Chant Café

Year after year at the Sacred Music Colloquium, some of the most beautiful, stable, and reliably accurate chanting has emerged from the choirs under the direction of Arlene Oost-Zinner. Why this is true becomes clear when you sit in the rehearsals. She holds the view that every single should be able to read and sing the chant on his or her own, and not merely depend on cues from neighbors or rote reproduction of what the director is demanding.

There is a huge difference between the two approaches. Too often scholas form around the abilities of a single person and others develop only the skill of echoing what the leader sings. This can work for years, even if it yields a sort of muddy and disorganized sound. The problem comes when the leader disappears and the group suddenly discovers that no one else really knows how to sing what they have only pretended to sing for years. It can be quite the revelation!

For this reason, she believes in teaching the details of everything that goes on in chant, from notes and rhythms to the delicate tasks of connection specific words to specific neumes. Her rehearsals, then, are not only about preparing the chants to be sung at liturgy the next day but about singing the chant in general. This is why her students are able to return to their parishes with a new artistic apparatus in place, one that can be applied at the local level and spread out from there.

I’ve variously stood at the side of the room and watched the faces of her students as she explains the way to sing this or that figure. Everyone is engaged very closely, listening very intensely, and then, when they learn something new, they have a look as if to think: “oh, now I understand this!” People report that the rehearsals go by very quickly. The singers in liturgy are completely prepared and sing with great confidence – not because they have memorized the chant but because they all have an understanding of how to sing.

I once asked a famous conductor how he decides what to work on next during a rehearsal. He said that it was not difficult: he has a model on his head about how something should sound, and slowly works to conform the performance of a particular group to this mental ideal. It is clear to me that Oost-Zinner does this herself. She has a sense of what should happen, and works with patience and precision — gently but decisively — to help everyone sing in just this way.

It’s not long before singers begin to trust her instruction, which, again, is never just about one chant but about the whole art of chant. Everything she teaches she does with the aim of imparting general lessons that can be applied throughout the whole body of Gregorian chant, and applied from within each and every singer.

Most people know her work through her composed English Psalms, which are the most popular downloads at Chabanel Psalms. The Cafe is attempting to raise money to bring them all out in a single volume as a help to choirs. One reason they are so good is precisely because of her primary interest and knowledge in the Latin chant from the Gregorian books. It is from these chant that she learned the integration between notes and words.

This year, she is teaching the beginning chant class. This much is for certain: by the time these students leave her class, they will no longer be beginners. They will be ready for a lifetime of singing the greatest body of music ever be created, and sing for the highest possible purpose. Indeed, this is a class from which future masters of chant will emerge.

The four-hymn sandwich doesn’t discombobulate the liturgical structure, though it does deeply injury the liturgical intent. By replacing the actual words of the Mass, the propers, with some random poetry drawn from someone else, it does indeed cheat the people, as the Vatican said in 1969. Still, it can work from a structural standpoint, which is one reason that it lasts.

But there are occasions when it is pushed to the limit, as when the crowds are so big that one hymn is not enough to take up the entire liturgical action. Since most modern choirs don’t have motets prepared, most organists (or guitar players) have no solos to play, and Psalm singing is an unknown art to most Catholic musicians, what are the musicians to do? Well, choose another hymn.Or two. Or three.

I attended such an occasion the other day – it was first communion – and the choir solved the problem by piling up hymn after hymn after hymn. There were a total of seven hymns sung in the course of a single Mass: one for entrance, two for offertory, three for communion, and one for recession.

Leave aside the problem of style; they were all essential indistinguishable variations of the Ecleasy Listening form we all know too well. The real question is: what message does this send? Well, I counted the total number of words sung in these non-liturgical hymns. The total was 1,650 words. Then I counted the words in the appointed readings of the day. The total was 530.

So if we care about the words at Mass, we have a clear case in which the optional hymns have dominated the message. Three times as many words came from random outside hymns than the scripture itself.

I didn’t count the words of the homily plus the order of Mass, but I would guess that if you add them, you would end up with equal content overall.

Now, this is interesting to me. We’ve just been through a 30-year struggle for a new Missal with endless meetings and struggles over the question of what should be the texts spoken and sung at Mass. That makes sense because this is serious business. And yet who is paying attention to the hymns published and selected by the choir? Clearly, this aspect of Mass is very nearly equally weighted in terms of the message that people hear. And yet, there has been very little focus on this at all.

Truly, most of these hymns constitute not an extension of the Mass texts but an interruption of them — or worse, they are a replacement for them. It strikes me that it would be a perfectly reasonable legislative change that would mandate that the propers of the Mass must be sung (or spoken). In other words, if people just have to have their hymn fix, the choir should earn the right to sing a hymn by first singing the propers of the Mass. This is not an extreme proposal. It would fix something fundamental. Pastors can and should implement this on their own.

As a final note, let me complain about something that has been driving me nuts for years. A certain publisher out there has manage to nearly destroy ever traditional hymn in the books by provide arrangements that are completely unsingable by any standard.

My choir sings Vitoria, Sweelinck, Byrd, and Tallis, but finds the arrangements given for traditional hymns to be incomprehensible, not to mention completely ineffective. It’s bad enough that these companies insist on copyright protecting hymns that are otherwise in the public domain, which is why they re-write them in the first place, but can they not have the decency to publish something that can actually be sung?

Here is my exhibit A