Category: Jeffrey Tucker

This week at Acton University, I was in casual conversation with a professor of theology at a Catholic seminary and the topic of music came up. She did not really know of my activities here or in music at all but when she found out that I had written a book on Catholic music, she asked me a pointed question. “Why do parishes and seminaries continue to sing music that is so obviously inferior to what has come before?”

I asked her to explain what she meant. First she gave provisos that she is not a musician and knows nothing about the topic. Then she went on to describe her gradual discovery that she could pretty much tell if some hymn is suitable for Mass based on its publication date. If it was composed anywhere between 1960 and the current day, it was likely to be silly and thin and not really very serious. It was likely to be a song that just didn’t seem very churchy.  In contrast, she said, she has variously sung hymns from the 19th century that are strong and inspiring and seem suitable for reasons she couldn’t entirely identify.

Perhaps you know this narrative well. I’ve heard it dozens of times, even hundreds of times. But she persisted in asking why. Why is it that this inferior music continues to be printed and sung but the great music of the past is not? I thought for a moment and first began with the explanation that this debate between old and new hymns is probably the wrong debate, that we really need to be talking about the problem of all hymns from all times replacing the actual text and music of the Mass centered on the propers and chant ordinaries. This intrigued her; she had not heard this before.

Still, she persisted: given that we are singing hymns, even if we should be singing propers instead, why do we sing these hymns and not better ones? I do understand what she means. In general I think she is correct – with all provisos for the sappy material in St. Gregory Hymnal and the like. In general, she has a point. There are many answers to the question I could give, and even then I’m not sure I know the one most important reason.

And yet, in the end, all issues of culture and taste and the triumph of mediocrity granted, the factor most often overlooked is the issue of copyright. The older hymns are in public domain. The CMAA has made hundreds available for free. But the newer hymns are all held in a proprietary legal arrangement bound up with royalty payments to publishers, writers, arrangers, and composers. That means that the publishers can extract money from congregations, pay their employees, pay whatever is leftover to composers, charge people for using them, license them out to other publishers, and so on.

The entire economic viability of these publishing firms that dominate our parishes is bound up with this state-based regulatory institution. If you doubt it, take a look at the ostentatious display of GIA’s copyright warchest in the back of Gather Comprehensive, for example. Here you find a major driving force behind the strange mystery of the persistence of bad music. None of this music has stood the test of time and most of it will not. That means that there is money to be made in the short run. Using public domain material, to put it very bluntly, doesn’t pay the bills.

I would like to know more about this, and much of what I’m saying here is based on hunches drawn from other industries and not inside knowledge about the ledgers of the big three. Whether it is the number one factor or just one among many, it is certainly the least talked about element of this debate.

Regardless, however, no one is forcing parishes to buy this material. The pastors who support these institutions with parishioner dollars are doing so of their own free will. They can stop anytime. So to some extent my explanation really explains nothing at all. As Adam Bartlett has written and emphasized, we lived in changing times in which digital media provides ever more free options to the warchests of the old-line publishers. If more parishes start to use them, there will come a time when the problem and mystery of inferior music will be no more.

This communio for this Sunday is very special indeed. Its economy is notable. It is a beautiful tune in a very short space, covering a very wide range, and with some interesting modulations and tensions. Most of all what we find here is an unmistakable forward motion that befits the text: If a man wish to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow.

As a first mode chant, its tonal center is RE but other than the first phrase, the chant doesn’t dwell in this resting place. It always seems to be headed somewhere else. Notice its midpoint on MI, which creates a musical question of what is to follow. We move up a fourth to the LA to sing about the cross, again with moving force.

We arrive at the last phrase, which is the most intriguing. In three words, we reach from the highest point in this chant to it lowest, nearly an entire octave. But notice the last musical phrase. Instead of going RE ME RE, as we might expect in a communion chant, it dips down to DO. It is a vocally interesting passage because we don’t often encounter this sound at the end of a chant.

We might say that this musical turn it is unexpected. A surprise. We have traveled a direction that we might not have anticipated. The singer even notices a near loss of breath. It is a subtle but powerful effect. If we follow Christ we must be prepared to go places that are unusual, places that do not fit in with our plans, places that are unfamiliar. But they always end in our true home.

I’m writing from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a town I’m just getting to know, and I’m wild about the place. What strikes me immediately is the remarkable range of architecture, materials, and styles used to make this place, all created over a very long period of time, all delightfully lacking in evidence of central coordination but somehow all cohering in a spontaneous order. It is huge, industrial, complicated, and beautiful in its way – highly suggestive of history with technology from all times currently in operation, an impressive demonstration of intratemporal and intergenerational life that is all working together. The unifying theme is the working together of design and function.

It might at first seem to be an implausible home for the holding of the CMAA Chant Intensive and Colloquium. The setting is not monastic. It is not a city of gardens and natural beauty so much as a city in which the work of human hands is everywhere in evidence. But in the same way that chant, with all its transcendent and divine qualities, must ultimately be rendered by human voices singing in places built and maintained by human hands, it strikes me as a perfect place for these programs to be held. 

Like Pittsburgh the city, the chant which was similarly born across many generations. No one sat down one day and wrote the chants and codified them. They grew up alongside and integral with the Roman Rite, becoming ever more embedded in the ritual through trial and error and achieving stability and universality through use and function. We look at the entire body of chant and we are in awe of its sheer size. Sometimes we are intimidated by its scope. We know that we can never get to know it in a lifetime and yet we experience joy exploring every bit of it.

It is the same with a great city. The whole can be awesome and intimidating. Yet as we explore it and get to know small pieces of it each day, our appreciation intensifies for the whole. It seems ever friendlier by the day. We can move faster through it. We get to know the tricks of transportation, and learn where to shop and where to live. Eventually, if we live there long enough, we become natives, which means that it seems truly like home. It doesn’t happen all at once. No great city is immediately accessible. A great city is something that we get to know slowly, one fascination at a time.

Like a great city, chant is also something that will outlast our lifetimes. We have but a short time to participate in its living aspects, aware that we are surrounded by the ghosts of the previous generations that experienced it and knowing too that how we handle our period of domesticity will have some measure of influence on our future generations will experience it. Both chant and Pittsburgh are filled with millions upon millions of stories, each one fascinating in its own way. Our voices and lives become part of story if we take on the challenge.

According to Jerry Galipeau of WLP, the final version of the English for the new translation of the Mass is still in flux. Rome has approved a version but there are so many requests for changes and exceptions and indults that the publishers still don’t have a stable version that can be used to prepare materials at Mass. It is fascinating to see how the musical considerations are oddly forgotten whenever the liturgy goes through another upheaval.

There is no reliable empirical study of the kinds of music used in the typical parish, so generalizations are rather difficult. This is especially true now that parishes have sliced and diced their Mass schedules in order to meet perceived demographic needs. There is the youth Mass, the family Mass, the college Mass, and so on. Moreover, available musical forces change week to week. Also, of course, it all depends on the pastor of the moment as to whether the propers are sung or if the Masses are accompanied by old or new hymnody only. All these factors cause us to resist making sweeping statements about the state of music in the Catholic Church in the United States.

And yet, I contend that all experienced Catholics know more about what is typical that we think we know.

This past week, I tried an experiment in stumbling upon a parish in the town I happened to be in for the night, and attending the main Sunday Mass. I knew nothing about the place. Ahead of time, I talked to some friends to ask for predictions about the music program. After just a bit of thought, they all said the same thing. It will be accompanied by the piano. There will be four hymns. The hymns will be from the Haugen-Haas genre of dated contemporary music. The ordinary setting will be the Mass of Creation of Mass of Light from the same genre. The Psalm will be metric, probably from “Respond and Acclaim” or a similar resource. There will be no choir or perhaps there will be two or three people led by a cantor. They will sing no motets but rather only sing hymn melodies.

Do you think this is a good prediction? If so, you know more than you think you know about the reality of parish life in the United States. We all know of exceptions like St. John Cantius in Chicago, St. Agnes in Minneapolis, St. John the Baptist in Charleston, and many others. The exceptions are growing in number. In fact, most every major city offers many exceptions to the rule, and there can be no question that the momentum is with the exceptions. Nonetheless, the rule persists, and, in our hearts, we all know it.

So what did I find? I found the rule, what we might call the modal parish music program – modal meaning that it has characteristic and predictable feature that constitute a norm. In fact, it conformed in every way imaginable. The musicians were fine at singing the songs. They were doing their best with what they have. The same was true of the celebrant, who sang as much as he possibly could and did he best to involve everyone. The ordinary setting was in fact the Mass of Light, and the four hymns, all drawn from GIA’s Gather Comprehensive, were Haugen-Hass.

If you are not surprised, then you do understand something about the state of music in our parishes. Once my own expectations were confirmed, I was able to settle in and take the time to observe other aspects of how the program worked.

Recall that a great goal of the paradigm shift in the 1960s was to permit the people to be more involved in the Mass, and singing along with the choir and cantor was a crucial aspect of this. The reformers imagined that the people’s voices had been somehow silenced and that the Catholic people were aching to be free to express themselves. Of course this wasn’t entirely true, as most everyone knows, and that left a vanguard of the cantor elite to elicit singing from people. This has gone on continuously for many decades. All programs, all compositions, all ensembles, are to be judged by how effective they are in calling forth audible participation.

The music program I witnessed had done everything correctly according to the prescribed model. The music was upbeat, catchy, and, by now, incredibly familiar. The cantor stood in front of everyone, chatting it up and raising her arms high. The pianist was heavily amplified. There was nothing too complicated for people to sing. People were asked to introduce themselves to their neighbors, “breaking ice,” as they say.

How did it work out by this overarching standard of audible participation? Let me see if I can describe the scene at the entrance. The cantor made the announcements and greeted everyone. We all greeted each other. The hymn was announced (“Gather Your People”) and the page number given. The pianist played a rollicking introduction. The cantor’s arms waved in the air and she began to sing. The wireless microphone on the celebrant’s vestment picked up his voice and he began to process.

As for the people, it was absolutely striking. Not one soul among the one hundred assembled picked up a hymnal, at least from what I could tell. Not one soul among the hundred even attempted to sing along. Not one soul among the one hundred even pretended to sing. I had some sense that if I had started to sing, my action would have elicited shock and awe from those around me. It was almost as if singing had become a taboo. This is despite all the efforts of the cantor and the celebrant. The people just stood there in stone silence with expressionless faces. And so on it went for the entire Mass, from the gathering to the scattering.

There was a time in my life when music of this sort in Mass made me angry about what has been lost. This time the whole scene struck me not as an outrage but rather as a tragedy. It was extremely sad. The people were there because they were obligated to be there. But there was no inspiration that was visible. The aesthetic package lacked the capacity to transform the heart. It seemed no different than the mood music you hear at the mall or the grocery store, something vaguely pleasant but otherwise non-intrusive, the great white noise of American Catholic liturgy.

How might we imagine that this parish could change? I think it could be done rather quickly, with a program that begins with Psalm-tone English propers and moves gradually to more complex propers. The parish needs a chant-based ordinary setting, which can also begin in English and move to Latin. The Psalm should come from Chabanel Psalms. The recessional can be eliminated completely. The dialogues can be in chant. The pianist could play organ instead, something very easy during offertory or communion. And all of this can happen without spending a dime.  

This change would make a dramatic difference. It would give back to the Roman Rite the music that is native to do, creating an integrated package that would touch the heart. The musicians would feel good about themselves. The people might start to sing because by doing so they will be participating in the ritual and not merely singing backup to a contemporary soundtrack. In other words, this approach would actually achieve the results of participation over the long term. Not that this should be the standard by which the music is evaluated but it is one side effect of a program that actually centers on genuine liturgical music.

As it is, the modal music at the American Mass is unsustainable. It just can’t go on like this, simply because it is an incredible failure, even on its own terms. How can the change take place? It is a matter of a growing conviction stemming from a sense of urgency. It is the job of everyone who believes in sacred music to contribute to this growing conviction. We are fortunate to be living in times when this process has not only begun but is making great strides.

William Renwick of McMaster University is working with William Mahrt. the Gregorian Institute of Canada,  and others on a remarkable project. It is a freshly typeset and fully reconstructed compilation of the music of the Sarum Office. Here is the information page and here is the download page. This is magnificent work.