`Hey, this is kind of beautiful stuff."'
On a recent Monday at the Abbey of Regina Laudis here, about 35 nuns gather in a dim chapel to chant, as they do every day at noon. Making their way through Psalm 118, the nuns sit or stand; some face different directions, while others bow steeply. Throughout, their voices remain in unison.
Pope Benedict XVI would approve. After a concert of 16th- and 17th-century music recently, the pope said he would prefer to hear Gregorian chant and other traditional types of music play more of a role during Mass.
That's good news for the cloistered nuns at the Bethlehem abbey, which is known around the world for its devotion to Gregorian chant and is one of the few places where it is sung with such frequency and intensity. The nuns sing seven times a day; some interrupt their sleep to chant at 2 in the morning.
But the pope's comments also raise certain questions: What is sacred music supposed to sound like? And what's wrong with new music in church?
It's a debate that has raged since 1963, when Vatican II reforms brought contemporary music to Catholic churches. Just as the Latin Mass almost immediately disappeared amid attempts to modernize, chants gave way to guitars and snappy folk tunes.
The new music helped fill pews, but it left church conservatives and formally trained musicians reeling. How could the church that brought about Gregorian chant, polyphony and musical notation -- all profound influences on Western music -- be the same one leading sing-alongs of "Love Is Colored Like a Rainbow" and songs from hit musicals? What, bemoaned the purists, had the folkies wrought?
The new music helped fill pews? In what alternative reality was this? There has been a consistent decline of Catholics going to Mass over the last forty years. There of course are a lot of cultural factors explaining this besides a change in the liturgy. But to assert that contemporary music is filling the pews when there has been a decline in Mass attendance is plain mistaken. I can't recall one conversion story that mentions comtemporay music as a factor. Though I have read some where they come into the Church despite comtempoary music at Mass.
"There's a sense of mystery and religious atmosphere that seems to be lost in the new days," says Scott Turkington, the choirmaster at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Stamford. "The fact is that the older music is better. Ask any serious musician, and he'll agree with that."
The chants sung at Regina Laudis are more than 1,000 years old. But Sister Elizabeth Evans says "old" doesn't mean "irrelevant."
Sister Elizabeth, 46, was a corporate securities attorney and law professor before she came to the abbey in 1997. Each of the nuns is assigned certain responsibilities; hers are music and dairy. Sitting in a small room behind a wooden screen (which symbolically separates the nun's world from the visitor's, though there's enough space to shake hands), Sister Elizabeth remembers stumbling onto the sound of chant when she was 14. To her, it was anything but off-putting. She played it for her friends, who were equally taken.
"And I mean, these were 14-year-old gum-chewing delinquents like myself," she says.
To the untrained ear, the unaccompanied chant named after Pope Gregory the Great can sound emotionally muted, droning at times and otherworldly. That it's sung in Latin doesn't help.
But to Sister Elizabeth, it sounds more recognizably human than any other music, down to earth and in tune to the rhythms of life.
It's based on the Scriptures, after all, which are filled with human foibles. She says chant is like bluesman Muddy Waters -- a comparison that conjures the improbable image of nuns chanting "Baby Please Don't Go." She explains that both have a certain earthiness and deal with the nitty-gritty of life.
What they chant depends on the time of the day (the morning lauds, for instance, often celebrate beginnings and creations; at noon, they chant the sext, which deals a lot with chasing down noonday demons). Subjects also change along with the seasons. Lately, they've sung about taking in harvests, filling storage houses and other day-to-day concerns.
So if chant is like Muddy Waters, what's contemporary Christian music?
"Donny and Marie," Sister Elizabeth says, laughing.
Amen to that.
Roc O'Connor, one of the St. Louis Jesuits -- a musical group of then-seminarians at St. Louis University that led the folk Mass movement in the 1970s -- says he recently visited a poor church in Brazil where the parishioners sang local songs.
"I thought, `How can these people make sense of Gregorian chant or polyphony?' " says O'Connor, whose group still raises the hackles of musical purists. "The cultural and economic issues that are tied to it all make the issue more complex. Not everyone can afford an orchestra or singers who can handle it."
Yes Brazilian are too stupid to learn Gregorian Chant or least that what it sounds like what the condescending Roc O'Connor is saying. He obviously has no idea of the history of when Gregorian Chant was first introduced to Catholic converts who were natives of South America. That not only did they take to it, but composed their own Chants.
Nobody's expecting Gregorian chant to fill churches en masse. But many say the pendulum had been swinging toward traditional music even before the pope weighed in on the subject.
"You had one generation in the 1960s that had the general mode of questioning authority," says Kurt Poterack, editor of the journal Sacred Music. "Now you have, not quite the children, but the grandchildren. They tend to be people in their 20s who are saying, `Hey, this is kind of beautiful stuff."'
As Fr. Tucker said on his blog today "I'd be hard pressed to think of anything written after 1960 that's worth teaching a congregation to sing."
Known as 
Oh, please, let Mass go Gregorian again before I'm gone. Or at least, let's remove the showy singer with the mike in the choir.
Today at Mass we were subjected to tamborines, a failed attempt by the choir director to get people to clap during one song and the following Alleluia:
Ale-Ale-Ale-uia, Ale(clap)Ale(clap)Aleuia(clap,clap)
Fortunately, this isn't our regular church.
Why is it that tamborines get more play time than the official instrument of the Church (the organ)?
I find it a little ironic that O'Connor is quoted as worrying about whether the Brazilian churches can pay for an orchestra...since chant (by general defintion anyway) doesn't require an orchestra. Maybe if we actually exposed people to the sound of Gregorian chant, they might well pick it up the way little kids pick up on any song they hear a few times.
Chant does require training, and polyphony requires not only training but really excellent singers. I'm WAY on the side of chant and polyphony, but the logistics of making the changeover in the 350 zillion Catholic parishes in the world--it's something to think about. Not that that should have the last word, but it's a big engineering and educational problem. The alleged theological problem of Latin vs. indigenous music, though widely discussed at the moment, is temporary, and very minor in comparison to the educational initiative that would be required to really "go chant."
I was educated in a Catholic school in the late '30's and '40's. The students in the 5 grade all found a Kyriale in their desks (with modern notation). We learned the various chants and sang them at Mass. We also learned the English translation of the prayers and chants (as did our parents). We were all children of blue collar families--some immigrants among them, some very poor. The "they are too dumb" to learn the Latin is insulting to me and the other families that loved Gregorian Chant and loved the Old Latin Rite Mass!
"Chant does require training, and polyphony requires not only training but really excellent singers."
As I posted in another blog on this same issue, while chant does require training, it does not require too much training. I'm saying this because my sister, a music major, has successfully trained volunteer choirs to sing chant (and polyphony as well) for the Easter triduum. The volunteers in this choir were people with day jobs in non-musical professions.
OK, who really thinks that some guy with a guitar is better than a real honest to goodness chant?
And for the record, our pastor has been "sneaking in" one piece of gorgeous chant after another, and the poor slobs at our church seem to be not only getting it, but hungering for it. And as a 20 something- yes, we do prefer gregorian chant to all this hippie mumbo jumbo we've been fed- call it our own type of rebellion,I guess.
I think there is a bit of room for both/and here. I've never been a big fan of chant, but I'm ralizing that part of that is because you rarely hear it done well. Often, it seems like a cantor will be given a chant version of a psalm because it seems easier, and he's not a very good singer. Fortunately, my children are being exposed to a wide range of the Church's treasury of music at their school. Last year, a couple of the older girls did a chant version of the Magnificat during advent, absolutely, tears welling-up, beautiful.
My criteria for music at Mass?
1- Theological appropriateness and correctness
2- Song itself fits the arrangement (not fond of "The Wedding Song" on the Organ, for example)
3- Music is performed at a competence level that doesn't distract from prayer -- neither too awful, nor too "showy" good.
"Showy good" has nothing to do with the quality of the music or the performance; it has to do with the attitude of the performer. All music is accomplished by just that verb: performing. When the attention is drawn to the singer and not to God, that's when the problems happen. However, we certainly should not downplay virtuosity and talent just to be modest. God deserves our best, and if we've got it, we should give it.
I'm a 25 year old music director, and I've gotten the impression from others my age (and myself) that my generation has been downright cheated out of a musical and liturgical heritage that only now are we seeking to reclaim as our own. God help us.
Jeff, good catch on O'Connor's nonsense. One of the first examples of beautiful chant was a recording of indigenous-language hymns from Mexico. It sounded different from, say, Benedictine monks chanting, but it was very moving.
IMO, chanting doesn't take any more training than regular choir singing does.
I can read both notations, and Gregorian notation is much simpler for the singer than modern, in that it indicates the action of the voice much more graphically and directly. Anyone who can read music can learn to chant in half an hour; for a non-musician it might take two hours.
Chant and polyphony are completely different things; in fact, the thing they mostly have in common is that they're far better than the modern rubbish. Polyphony is difficult and intended for accomplished musicians, while chant is dead easy and intended for ordinary people.
The best way to spread chant is to start doing it. We don't need logistics studies or conferences or a master plan. Just sing it.
Actually what chant and polyphony have in common is that Sacrosanctum Concilium says they are the most suitable music for Mass, #1 and #2.
Some chants can be learned in half an hour. But not Graduals, and not the more melismatic Mass settings. A choir must hugely change its way of singing together, and a choir director has to learn a whole new way of conducting. And right from the very beginning, the choir has to sing so well that the pastor hears few or no just complaints about quality. He will certainly hear complaints about the style, and lose donations, until people adjust.
The main problem as I see it is infrastructure. Choir directors must be trained. In the old days, nuns in classrooms had chant skills that they could pass on to their students, because the nuns learned the chant skills in the novitiate. And reinforced them several times a day in the Divine Office. There are all sorts of chant instuction initiatives popping up, but few provide immersion into chanting communities, even for a short time. It's a big problem--not insoluble, but serious.
Remember the time when the Gregorian chant album of a monastic community in Spain hit the top charts? This means that Gregorian chant is, even from the purely commercial point of view, more than just palatable. It should be easier to teach chant these days than it was centuries ago, because there are recordings available.
Yes, Gregorian chant was a big fad for about 3 months, 15 years ago. (I think it was replaced by chubby-baby angels :-( .) And 3 months is the maximum time chant will last in parish life unless it's done well from the beginning. This requires preparation and structure. We know what Point B is: chant and polyphony. I think we have to be realistic about what Point A is: An American Church whose overwhelmingly favorite song is On Eagles' Wings.
My children were starting to get into the newer music that is played at our parish, ala "Sing A New Song". Quick as a flash, we had them join a children's choir in another parish that uses the Adoremus Hymnal. Now they prefer memorizing the "old standards" and learning chant. Exposure begets desire to learn.
Ian, that Alleluia song is known in my house as "the Polka Alleluia". Imagine it being accompanied by an accordion and you'll get the picture.
I'd be inclined to say that choir directors must be fired rather than trained. "Music ministers" are the public school teachers of the liturgical world: whiny, expensive, politically correct, and very much in the way. Fortunately, chant doesn't require a choir or a director, just one person who knows what he's doing.
As a matter of fact, the album "Chant" was on the charts for a very long time, and chant albums are still surprisingly robust sellers.
We assisted our former pastor to change one of the regular Sunday Masses to chant a few years ago. It couldn't have been easier. We stuck to the Missa Jubilate Deo, which is easy for the congregants to pick up, and before long people were quite at home with it. Training "music ministers" is a waste of time and money: just sing it, and people will quickly catch on.
Roc seems every bit as knowledgable about, (and skilled in) history and musical pedagogy, as composition...
Which is to say, not very.
The "liturgical composers" of our day have a lot in common with the film makers and politicians and pop singers -- success and prominence have nothing to do with aptitude and excellence, and all to do with hype and marketing.
HOWEVER -- there IS music of beauty and appropriateness being written, Fr Tucker. The Holy Spirit still inspires the creative, devout mind (that is not say such music is necessarily being printed in the latest Breaking Bread, however.)
Your friendly neighborhood Gadfly
The people will catch on, and then the next pastor to come in will change back to the Mass of Creation (as is his prerogative) unless there's a choir director to provide continuity. And excellence. And polyphony.
Because you know what the new pastor will think about the parishioners who complain about the loss of their beloved chant? He will say that they are whiny, and very much in the way.
Now if there could be a sea change...