Chant Café

I’ve long suspected that the Catholic world of music at the parish level, by which I mean parish music directors and singers along with priests in charge, can be rough divided as follows: 10% dedicated to a sacred music program, 10% dedicated to a pop music program, and 80% wallowing in unrelenting confusion about nearly everything related to Catholic music. I derive these estimates based entirely on years of anecdotal evidence from visiting parishes, receiving thousands of emails, hanging around on forums, and generally talking with people here and there.

There is no way to scientifically validate or invalidate my claim because no one really knows for sure. But this much I do know. There is no single document in existence that explains with clarity what it is that a Catholic musician is supposed to do on a week-to-week basis, nothing that clearly presents the goal of one’s endeavors, and no monograph or book that can state with absolute certainly what are the core responsibilities and tasks of the Catholic musician in the current climate. This is because there is a major conflict of vision at work today and we are far from having resolved it enough so that such a document can be produced.

Catholic musicians today are like city managers without training who hired to build infrastructure, manage the community environment, and undertake activities that are suitable to the task – with no specific instructions or mandates of any sort. They can read libraries full of books but come no closer to understanding what they are really supposed to be doing. It would not be a surprise to discover that such a person would eventually learn that showing up and doing something, anything, is just about the best one can do. It’s not very inspiring but such is the nature of the job.

The email below is a typical case. I shared the original (which I’ve changed for clarity, grammar, and to hide the affiliation) with several people, and they all responded the same way: nothing new here. To give you an idea of what we are dealing with, have a look:

Music for Mass seems like a subject that drives everyone up the wall. Traditionalists and many young people would like to hear chant, while many pastors believe that to attract youth we must play folk music and some of the newer material, and there is everything in between. I’m trying to sort all of this out. This has recently become much more important to me because I am now the leader of one of the choirs at the student parish. As I strive to learn about the ideals the church has in place, I’m finding the answer to one question and two more will pop up.

Let me start from the top. I’ve seen in a few places that the Church’s ideal for music is

chant. But if that was the case, wouldn’t that severely bar participation from the congregation? Isn’t another ideal to have everyone involved in singing? Even forgetting that, we have another problem. The choir I lead jokes about doing chant, but the reality is that we simply do not have the talent here. We have two singers. Only one of whom can project his voice. No one has any real training.

The natural place to go (for us at least) is to look in the hymnal. We currently use [a mainstream hymnal]. It contains most of the songs I remember from childhood, and most of the songs the lay faithful would probably consider favorites. However, I’ve been much more on the lookout for what the songs actually say, as I haven’t always been so careful about the message as much as the music. The more I scrutinize the hymns we know and love, the more amazement I have.

There’s a few songs which really scare me. Such as “The Supper of the Lord”. “Precious body, precious blood, here in bread and wine…” Isn’t this a bit confusing? There have been a few others which could be argued either way (“Eat this bread, drink this cup, come to me and never be hungry; eat this break, drink this cup, trust in me and you will not thirst”) if you look at them in context. But ultimately I am finding songs I cannot stomach, and I wouldn’t consider myself closed-minded to the newer material (“Let us break bread together on our knees, when I fall on my knees with my face to the riding sun, O Lord, have mercy on me…let us drink wine together on our knees…”).

Am I being oversensitive, or is this really as odd as it seems? If it is not what the Church teaches, why are the publishers pushing it at us? This begs yet another question…in the front of the book, it is printed “Published with the approval of the Committee on Divine Worship, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.” What does this mean, exactly? It’s some kind of stamp of approval, but on what? I also see that many, many of the hymns are post-1970. What happened before that? Where did those songs go?

I’ve also been told that I cannot use the Mass of Light Gloria–because it adds a word to the Gloria. Is this true? Do you know offhand where this directive can be read? I’m not looking to be disobedient on this or any other issue; I simply want to be able to point it out to people in the future if I get questions about it.

I’ve had it up to my eyeballs in the bashing wars towards American Catholics; I do want to restore the beauty that everyone talks about, but I haven’t got a clue where to start, and I have yet to have a productive conversation with anyone about this. Any help or insight, or even a single answer to any of my questions would be greatly appreciated. I know there’s a lot there, but it’s really a huge topic (at least in my mind) and I’m really trying to figure this out.

There is so much interesting about this, starting with its wholly common sense of being completely lost in a thicket of confusion. The writer wants to know who is charge around here. If it is the publishers, why is so much of their material vaguely suspect? I’m also struck by the writer’s innocent query: what kind of music did Catholics sing before 1970, because that historical record seems not to exist. It’s true: there does seem to be some sort of black out here.

Then there is the very legitimate inquiry about the people’s role in chant. Let me just answer this one right here. The Church provides dialogues for the priest and people, propers for the schola to sing, and the ordinary chants of the Mass for the people. Even if the schola sings all the propers, there is still a vast responsibility remaining for the people. Even if the schola sings Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus as well, there is are vast responses and the Pater Noster for the people in addition to any extra hymns one might add after communion or for recessional.

But this much I can guarantee: that paragraph above would be completely lost on this correspondent. And why? Because no one has ever explained the musical structure of the Roman Rite to this person, much less the responsibility of the music director with regard to it. The other problem is that answer I just gave makes virtually no sense in light of hundreds and hundreds of pages of the hymnals produced by mainstream publishers, which are filled not with chanted ordinary settings or schola propers but rather: piles and piles and piles of post-1970 songs that we are supposed to plug in anywhere we want.

I do wish that there were a single book one could use that would provide all things that the educated Catholic musician could use to navigate the prevailing mess but there is no such thing, I’m sorry to say. We are in the midst of a transition that consists mostly in rediscovering Catholic music that pre-dates 1970, and I don’t mean music of the 1950s. I mean music that shares in the sensibility that has always and everywhere defined the idea of liturgical music, music that is holy, universal, and beautiful.

One of the advantages that the publishers have right now is that they can hand a book over to a music, along with a sample CD, and say: sing this stuff. However, this might not work in the future as well, because the new translation of the Mass starting next year is structured to lend itself to chant-like settings and because of the new emphasis on the propers of the Mass (especially the introit, offertory, and communion). The existing model of the “hymn cafeteria”’ cannot and will not hold its firm grip on liturgical music in the future.

A final issue in the note above concerns talent. Where is it? Where are the singers? Where is the musical competence? Frankly, it is a desert out there. Only clarity about mission will make it bloom again.

This article is not a statement of despair. It is a statement that draws attention to the desperate work that needs to be done to educate, create new resources, learn, and put into practice the lost wisdom that this generation is recovering. There is crowd of Catholic musicians out there crying out for answers.

The wonderful film The Secret of Kells (2009) tells the story of the monastic effort to create The Book of Kells, the finest of Ireland’s national treasures, a gorgeous illuminated book of Gospels used for Mass that managed to be preserved all these centuries and is currently on display at the Trinity College library in Dublin. The film sets the forces of light, as represented by the Christian faith and those who practiced it, against the dark forces of Viking invaders who cared not for productivity, beauty, and holiness but instead practiced the more ancient skills of invading, looting, and destroying.

The monks were not satisfied merely to produce books of texts. The conviction was that these books should also be works of art, when possible. It was not too much to spend many years and even several generations to create the perfect book to be light unto all. Words alone would have served the functional purpose but there was more to functionality that mere words. There were also considerations of excellence, skill, and beauty (above all) that must be central to the effort of making a book to be used at Mass. The creation and preservation of that book was worth more than their lives, in their view, because it embodied truth and light and had a longer life than all living people.

The film puts on display a microcosm that represents a much grander effort that stretched from the Apostolic Age to the Renaissance, and that effort involved not only art but also issues of human rights, the dignity of the human person, the integrity and inviolability of human association and spaces, and the centrality of disciplined learning and sacrifice in the process of the salvation of souls. It all stems from that great lesson of the Incarnation: God loved the individual person enough to send his son to become man, who in turn made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of our souls. In turn, we offer praise and thanksgiving through our highest efforts. Beauty becomes, says Pope Benedict XVI, “the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes.”

Today we take the creation of manuscripts and the spreading of knowledge for granted. What took dozens of highly skilled men many years, sometimes generations, to accomplish can now be done by anyone with a laptop computer and uploaded to a server that can create copies for anyone who wants them, many million of times per minute. This is called technological progress. Technology changes; what remains the same, or should remain the same, is the Christian ethos that gave rise to beauty in the modern world. Aesthetics and technology are really two different things; within the Christian ethos, the second can and should be used in serve of the first.

What the monks did to create and preserve manuscripts in the 8th century was also taking place in the realm of music. From the 5th century onward, there are documented efforts to codify liturgical music and build up a culture of teaching and singing that would parallel the efforts made to create and preserve manuscripts. The sung Psalms would become a form of musical illumination for the liturgy in the same way that pictures and beautiful letters would lift up mere text to become a work of art worthy of the act of worship.

In fact, the early theorists made analogies between the notes and phrases of music and the letters and syllables of text. In the same way, says the 9th century treatise Musica Enchiriadis, “the pthongi that are called sounds in Latin are the sources of sung sound, and the content of all music lies in their resolution.”

For the better part of 1500, the efforts with regard to music were focused and serious and appear wherever the Christian religion was practiced. Century by century we saw the composition of chant, along with the spreading of choir schools, manuscripts, pedagogical tools, chant masters with astonishing aural memories who could sing any chant in the Gradual, and also great singers who achieved fame in country after country.

Even after the Reformation, there was let up in the progress of the polyphonic art; it thrived in every country on all continents. Perhaps it was inevitable that the chant went through a period of languishing while the fashion of polyphony marched forward, but even here it was the monasteries that provided the right balance between preservation and progress. When the time came for Solesmes to restore the chant books after several centuries of confusion, they depended very heavily on what the monasteries had done to maintain an uninterrupted tradition of beauty in service of the liturgy.

In the postconciliar period, the idea of excellence, beauty, and preservation all gave way to a new cultural ethos that exalted various ideological aims ahead of traditional Christian aims. Suddenly, excellence came to be depreciated in favor of a manufactured idea of authenticity, and the goal of creating magnificent sounds gave way to the goal of copying stylish sounds from the secular world. God-centered liturgy became people-centered gatherings. Scholas were toppled in favor of folk groups, organists lost their positions in favor of strumming and banging, and the hard work of rendering the chant with ever greater perfection lost to the fashion for spontaneity and improvisation. Beautiful liturgical books with illuminations gave way to felt banners to broadcast to people a sense of comfort and homeyness.

These new trends not only broke a long tradition; they turned that long tradition on its head. In that sense, I don’t think it is unfair to say that the musical ethos that emerged after (but not because of) the Second Vatican Council was fundamental un-Christian, that is, contrary to all that came before. It was the equivalent of throwing out illuminated manuscripts and replacing them with newspapers, or of tearing down great cathedrals and replacing them with halls suitable for civic gatherings.

As we make our way out of this desert that has lasted forty years, we need to look to the attitudes and disciplines that were adopted by the monks of old and have always pervaded the Christian artistic sense. The goal was never merely to make things that are serviceable much less merely fashionable. The idea was to point to eternity as best we are able and not curry favor with the times. We need to have the discipline that led monks to make illuminations on manuscripts used only by one mortal person because these beautiful things were created for God above all else. Yes, they were impractical but sometimes what is practical contrasts with what is principled.

What this means for music is profound.

First, we do well to remember and appreciate the many thousands of holy men and women who struggled long before the age of recording technology and even before musical notation in order to pass from age to age the great music of the Catholic liturgy. It is a mistake to take the tools we have today for granted. These tools should be used for doing an even better job at our task than they did.

Second, we must attempt to replicate the focus on excellence in the service of God that monks of old made part of their daily lives. It is not enough to show up on Sunday, pick four hymns, sing them, and go home, while expecting everyone to value your marvelous contribution to parish life. No. Singing for liturgy requires work, learning, discipline, time in practice, and sacrifice. A true singer for liturgy never seeks out praise, never performs in an effort to elicit public adulation, never seeks to entertain. We work solely in service of the public prayer of the Church.

Third, we must restore a central focus on beauty, which means orderliness, balance, and exalted forms that point to the author, composer, and maker of all beautiful things. Fortunately for us, we are not burdened with the job of seeking out beautiful music for everything that goes on at Mass. The foundation of it all is already given to us in the form of the chant, which we have thanks to the extraordinary efforts of so many dating back to the earliest years of the faith. We only need to embrace it or, at least, see its beauty as a goal and measure all that we do in the interim against this standard.

In the sweep of time, we singers in this generation have very little time to do what we ought, very few chances to sing, as compared with all the liturgy in world history, and praise God in a way that is fitting. There is no time for laziness, no time for the production of unworthy music, no time to take shortcuts or unleash some commercially canned solution on our parishes. We can learn from those who came before and leave something wonderful for those who will come after us.

The Secret of Kells, an animated feature film made in 2009, has been showered with awards since its release, including a Academy nomination for best animated feature film.

Maybe it is already famous in Catholic circles but I knew nothing about it, and had never heard of it before. It tells the story of the creation and preservation of the Book of Kells, the 8th century liturgical book of the Gospels from Ireland that contains many of the oldest images we have that form that basis of Western art. It is one of the great masterpieces of all ages, though I can’t say that I really knew about it at all before this before.

The movie focuses on life inside the Irish monastery where the book is created. It tells the story of a young boy’s relationship with a master scribe, and the tensions that develop with the abbot over how to prepare for a possible Viking invasion of the monastery.

This deals with some of my own personal favorite themes in history: the culture and technology of scribing, the role of monasteries in the fostering of civilization, the centrality of learning to Christian history, the problem of security in a time of severe threats. But when was the last time that a movie was made to feature all of these themes? In this film, Christianity is portrayed as the light, the hope of mankind. It’s true but we don’t often run across this truth, do we?

The animation itself is beyond spectacular. It is ravishing, gorgeous, astonishing. The music is perfect: liturgical where it should be (and in Latin!) and Gaelic/dance where it should be. How striking that it was made by an entirely secular animation studio!

In times of instant communication and universal distribution of text and images through digital media, we need to develop a greater appreciation for how we got from there to here. This film provides some of this background. It is suitable for kids and adults and everyone. Parishes could really benefit from a showing of this.