Author: Kathleen Pluth

In the heart of SouthEast Washington at Holy Comforter/ Saint Cyprian Parish, there will be a free perfomance of Spem in Alium, Tallis’ famous 40-voice motet, sung by nearly 100 people.

A reception following is available for a $10 donation or more.

Spem in Alium will be sung at 3:30 pm today (Saturday), and the address is 1357  Capitol Street SE.

The marvelous Westminster Cathedral Choir will sing at the Consistory at the Vatican this weekend, and for the Holy Father’s Sunday Mass.

Update:

Lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the fact that more formal worship styles appeal to a surprising demographic: the young.

While many youth liturgical outreaches continue to focus on the casual and the near-secular in order to attract young people, this type of pastoral programming seems to be doing less well in many cases than those using more traditional forms.

Not long ago I visited a parish that within a couple of years had built up a large group of young servers and a sizable youth schola for the traditional Mass–celebrated on a weekday evening. And this is hardly a unique case, just in the parishes I’ve personally visited.

There was a time, a naive time, when it seemed there was a desire among the young for an authenticity that had as its heart a certain casualness and spontanaiety. In the 60s and 70s, it was the fashion to speak one’s mind, follow one’s heart, and go with the flow.

I believe that it is likely that today’s young people are likewise interested in authenticity–but in authenticity that has a much different character. Spontanaiety is wonderful, in its place. Casualness, chattiness, hanging out–these are activities as popular among young people as they have ever been. But there seems to be a growing sensibility that not every place is the same. Mass is not the place for relaxed, casual activities. The true liturgical joys can be found by going deeper, by being more quiet, and by experiencing more and richer beauty.

When I was young there was no leadership in the Church of my experience for this kind of liturgical experience, which leads to a second and more practical reason that young people are enjoying good liturgy: it is available. If a teenager would like to attend a polyphonic Mass on a given Sunday, and if s/he is willing to travel a bit, it is available. If a family has been singing chant at home and would like to join a schola to improve their skills, it is possible–not always at the local parish, but somewhere.

I sometimes wonder why there was this enormous temporal gap in leadership of the sacred liturgy. I suppose some of the reason was political, some was a misunderstanding about the aims of the Second Vatican Council, and some was a skill vacuum of a kind that we are thankfully not likely to see again soon, if all the young people now involved in liturgy continue to persevere and serve.

“When we celebrate the Mass, we don’t accomplish a representation of the Last Supper: no, it is not a representation. It is something else: it is the Last Supper itself. It is to really live once more the Passion and the redeeming Death of the Lord. It is a theophany: the Lord is made present on the altar to be offered to the Father for the salvation of the world. The Mass…is participated in, and it is a participation in this theophany, in this mystery of the presence of the Lord among us.”

Pope Francis, this morning.

The Catholic Church’s vast heritage of sacred music, which has been kept alive for years by university music faculties and commercial publications rather than being a living presence in our Catholic churches, received two quite different expositions in Washington, DC this weekend.

On Saturday evening in the Basilica of the National Shrine, the Shrine’s resident professional choir joined with the vocal ensemble Seraphic Fire to sing Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, an extensive piece which Seraphic Fire has recorded previously. The music was in every way stunningly beautiful, filling the vast space with unbelievable harmonies and overtones. The great choruses were beautiful, but perhaps even more of an aural treat was provided by small groups, duets and trios. The physical space was used to great effect, most notably on the charming call-response hymn Audi coelom. It was a start-to-finish celebration of the human voice, in praise of God and the Blessed Virgin, and hopefully the prolonged standing ovation will be some small encouragement for this sort of enormous effort to be repeated in the future in our outstanding Catholic music programs.

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On a much smaller scale, and in a liturgical context, the choral ensemble Musikanten sang a polyphonic Solemn High Mass at Old St. Mary’s Church in Chinatown, DC. The resident men’s schola sang the proper chants from the Graduale, and the Ordinary and motets were sung by Musikanten.

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Weekends like this feel to me something like the Antiques Road Show, where someone’s forgotten old belongings turn out to be worth millions. I think it’s just marvelous that these nearly-forgotten treasures of ours have been brought out from the boxes and cupboards where they’ve lain for centuries, scarcely noticed, and fill the air with excellence, beauty, and praise.

Some of our readers may be interested in applying for this scholarship from the AGO.

  February 7, 2014

The American Guild of Organists is delighted to announce a new college scholarship program for organ students with financial needs:

The Ronald G. Pogorzelski and Lester D. Yankee Memorial Scholarship will be available to six students (four undergraduate, and two graduate) beginning with the 2014–2015 academic year.

• Four undergraduate scholarships in the amount $7,500 each will be offered: one each to an incoming college freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior. Each scholarship will be renewable through completion of the student’s undergraduate years of study.

• Two graduate scholarships in the amount of $15,000 each will be offered and will be renewable for a total of two years of graduate study.

Eligibility requirements and application details are available online. The application deadline is March 1, 2014.

The mission of the AGO is to enrich lives through organ and choral music. For more information, please call 212-870-2310 or e-mail info@agohq.org.

The following is a guest post from Richard Skirpan, young choirmaster and organist in Pennsylvania, written in response to Ben Yanke’s post here. I think it is wonderful to have a chance to hear how young people are thinking about sacred music.

A few weeks ago in some comments here I was working out my thoughts on why so many younger people seem to express at least some preference for liturgy that is received rather than invented. I’m becoming more and more convinced of my theory as to why that might be so. I’m sure other wiser people have already said most of this, but here it is from my point of view.

My grandparents lived in a world where secular culture more or less supported Christianity. That’s fine, and if that’s how the world worked it sure would make it comfortable to be a Christian. (But I’m not sure comfortable is where Jesus wanted us to set out sights.) And while many look at it with nostalgia as a simpler time, it seems to me there were still plenty of real problems, but mostly they were swept under the rug.

My parents’ generation lived through the great cultural revolution. A lot of those wrongs were righted. I’m sure it seemed like the humanity’s great next step, and the Catholic Church seemed to being coming along with it. I’m sure it was exciting to live through and hard for many people of good will to imagine that the gaining momentum would ever subside, or contemplate why it even should.

But by now, all those torn-down cultural walls that kept my grandparents “safe” (and also kept a lot of wrongs unrighted) are gone, and in the West, culture and Christianity are less entwined than ever before in modern history. Maybe for some that’s great. For others it may be a terrible loss. But it occurs to me that for a Christian it shouldn’t matter much. After all, Christianity was at its founding countercultural, and perhaps we can acknowledge that some aspects of it work better that way.

As a result, it seems a lot of my generation don’t want to think of church as a meeting or a convention or going to hear a speaker (even though all of those are part of it) – we want church to feel like church. As a Catholic, I want to call it the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass – maybe not exclusively, but at least more often. It never stopped being that, even if other aspects gained emphasis.

And a lot of us don’t want church music to always feel like a Disney soundtrack or what we hear on the radio or the muzak in the mall (even though there are sacred texts set to all of those) – we want church to sound like church. As a Catholic, I think it should not be an unreasonable expectation to hear some chant at every Sunday Mass. When any media outlet does a package on the Catholic Church, you hear chant in the background. About the only place you don’t hear chant in association with the Catholic Church… is most Catholic churches.

I find when those of my grandparents’ generation see this movement, they love it, because they think we’re trying to turn back the clock, so to speak. It makes them *comfortable.* But that couldn’t be further from the truth for many of us. And a lot of things, both good and bad, have happened in between.

Many of my parents’ generation are completely confused. They think we’re trying to undo what they worked so hard to accomplish. But one can’t undo time. We’re not doing it because of nostalgia, or to promote any human political idea that traditional elements may happen to represent. In fact, there are many people who promote tradition for terrible reasons. But I hope I’m not one of them.

So… that’s the problem. Now other than just making my case as lovingly as I can, I don’t know what the solution is.