Chant Café

This past Sunday, the schola in which I sing provided the communion antiphon from the Gregorian books, Optimam Partem. I just love this chant because it tells such a beautiful story of the lesson of Mary and Martha (Gospel reading) in song. Following this chant, we sang the motet with the same text name by William Byrd – which is in a minor key and doesn’t borrow much from the chant, but is extraordinarily beautiful.

This morning I was stunned to find a live recording of this very motet by the Cantores Ecclesia, a choir that specializes in Byrd. The choir takes this motet at half the tempo we took it, which changes the sensibility of the piece dramatically. Have a listen. I do not know which is “correct”; in fact, there is probably no answer to that, and therein we find yet another magnificent thing about this music.

Roma locuta est points out that many parishes (a search) print canned snippets on the meaning of the Gospel of the week. The snippet today includes the claim, made by one writer for a commercial publisher, that the Gospel instructs us to avoid “over-fussiness in worship.” Seems like a stretch from the Mary and Martha story to a case for sloppiness in rubrics and music. Pastors really should rethink this policy of just printing whatever comes in the mail. In any case, Roma responds to the claims of this week’s “lesson.”

At the Sacred Music Colloquium, there is plenty of time to talk to other directors and singers about what their scholas are using, particular as regards the propers of the Mass. This is a particular challenge in English-language Masses because this is a major area of neglect from mainline publishers. They print the antiphons in the Mass aids and then forget them completely when it comes to music, under the expectation that every parish sings some hymn with a text that is (most likely) unrelated to the Mass.

This tendency has created a major fissure between the music you hear at Mass and the Mass text itself, dividing the attention of congregations and erecting a wall between the sanctuary and the loft at critical points in the Mass: entrance, offertory, and communion. This is not how it should be.

But what is a choir to do about the problem? A resource used ever more frequently is the Simple Choral Gradual by Richard Rice. He offers very easy but very effective choral settings of all the propers for Sunday and major feasts for the entire liturgical year. Once you get the hang of them, they can be worked up very quickly. They can be adjusted according to the sensibility of the parish, and they offer an excellent solution for any schola that is working to transition a parish from the conventions of the day toward a sacred music model. The price is also just right at $19, so that you can buy a copy for each member of your schola.

I surely wished I could have been there this year. This was Friday

“William Byrd, the Euroskeptic: His dedication to English Style and Sensibility”, consort songs performed by Oliver Mercer, tenor, and Mark Williams, harpsichord and organ, Friday, August 13, 7:30 PM, at St. Stephen’s Church, 1112 SE 41st Ave., Portland.

This recital explores Byrd’s setting of texts in his songs, which Byrd scholar Philip Brett described as having “a strong attachment to a native idiom rooted in Tudor court culture” as opposed to popular Italian styles, and distinguish Byrd’s music from other English composers such as Weelkes, Morley and, eventually, Dowland. The program includes elegies written for Mary, Queen of Scots, English-style consort songs in foreign languages, and song settings of poems by Sir Philip Sidney, including the joyful “My mind to me a kingdom is”, and an elegy on the death of the poet “ O that most rare breast.”

About the performers:
Hailed by the New York Times as “excellent” and “particularly impressive”, Oliver Mercer is quickly gaining recognition as one of New York’s most exciting young voices in early music. The 2009/2010 season marked several solo debuts, including Alice Tully Hall under Kent Tritle with Musica Sacra, Houston’s Wortham Center with Le Voix Baroque, 5 Boroughs Music Festival, and Handel’s Messiah with Taghkanic Chorale under Steven Fox. Mercer also returned as featured soloist with the Sacred Music in a Sacred Space concert series, Saint Thomas Fifth Avenue and the Clarion Music Society. A highlight of 2010 has been Mercer’s participation in multiple performances of Monteverdi’s Vespro della beata Vergine. In the summer of 2009 Mercer participated in Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s 75th season in their acclaimed production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen under the baton of William Christie. Other past engagements include Performances of Bach’s St. John Passion in Korea and Japan with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Evangelist in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion at Saint Thomas Fifth Avenue and soloist in various Bach cantatas at the Oregon Bach Festival under Helmut Rilling.

Mark Williams took up the post of Director of Music at Jesus College Cambridge in September 2009. Described as ‘the shooting star of the international organ scene’ by the international press, he has appeared in the UK, Europe and America with many of the UK’s leading ensembles, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the City of London Sinfonia and the Gabrieli Consort and Players. He is the Principal Conductor of English Chamber Opera, the Organist in Residence at the annual International William Byrd Festival in Oregon, and has given solo recitals, appeared as harpsichordist and organist, and led masterclasses in choral training, singing and organ performance in the UK, the USA, Asia and Africa.

The Tablet says that Benedict XVI will celebrate Mass with large parts in Latin when he visits the UK in Sept. Pray Tell says that this is the first time since the Mass went vernacular, which doesn’t sound quite right. In any case, even if the decision is tied to the current transition to a new translation in English, this is a very good sign. Vatican directives have long specified Latin for large international liturgical events.

All Christians embrace the claim that the Bible constitutes the definitive book of Christian truth. This idea is so ingrained in Christian communities that many people without historical understanding suppose that the earliest Christians had the book somehow handed to them directly from the Apostles or perhaps even from the Heavens.

Catholics have a more refined understanding. Truth came before the text, and this is one reason we revere tradition. The Bible as a unified book emerged from deliberation by learned theologians and clerics over the course of four centuries, as many writings were investigated for soundness and excluded or included based on conformity with Christian truth.

Absolute discipline was required during this process since this was a time of remarkable creativity for heresy as well. Bogus texts, pseudo-prophets, vagrant doctrinal amalgams, counter-churches, peculiar practices, and outright hoaxes were everywhere. Sorting through this textual chaos was a priority for the Christians but it took centuries.

The nucleus of what later became the New Testament is in evidence from the late 2nd century. The earliest dateable inventory of canonical Scriptures is from Athanasius’s Easter Letter of 367. The Council of Hippo of 393 was the first to require a specific canon of scripture to be used for public readings.

It was during this very period when the music of the Christian Church was being codified as well. This is hardly surprising, if you think about it, but while we tend to think and write often about the origin of the Bible, very little of the same effort is put into thinking about the origin of Christian song. We know that the earliest Christians took over Psalm singing from Jewish worship, while eschewing the secular dance styles of Greeks, but in what way was the use of music regulated as text were?

The Council of Laodicea, a regional synod of bishops held in the 4th century in Asia, was the first to overtly regulate the production of music. Given the times and the emphasis on rooting out error, writes Christopher Page in The Christian West and Its Singers (2010), “the bishops at Laodicea could not possibly regard the canonicity and textual authority of materials used by their singers with indifference. The time had come for decisive intervention.”

The council said that music could only be sung by “regularly appointed” singers who could also read from parchment (not merely papyrus, which was cheaper and more likely to include fraudulent texts). The singers, regarded as more than mere hirelings for an occasion, could not visit taverns. Most importantly for our purposes, there could be no singing of improvised or made-up songs in services. Only canonical books could be sung. The ban was emphatic: there could be no singing of Gnostic gospels, hymns celebrating then-popular angel worship, much less poetry made up on the spot by some popular mystic.

Why is this?
The bishops understood that what was sung was just as important as the printed texts, perhaps even more important, for what people came to believe about Christianity teaches. Inevitably, then, the music had to undergo a process similar to that which took place concerning the texts. The matter that had to be first addressed was: what texts? And that matter of the source material was settled in approximately the same time frame as the issue of the what constituted Christian texts too.

The council did not address the issue of style. That was left to later Church legislation. But that is perhaps because there was no real controversy here. It had long been established that rhythmic music drawn from the world of taverns and commerce and theater were not admissible. The chant was of a musical structure free enough to accommodate the text, and that is for a reason: the word is given priority over the tune. The silence of Laodicea seems to indicate the absence of a problem in this respect.

It is Professor Page’s opinion that the strict regulation of text was a response to an immediate problem that “there were churches were psalmody was no longer regarded as a form of reading.” The bishops sought to reinforce the long-standing practice in which the purpose of singing in liturgy was inseparable from the practice of praying and teaching from scripture (the term lector later came to be used interchangeably with singer).

There was the further matter of the organization of texts within the liturgical calendar. That would be addressed and codified in later centuries, most famously by Pope Gregory (hence Gregorian chant refers not only to the music itself but the liturgical organization and purpose of the music). The rendering exact shape of the melodic structure of the chants in the Roman Rite would take place centuries later, and, in fact, this is still an ongoing process. But in general, the question of the music book of the Roman Rite of Mass was and is a settle matter: the Graduale Romanum (a book that not 1 in 100 Catholic musicians today has ever hear of).

The analogy between the Bible and liturgical texts can’t be pushed too far, since with music we are dealing with a changing and evolving art and not something frozen in time. There is always room for new composition and organically evolving style that builds on the chant foundation. Still the analogy reveals something that is widely forgotten today: that the music of the liturgy is part of and inseparable from the liturgy itself, as important as the Scriptures read in lessons or the doctrine taught in sermons.

It makes no sense to place a high emphasis on authentic texts, sound teaching, good doctrine, and leaving all aspects of music to the whim of musicians and commercial music publishers, as if the Church should have nothing to say about the matter. In fact, throughout the history of the Roman Rite, this has been largely a settled matters. The music that would be sung at Mass, for example, would be rooted in chant and use the texts of the propers and ordinary of the Mass. Later on, the sequences were permitted as part of liturgical music. None of these texts were options. Any additional music was permissible only as a much lower level of priority.

This understanding was in place from the earliest centuries up to our time. In fact, when Pius X’s motu proprio on music came out in 1903, the director of music for St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York told the press that the Pope’s insistent on Gregorian chant would not imply any changes in their existing program. They sang all the propers of the Mass with Gregorian chant, and the ordinary similarly used the texts of the Mass with polyphonic and other music. The cathedral’s music program would proceed exactly as before.

In our own times, we have extreme problems in the area of both style and text. The undisputed understanding that had been with us from the earliest centuries has been smashed by convention and culture. A tiny proviso of the Missal of 1969/79, one that permitted the propers to be replaced by other “appropriate songs” unleashed a kind of chaos that reminds us of what the bishops gathered at Laodicea must have faced.

But contrary to what many people think, this is not just a postconciliar problem. Legislation from the 1950s permitted vernacular hymnody, with no regulation of texts, as part of Low Mass in special circumstances (this practice was widespread long before). Many of the fathers of the Second Vatican Council actually sought to put an end to this problem and thus did the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy put such a strong emphasis on singing Mass texts and on Gregorian chant.

I had a long discussion with Fr. Samuel Weber earlier this year in which he really brought home to me the point that we really do face a two-part problem that can easily be divided into text and style. It’s his own view that the textual issue has received too little attention. We need to be singing the propers of the Mass itself, and whether we do that in English or Latin is not as central (right now) as the problem that most musicians believe that they can sing anything they please.

The natural response of many to this is: let’s have more legislation. I would personally like the permission to replace propers with other unspecified songs to be completely and immediately repealed. That change requires legislation. Beyond that, change can occur without big decisions from on high. Education in the very meaning of liturgical music itself is the most important priority.

The core point that needs to be emphasized: not just any music is appropriate for Mass any more than just anyone’s scribblings are entitled to be called the Word of God. When Luther decided to take on the Catholic Church, he produced his own Bible that raised fundamental questions about the canon of books. And when modern secularists seek to debunk settled Christian teaching, the wave silly Gnostic texts around. So too, the opponents of sacred music can be found hocking their own texts and their own musical styles that have nothing to do with the treasury that Vatican II called on us to preserve and pass on to the next generation.