This article appeared this morning in our regional daily, about the last concert appearance of the St. Louis Jesuits, which is to take place on Sept. 29 in (who would have guessed!) St. Louis.
From the article:
"The St. Louis Jesuits, the Catholic Church’s Simon and Garfunkel, are reuniting for a fall concert to be held on Sept. 29 at Powell Hall, near Saint Louis University, where they first met almost five decades ago and revolutionized Catholic liturgical music through their folk-rock sounding songs.
"Like band reunions, this one has the wistful feel of an era ending. The five men, like their baby boomer and Generation X fan base, have aged. Jesuit seminarians when they met, they are now in their 60s and 70s, and one is 80.
"... All went their separate ways in individual projects long ago. And church music in general has expanded and evolved to include newer artists and compositions and to bring back some of the old chant and Latin traditions."
Said one fan: “The songs are comforting, inspiring, uplifting, even joyful,” she said. “Those songs put the ‘celebrate’ in the celebration of Mass.”
The author of the WH article, Erin Grace, had this to say:
".... the songs of the St. Louis Jesuits were all I knew. We sang their music at every Mass at St. Margaret Mary in Omaha. At home, my ex-nun mother cranked up her Jesuit albums on the weekends. My four siblings and I grew up doing our chores with “Sing to the Mountains,” “Be Not Afraid” and “Seek the Lord” thrumming in the background."
"Mom didn’t get the Led (Zeppelin, for you millennials) out in the 1970s because she found what she needed in the Jesuit music: peace and calm, which as I think about it now, probably reflects on her always having young children underfoot. Of course, it was also meaningful.
“It’s quiet, and it’s tender. It’s spiritual,” she told me after unearthing those old Jesuit records. “It’s moving.”
"....To understand the hold the St. Louis Jesuits have on many older Catholics, it helps to get a window into what old church music was like. It was old. It was formal. It was often in Latin, Hebrew and Greek. Sometimes it was chant, and once in a while, there were devotional hymns with titles like “O Saving Victim Opening Wide.” This could be beautiful, depending on one’s taste, but the style did not encourage much active participation from the pews."
I was amused by this statement by the author:
My literal home still has the old Jesuit record albums. Mom found them in the basement, next to a record player that’s hardly ever used. But she doesn’t need vinyl anymore. “Alexa!” she commanded. “Play the St. Louis Jesuits.”
Some personal reflections on the St. Louis Jesuits' music: I had mixed feelings about them in the 1970s and 80s. I liked that they were scriptural, and spiritual. But the parish I belonged to used their music pretty much exclusively. "Glory and Praise" was the ubiquitous blue hymnal in the pews, and the only time we dusted off something else was to sing Christmas carols. I had belonged to school music groups all through high school, and we sang a pretty varied repertoire. Even though it was a public school, we sang a lot of classical and contemporary religious music. I enjoyed the variety, and wished later that we had more of it in church.
But fast forward several decades; I now have a better appreciation for how much the St. Louis Jesuits were pioneers. Now our hymnals do have a variety of music, including some of theirs. I give them credit that much of their music has stood the test of time, and has even crossed denominational lines.
I am not planning to attend the concert, but one of our choir members is. He is a gen-x or y-er, and to him this is the traditional church music he grew up with. I will be interested to hear what he has to say about the farewell concert of the group.
Katherine, thanks for this post. Unfortunately the article is behind a subscriber wall but I'm sure the snippet you posted gives us a taste of it.
ReplyDeleteAt one time there was a sort of multiple-waves theory of music for the Catholic renewed liturgy, which still has some validity. According to that theory, in between the old Latin and devotional hymns mentioned in the article, and the St. Louis Jesuits, was a first wave of the new music. That was the stuff by guys like Joe Wise, Ray Repp, maybe Carey Landry (who is still going strong - saw him in Raleigh last week). Those were songs like "Sons of God" and "The Spirit is A-Movin'" and "Joy is Like The Rain". A lot of that stuff was based pretty directly on the folk revival. They appeared in our pews in the late 60s or early 70s, in booklets that I think were mimeographed. The mimeographing may not have been cheapo publishing on the publishers' parts; lots of material was illegally copied by parishes and dioceses in those days, and in fact that material, published by an outfit called FEL, was banned by the Chicago Archdiocese because it was sued by FEL for copyright infringement. To this day, that music isn't sung in the Chicago Archdiocese.
The St. Louis Jesuits music (and the rest of the Glory and Praise paperbacks) was the 2nd wave. I think those guys were brilliant. Their texts were much more scriptural (or based on prayers in the missal) than what came before. They laid out the psalms in melody, in a way that made us hear that poetry for the first time.
The guys who formed The Dameans, about which I wrote the previous week, were from that same wave.
The next wave would have been the Minneapolis guys, Haugen, Haas, Joncas. And Rory Cooney. And many others. If there has been another wave after that, it's been the LifeTeen-style music - a good deal more electronic than the folky stuff.
The St. Louis Jesuits were primarily guitar-based. That made their music accessible and popular then, and perhaps to some extent today. I think the piano has overtaken the guitar and the organ in Catholic music as the primary instrument. At least that's how it looks to me But admittedly I play the piano. It's hard to speak of what goes on in the country as a whole; all of us have tunnel vision because we tend to worship in the same place from week to week.
Sorry about the paywall, Jim. The World Herald is weird, some of their content appears to be public, but apparently some is available only to subscribers. I didn't see that this article was in the latter category.
DeleteI do remember the first wave music. My hometown parish had the green folders full of pirated music in purple mimeograph ink. We didn't need no stinking copyrights! Probably bad music but kind of fun for teenagers tired of the old black St. Basil hymnal.
DeleteThose were the days of seven acoustic guitars, all playing the chords and strum patterns. "Though the mountains may fall, and the hills turn to dust ..."
DeleteWell the choir I'm in now only has four acoustic guitars, but one of them is a twelve string, so that counts double. I think we had Though the Mountains May Fall for our exit song a couple of weeks ago.
DeleteWhat has given the St. Louis Jesuits their staying power, I think, is the scriptural bases of almost everything they wrote. Who among us hasn't sleepily come upon a line in a psalm one morning and said, "Oh, that's where they got it!"?
ReplyDeleteI have probably mentioned before that in Kansas City we had a very conservative pastor. An old-style conservative who loved everyone and hated no one. He is why we had, on weekday mornings, the first vernacular Masses after the Vatican Council while the official translations were still in the works. And he is why we rolled with Ray Repp's "Hear, O Lord" while everyone else was still struggling with "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name" and "To Jesus' Heart All Burning."