It is a language that we are too often afraid even to hear. But we must and do in the context of facing that terrifying thing: the mortality of all living things and the immortality of our souls.

This is the truth of the liturgy. It has nothing to do with being on stage, and nothing to do with entertainment. Can we handle the truth? I do not know. The deceased in this case did a bold and generous thing. He made it impossible for all of us to turn away from it. May we face it, see and hear its beauty, and be transformed by it.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Does the Ordinary Form Have a Distinctive Voice?

Does the ordinary form of the Roman Rite have a distinctive voice from that of the extraordinary form? One one level, the answer seems obvious. You go to the extraordinary form (EF from hereon) and you hear Latin, chant, silence, and the rubrics, worked out over many centuries, yield a result that can be stunningly beautiful. Happen onto one of many EF Masses that has been instituted over the last ten years, and this is what you experience.

The archetype of the ordinary form (OF from hereon) is very different. You hear the vernacular. There is popular music. The rubrics are loose. The atmosphere is casual. It can often be difficult to tell the difference between laxity, approved improvisation, parish tradition, and outright abuse. It all gets mixed up in what often ends up as a liturgical stew that, if observed from preconciliar point of view, would not look like the Roman Rite at all.

So, from the point of view of real-world experience, the question is easy to answer. But at the Sacred Music Colloquium of the Church Music Association of America, we’ve all attempted to show another side to the OF. We adhere to the General Instruction and attempted to present the Mass in light of the larger historical experience of the Roman Rite. We use Mass propers, whether in Latin or English. The celebrant has said the Mass ad orientem, that is, not facing the people. The celebrant is not front-and-center; the sacrifice on the altar is the focus.

We employ silence. The Mass parts are chanted. The dialogues are chanted. The readings are chanted. Vestments are beautiful. We’ve used polyphonic ordinary settings. We do not neglect the Kyrie. The creed is sung. Optional prayers are eliminated as unnecessary innovations. Instead of the Responsorial Psalm, we have typically sung the Gradual chant from the Graduale Romanum. The use of hymns is generally restricted to the recessional. There are lots of other “smells and bells.”

The result is something spectacular, something rarely if ever seen in the Catholic world. It is solemn and dignified. It is moving and spiritually fulfilling. Older Catholics who have attended these Masses say that it is easily recognizable as the Roman Rite that they knew from their childhood. Even sophisticated observers are unable to distinguish this OF from the EF. I had people insist to me that this was certainly the Tridentine Rite. Yes, it is missing the prayers at the foot of the altar, the last Gospel, and other pieces of the puzzle, but unless you are specially looking for those, you could easily mistake what you experience for the older form of Mass.

It is a beautiful thing to behold.

I’ve never really questioned this approach. It strikes me as an obvious proposition that the OF when done properly should look and feel like the EF of Catholic history.

And yet, some comments by one of our faculty do give me pause and cause me to wonder whether this is the whole of the answer to our liturgical problem. Paul Ford, author of the first English simple Gradual called By Flowing Waters, wrote on the blog PrayTell that we really went too far with this methodology. The OF does have a distinctive voice and all our efforts to dignify the celebration have managed to mute that voice.

Here is what he wrote:

This CMAA Colloquium was the perfect venue for experiencing the reform of the reform at its most exemplary. Readers of this blog will know that I am not convinced that the ordinary form of the Mass can be enriched (let alone needs to be enriched) by the extraordinary form in ecclesiology, sacramental theology, or pneumatology, although the latter can contribute to the former its ars celebrandi and its standard of musical composition and music making…. Although the extraordinary form’s ars celebrandi and its standard of musical composition and music making were august, I am not convinced that we need to celebrate the ordinary form ad orientem. The wise presider gets himself out of the way by directing his attention to the assembly, to the word, to what he is doing, and to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Professor Ford offers other comments along these lines. He wanted the congregation to sing the propers. He wanted to hear the prayer of the faithful. He wanted more integration between the sanctuary and the nave, and he desired more active participation from the people.

One can argue with his specifics, and the chaplain of the CMAA did so, defending ad orientem and the elimination of the sign of the peace by the people. These defenses were persuasive, in my view, and I remain unconvinced by the specifics that Paul Ford offered.

And yet that leaves the larger question. Is the only path through the reform of the reform to make the OF like the EF as much as possible? Maybe not. The OF certainly does have some merit on its own: the intelligibility of the readings, the openness and audibility of the some prayers, the unavoidable emphasis on deeper involvement of the people in the pews.

Had the postconciliar reforms been conducted with more caution, we might have ended up with all the benefits of reform without experiencing the radical remake that the rite of Paul VI ended up being.

But that’s all water under the bridge at this point. The vernacular exists. The OF exists. The calendar was changed. So let us put the question a different way. Does the OF, as it exists in the liturgical books (as distinct from how it exists in the real world) have anything unique about it that needs to be protected from being absorbed by the history of the Roman Rite? I find this question intriguing and the answers not entirely settled.

In general, I think the answer is yes. The Of does offer some uniquely meritorious features that I would not want to see entirely go away. The vernacular is a gift, as Msgr. Schuler used to say. The wider range of readings is a good thing. I can even see that there is a point to the Responsorial Psalm when done well. To my mind, these must be considered against what I find to be regrettable aspects of the OF: its linearity, its lack of quiet prayers, its reductionism, and, above all, its overemphasis on choices and options.

Nonetheless, Ford does raise interesting points. It is undeniable that, for example, polyphonic settings of the Mass ordinary, enjoy a happier existence in the EF than the OF framework (for distinct reasons). Even from the point of view of the liturgical books, the OF does seem to call forth a distinct treatment, and I do believe that Ford might be onto something here. The problem of the reform of the reform might not so easily be addressed with the one standard that the EF provides.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

How to Criticize Liturgical Music

It’s a particular problem for those of us who write about liturgical music. We can write and write about positive ideas, highlight good music, present the rationale and the ideal time and again, and yet not hear that much either way about the views we advance.

But if we take on a particular real-life liturgy and point out ways in which it fell short, it’s like the ceiling falls in. We are accused of being horrible people who are setting out to hurt others, of being terrible snobs who are out of touch with the people in the pews, of pushing a mean-spirited agenda at others’ expense, and other things along those lines.

It’s true enough that critics need to be respectful and never personal. I’ve not always maintained the wisest and most prudent path in this regard, though I’ve tried to improve in my tone and approach to criticism over the years.

Even so, it rarely makes a difference. Anytime you point that that some attempt at liturgical music falls short, and obviously so, the response is the same hysteria each time. You would swear that I insulted someone’s clothing or appearance or choice of radio station. The tenor of the response is always personal even when the criticism was not.

It was very interesting for me to hear Msgr. Andrew Wadsworth’s speech at the Sacred Music Colloquium XXI because it struck me as a model of criticism. It was precise, balanced, and well documented in every respect. But it still hit hard, making headlines in the Tablet and raising the hackles of the liturgical establishment all over the UK. His criticism was directed at the Mass of the 2012 Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in which the Pope himself participated.

The Pope had given a wonderful video homily on the progress of liturgical reform, but none of this progress was in evidence at the liturgy itself.

And so Msgr. Wadsworth made the obvious points that no one else was willing to make. He said that the “the entire liturgy had a ‘performance’ quality to it, with the assembly as the principal focus.” As evidence, he pointed out that musical numbers were met with applause. He further pointed out that the Mass used none of the proper antiphons assigned to the Mass of the occasion. The choir could have sung the entrance, offertory, and communion but instead replace each with some other composition with a different text. Illustrating the problem. the communion antiphon was replaced by a performance of “The Priests” singing “May the Road Rise to Meet You.”

Msgr. Wadsworth said” “I feel like asking, just what is wrong with the Communion antiphon and psalm?”

Further, there was no Latin in the liturgy.

Finally, the Credo was spoken in an antiphon-response structure whereby a different language was used on each phrase and the response came from the people each time: “Credo, Amen.” The rubrics nowhere provide for such an innovation. It was entirely invented.

Msgr. Wadsworth concluded: “The depressing cumulative effect of the disregard for all these principles in a major liturgy, celebrated by a papal legate, and broadcast throughout the world, is hard to underestimate. … There can be no talk of the reform of the Roman Rite until the GIRM is enforced as the minimum requirement. If it remains a largely fantasy text at the beginning of our altar missals then ‘the rebuilding of the broken down city’ will take a very long time.”

Strong and on point in every respect. It touches on all the salient points and does so with precision, accuracy, and the complete absence of personal attack or personal bias. All he did was compare the reality at a Papal Mass in Dublin with the words of the General Instruction and the true spirit of recent reform efforts.

It’s long past time for the people who construct these events be held to account for what they do. If they do not know better, that speaks very poorly of their liturgical knowledge. If they do know better, one does have to wonder about their motivation. Either way, something must be said and someone must say it.

For years, we’ve seen this sort of thing. I find myself dreading these events because you never know what’s going to come next, and it pains me so much to see the Pope in particular celebrate them. One suspects that he does find this heartbreaking.

The advance team does what it can to encourage good liturgy but there are pastoral limits to how far the team can go in imposing Rome’s wishes. And in fact, nothing should have to be imposed at all. The purpose of liturgical law, rubrics, and tradition is precisely to prevent the arbitrary exercise of power.

But what to do when such rules are completely ignored and the spirit of the times is treated like it is wholly irrelevant to the choices made over the structure of the liturgy? This tendency illustrates a complete disregard for the minimal requirements of being a faithful steward of the Roman rite.

So where do we begin the change? Msgr. Wadsworth suggests the following. a sense of reverence for the text, a greater willingness to heed Sacrosanctum concilium, careful attention to the demands of the calendar and the norms which govern the celebration of the liturgy, a re-reading of the encyclical Mediator Dei of Pope Pius XII in conjunction with more recent Magisterial documents, a widespread cultivation of a dignified and reverent liturgy that evidences careful preparation and respect for its constituent elements in accordance with the liturgical norms, a recovery of Latin, the recovery of the liturgical voice, the exclusion of pop music, a clearer distinction between devotional music and liturgical music, and greater commitment to silence.

Most importantly, we need to start to see “the music as a vehicle for the liturgy not the other way around.”

If we heeded those principles, we would start to see dramatic change. You can help in this regard. If you find yourself in a position to comment on music in the Catholic Mass, go through a checklist:

Where the proper texts sung?
Did the form of the Ordinary texts conform to rubrics?
Did Latin make any appearance?
Did the musicians perform as if on a stage and elicit applause?
Where the people or God the focus of the liturgy?
Did the style draw mainly from secular culture or sacred forms?

These are all important considerations. It is true that a Papal Mass should be held to a higher standard but these really are universal standards. And remember to always criticize in charity and awareness that many people today just simply do not know better. Education and enlightenment are better paths than outright condemnation. The model presented here by Msgr. Wadsworth really does need further application.