Category: Article by Jeffrey Tucker

Two years ago, we made a movie that was one of those media events that happens only once and will never be repeated, mainly because its brilliance rests most fundamentally with the delightful naivete of all of us who were involved in its making. We had no idea just how difficult such a task would be, or what the results might be when we started out.

The credit belongs entirely to Jeffrey Ostrowski who shepherded from the beginning. The goal was to do something, anything, to convey to the world just how exciting and thrilling the world of sacred music truly is. It was also designed to advertise and market the Sacred Music Colloquium (which this year runs June 25 through July 1 in Salt Lake City).

It seems odd to use the language of marketing here since no one makes a dime from this event and the sponsoring organization runs on a shoestring budget. If it were not for periodic (but rare) benefactors that picked up some of the bills, we would have shut down long ago. The truth is, that everything needs marketing at some level, something to convince people to interrupt the regular course of their lives and try something completely new.

This has been the great challenge in the world of sacred music. The problem in our parishes is not unknown. It goes something like this. Our music is not serious, not substantial, not liturgical, facts which drive off serious people and talented musicians; but without the serious people and talented musicians around, there is no real hope for improvement down the line. It becomes a vicious circle that digs a deeper hole every year.

This happened only recently to a top-notch musician who moved to a college town. She went to a local parish to offer services. Then she found something amazing. The parish was large but had no musicians at all. There was no budget and no talent. They scraped by on the usual terrible music from the 1970s, sort of singing and sort of playing a few things. But otherwise there was nothing.

She began to ask around as to why this was so. The answer came quickly. No musicians are involved because the music is so bad. And the music is so bad because no musicians are involved. How do you break out of such a disaster? And by the way, this is not at all uncommon. Musicians have been fleeing the Catholic world for decades, and only recently started to return very slowly.

The only way out is find people who have an ever so slight interest in doing something about the problem, training them to read and sing the chants of the faith, and inspire them to get to work in saving the liturgy and the world. It’s not so easy to do this. You have to inspire even that much interest. You have to get people to believe that it is worth their time and effort. And, let’s face it, Catholics aren’t much for making serious commitments beyond weekly Mass attendance. They imagine themselves to be consumers not producers of services. It is pathetic but true, and I wish I understood why.

Still, we have to offer opportunities for those who feel the call. If we do not, there is no hope at all for change.

The Colloquium goes many steps beyond that toward total immersion in heavenly beauty for a full week. Yes it is life changing. Every year the Colloquium has attracted more people. This year will be the biggest and best ever. I would suggest that nearly all progress in the Catholic musical arts in this country and beyond are due to this one event.

The really big change this year is that we have opened up the program on both ends: you can be a non-musician, non-singer, and not read a note, or you can be an advanced professional with a conservatory degree. Absolutely everyone can benefit. We wanted to reduce the intimidation element that keeps people away while always increase professional networking opportunities. We hope that we’ve done both.

It is an uphill struggle and it is certainly not lucrative. But here we are with the job that has fallen to this generation. We must rebuild. We must work. We must leave Catholic tradition for others to pick up and appreciate in the next generation. If we do not, we have not fulfilled our mandate.

It only takes one generation to make this turnaround happen. With enough commitment and sacrifice, it can happen. It also involves non-musicians. We need donors. We need attendees. We need people to talk this up. We really need prayers.

There have been dark times in the past for sacred music. But the light can come if we take the right steps. Please join us.

Ignatius Press is a leading publisher of Catholic books, including many by Pope Benedict XVI. I’ve been in parish libraries before to see hundreds of this publisher’s editions. They are loved by priests and laypeople. They market online and in a print catalog. They are even releasing ebooks today. None of this is news to anyone reading this. Ignatius has been part of the Catholic landscape since 1978, so much so that people just take the company for granted.

Think of the date of 1978. That was more than a decade after a wild and unexpected turmoil swept through the Catholic Church in all lands. The publishing house was founded to recall our roots, to firmly root Catholic teaching in tradition and history and truth. It received little or no support from the Bishops. It had no sugar-daddy funding. It was a struggle from the beginning and still is.

But, my goodness, look at the difference it has made. This is what makes the difference between complaining and doing. Or to use the old cliche, it the difference between cursing the darkness and shining a light.

Why did it take so long to do this with music? Music was among the most contentious area of Catholic life after the Council. The propers of the Mass faded away. The Gregorian chant became controversial because of the language change. Pop music was all the rage. It shoved its way into liturgy. It took over the publishers. It became a juggernaut. If you stood in the way, you were destroyed.

One of the earliest efforts to provide an alternative was Cantica Nova, a publisher of excellent work for parishes. It was started by Gary Penkala, and on a shoestring budget. But he did it and he did a great job. Still does.

This effort was picked up and joined by the Church Music Association of America. It is wonderful to see what is happening now. The Parish Book of Chant is an institution. We’ve published the first widely distributed book of English propers. And, my goodness, have a look at William Mahrt’s The Musical Shape of the Liturgy. Here is the high-powered stuff, the real and full explanation of the framework of music at Mass.

What’s next? In a few weeks, you will begin seeing some announcements for two books we are now finishing up. The first is Words With Wings, a program for children’s chant with a workbook and teacher’s manual. It was first conceived of by Netherlands conductor Wilko Brouwers. Then it was translated and adapted for English by Arlene Oost-Zinner.

It is the first modern curriculum for schools and parishes to use to build up children’s choirs. It takes the great wisdom of the past and renders it in contemporary language. It permits kids to learn how to sing using chant, and forms them and shapes them into real singers who can sing at Mass. These books are short, lucid, easy to use.

It’s a new beginning for children’s voices in Catholic liturgy. We dare not neglect this task. There can be no real future for the chant until children are heavily involved in the project. But until now, all the material we’ve had to work with was dated and a bit dusty. Worse, they presumed a world that does not exist, one in which kids were in school in dedicated choir programs every single day of the year. This is not our world, as we well know.

Words with Wings has been long in the making and now it is about to become a reality. It will be affordable and accessible. Any teacher can learn to use the book in the course of a very short training session. So long as she stays one step ahead of the kids, the learning and progress can take place in every parish.

So, if you are pastor or a education director in your parish, prepare ye the way! Musical improvement and progress is at hand.

The translator of this book is also the composer of the most-downloaded Responsorial Psalms on the Internet. These Psalms are all being collected in one volume called The Parish Book of Psalms. It will be the clearest and most accessible way to sing this portion of the Mass according to a Gregorian tradition in English. All the verses are written out and notated. All the antiphons can be immediately sung by the people. They are solemn and dignified.

The idea of this book is to provide a viable competitor to the usual books that are out there. I believe that this will work and work brilliantly.

These will be the latest addition to a suite of books that provide real-world answers to the problem of what to do about the pervasiveness of pop music liturgy. These are lights in a dark world.

One final word about journalism. The Wanderer deserves a great deal of credit too. In times when nearly every Catholic publication went with the time, The Wanderer has chartered a course of truth and courage. Even now, I’m deeply grateful for this venue because it runs my article on music every single week without fail. This takes guts. And it is making a difference.

In their own way, each of these institutions has decided to do something about the problem. The future is much brighter as a result.

Everyone knows that the Catholic people in the pews have a singing issue. For the most part, they don’t dig it. It doesn’t matter how many lectures they are given, how much a cantor waves his or her arms, how loudly the organist or pianist prays, the singing in a Catholic parish, even when it does take place, is seriously subdued as compared with just about any protestant congregation.

I’m not among those who think that this issue is the central issue of the liturgy that needs to be fixed. For my own part, I do find it annoying that when I visit a new parish and sing out, I get stares and glares from people as if to say: “hey, we don’t do that here!” But in the end, what matters about Mass is not that everyone is belting out songs at the top of their voices but rather the interior work of prayer and contemplation.

As regards singing, a much more serious problem concerns the celebrant. His parts should be sung, as often as possible and as much as possible. On this front, we have a serious problem. When the parts are not sung, the people are not singing the dialogues (“The Lord be with you; and with your spirit”) and those are the parts that are easiest and have traditionally been most commonly sung. When the dialogues are spoken, the liturgical structure is destabilized because the only singing then comes from the choir, and that reinforces the sense that the music is merely for background effect or for entertainment and performance.

In 2007, the USCCB released document called “Sing to the Lord.” It says the following about the need for the priest to sing:

“The importance of the priest’s participation in the Liturgy, especially by singing, cannot be overemphasized. The priest sings the presidential prayers and dialogues of the Liturgy according to his capabilities, and he encourages sung participation in the Liturgy by his own example, joining in the congregational song…. Seminaries and other programs of priestly formation should train priests to sing with confidence and to chant those parts of the Mass assigned to them. Those priests who are capable should be trained in the practice of chanting the Gospel on more solemn occasions when a deacon may not be present. At the very least, all priests should be comfortable singing those parts of the Eucharistic Prayer that are assigned to them for which musical notation is provided in the Roman Missal.”

The language is stilted and unimaginative but the message is correct. And yet, once again, the exhortation has no effect. Why? Here is my theory. Our culture treats the notion of “singing” as something done by specialists, entertainers, recording artists, pop superstars, and all for the sake of delighting the audience. American Idol. That is what singing is. The priests notes the contrast between himself and these people and comes to the inevitable conclusion: I’m not a singer. Believe me, you don’t want to hear my voice. I can’t carry so much as a simple tune. Therefore I will not sing the liturgy. I’m sparing you the pain.

You know what’s awful? This whole mistaken view of what singing is tends to be reinforced by pop music at Mass. Pop music encourages the performance ethos. Music with a beat reminds us of recording stars. Jazzy chords and head-swaying sensibilities pushes this idea that singing is only for those who want to be loved and admired for their great talents. Music groups who do this kind of music — and this is the mainstay of the music pushed by mainstream publishers — are only entrenching the non-involvement of the priest in singing.

There is a reason that only a few Bishops in the entire national conference of the United States sing their parts. It’s because they are very much used to pop music and the pop ethos dominating the Mass. In the same way that a very talkative person won’t let you get a word in, this style of music doesn’t like the celebrant get a note in. This music crowds out simple chanting. The celebrant comes to believe that there is no place for him in the production of Mass associated with liturgy.

There ought to be a different word for what the priest is actually be asked to do. He is not being asked to become a star or to entertain anyone. He is not seeking a channel on Pandora or looking to sell downloads on iTunes. He is not trying to win a competition. In the Church’s conception of the singing a priest does, there is not a very great distance in physics between the speaking and singing. His singing really amounts to speaking with a slightly different kind of voice, one with a pitch that takes it off the ground and out of the realm of conversation and puts the words in flight. It is a simple shift that makes a gigantic difference in how the words come across.

I’ve personally never heard of a priest who cannot, in fact, sing all the parts he is being asked to sing. I would go further and say that the priest who is most qualified to do this is precisely the one who thinks that he cannot do it. That implies a certain humility, which is what is required to sing at liturgy.

The first step, which any priest can start this week, is to find any pitch and enunciate the words of the Mass on that one pitch rather than simply speak it. Maintain the rhythm of speaking. There is no need to work on changing pitches at the start. Just pick one random note that feels good and proceed with the text of the Mass. This one step makes him a singing priest. He has already fulfilled the goal of the Church in doing this one thing.

I know a priest who went all the way through seminary and his first years of priesthood without singing a single note. He was convinced that he could not. He was surely that was “not a singer” and thus refused to do so. There was no negotiation on this matter. It was just the way things are.

Then one day he was given the above advise, that singing liturgy isn’t like singing Broadway or trying out at an audition. One note will suffice at the beginning. He finally tried it at liturgy. Guess what? He was perfectly brilliant. He was fantastic. The words were very clearly and the text was ennobled and elevated. He loved it because he could immediately tell what taking this one action did to the liturgy. It changed the whole environment to become more solemn and beautiful. The choir and the people were all inspired. And this was just the beginning. Over the coming weeks, he tried more and more. Pretty soon he had overcome all his fears and he redefined himself and his skills.

The Mass where I heard him do this was otherwise filled with chant from the schola and the people, who chanted the Mass parts without accompaniment. This made his first attempt easy to integrate into the existing aesthetic structure. It might have been different if the choir was singing jazz or rock or had some amazing soloist seeking to delight an audience. Sensing that a simple chant would be out of place, he might never have attempted it.

So the solution: the choir should chant. That’s what gives the priest the confidence to attempt to sing his parts. And he can. He really can. Then we will start to see a change in the people in the pews as they join in the song.

Just about every Catholic I know is interested in this idea of re-introducing sacred music in their parish. The musical conventions are worn and tired, no longer fresh as they might have seemed when they came along decades ago. Meanwhile, there is all this vast amount of sacred music that has been sitting on the shelf, waiting to be incorporated into Mass. The trouble is finding the inspiration and means to make the change and doing so with some degree of competence and knowledge about what the change really means.

There really are no shortcuts to a thorough experience such as what the Sacred Music Colloquium provides. You can find out more at musicasacra.com/colloquium.

This year it run June 25 through July 1. It is being held in Salt Lake City at this city’s stunning cathedral. It is a full week of teaching, lectures, training, socializing, and participating in a liturgical life that is hardly available anywhere else. All your questions will be answered. You will discover the theological rationale. You will learn to read and sing chant. You will discover how polyphonic music fits in with sacred music.

In some ways, it is like learning a new aesthetic language. This requires rethinking the purposes and culture of Catholic liturgy itself. This program makes doing so fun, enlightening, and even life changing.

This year we are trying something new. We are trying to make the conference a friendly environment for people who do not think of themselves as musicians. For those who don’t want to sing complex polyphonic Masses, they do not have to. There are several beginning classes on chant that face no pressure to perform at any point in the week. You can just be in the classes and learn.

A major advantage of the venue this year is that it is very family friendly. Spouses, even those without the slightest interest in singing, can come and enjoy large parts of the program, attending the lectures and events they want to attend and otherwise enjoying the amenities of this great city.

In the past, the colloquium did actually require a commitment to attending rehearsals all day. For those who want to do this, that’s great. Nothing has changed. But for others who want to attend chant classes just to gain an exposure, attend the day’s liturgy to experience something amazing, go to a dinner or an afternoon lecture, those are available without the expectation that it will be “all music, all the time.”

At the same time, we’ve changed the program so that professional musicians feel very much at home. They can come to be with colleagues, attend one of many break-out sessions on a topic of their choice, or go to concerts of the best performers. They can spend time with the top experts who make up the faculty. This change was made because we are ever more aware that a large community is developing now and it includes people who are very sophisticated and sing chant and sacred music every week.

It is no small feat to put on this program at all — and the CMAA is a volunteer organization with a tiny and vulnerable budget (please support us: we need it!). It is even more of a trick to put together a program that serves beginners, professionals, and just interested attendees. But with much thought, time, and attention to lessons learned from past years, we think we have accomplished that this year.

As for the effectiveness of the program, it is beyond doubt. People are left changed by it. To live in and breath this culture for a solid week leaves a permanent mark. You come to realize just how remarkable the opportunity for beautiful liturgy really is. Every week when we forgo it in favor of something else is a week when sung prayer does not happen, and when, in a literal sense, an important part of the Church’s liturgy is left to languish. On the other hand, there is no one who cannot immediately understand the merit of true liturgical music upon hearing it.

There are many reasons why some people choose not to attend an event like this. There are those who think “I’m not a musician” and so they decline. This can no longer be an excuse. I’m thinking in particular of pastors and priests who are fascinated by the prospect of improved liturgy but don’t see how they fit into the picture. This time, they can come and learn so much and take this knowledge back with them to inspire change.

Also, there is often a confusion about the kind of people who inhabit the world of sacred music. The caricature is that we are snooty, stuffy, distant, dogmatic, and do nothing but sneer at popular music and every amateur attempt to do music at the parish level. This perception — and I’m not even sure what it is based on — is incredibly and wildly wrong.

Contrary to the caricature, the people who love this music are fun, warm, engaging people. There is no room for intellectual snobbery here because the chant itself is humbling — and not one attendee or faculty member knows all that he or she should or could know. There is a real sense in which we are all discovering this wonderful music together.

Nor is there an entrenched loathing of popular music on display at this event. Most of the musicians have sung other styles. We’ve played in jazz bands, rock bands, and sung every kind of music one can imagine. What makes the difference is that we’ve come to to realize that liturgy itself requires something special and unique — something “set apart.” The music especially suited for liturgy is unlike any other music in the world, with its own beautiful and own purpose. Once we discover that beauty and purpose, we fall in love with what could be, and we work hard to see it realized.

Once discovering chant, we don’t suddenly become stern and cold, disapproving of the state of the world and all that it is in. Sometimes the opposite happens. Sacred music is so fulfilling that we become more fun, more joyful about life, more liberally minded, more expansive in our outlook. To discover this music is like discovering a new sector of life itself, like learning philosophy or travelling to a new country that helps you see the whole world in a new way.

Another point here: it is not the case that an event like this preaches only one approach to music at liturgy. Every year the options grow. There are now so many varieties of chant, so many different ways to sing it, so many options for singing the liturgical text, so many beautiful choices that are presented before us. What makes the difference is that sacred music is using the actually liturgical texts and doing so in a balanced way that doesn’t exaggerate one truth (e.g., the people should participate in singing) at the expense of other truths (there really is an exclusive role for the choir!).

Many Catholic musicians I know (and actually this applies to many Catholics in general) are seeking inspiration and liturgical goals. We have a new translation of the Missal. What is next? Or is our experience at Mass just going to be the “same old” forever and ever? Sacred music provides a fresh start, something new and dazzling that helps us understand our faith and its liturgical presentation in a whole new way.

If you have ever considered coming to an event that deals with Catholic music, it is very likely that you are being called. Answer that call, and come to the Sacred Music Colloquium, June 25-July 1, 2012, in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is more exciting than any adventure you have ever experienced. This conference is for you, and it is only left to you to take that step.