Chant Café

As we celebrated the Ember Days for Lent, I started doing a little bit more research on Ember and Rogation Days, with a view to wondering how I might be able to explain to my faithful, especially my school kids, what these are all about.  As I continue my series of liturgical guides, I composed one for these all-too-forgotten days. Here is the link to my Dropbox with all of those guides, as well as the  Ember and Rogation Days Guide.  I know it is a bit late for these Ember Days, but keep it in your crime files for the future!

Remember this is meant to be an internal document just for our parish, and this guide basically rearranges lots of already available stuff from fisheaters.com and Gueranger’s The Liturgical Year.  But if it is helpful to you, then do with it what you will!  Enjoy!

On an “ages old” MusicaSacra Forum post which recently had a little new activity, there is a discussion – one that is repeated and continued over and over wherever Catholic musicians congregate: What role should historical “accuracy” and other scholarly musicological work have on current performance practice? How important is it to get performance details ‘right’? Does it even matter whether we can know how chant sounded at some specific point in the past?

I am not a musicologist, so I’m can’t really comment on issues such as what is or isn’t known or what should and shouldn’t be considered accurate historical performance practice.

What concerns me, though, is a particular way of thinking about historical performance practice which I think is wrong in itself and which is related to a very wrong way of thinking about liturgy and its historical development.

The “wrong way” (in my opinion) is expressed by forum user ‘pulchritudo_musicae’ (who is, apparently, Amy Danielle Waddle, the author of the original Sacred Music article that sparked the discussion). I don’t really believe that she thinks exactly what her statements seems to say, so I want to focus just on the statement as a manifestation of a certain way of thinking, whether or not ADW holds that mindset or not. She wrote:

it is our duty and responsibility to try to determine the most accurate way to sing, the most accurate style, the most accurate notation [ . . . ] the task before us as scholars and as musicians to determine what chant should be

I think this notion that there is some accurate or correct ideal performance practice is wrong-headed, and that it is a manifestation of a modernist way of thinking which has, in other areas of the Church’s life, been destructive.

Moderns have a tendency to fetishize historical accuracy, cloaking a reactionary retreat into the past in the guise of intellectual progress.

This began in the Renaissance with the attempt to restore some perfect past version of Latin (that of Cicero). That project killed Latin as a conversational language among international academics, and halted the ongoing development and creation of new, and yet authentic, Latin liturgical texts.

At the same, the revival of Classical thinking and the adherence to Classical authorities in early-modern academia caused a substantial loss of Medieval philosophical and scientific development. While contemporary secular culture considers this period one of enlightened progress, the fact is that these Classicists wanted nothing more than to ‘turn back the clock,’ abandoning over a millennium of real and steady progress.

(And when Protestants, the spiritual children of the Renaissance, had the opportunity to write history, they swept all this under a rug of anti-Catholic propaganda, coining terms like “The Dark Ages” for a period of almost unparalleled freedom, stability, and intellectual progress. But, I digress…)

In the 20th century liturgical movements we can see first the liberal resourcement that wanted to strip away eighteen centuries of development in favor of some imagined “Early Christian Community Meal” (in exact parallel to the early-modern idolization of Classical philosophy). Then, later, a generation of naive traditionalists seemed to imagine that everything was wonderful before the Council and that history ended sometime in the Baroque era – rejecting false progress in favor of false nostalgia.

But history doesn’t work like that. And working performers – singers, directors, actors, dancers – know especially that the performing cannot be properly understood this way.

Any particular performance of a chant – or, really, any piece of music – is a unique event on its own AND ALSO is part of the tradition of that piece’s history. The first performance is not a ‘Platonic’ standard, with subsequent performances being merely re-enactments or instantiations of that single ideal.

When this notion of a past ideal and present re-enactment becomes normative in an artform, the results are usually disastrous and (Peter Brook would say) deadly. Opera, for example, suffers from this in many places. Ballet as well, and – to a lesser proportion but a greater quantity – Shakespearean theatre.

And this way of thinking, which is deadening to the performing and practical arts, is equally dangerous (perhaps, moreso) in liturgy.

The sacrifice of Calvary and the self-giving nourishment of the Last Supper are not simply remembered or re-enacted in the Mass, with the historical events standing behind us as Platonic ideals or as dramatic inspiration. Rather, the sacrifice is made entirely present and new in each Mass throughout history – even as it is the same sacrifice, offered once for all.

Because we cannot allow this deadening spirit to inform our understanding of liturgy, it is important that we guard against it in performance culture generally and especially with regards to the music which is so integrally a part of our liturgical heritage.

And I want to make clear that I am in no means suggesting an anti-intellectual approach to chant and liturgy, or that I would encourage an abandonment of the historical and musicological study of these things. Rather, I simply believe that we must keep these things in their proper perspective.

Historical scholarship is important. It is good to know what people have done in the past. It is worthwhile to preserve and work within the tradition, and worthwhile to revive traditions which have fallen out of practice. We should never approach music in a haphazard, “do whatever I like” approach, but humble ourselves and recognize our place within a tradition that has gone before us for a thousand years and will most likely survive us for another thousand.

At the same time, we shouldn’t let the virtues of historical and musicological scholarship become idols, and we should guard our theoretical frameworks, lest we let our academic pursuits become a deadening force on the liturgy and an impediment to the recognition of God’s all-present and life-giving grace in the sacraments.

Indeed, this is the very last day, very last evening on which your paid early registration for Colloquium XXIV will not only save you money on the best week of your musical summer.  Indeed, this is your last chance to include a FREE copy of Dr. William Mahrt’s The Musical Shape of the Liturgy.

Think about it – money saved and a new book to enjoy!  But remember, the offer ends at midnight tonight!
Make haste!  Go here now!!

If you’ve already benefited from this offer, accept our thanks and congratulations.

I wrote an exegetical paper once that tried to prove that the water imagery throughout the Gospel of John is a reference to the Holy Spirit.

St. Thomas Aquinas holds a more nuanced position: the Holy Spirit is the fountain of living water, and the water itself is the grace given by the Holy Spirit. These few paragraphs from his Commentary on John concerning this Sunday’s gospel are enlightening on that score.

577 We may begin with what is last, and we should know first what is to be understood by water. And we should say that water signifies the grace of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes this grace is called fire, and at other times water, to show that it is neither one of these in its nature, but like them in the way it acts. It is called fire because it lifts up our hearts by its ardor and heat: “ardent in Spirit” (Rom 12:11), and because it burns up sins: “Its light is fire and flame” (Sg 8:6). Grace is called water because it cleanses: “I will pour clean water upon you, and you will be cleansed from all your uncleanness (Ez 36:25), and because it brings a refreshing relief from the heat of temptation: “Water quenches a flaming fire” (Sir 3:33), and also because it satisfies our desires, in contrast to our thirst for earthly things and all temporal things whatever: “Come to the waters, all you who thirst” (Is 55:1).

Now water is of two kinds: living and non-living. Non-living water is water which is not connected or united with the source from which it springs, but is collected from the rain or in other ways into ponds and cisterns, and there it stands, separated from its source. But living water is connected with its source and flows from it. So according to this understanding, the grace of the Holy Spirit is correctly called living water, because the grace of the Holy Spirit is given to man in such a way that the source itself of the grace is also given, that is, the Holy Spirit. Indeed, grace is given by the Holy Spirit: “The love of God is poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). For the Holy Spirit is the unfailing fountain from whom all gifts of grace flow. “One and the same Spirit does all these things (1 Cor 12:11). And so, if anyone has a gift [here Thomas is speaking of “gift” in wide sense] of the Holy Spirit without having the Spirit, the water is not united with its source, and so is not living but dead: “Faith without works is dead” (Jas 2:20).

578 Then we are shown hat in the case of adults, living water, i.e., grace, is obtained by desiring it, i.e.e, by asking. “The Lord has heard the desire of the poor” (Ps. 9:17), for grace is not given to anyone without their asking and desiring it. Thus we say that in the justification of a sinner an act of free will is necessary to detest sin and to desire grace, according to Matthew (7:7): “Ask and you will receive). In fact, desire is so important that even the Son himself is told to ask: Ask me, and I will give it to you” (Ps 2:8). Therefore, no one who resists grace receives it, unless he first desires it; this is clear in the case of Paul who, before he received grace, desired it, saying, “Lord, what do you want me to do?” (Acts 9:6). Thus it is significant that he says, you perhaps would have asked him. He says perhaps on account of free will, with which a person sometimes desires and asks for grace, and sometimes does not.

579 There are two things which lead a person to desire and ask for grace: a knowledge of the good to be desired and a knowledge of the giver. So, Christ offers these two to her. First of all, a knowledge of the gift itself; hence he says, If you knew the gift of God, which is every desirable good which comes from the Holy spirit: “I know that I cannot control myself unless God grants it to me” (Wis 8:21). And this is a gift of God, and so forth. Secondly, he mentions the giver; and he says, and realized who it is who says to you, i.e.e, if you knew the one who can give it, namely, that it is I: “When the Paraclete comes, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth … he will bear witness to me” (below 15:26); “You have given gifts to men” (Ps 67:19).