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Catholic World News News Feature

Analysis: New group seeks revival in Church music July 18, 2003

How did the Church of Gregorian chant and Palestrina became home to folk guitarists and soft rock? It is a sad tale, but it may not be the end of the story. At a June 2003 colloquium at Catholic University, sponsored by the Church Music Association of America, participants were given a wonderful vision of the beauty and solemnity through reaching deeper into the long Catholic tradition of liturgical music.

With Mass offered every day at the National Shrine, the conference featured daily lectures and workshops that offered extensive training in Gregorian chant. Also covered were the history and meaning of liturgy, choral repertoire from the age of polyphony, modern compositions that reflect a genuinely sacred style, practical approaches to music in parish life, the theology of worship, and much more.

This was the 13th meeting of this annual colloquium sponsored by the CMAA and the first time it has been held at Catholic University. The title sums up both the content and the agenda: "Liturgical Music and the Restoration of the Sacred."

The CMAA was founded in 1964 to assist church musicians in maintaining the "highest artistic standards and to preserve the treasury of sacred music." It maintains an active membership of Catholic musicians from around the country.

Attending the colloquium were music directors from parishes and cathedrals, academics who specialize in this music, seminarians, composers, priests, and other specialists and writers who are leading the way out of the styles of the 1970s and into recapturing a sacred sound for our times.

Some attendees were from an older generation that remembered the Latin Mass around which great Catholic music grew up. But most attendees were younger than 50 years old, people who grew up with folk masses and now seek a more solemn alternative.

What united everyone was the conviction that Catholic liturgy requires a greater emphasis on solemnity and the sacred, in line with recent pastoral exhortation of John Paul II.

"The Christian community must make an examination of conscience so that the beauty of music and song will return increasingly to the liturgy," he said at the February 26, 2003, general audience. "It is necessary to purify worship of deformations, of careless forms of expression, of ill-prepared music and texts, which are not very suited to the grandeur of the act being celebrated."

The music and liturgies at the meeting worked towards the goal of seeing the Pope's words come alive through example. The organizer of the event was Father Robert A. Skeris, who heads the CMAA and has taught and written extensively on Catholic music. Assisting him was Scott Turkington, the conductor of the Stamford Schola Gregoriana, who recently edited an important new text on Gregorian chant by Theodore Marier (1912-2001), Ralph Stewart of Ave Maria College, as well as Leo Abbott of the Holy Cross Cathedral, Boston.

In the conventional parlance of modern Catholicism, the CMAA represents the "conservative" side of the debate, but the term has an ambiguous meaning in today's world. For those who would like to see chant truly take "pride of place" in our liturgies (as Vatican II said it should), there is very little that remains to conserve, attendees observed. Pick a Catholic parish at random to attend on Sunday, you will not hear Latin chant at all, but rather a hymnody rooted in popular styles. The Latin propers and ordinary musical settings of Catholic history are rarely heard.

It is often said the new liturgy in new times does not allow for the incorporation of traditional forms of liturgical music. However, masses at which colloquium participants had the privilege of lending their voices did much to dispel the sense that solemnity and the new rite cannot go hand in hand. Daily Mass included both Latin and the vernacular, but all were woven together with the chant and resounded with traditional and newly composed polyphonic hymns, motets, and mass settings. Whether the choir sang alone or with active participation from the congregation, the liturgies during the colloquium featured a sound that linked the current generation with the long history of Catholic music.

The CMAA represents the institutional vehicle that not only refuses to accept the status quo in Catholic parishes today. It is also taking active measures through teaching and publishing (through its journal Sacred Music ) to train a new generation in the art of chant and choral music. The emphasis was not only on large cathedrals, where excellent music can often be heard around the country, but also in parishes, which are often loath to even look at chant and polyphony as an option.

Playing an important pedagogical role was Marier's new text, as edited by Turkington. A Gregorian Chant Master Class (Bethlehem, Connecticut: Abbey of Regina Laudis, 2003). It takes the singer through the technical and stylistic aspects of Gregorian chant, and includes a CD to go along with the book. It is a highly useful tool for any parish musician who is taking the first steps into this repertoire, and the only thing like it in print.

What colloquium members, and those fortunate enough to happen upon a daily liturgy at the shrine, came to realize was that sacred music and the solemnity can thrive in our times. If the CMAA colloquium is an indication, the advocates of this music are looking back in time but also, and more importantly, forward to a restoration of a magnificent tradition.

- By Arlene Oost-Zinner and Jeffrey Tucker

The Church Music Association of America can be joined for $30, which includes a subscription to the journal Sacred Music . Marier's text on chant is available from the Abbey of Regina Laudis.