Chant Café

Fr. Lawrence A. Donnelly beautifully puts it all into perspective with excerpts from 100 years of Church teaching. People are always saying that Rome should speak out on the music question and put an end to all the nonsense that is driving people away from their parish and keep the liturgy from singing in its true voice. Well, Rome has spoken out, again and again and again.

The Intense Debate comment system is the most sophisticated that I’ve seen – allowing for nested commentaries – and we’ve implemented it here. If there are problems with the integration, I’ve not found them yet. The comment widget on the sidebar might not update properly and this will be a work in progress. If you see troubles be sure to let us know. (If you are moderated, we can assure you that it is inadvertent and a matter of software tuning.)

Everyone once in a while I receive word from a traditionalist congregation that someone has discovered Pope Pius X’s motu proprio on music and insists on imposing it on the parish to the letter, with no knowledge of the long history of controversy in the United States when the document first came out or of any of the qualifiers and conditions embedded in the document’s structure. The press, even when the document first appeared, was full of claims that the Pope had banned all music but chant and forbid women from singing in choirs. Neither was true but confusion was everywhere in the days before one could easily look things up online. Why confusion continues to this day is another issue.

In any case, the following interview with the music director at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York appeared in 1904 in the Kansas city Star (June 12) and it helps clarify matters. I have this from Fifth Avenue Famous, a new book on the topic of St. P’s. Incidentally, note the matter-of-fact mention that chant has always been central to the liturgy at St. Patricks.

“There is nothing in Gregorian music that women’s voices cannot do most effectively,” said Mr. [James] Ungerer, the New York choirmaster of St. Patrick’s cathedral. “The public seems to be laboring under erroneous ideas of the whole subject of Gregorian music and the purport of the Motu Proprio. It seems to think all figured music is to be abolished, and that church music of the future will in consequence partake of requiem – something mournful and monotonous. Unless there come from Rome explicit orders to abolish women they will certainly be retained at the cathedral.

“The cathedral, in probability, will have no more Gregorian chant than it always has had. The Introit, Gradual, Hallelujah, Tract, Offertory, Communion, which change with the feasts, have always been Gregorian at the cathedral. This has not been the case in other churches in this vicinity and elsewhere, and it is to effect this that the pope evidently wishes to make it compulsory. The Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei will continue, as they always have been at the cathedral, to be figured music, but we trust of a higher order of composition. There is a lot of splendid modern music to displace Haydn, Mozart, etc. — music that sustains all the simplicity and solemnity of Palestrina. To bring the figured music to a higher standard of excellence, it would seem, is one of the chief objects of the pope’s decree, and it has not come too soon.”

You might be interested in Fr. Anthony Ruff’s defense of the term performance in the context of liturgy, which I find persuasive. Too often people use the term performance, always in snarling tones, to music they do not like – and the forbidding of anything at all resembling a performance has been used to rule out anything artistically accomplished from taking place at Mass. See page 383 of Sacred Music and Liturgical Reform (1987).

There was once an institution in the United States called the Gregorian Institute of America, and it published some great books among which An Applied Course on Gregorian Chant by Joseph Robert Carroll. If anyone has a clean copy that we can scan and perhaps print, please write me. In the meantime…

An Applied Course in Gregorian Chant

Haaretz runs a fascinating article on the life and work of Pierre Boulez:

Boulez became familiar with contemporary non-European music through his teacher, pathbreaking composer Olivier Messiaen, at the Paris Conservatoire, where Boulez enrolled in 1942 against the wishes of his father, who had wanted him to attend a technical college. It was there that Boulez encountered the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok and the highly innovative Edgard Varese. The sudden acquaintance with these composers shook up the 19-year-old Boulez.

“In Messiaen’s regular class, we studied harmony, the way one does at any music academy, but he would pick five or six of his best students for courses in composition and analysis that took place outside regular hours,” Boulez said, recounting what can now be found in books about the history of new music.

“We would get together in someone’s house, and study the evolution of music from Mozart to Schumann to Debussy and the new music of that period,” he said. “Messiaen showed us how the genius composers created their own rules. He was the only one; the other teachers were academics, unimaginative, who taught tricks but not the secrets of style and evolution. This is the way I began to understand composition.”

Music wasn’t something Boulez could pick up at home, though there was a piano in the house. “My family wasn’t musical,” he said. “I played and I sang in the choir at school. Because it was a religious school, we sang religious music. I mostly remember Gregorian chant, because it was so different from the other music, and I like it to this day.”