Chant Café

I know a high school group of liturgical singers and strummers that might mean well but makes a terrible mess of the music at Mass, week after week. There are thousands of such groups around the country. I’m sure you too know of a few.

The archetypes are common. There’s a drummer, a singer, a backup singer, a pianist, and a guitar player. None of them can play their instruments well. The singer can’t sing without being heavily miked and without musical emoticons strewn throughout. The repertoire is bubble-gum pop ballads with a Jesus theme. People fear going to Masses where they play, and they are the constant brunt of negative mutterings, though the players themselves are not aware of it.

Of course they have no idea what they are doing. No one has ever discussed with them anything about the musical demands of the Roman Rite. They know nothing about the proper orientation for making music at Mass. The liturgical calender is an abstraction. Terms like propers or dialogues are gibberish to them. Most of the players can’t even read music. To them it is an opportunity to see and be seen, a weekly talent gig, and they probably don’t mind it that people give them credit for their service to the parish.

The pastor and celebrant don’t like it any more than anyone else. But the parents of these kids are important people in the parish. The band doesn’t charge any money for their services, such as they are. The director of music has nothing to do with them, and no adults are really involved at any level. At least that teen Mass slot is covered, so, in the balance, it seems to make more sense to tolerate them and endure. Again, it is well known that they mean well, and surely that is enough.

I’m looking at this situation and it seems like an impossible nut to crack.

Some people might look at this and say that the answer is obvious: toss these ill-educated, amateur noise makers out on their ears. Well, that’s an interesting proposal if not exactly pastoral. In fact, I don’t think this approach really works. It does not foster a stable parish environment. It’s not realistic. It doesn’t draw on the existing talents in the parish – and they are thin indeed – and there remains the question concerning who or what would replace them. The Catholic world isn’t exactly crawling with Gregorian choirs waiting in the wings to sing.

So let’s say you had the opportunity to reform them. Keep in mind that this group is not particularly inspired to do more than show up once per week. I’ve thought about this quite a bit and even after all my writing and experience, I’m not entirely sure I would know where to begin. There needs to be a complete reestablishment of musical priorities. They have no idea what they are. And there is a precondition even to that stage: they need to get away from all the microphones, guitars, pianos, and drums, and come to understand that it is not their machinery that makes the music but their voices.

Once we establish the preeminence of the voice in liturgical music, there is another immediate problem. We need sheet music and we can hope that this would not just be yet another collection of junky hymns in a slightly different and stodgier style. We need real liturgical music that is connected intimately to the ritual. Otherwise, they will never come to understand the weightiness of their responsibilities or feel the satisfaction that comes with providing music for Mass.

Now, let’s say that I marched up to this group and handed them the Graduale Romanum and said: sing this! I don’t think I have to explain to readers that this approach is pretty much dead on arrival. In fact, I would suggest that this is true of any music in Latin. This material is absolutely terrifying to this generation. As tragic as this sounds, Latin might as well be German or Russian to these kids. They are nowhere near prepared for it. They barely speak English as it is. What need, then, is music in English, for starters.

Let’s see where we’ve come so far. We’ve led them to see that their voices are more important than their external equipment. We’ve seen that they need to apply their talents to singing not just any Jesus songs that they like but rather music actually connected to the ritual. We realize that this music must be in English.

Now what? If I worked at it I could probably cobble together enough resources to make it possible. I could print out this proper written in 1956 and this choral offertory written in 1992, plus this communion chant someone uploaded last week, and then also this responsorial psalm from a different website. They would all be 8.5X11” printouts from different files online, hard to find and hard to repeat week to week because the resources are so scattered. And let’s face it: a series of random links to scattered material here and there is no substitute for a coherent musical program.

Can you imagine how these kids eyes would glaze over at my explanation? How long would it take these kids to bail out of my great plan here and revert to their fun garage-style music making that everyone else hates and drives people to avoid their Mass time like their plague?

Readers who have been keeping up with the ChantCafe.com know what I’m getting to. I’m getting to the Simple Propers Project of Adam Bartlett and his coworkers. This is music in English in free rhythm, meaning that it does not play to that secular beat approach to music. It is liturgical chant. The editions provide enough music to cover the entire liturgy. They are propers of the Mass so it means that the kids will be contributing to the Mass structure, not behaving as a side show act. This makes their role more important. The music is entirely vocal. It can be sung by one person or twelve. It is a coherent and integrated program.

I’m absolutely beside myself in anticipation of their completion. As I’ve told many people, my dream is to hold that final book in my hands. With this book, at last there will be something to hand to groups like this and say: this is music that is appropriate for you to sing at Mass. It does require a bit of teaching. But how much? I think I could prepare even the kids I describe above to render all this music competently in a single teaching session, and perhaps one followup. This is essential for short-attention spans.

The Simple Propers will acculturate these kids to understand their responsibilities and to come to understand what sacred music feels like and sounds like. This is without long hectoring lectures and treatises and documents on the subject. We teach best by showing and having people do these. This is the best teacher of all. There is another benefit here: the Simple Propers are not an end in themselves. They point to more. They point to the Gregorian tradition because the modality and rhythmic approach is identical. Once having sung propers, choirs will accept no less, so we have here beautifully prepared ground for the re-introduction of the full Gregorian tradition. At some point, the Graduale Romanum will not seem like a book from Mars.

I’ve thought about this whole subject and this book extensively and I’m not exaggerating when I say this: this one book can be bridge for an entire generation to come to embrace the Catholic tradition of music. In this sense, I hardly think there is any more important musical priority for Catholics than this project right now. I’m so excited about it. I’m counting the days until they appear sometime in the summer of 2011.

Thank you again to everyone who has contributed to this marvelous project. We have glorious things to look forward to this Advent.

I’ve posted the 1988 and 1992 Progress Reports of ICEL on the translation of the Roman Missal, which, according to these documents, seems to have begun in earnest as early as 1982. If you think about it, this is a mere 12 years following the promulgation of the New Mass.

The widespread consensus is correct many times over: it was rushed into existence without problem planing, research, or serious work on the translation. The extent of the problems in that first Missal – the bulk of which is still heard in our parishes on a daily basis – go a very long way toward explaining the probably unprecedented upheaval that followed the introduction of the revised liturgy.

Speaking of musical issues alone – and this blog tends to do that! – there was so much confusion from 1970s onward that musicians themselves had no idea what they were supposed to sing, if there were any rules or rubrics or guidelines. Celebrants couldn’t help them because they didn’t know either. Confusion reigned and chaos followed.

You can get a flavor of that in these documents. The opening document from 1988 states the issue plainly: the goal of a translation is to faithfully represent the Latin original. It seems very clear in retrospect (and it was clear to many at that time) that the original translation did not embody that spirit. You only need to set the current English Gloria against the Latin Gloria to observe that the first round of release gave us something entirely new, an attempt at a unique product, prepared with a methodological priority of making the English preeminent thing.

This could not stand. As the documents here demonstrate, the criticisms were widespread. ICEL placed the Latin next to the English and offered a detailed critique. Here is just one sample of hundreds, offered as a critique of an oration on the first weekday in Advent.

Fac nos, quaesumus, Domine Deus noster,
adventum Christi Filii tui sollicitos expectare,
ut, dum venerit pulsas, orationibus vigilantes,
et in suis inveniat laudibus exsultantes.

The early Missal rendered this as follows (and this translation is what we heard this year):

Lord our God, help us to prepare for the coming of Christ your Son.
May he find us waiting, eager in joyful prayer

ICEL comments on this:

The present ICEL version (1973) is short and succinct, but is so spare that it scarcely does justice to the Latin original with its wealth of scriptural references. It comprises two sentences, which, if the introductory “Lord our God” is ignored, have respectively eleven and nine words only. The committee felt that it was so short and ordinary that it would be over before it had any impact on the congregation and the second sentence in particular conveys nothing of the thought or allusions of the Latin.

Read that again: Nothing of the thought or allusions of the Latin.

Keep in mind: this is not Michael Davies. This is not Cardinal Ratzinger. This is not some editorial drawn from the pages of The Remnant or some other traditionalist publication. This is the International Commission on English in the Liturgy saying that early attempt at translation – and so much of this survives to this day – conveys nothing of the thought or allusions of the Latin.

The translation of the text coming next year reads as follows:

Keep us alert, we pray, O Lord our God,
as we await the advent of Christ your son,
so that when he comes and knocks
he may find us watchful in prayer and exultant in his praise.
Through our Lord.

Here we have it: blessed Catholicism. It’s coming back!

It will be many decades, I should think, before the reality of what we have gone through will be fully processed in our minds. In the end, the striking irony here is that ICEL will deserve so much credit for having led us toward better language and liturgy.

It turns out that ICEL in 1988 offered tremendous amounts of criticism of the existing translation. That criticism can only be described as blistering. Of another Collect, ICEL wrote: “The Latin prayer is built around the concepts of health and wholeness, which the present ICEL text does not mention. In general it so pares down the Latin that it says very little that is marked or interesting.”

Of the initial attempt at translation, ICEL wrote: “there was little time to do research and detailed background preparation before translating the Latin texts into English. The responsible agencies in Rome were also under great pressure at this time to make the revised Latin ritual books available to the worldwide Church and were as a consequence unable to provide those preparing the vernacular translations with the background research and notes that had been done as part of the work….”

There are many reasons for the crisis of Catholicism in our time. But if you are looking for the cleanest and clearest evidence of any crisis in any public faith, looking at the status of its ritual is a good place to begin to discover reasons. If you find an imposition of a new ritual that bears little in common with everything that came before, you might begin to see the problem.

The great news is that this period of our history is ending. The process of healing has begun, and the biggest milestone on this journey begins one year from now. Thanks be to God.

What did the Second Vatican Council intend as compared with its results? The answer to that question is enormously complex because, as with the so-called American founding, it is difficult to compress the intentions of hundreds and thousands of people, many unnamed, into a single body of “intention.”

In fact, there is no such thing as “intention” that somehow emerges from the back and forth of human agency to become a new and immaculate being. To claim a single clear intention from a Church Council is probably just as fallacious as to assert the existence of a Rousseauian single “social contract” to emerge from the give and take of the political process.

Nonetheless, with regard to music, it is easier to discern the main themes: 1) a strong emphasis on the restoration of Gregorian chant as the people’s music, 2) an emphasis on singing the Mass instead of just singing stuff, and 3) a push to see the liturgy as a prayerful and audible song that elicited the involvement of everyone instead of just a private prayer by the celebrant alone.

It became clear very early on following the close of the Council that other priorities, such as new permissions for the vernacular, were in tension with the musical aspects of the reform. There is a long history of liturgical reforms and their failure to fully appreciate the importance of working out the details of the musical component. And this was a case in point. The Council inspired a conflict between groups of musicians that began immediately and has pretty well continued to this day.

I’m thinking about this as I read through a wonderful compilation of documents from the watershed event called The Fifth International Church Music Congress, held in Chicago-Milwaukee, August 21-28, 1966. Here is a snapshot in time. What we find are many musicians in open protest about liturgical trends that were not appearing from on high; they were coming from within and threatening the very core of what most musicians believed would and should emerge from the Council.

Here are some statements culled from this volume. They represent a wide consensus that something must be done to stop the unraveling of all that has come before and a hope that the words of the Council would be heeded with regard to music. Keep in mind that this is all in 1966, long before the promulgation of what is now known as the ordinary form or reform ritual of Mass:

Statement from England and Wales: “The Church would suffer irreparable loss if the traditional Latin sung Mass, suitably modified to fulfil modern liturgical requirements, were to be allowed to fall into disuse. They earnestly hope that the Latin sung Mass will be actively encouraged in those places where it meets the needs of the people, and where it can be worthily performed, making proper provision both for the participation of the people and for the maintenance in use of the Church’s heritage of music. The English form of sung Mass should at the same time be developed on the lines indicated above. In this way it will be possible fully to implement in this country the teaching of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.”

Jacques Chailley, University of Paris, France: “The duty to preserve the imposing patrimony of sacred music, both Gregorian and polyphonic, is laid down in explicit terms by the Constitution (Article 114). This obligation must not be neglected, nor should it be presented in a negative way such as a sterile reticence towards the new and necessary things that are likewise ordered by the same Constitution. We must seek for a harmonious coexistence of the two types of expression that each correspond to a different need, without causing any contradictions unless they are introduced artificially, such as would happen if one were deliberately to reject one panel of a diptych in favor of the other. If one neglects the duty of preservation, one actually compromises the ultimate success of the renewal itself. Any exaggeration in one direction leads to an opposite reaction in the other, creating inevitable divisions that keep multiplying, until one finds that some whom the Church wanted so rightly to attract have finally been left outside. From all this it follows that it is impossible to conceive of the duty of preserving the treasury of sacred music without maintaining in the liturgical functions, in an habitual way and in reasonable proportions, at least some part of the Gregorian repertory… It is obvious that in order to encourage artistic religious composition, especially polyphonic choral works, there must be some assurance given that the choir will be used regularly in the liturgical functions, not just now and then, as has sometimes happened. In other words, there must be a policy for the renewal of choirs and encouragement of them; this is absolutely the opposite of the tendencies that we are witnessing at present. There must not be any brutally excessive elimination of Latin music, since this music will promote the vernacular language, which will inevitably come in due course, but the best way this can be realized is to follow a reasonable, progressively planned program.”

Committee on Musicology of the Allgemeiner Cacilien-Verband: “It is important for congregational liturgical singing that it can be the spiritual and musical possession of the people. At the same time it must be in accord with the laws of art, so that, for example, both the so-called religious ‘pop’ music and the pseudo-Gregorian piece are both excluded from sacred music. Furthermore, with the development of liturgical congregational singing, the characteristics of the various vernacular tongues and lands must always be considered, which means that in the question of forms one is not restricted merely to the responsorial form alone.”

Resolution on Profane Music in Mass: “The present-day, commercially oriented dance and entertainment music is inappropriate for divine services. Music which is directed predominantly toward the sensitive motor responsives of man is not worthy of the liturgy. This music makes its appeal to the performer as well as to the listener only on the level of the purely sensual, even to the possible exclusion of the spiritual faculties. Attempts made up to the present time to combine elements of jazz with the serious music of our Western culture and to use these in the Catholic liturgy have necessarily been doomed to failure, because the audible result offers only music that to all appearances only resembles jazz. The rhythm of this music with its primitive and uniform impulse generates in the listener a sensual, driving excitement. This monotonous, continually repeated rhythm dulls consciousness, but soon even this exciting feature loses its strength and dissipates into mere motor responses which serve to blot out all personal individuality. The prayer of a congregation, which ought to be vivified by the liturgy, is thus rendered impossible by music which evokes in men truly disorderly feelings and serves only to awaken essentially emotional drives. True liturgical community can be achieved only through the participation of the whole man. True liturgical community is accomplished only by impressing the seal of man’s spirituality upon it.”

Rt. Reverend Guilherme Schubert, Representative of Jaime Cardinal Barros de Camara, Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro: “We are shocked to witness, in church and even during liturgical services, performances of music which must be regarded as a profanation of the holy place and a heretofore unheard of degradation. This has happened under the guise of alleged implementation of the conciliar decrees, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, which wished to reform and modernize. Obviously we are dealing here with a misunderstanding and an erroneous interpretation of the official documents. … there is a general and very often quite energetic opposition to exaggerations and abuses, especially when small groups, generally youth groups, attempt to bring music, rhythms, instruments and gestures into the Church which are borrowed directly from contemporary profane music. These protests have very serious consequences in scandal, separations from Church and cult, a diminishing respect for the Church, and increasing religious doubt and confusion…. It is a mistake to think that the faithful would show more interest in the Church if the Church were made to resemble their everyday milieu, their homes, their factories, their offices. It is above all the spirit of religion which must accompany the faithful into the arena of their daily lives. But when they come into the Church, God’s temple, they expect to find something else, something special, something which stands above the everyday, something which elevates them, encourages them, comforts and ennobles them.”

RESOLUTIONS FROM SPANISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES (Spain, Mexico, Ecuador): “1) Fully appreciating the pastoral character the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council attaches to sacred music and in order to stimulate the active participation of the faithful, the national and international commissions are asked to provide for the preservation of existing songs for the people and the creation of a new repertoire in keeping with the characteristics of each of our countries, since songs imported from other places do not always respond to the people’s needs. 2) As prescribed by the same Constitution, let the Church’s patrimony of Gregorian chant, polyphony and organ music be preserved in our countries with all care, and let scholae cantorum be duly promoted. 3) Taking into consideration the nature of Gregorian chant, and also some experiences with the vernacular which lead to a corruption of Gregorian chant, all adaptations of vernacular texts to ancient melodies are emphatically discouraged. 4 a) Since some Masses written after the Council are inspired by profane dances and tunes, and since they confuse the faithful in the Hispanic nations, and since they are radically contrary to the liturgical spirit and to the letter of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, such Masses should never be permitted in any way. b) The nature of liturgical music requires that composers do not use for liturgical compositions melodies which people associate with situations foreign to the liturgy, even though those melodies may have a religious character. 5) Greater diligence must be used in imparting a musical formation in seminaries and religious institutes, so that clerics active in pastoral work will be qualified cooperators and even leaders in the liturgical movement. 6) Taking into consideration the continuous increase of the number of tourists in many places and the pastoral sense of the Constitution, it is deemed necessary that the Mass in Latin be retained fully wherever required for the spiritual benefit of the faithful.”

PROPOSITIONS SUBMITTED BY THE STUDY GROUP OF THE CHURCH MUSIC COMMISSIONS OF ALL THE AUSTRIAN DIOCESES. 1. Austrian church musicians are filled with the greatest apprehension that with the impending innovations in the area of liturgical singing the polyphonic rendition of the entire Ordinary of the Mass is endangered. They are well aware that every restriction of the use of the polyphonic settings of the Ordinary makes illusory the preservation and fostering of the treasury of sacred music. They stress that the exclusion of the liturgical masterpieces of Austrian music which results thereon will not only harm the liturgical religious experiences of the Austrian people, but in a wider way it will be considered in the international sphere as cultural robbery.