Chant Café

The campaign to fund the simple propers is making great progress. We are already one-third the way to the goal. I want to explain in more detail why I believe that this might be the most important project in the world of Catholic liturgy today. As incredible as it is to imagine, there is not a single book of sung English propers in print today that parish musicians in the ordinary form of Mass can use to sing the Mass instead of just sing various songs at Mass.

When this project is completed, we will at last have it, a full book of propers with Psalms that can suitably be sung at every single Catholic parish. We will give them all away for download. The copies we sell will be sold at direct cost so that way choirs can buy as many as they need, and make photocopies when they run out.

Before I continue, please listen to this entrance for All Saints, and, while you do, imagine this in your parish and consider how this would change things in the world in which you live.

Now consider the big picture. People commonly attend Catholic Mass with the expectation that they will hear chant. What they experience instead are a wide variety of songs with texts that are disconnected from the liturgical texts. This often shocks visitors, who wonder what happened to create this disjuncture between their inchoate expectations and the peculiar reality. When did the Catholics change to have music that sounds like contemporary Methodism or evangelicalism? What happened to Gregorian chant or at least its English equivalent?

It is a complicated story with deep roots but the source of the most immediate problem actually traces before the Second Vatican Council. In 1955, Pope Pius XII issued a document called Musicae Sacrae, and it is a fine document overall, one worth revisiting today and learning from.

However, very late in the document, he introduced a small idea that spun out of control over the years. He writes of how touched he is by hymn singing. “Sacred canticles, born as they are from the most profound depths of the people’s soul, deeply move the emotions and spirit and stir up pious sentiments,” he wrote. “When they are sung at religious rites by a great crowd of people singing as with one voice, they are powerful in raising the minds of the faithful to higher things.”

There is no doubt that he is correct here but there is a time and place for such hymns, and they were never intended to replace liturgical chant that is embedded in the ritual, as he will knew. One would never, for example, arbitrarily remove a text that pertains to the beginning of the Mass of the day, having been in place since the 8th century or earlier, with some new song which a text written by a 19th-century poet.

As a way of underscoring this, the Pope wrote that “such hymns cannot be used in Solemn High Masses without the express permission of the Holy See.” But then he added something: “at Masses that are not sung solemnly these hymns can be a powerful aid in keeping the faithful from attending the Holy Sacrifice like dumb and idle spectators. They can help to make the faithful accompany the sacred services both mentally and vocally and to join their own piety to the prayers of the priest. This happens when these hymns are properly adapted to the individual parts of the Mass.”

Now, this is an interesting passage in many ways, but the practical manner in which this came to be applied could probably not have been anticipated. The core problem was that nearly all the Masses in the English speaking world apart from one Sunday Mass was what was called a Low Mass, meaning that it was spoken by the priest and without music for the Mass propers or the ordinary of the Mass. The Pope’s words gave permission to sing hymns during these Masses, and the times when they came to be sung were: entrance, offertory, communion, and recession (which has no Mass proper to be replaced). This gave official approval to what became known as the four-hymn sandwich. This was the steady diet of American Catholics until the Second Vatican Council.

Now we move to Chapter Two of this drama. Part of the driving force behind the liturgical reform of the Council was to move away from this strict high-Mass, low-Mass division and refashion the Mass structure to make every Mass a sung Mass. Vernacular hymnody had become so pervasive that they had nearly devoured the early hope of St. Pius X at the turn of the century. He had hoped for a Mass that was sung by new scholas and a chanting people. Instead we ended up with a quiet Mass dominated by a hymn-singing people even as choirs ignored Gregorian chant.

This is why the Council was absolutely emphatic that Gregorian chant must have pride of place in the Mass. The push for restructuring was to make possible more sung parts of the Mass, including Mass propers and the Mass ordinary. Composers got busy with experiments to make the transition possible.

Hopes were in the air in 1965 when the Church Music Association of America was forged out of the St. Gregory Society and the Society of St. Cecilia. These were new times with new energy behind beautiful Catholic music and an end to the problem of people as spectators and people as English-hymn singers to the neglect of the Mass itself. The CMAA was to lead the way.

I do not need to explain that the reality was close to the opposite and it has remained so ever since. The high hopes were completely dashed due to dramatic cultural shifts, terrible missteps in the implementation of reform, demographic factors, and a range of other upheavals that made the words of the Council itself appear to be a dead letter. The results are far worse that Pius XII could have ever imagined in 1955.

The history I’m referring to here is now forty years ago, and not that much has changed. However, there is a great movement afoot today to teach Latin propers to singers in a new generation. Many parishes have made the transition. The preconcilar rite is now authorized again and we can again here Gregorian chant in select parishes around the country. Workshops in Gregorian chant filled up months in advance.

But there is a problem. A vast gulf separates the vast majority of song-singing parishes from the chanting parishes. There is a grave lack of materials available that make a transition possible. It isn’t very easy to go from “Gather Us In” to “Dominus fortitudo plebis suae,” even among those singers who are fortunate enough to be in parishes were the pastor favors such a switch.

Even as of this writing, there is not a single book in print that I can hand a parish musician and say: “here is the music of the Roman Rite in English; use this to replace what you sing now.”. Not one single book offers the entrance, offertory, and communion antiphons in english with Psalms so that the Mass can again sound truly liturgical. So long as this persists, there will be little hope of changing this parishes to sacred music, and the gap that separates Gregorian parishes from praise-music parishes will grow and grow.

Now we come to Chapter Three and the propers of the Adam Bartlett, a musician in Pheonix, Arizona. He is writing chants that any parish can use with Psalms to cover the entire liturgical action. He writes them on four-line staffs so that people can get use to reading real chant manuscripts. They are intended to be sung without accompaniment so that singers can throw away their accompaniment crutches and use the instrument that God gave them.

The method here is brilliant in every way. The texts are modernized in the best sense without being politically corrected. The texts come from the Roman Gradual, the official music book of the Roman Rite. He preserves the mode of the original Gregorian so that we retain and re-enliven the sound and feel of the original Gregorian. There are 24 total melodic formulas that are used in total for the primary set of antiphons; one in each mode for each proper (8 for the Entrance, 8 for the Offertory and 8 for the Communion). In this way the melodies become intuitive and easily learned without the burden of having to learn a completely new melody each week.

In short, these pieces make it possible to go from what is toward the ideal. They offer the greatest hope we have in our time for doing the thing that must be done.

Now, someone might say: surely we can use these for every proper of the Mass every week! Well, you don’t have to. But when you need an entrance, offertory, or communion, you can have a book in your shelf that allows you to sing the propers on the spot. They are easy to learn and train scholas in how to chant. They also sound very beautiful and compelling.

How do they mix with the politics of parish life? To use them requires no efforts at changing the pastor’s mind about something fundamental (such as language), and they will not give rise to some strange resistance movement against them in the parish. They take the existing parish culture and move it toward something holy, beautiful, universal.

The plan is to give the complete book away to the entire world, for free download. We will also bind it and sell it with absolutely no profit. The cost to the purchaser will be identical to the cost of printing. This way it can achieve maximum distribution across the entire English-speaking world.

Maybe you think that you can’t afford to commission music for the Catholic Church. You can’t afford to be a benefactor of an artist. Well, that’s where the technology comes in. When our method of raising money here, you can give $5 or $50 or $500. For the price of a value meal at the local fast-food joint, you can partake in sponsorship of music that can completely change the way Catholics sing at Mass – not in just some parishes but all.

This way, when people come to Mass, they will hear chant and love it. Our parishes will again attract people rather than disappoint them and drive people away. We will be singing like Catholics and inspire this to continues because these provide the basis for future growth. This way, we can look forward to a brilliant future that is continuous with the best of our past. And make no mistake: what happens in the Catholic Church has a huge influence on the culture at large. Beauty in our Churches enlivens beauty in the world.

This is what your contribution can make possible. Please donate right now.

Go for it

Calling and priests, bishops, and scholars: see the new CMAA Vimeo Channel. It features tutorials on the new Missal. You are welcome to hire us, pay us big fees to travel and stay in luxurious hotels, and feed us all fabulous food. or you can just save your money for the poor and learn the new Missal chants from your desktop. Oh, and by the way, you can embed these, copy them, sell them and make millions, adapt them, or do anything else you want to do. These are yours for the taking with no restrictions.

Please have a look at this wonderful letter from Bishop Robert C. Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin. (Fr. Z also links here.) This is an absolutely perfect way to deal with the growing problem in the American Catholic Church of small bands of agitators who try to wreck the lives of priests, teachers, and musicians who are working toward what the Church intends.The Bishop defended his priests against a predictably vicious campaign of calumny. He said very clearly: you are wrong.

I’ve intended to reprint my piece on the book When Sheep Attack. Here is my chance.
American Catholic parishes will continue to go through a period of change in the years ahead. New priests are coming out of seminaries that have trained him in the extraordinary form and the finer details of liturgy. It is the first generation to have been so trained in many decades. They are entering parishes with new ideas. As they become pastors, they will be hiring new musicians and changing the personnel structure of parish life. There will be new budget allocations and new institutional priorities. Educational curricula will change too.

One hopes that this transition will be smooth, but experience suggests otherwise. Parishes are complex social structures. They invite everyone to join and encourage everyone to contribute time and money. But it is inevitable that pockets of interest group pressure develop within them. There are always factions. These factions can be based in ideology and theological outlook, but they are more commonly based in issues of control and perceived ownership over some sector of parish life.

New personnel, new priests, and new pastors are not nearly as aware of the legacy of factional divisions as existing parishioners tend to be. I recall one occasion where a director of music dismissed the instructions of an idealistic new pastor on grounds that “these guys come and go but the musicians stay.” He figured that he would outlast the pastor, and there was everyone reason to think that he was right. Directors of education, volunteers in various ministerial sectors believe the same thing.

Sometimes this dynamic can be explosive and lead to great tragedies, even to the point where new pastors and music directors are driven out of parishes. The force instigating the upheaval might be a small cadre within the parish. They probably do not represent the views of the majority. Nonetheless, they can be effective because they are well organized know the lay of the land better than their opponents.

I just read a wonderful new book on this entire subject. It is called When Sheep Attack! It is by Episcopal priest Dennis R. Maynard. He is addressing cases where a highly successful pastor or new parish hire, a person responsible for great energy and growth in a parish, suddenly finds himself the subject of a subtle and underground terror campaign. The new hire is driven out, with the person having resigned “voluntarily” to stop divisions within the parish, often with the encouragement of the Bishop.

Maynard documents that this scenario is not at all uncommon. He has performed at detailed examination of 25 such cases, and from extensive interviews and surveys he has found common elements in all of the cases. He suggests remedies for these situations. I can highly recommend this book for any young priest or musician headed into parish life. It explained some many things about parishes that I had not understood. I can see now that many cases that I’ve personally witnessed have common traits.

Let me mention just two cases that I’ve known among many. A new pastor arrived at a small and ailing parish. The parish had been through many rounds of upheaval with various scandals dating back decades. The money had dried up, the building was falling down, the grounds were a complete mess, and the educational programs were empty. The new pastor flew into action, instituting change in the music, raising money, getting volunteers to work on the grounds, and beefing up educational efforts with new books. Everything was going so well. They parish started filling up on Sundays and even daily Masses were well attended. It was a spectacular transformation.

Little did he know that a tiny sector within the parish had targeted him for destruction the moment he walked in the door. The more he did, the more he was successful, the more resentful this small faction became. The rumors started to fly about how he wasn’t making enough hospital visits, how there were questions about where the money was going, how he was living it up on the rectory, how he was giving inappropriate looks to men, women, and young children in the parish, how he was muscling teachers and others. None of this was based in actual facts. It was all unsubstantiated rumor mongering. The ordeal began and ended in about four months. The pastor left with the encouragement of the Bishop. The parish fell apart soon after. The money dried up and attendance fell back to previous levels. The fleeing pastor never knew what hit him.

The same scenario played out with a musician friend of mine, who arrived and made wonderful changes. The choir was suddenly large where it has previously been nonexistent. His program was praised in the national press. Parishioners were thrilled. Every Sunday was glorious and getting better. He put in some 60-plus hours per week in what was the most fulfilling job of his life. Again, he did not know that as tiny faction had similarly targeted him at the outset. The innuendos started and he couldn’t figure out their source. Many sleepless nights were the result. Within a matter of a single month, he was out the door. Again, he was completely blindsided by events and spent the next months puzzling about what happened. The music program fell apart.

Who is doing this to new hires in the parish? Maynard reveals the answer to the mystery. He calls these people the “antagonists.” They represent perhaps 2% of the parish. They give very little money to the parish at all, but volunteer for many projects, always hanging around. They don’t tend to have regular jobs, so they can spend all their time obsessing about parish matters. Maynard emphasis that they are not interested in compromise. They want to remove the person no matter what.

It takes about 6 people total to constitute an effect group of antagonists. There is usually one ring leader. Most often it is someone on the staff of the parish, perhaps even having retired from some ministerial position. It could be a church secretary. It could be a former youth minister. It could be the person who organizes first communions. Regardless, it is the sort of person that the whole parish regards as a fixture, someone who is seemingly indispensible to parish life.

What is the motivation for this behavior? The person and his or her follows have high “control needs.” They must be in charge if not in name then at least in reality. They are accustomed to determining structures and outcomes of parish life. They resent anyone who would interfere with their power. I know that this sounds petty and ridiculous but it is a reality. As they say, the lower the stakes, the more vicious the politics. They more that the new hire succeeds, they more the antagonists get whipped up in a frenzy. They start the rumors. They begin to raise “concerns” – a favorite word of the antagonists. They pass on unattributed complaints. They tell of possible scandals. They try to recruit other people to their cause, using in particular their status as indispensable fixtures of parish life.

They talk to the Bishop, in meetings, letters, and emails. They misrepresent themselves as a major voice in the parish. If the Bishop is weak and unsophisticated in these matters, he can come to believe that the new hire has somehow become a force for division. The Bishop just wants the problem to go away, and he accomplishes this by failing to back the person under attack and finally pulling the trigger.

A further heads up on this subject: the source of trouble is rarely about whether the new priest or musician or educator is a “liberal” or “conservative.” The factions do not usually fall along these lines, mainly because the antagonists are not actually intellectuals or idealists in any sense. These words might be tossed around here and there but they are merely cloaks for a more fundamental malice rooted in the desire to control.

In these days of priest scandals and sexual innuendo everywhere, the problem is probably worse than ever. The antagonists have more ammunition on their side, since even the smallest accusation can lead to disaster. With more changes coming to liturgy and education, there are ever more opportunities for the antagonists to feel motivated to accomplish their demonic works.

What can be done about the problem? Maynard recommends that the anyone who is headed to a new parish do careful investigation about the structure of parish life and its history. If a parish has been through years of upheaval, there is probably good reason to be on the lookout. A faction of antagonists once successful will try again. One might think that good communication would be the best means to placate the opposition, but rarely works in fact, since the antagonists are filled with hate and accept no compromise short of destruction.

Some strategies that do help include total openness on finances, thorough documentation on how time is spent, and absolute scrupulosity in all social relations. New pastors should not fear replacing problem staff, even to the point of cleaning house completely. The seemingly indispensable person who is the source of the problem must be sent packing as soon as possible. In the end, however, the only real solution here is a Bishop who understands the racket and is willing to back the new pastor or musician or whomever is under attack from the antagonists. He should accept no rumor or unattributed accusations. The Bishop should invite the antagonists to move to different town or parish. He must be willing to risk the possibility that they won’t come back to the faith at all.

Maynard’s book goes into much greater detail, even though it is not a long book. It will take about an evening to read. I highly recommend that any new pastor or musician read this in order to discover the true nature of the pathologies that can exist within any parish. His book is written mainly for the context of an Episcopal or Methodist environment but it applies to the Catholic case just as well. Unless we learn the lessons he has learned and passed on in this book, we risk letting the malevolent 2% stop the reform of the reform and driving us back to the past of demoralization and stagnation.

This image is so beautiful that I had to share it. Thanks to Paraclete.

My copy of Office of Compline, by Fr. Samuel Weber, arrived yesterday and I can’t be more excited about it. It is far more impressive than I imagined it would be. It includes the complete office of compline (night prayer) for the ordinary form, with notation for singing. The Latin is on the left and the English is on the right. The notation is on a four-line staff.  The English adaptions are just wonderful in every way. One can’t be marvel that such a resource is only now available more than forty years after the liturgical reform, but, at the same time, it is still thrilling that it is finally here.

There is a special treat in here that seems to be unadvertised. It includes an entire section of beautiful hymnody for Compline at the end of the book, again with Latin on the left and English on the right. The Office is precisely the place for hymnody in the Roman Rite. And if all you have known of hymns are what is fed to you by contemporary resources, you are in for a real treat here. These hymns are gorgeous, stable, prayerful, singable, and steeped in Catholic history. They require no instruments. I want to learn every one of them. They are that inspired. This section alone makes the book worth the purchase price. I see no reason why these Office hymns should not be introduced in parishes where hymns are in demand for Mass. They are leagues above the usual fare.

The price is $16.11 at Ignatius Press. It is a hardbound book. It has a ribbon. The inside printing is two color. The binding is excellent. It is a beautiful product, one suitable for parish or home use. Every Catholic should be proud to own this and use it as a source of sung prayer. Congratulations to Fr. Weber for a splendid job of engraving and composing. And congratulations to Ignatius Press for taking an interest in liturgical music and backing this project. I wish it every success.

I have a reservation, however, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the product. It has to do with the method of distribution. Ignatius Press has locked the book behind a copyright wall for no apparent reason. You can’t even purchase a digital version of this book. This means that everyone who uses it has to buy a copy, which means of course that few people will buy a copy. Had they made it available for purchaseable download or even free download, they would have guaranteed a much larger circulation and thereby much larger sales.

Ignatius Press, if you are reading: hear me out. If this book fails to break even, do not blame the author and do not blame Catholic book buyers. Blame a short-sighted publishing vision that is in denial about the world of digital information. This is a product that needs promotion. You have the means at your disposal to do just that. Promote it. Then it will find users and therefore buyers. This is not the 1950s or even the 1980s. I fear that the failure to realize this would mean that this book will not gain the traction is much deserves. Think about it: seriously. A book like this is a tool for evangelization.

Bishop Slattery of Tulsas has offered a wonderful case for bringing back the sung introit. What he calls for here is PRECISELY what the Chant Cafe has been pushing with the Simple English Propers Project. We are making progress in this campaign but we need your help. Please make a donation today.

But today I would like to suggest one simple change by which we might begin to recover the sense that the liturgy is something we receive, rather than something we create. I do not propose this as the most important or essential change towards this end, but merely as one change, one step, one movement away from the chaos of created liturgies towards the proper vision of the Council.  

What I would like to propose is that we recover the sung introit at Mass.

I know that for two generations now, Catholics have been expected to sing an opening hymn at Mass and in many parishes the faithful are regularly browbeaten to “stand up and greet this morning’s celebrant with hymn #so-and-so” which, depending upon the parish, might be taken from the red hymnbook, or the blue hymnbook, or the nicely disposable paperback missalette. So deeply has this ‘opening hymn mentality’ shaped our consciousness that most Catholics would be astounded to hear me say that hymns have no real place in Mass.

Hymns belong in the Liturgy of the Hours and in the common devotions of the faithful, but the idea that the parish liturgy committee should sit down sometime early in the month and look through a hymn book, trying to find pretty hymns which haven’t been overdone in the past three or four months, which explore the themes of the Sunday Masses and which brings the people together as a singing community is an idea completely alien to the spirit of the Catholic liturgy.

It is alien first of all because the singing of hymns as Sunday worship was a Protestant innovation, better suited to their non-Sacramental worship than to the Mass, and alien secondly because an opening hymn introduces – at the very inception of the sacred action – that element of creative busy-ness, which is, as we have seen, antithetical to the nature of salvation as a gift we receive from God.

What belongs at the beginning of Mass is the sung introit, that is a sung antiphon and psalm. In the Catholic liturgical tradition, these are unique compositions in which a scriptural cento is set to a singular piece of music. The melody explores and interprets the text of the cento, while the composition as a whole illuminates the meaning to be discovered later in the readings of the day.

The Sung Introit
These sung introits have been an integral part of the Latin Rite, and remain so in the Extraordinary Form, where the schola or choir chants the more difficult antiphon, and the congregation sings the psalm. This gives the faithful both the chance to listen and respond, practicing, in effect, the basic elements of the Mass, listening and responding, listening, for example to the Word of God as it comes to us in the readings, and then responding to the Father’s initiative by offering to Him the obedience of Jesus.

Unfortunately these antiphons have never been set to music in the Novus Ordo. For forty years they have sat, lonely of notation, at the top of each page in the Sacramentary unable to be sung, until even the memory of the sung introit has passed away.

Yet there are changes afoot and reason to hope. The introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal, now definitely set for the First Sunday of Advent of next year, gives me reason to anticipate a new beginning here. Faithful to the spirit of the Latin text and with an accurate translation into a consciously sacred style of English, the new Missal points to a rediscovered seriousness in the way America celebrates her liturgy and perhaps a greater appreciation as well of the elements of liturgy which have been discarded these past forty years.

Perhaps with this new seriousness, and given the need to compose new chant melodies to accompany the new translations, this may well be the time when liturgists will begin discussing the meaning of a received liturgy; when composers might make their first attempts to set these antiphons to a simple English Plain Song, and when publishers might begin to produce worthy and dignified liturgical books.