Chant

Among the workshops I attended at the National Association of Pastoral Musicians (NPM) convention this week was one on the use of liturgical chant.  The presenter, Richard Clark, is the director of music at Boston's cathedral.  He is a graduate of the Berklee Conservatory and obviously has a passion for the musical form known as Gregorian chant.  He doesn't come across as a reform-the-reform crank; rather, he has spent his professional life working to integrate the church's tradition of chanted prayer into the reformed liturgy.  His presentation has spurred the following reflections.

I don't need to tell NewGathering readers that the Roman Catholic Church's liturgical reform has unleashed keen emotions.  As most readers of NewGathering are aware, a liturgical reform-the-reform movement got itself organized in the 1980s and 1990s, a quarter century or so after the Second Vatican Council inaugurated liturgical reform.  The goals of the reform-the-reform movement were never singular, from what I can tell; some adherents wished to jettison the reformed liturgy completely and go back to the pre-reform book and the practices, devotions and spirituality it accreted; some others wished to press the reset button on the reform and do it all over again; still others wished to weave into our current practices those things which (they insist) the Council Fathers intended.

Whatever the merits of those goals (and on the whole I don't support them), the reform-the-reform movement has achieved a disproportionate influence among church officials over the last 20 years or so.  Certainly, Joseph Ratzinger has given it a sympathetic ear.  Benedict's papacy was (I hope) the pinnacle of the movement's influence.  But beyond Benedict, the number of Vatican officials and bishops throughout the world who prefer a reform-the-reform-rooted spirituality apparently is not insignificant; not to mention the priests and academic types who promote it within their respective spheres of influence.

The two elements of Catholic worship for which the reform-the-reform crowd has the strongest arguments are the use of the vernacular, and the style of music.  Sacrosanctum concilium, the Vatican II document that instituted the liturgical reform, was pretty explicit in its wish that Latin continue to be used in worship to some extent; and also that chant, especially Gregorian chant, continue to be sung.  The latter is said to be "proper" to the Roman Rite (which is to say that it is the musical style that is indigenous to Roman worship), and that it possesses "pride of place" (a metaphorical seat of honor).

Subsequent to the Council's promulgation of that groundbreaking document in 1963, a lengthy magisterial documentary tradition for liturgical and musical reform has grown over the years.  According to that authoritative tradition, the insistence on the use of Latin has more or less been consigned to the dustbin of history (although, to the best of my knowledge, no document explicitly announces this).  But the insistence on the privileged place of chant as a musical form continues on.  A perusal of the document which is supposed to guide the celebration of mass, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, shows that chant is listed as an option - indeed as the first option - for the entrance song, the responsorial psalm and the communion song.  And beyond those elements of the rite, virtually every word of the mass can be chanted - the Penitential Rite, the Gloria, the Alleluia, the Holy Holy, the Eucharistic Prayer, and so on.  The Roman Missal and other liturgical books provide chant settings of all these.  Even the readings can be chanted if the pastor is so inclined.

Despite this official promotion of chant, the masses that I've attended over the course of my lifetime (which corresponds almost exactly to the lifetime of the liturgical reform itself) have featured little or no chant.  The music of the reformed liturgy has gone in directions other than chant.  During the course of my lifetime, two basic traditions have existed in parallel: a style of traditional hymns, borrowed from Anglican, Lutheran and other Protestant worship; and new compositions in a more contemporary and popular style, indebted to Bob Dylan and the folk revival, and, more recently, to Evangelical Christian Contemporary power ballads.   In my own very modest way, I've contributed to this departure from official wishes: the ensembles I've led over the years have had a focus on "contemporary" music.  It's fair to say that I've been a proponent (again, in an extremely modest way) of taking the church's musical prayer away from chant.

I'm not anti-chant.  In my view, there are two basic arguments in favor of chant.  One, which in my view is the weaker of the two, is the one I've already mentioned: the church's official and authoritative instruction is that the chant tradition is to be maintained.  Not that I am a reflexively disobedient person; but the official church gives other options for music besides chant, and it's abundantly obvious that the people have voted for Other.

The second argument, which I consider stronger, is aesthetic.  There is something about chant that just seems and feels sacred to me.  A number of people roll their eyes at pronouncements like that, which fall easily from the lips of the reform-the-reform crowd; but as an aesthetic judgment, I consider it powerfully true.  I've reflected a bit as to why that is so, but I've never reached a satisfactory conclusion.  But whatever the explanation, there is something about chant that "feels sacred".

Richard Clark, the presenter of this particular workshop, is not a wild-eyed reform-the-reform zealot.  He comes across as mild-mannered and thoughtful - but a mild-mannered and thoughtful man in love.  In fact, it's a powerful passion in him.  He discovered the church's treasury of chants when he studied at Berklee, and has had a love affair with chant ever since that has spanned his professional career.  As I mentioned above, he has been working hard since then to figure out how to make chant "work" in the form that the reformed liturgy has taken.

He has at least one good argument to make: when we dip into the church's treasury of traditional chants, we dip into the texts that those chants clothe, and those texts, by and large, are psalms.  Most Catholics don't understand that, when the mass is celebrated day by day and week by week according to what is in the books, the psalms are primary prayer texts.  In a typical parish Sunday mass, the only exposure we get to the Book of Psalms is a small handful of verses from a single psalm (often paraphrased by contemporary lyricists) in the Responsorial Psalm.  But the Missal itself envisions that, at the beginning of mass, rather than singing (as we did in the 1960s and 70s) "Praise To The Lord" or (starting in the 90s) "All Are Welcome", an actual psalm text and refrain would be sung.  Likewise, a psalm would be sung during communion, rather than "I Am The Bread of Life".  I have nothing against any of the non-psalm or psalm-paraphrase texts I've mentioned; in fact, I think our worship is richer for it.  But as we've enriched our worship by incorporating these newer texts, we've simultaneously impoverished it by excluding the traditional scriptural texts.

I suppose it's clear that I like the idea of immersing ourselves more deeply in the psalms in our worship.  But there are a number of objections and obstacles that would need to be overcome.  One is straightforward: the official chants for the Introit (Entrance Chant) and Communio (Communion Chant) are in Latin, so, as written in the official chant book, the Graduale Romanum, it would force us to sing in Latin.  And I find there is little or no appetite among Catholics in the pews to re-incorporate Latin into our corporate prayer.

Another objection, about which Clark was upfront, is architectural.  He stated that his favorite kind of church are those 19th century buildings in the Gothic or Romanesque style, because their acoustics typically were designed for chanted prayer.  Of course, there are still many churches in those styles that are in use around the United States and elsewhere - and those churches' architectures are problematic in a number of ways for other elements of the liturgical reform.  They were built at a time when choirs were above and behind everyone, in a loft, and if they were accompanied by any instrument it would be an organ, and there was no such liturgical role as cantor or ensemble, and there was no electronic amplification.  The acoustic requirements of the reformed liturgy are very different, and architects, pastors and faith communities have struggled for decades to make the reformed liturgy work in these older spaces.  Conversely, the worship spaces that have been built since the middle of the last century are acoustically well-suited to the reform - electronic amplification is built into the original design, and there is space at the front for the musical leadership; but they usually lack the natural resonance that chanted prayer thrives in.

Still another objection is that the texts that are chanted are not in regular meter.  The psalms are poetic in many ways, but standard English poetic and lyric features like ending rhymes and regular meter and syllable counts were not part of the psalm authors' poetic tradition.  Chant is well-suited to irregular metered lyrics (as is rock music and the revived folk tradition; this was the brilliant insight of pioneers like the St. Louis Jesuits).  But for group singing, irregular meter is less congregation-friendly.

Finally, there is a basic tension, perhaps even contradiction: the reformed liturgy calls for the full, conscious and active participation of the people; but the church's chant tradition was not developed with that goal in mind.  Chants come from monasteries and cathedrals where relatively small chapters of monks or priests prayed together multiple times a day and formed scholas for this purpose.  The chants were composed with these configurations in mind.  The expectation was that the schola members would be formed and trained.

To do chants as they exist in the liturgical books requires a schola.  To put it baldly, it requires taking the sung prayer away from the people and giving it to a group of elite specialists. The people themselves are not capable of singing these chants, which are complex (even though there is no harmony) and are in a language, Latin, which almost nobody studies anymore.  The liturgical books envision this limitation: prayers such as the entrance song, the Gloria and the communion song can be sung by the choir alone (i.e. a schola), although I've never encountered that in any parish mass I've ever attended.   Pastors and music directors, given the choice between this option in the books or putting sung prayer in the mouths of the people, have chosen the latter.

I asked Clark whether he utilizes a schola; he said that he does, but still tries to accommodate the people's participation.  For example, after his schola sings the Introit (the entrance song), he then follows up with a congregational hymn.

There are other adaptations as well.  Composers are translating the Latin texts and even paraphrasing them into regular meters so they can be fit into well-known hymn tunes.  I never discount the ingenuity of composers and other artists.  But to my way of thinking, chant and the reformed liturgy don't mix well.  If chant is indeed to have "pride of place" in Roman liturgy, the reform would need to go in a direction other than it has so far.  It's probably fair to say that the church has moved on, and I don't suppose many will mourn too much over the loss of chant - especially considering that anyone younger than me (and I'm a lot closer to 60 than 50 at this point) has little or no first-hand exposure to chanted liturgy.  But I'd preserve the aesthetic of chanted prayer, if I could.  The disappearance of that aesthetic is a loss.  Or so it seems to me.