Two chapters of Musica Sacra (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments) published by Ignatius Press, 2010, deserve some special commentary. They are two papers from a 2005 conference at the Vatican that helped spark the current revival in chant – certainly not the two most famous but they are worthy of attention.
Dom Philippe Dupont of the Abbot of Solesmes offers a powerful piece in “Gregorian Chant: Its Present State and Prospects.” He begins by recounting the enormous progress that chant has made within the academy in European, particularly in France and Germany (politely bypassing the problem in parishes). This academic progress is worthy of high praise. However, he cautions that chant should not be relegated to an academic niche: “Gregorian chant is not the music of a particular group in the Church, a sort of club of one spirituality, school or interpretation or rite (sometimes Latin and Gregorian chant have been associated with the use of the missal of Saint Pius V). The interventions of the Church’s Magisterium since the Council have confirmed that Gregorian chant maintains its place of honor in liturgical celebrations.”
He asks a very relevant question. “What sort of song besides Gregorian chant can allow all the faithful of the Latin Church to proclaim their faith together in the Credo or to pay in the same language the Pater noster? This chant is a magnificent sign of unity.”
He continues to illustrate its merits. “The distinguishing feature of Gregorian chant is its unparalleled service to the word of God in close connection with the liturgical celebration itself…. Gregorian chant clothes the word of God with contemplative melody. These melodies, we should recall, were born in the liturgy and for it. They are meant to be wedded to the word of God.”
This extremely practical papers then moves to what he considers two “stumbling blocks” to future progress. I would like to quote the first one in full because, in my own view, this is serious matter.
“The first is competition between schools of interpretation. Instead of contributing to an improvement in the quality of the chant, this leads in some cases to rivalries or mutual snubbing. Besides the damage that this does to unity — of which Gregorian chant out to be a sign, as I mentioned earlier–these quarrels end up discrediting Gregorian chant.”
What can I say but: hear hear! These quarrels have been around for the better part of the century, with each camp claiming to have discovered the Rosetta Stone for the perfect rendering of chant. Two main competitors for the title going back many decades are of course the old Mocquereau school and the new Cardine school (sometimes shortened as old Solesmes vs. Semiology) but there are many gradients within these broad strokes. The original proponents of these approaches were not nearly as dogmatic as their followers, but, as time when on, the camps became ever more divided.
I once had the impression, as many novices do, that it was somehow necessary to choose between them, though I was hardly intellectually prepared to do so. It was many years before I came to realize that these two schools hardly exhaust all possibilities. Each monastic tradition has its own style and approach, some preferring and some rejecting rhythmic symbols, equalist renderings, eccentric interpretations of certain neumes, and the like.
In some ways, none of this would be surprising in any musical field. There are as many interpretations and understandings of Bach as there are serious musicians who play Bach. So it is with the chant, as Guido d’Arezzo’s own pupils reported of the 11th-century diversity in chant styles. We can learn from many approaches, surely. That is not to say that there is not a role for scholarship and ever more subtle understandings of the manuscripts, but, as Dom DuPont suggests, these differences should not be used as a means of fueling acrimony and mutual recrimination.
Whenever I hear these arguments being made today in public forums, I want to invite any of the speakers into the reality of parish life and let them hear what is actually going on in the real world. Clearly this is not the time for such divisions. Dom DuPont is certainly right to regard these competitive rivalries as a source for the discrediting of chant. Tolerance of other approaches is to be cultivated. My strong impression is that in the last five years, and since this essay was written, these rivalries have lessened, as they inevitably will with the expansion of the ranks of chanters and as younger generations get more involved with chant. The tribal loyalties of the previous generation fade from memory.
Dom Dupont goes to to mention a second stumbling block: “weak support and meager encouragement that these choirs sometimes complain of receiving from the parish clergy. It may even happen that they experience genuine opposition to Gregorian chant, which is thought to be outmoded, ‘traditionalist’ or else a kind of concert that does not foster the participation of the faithful, whereas these choirs want nothing else than to sing a liturgical chant of the quality that is recommended by the Church.”
The problem is such a serious one that he wonders “whether the specific directives issued, for example, by the Congregation for Divine Worship might not stimulate the clergy to integrate Gregorian chant better into parish liturgical celebrations.”
Again, hear hear! My inbox receives weekly notes of tragedies taking place at the parish level: scholas thwarted, directors fired, singers harassed, and whole programs once highly developed being brutally abolished by a new pastor who knows and cares nothing about the liturgical value of chant. One might think a remedy were at hand, but there is none that I know of. What the pastor says goes, and after him the deluge. I always counsel patience and finding a way around these people, working within the structure instead of pointlessly fighting it. But perhaps Dom Dupont is right that directives are in order.
The second paper I want to mention deserves more discussion than I can provide here. It is “Sacred Music and Participation” by Louis-Andre Naud. It is not a revisionist account of what constitutes participation but rather a highly conventional account of the Liturgical Movement’s emphasis on the people’s experience at Mass and its supposed culmination in our time.
The paper lacks the subtlety that one might expect. It is written by a theologian rather than a musician so the reader senses that naivete that comes from a romantic view of people joined in song during liturgy, without considering the downside to an unbalanced emphasis on relentless vocal musical participation by the people, namely 1) the subtle devaluing of the schola’s contribution, 2) the inevitable dumbing down of music to the lowest common denominator, and 3) the eventual demoralization of the people as the face a bewildering set of demands that they sing music of every style and with texts that have nothing to do with the task at hand.
What is striking is how the paper ends, with the observation that these precise problems are the biggest ones that confront us today in the parish context, without ever connecting this grim reality back to the unbalanced prescription that the people sung everything and nearly anything as much as humanly possible.
He writes: “in some places the congregation has stopped singing so as to listen to the choir and the principal celebrant. The congregation no longer as the cantors needed to guide the singing… It no longer has the strength to adapt to the excessively wide variety of songs, even the popular ones. The people still have good faith, but the lack of personnel qualified in liturgy and sacred music leads them to be content with the simplest solutions.” He adds a line that made me laugh: “the liturgical assembly is also a motley crowd, particularly in celebrations of marriage, baptisms, and funerals.”
This conclusion is actually a devastating indictment of the very thing he recommends, though he seems unaware of this. When he writes “in some places” he might have said “nearly all.” In parishes where PARTICIPATION is the rallying cry we see hordes of depressed and depressing people who can barely bring themselves to pick up that sorry excuse for a hymnal that sits in the pews, and their singing amounts to pretending to barely open their mouths, and otherwise glare at the amateurs on the altar who are hectoring people to join in singing some silly ditty. The music professionals are long gone, driven out from our parishes after being told that they have nothing to contribute except as campfire-song leaders.
A rule we can observe across the entire Catholic landscape: the more emphasis that is put on participation by the people, the less participation there will be. On the other hand, if all things are in their place — the schola sings the propers, the priest sings his parts, and people sing the ordinary chants of the Mass and not some made-up thing from the outside — we do indeed observe participation. It is a paradox with an easy explanation. This is what Catholics are to do, and what the Church is asking Catholics to do, and the Catholic people sense this in the heart of hearts, while resisting artifice, manipulation, and ideologically driven agendas that contradict the sense of the faith.
Professor Naud’s paper seems to miss of all this completely. On the upside, however, his recounting of the history here does end up highlighting (however inadvertently) many mistakes along the way, by even popes such as Pius XII.
