Let me start out by saying that I am emphatically NOT a professional musician, Church or otherwise. I have had the benefit of some amazing musical training in my life (beginning with my piano teacher, the Rev. Joan Ewaldsen of Cherokee Village Lutheran Church ELCA) and participated in some really incredible musical experiences. That's all the claim to expertise that I have.
That being said, I do believe that renewing and restoring the quality of worship music is probably one of the greatest needs of the modern Church. Does that sound too hyperbolic? Surely the Catholic Church has a greater need to correct doctrinal errors, to assist people in making moral choices, to reach out to the new immigrant communities in North America, to restore trust in the clergy....etc.
Well, probably, but the thing is, I believe that many of those things are incredibly lofty goals that are almost unreachable without divine assistance. We can work towards them, but probably the best we are going to do is prepare our hearts for the Holy Spirit to do most of the work for us. (Not the actual labor, mind you, but the work of converting hearts and minds to the Gospel.) So, when you are not sure what to do, in the face of so many problems in the Church, I always say do what you CAN do.
And we CAN, very easily, change what we're singing in Church.
"What we're singing in Church." That's the phrase I want you to think of every time, in this post, that I use the words "Church music". I know that there is a broader class of music, what we might call "Sacred Music" which is music directed towards and about God. Such music might be said to include polyphony, such as that of Tallis or Palestrina, contemporary praise and worship music, Vivaldi's Dixit Dominus, and a whole plethora of different types of music that deal with the divine. I, however, want to restrict this discussion, for the sake of time and simplicity, to that music which a regular parishioner or a regular parish choir member, in a regular parish might sing or have sung to them. I suppose that one could spend a post lamenting the advent of John Rutter's anthems onto the Cathedral repertoire over the polyphony of William Byrd, or whatever, but that isn't really what concerns me. I am worried about the situation of the ordinary man in the pew, like me, and what the Church is doing, through its music, to reach him.
One of the reasons I worry about this music is because of the manner in which we go about selecting it these days. In fact, that's not what I'm worried about. I am worried about the idea of "selecting" music at all. You see, in the selection of Church music, it is an almost unavoidable temptation to do one of two things: to select music which will please the congregation or to select music which represents one's own musical/theological preferences. In fact, I have never been in a Church choir where someone didn't at some point say, "Well, everybody really likes....." or "This song really goes with....." or "We've always ......."
Now, I ask you, what if we applied these criteria to everything else in our Christian life? Would it make sense for the congregation to adopt the text of the sermon by parliamentary procedure prior to each service, or to have the congregation vote on which lectionary readings to do each Sunday? No, of course not. Somehow, in our subconscious mind, we have the notion that it is part of the Christian challenge to be formed according to the will of God, not according to our own will. If, however, we were to always hear, with the "itching ears" mentioned in the Epistle, what we wanted to hear, or only read what we liked in the Bible, we know that our doctrine would slowly be warped into a sort of mishmash of prejudices easily consumed by the greatest number of people. Enter the Least Common Denominator.
Church music is probably the single most formative part of any liturgical act. By it, words are put into our mouths so that we return to God praise for what he has done for us. We become, through song, an image of the heavenly Jerusalem, redeemed and transfigured into the likeness of Christ. Now, does that sound like something we can "choose" our way into? Do any of the phrases above sound like a transformed people, whose whole will is dependent on God? I have never thought so.
Fixing this problem is not as complicated as one might think. True, we will probably never be able to exclude choice entirely from the process of selecting music, but I do think we can at least mitigate it by singing songs and texts which we 'receive' rather than 'prefer'. This involves moving away from choosing various hymns and motets to fill our liturgy and moving towards a regular cycle of songs and chants that have nothing to do with our own preferences. Lo and behold, the Church has given us just such a cycle in the Graduale Romanum (the Roman Gradual); and, because there are two forms of the Roman Rite, isn't it incredibly fortunate that there is an edition of this book for each of the two Uses respectively?
The Graduale Romanum is written entirely in Gregorian Chant. It contains very few "hymns", unless they are prescribed for a particular liturgy. The texts are drawn either from Sacred Scripture or from time immemorial, and reflection on them is almost a theological exercise in itself. Truly, nothing could be more "counter-cultural" or, I might add, "counter-preferential" than that. The Ordinary of the Mass is in there too.
Now, however, we start coming to a problem. Many parishes simply CAN'T have the Graduale Romanum every week, because they either lack the group of dedicated singers to tackle the proper texts for each Sunday and sing them in a manner that edifies or they simply do not have a solemn celebration each week in which to sing said chants.
I believe that the texts themselves are the primary formative aspect of the chants. If the ability is lacking, why not simply sing the texts to simple melodies which are easily memorized, so that we do not lose the full effect of the chant? If the opportunity is lacking, why not put the texts in the mouths of the congregation as a Responsory Reading or Psalm, whether in English or Latin? I do not think that either goal would be too much.
Now, most of this post has been directed to churches that either omit the propers or cover them up with devotional 'hymns'. However, I don't think that even exemplary traditionalist apostolates are exempt from this attitude either. Too often we finish with a proper only to join in singing our favorite 'hymn' or motet from whatever atrocious choir book we've selected, simply because it seems to be the general preference of the congregation or because we "haven't sung this one in a while". The problem with this attitude is precisely that doing so distracts us from the transformative text, namely, the proper, and puts attention on the choir's selection. My proof of this phenomenon comes from personal experience. I am often told how beautiful "that song at the Offertory" was, meaning the choral piece, but am almost never congratulated for my faithful rendition of the Rossini Propers. Why? Because they've forgotten about them already; the propers were driven out of the people's minds by that stunning descant. And who can blame them?
The solution to this, I believe, is always to make the Proper of the Mass the star of the show. This can be by ornamenting it with simple Psalm verses (which might be chanted in a Gregorian style or by a simple harmonization), or by selecting (ouch, that word) music which primarily repeats the text of the propers themselves.
I haven't got around to addressing the issue of congregational participation, but I think that I will leave it for a later date. I do believe that we need to have more congregational participation in traditional apostolates, particularly in singing the Ordinary of the Mass. I also believe that hymn-singing has its place, but I wonder if there aren't better ways for us to make this singing more biblical in nature and restrained in tone. For example, I think that we could take some notes from the old Presbyterian tradition and perhaps sing metrical psalms to familiar tunes, particularly the psalms that are meant to accompany each of the proper antiphons of the Mass. In this way, the congregation would internalize Sacred Scripture in a much more immersive way.
All of this talk of "transformation", though, brings us back to where we started the discussion. Aren't there more pressing matters for the modern Church, issues which can only really be solved by the action of the Holy Spirit in individual hearts? And yet, what better way would there be for us to dispose ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit than through the music that we sing? And if we sing the Holy Scriptures, if we make them our means of rejoicing to God, isn't the Holy Spirit already beginning His work in us? Perhaps the issue of Church music is not so "petty" or "self-referential" after all.
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