PSALMS, HYMNS, AND SPIRITUAL SONGS: ROMAN CATHOLIC LITURGICAL MUSIC
IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE VATICAN II
Fr. Jan Michael Joncas - University of St. Thomas
Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University, October 17, 1997
There is a singing group in this Catholic church today, a singing group
which calls itself "Wildflowers." The lead is a tall, square-jawed
teen-aged boy, buoyant and glad to be here. He carries a guitar; he
plucks out a little bluesy riff and hits some chords. With him are the
rest of the Wildflowers. There is an old woman, wonderfully determined;
she has long orange hair and is dressed country-and-western style. A
long embroidered strap around her neck slings a big western guitar low
over her pelvis. Beside her stands a frail, withdrawn fourteen-year-old
boy, and a large Chinese man in his twenties who seems to want to enjoy
himself but is not quite sure how to. He looks around wildly as he
sings, and shuffles his feet. There is also a very tall teen-aged girl,
presumably the lead singer's girl friend; she is delicate of feature,
half-serene and half petrified, a wispy soprano. They straggle out in
front of the altar and teach us a brand-new hymn.
It all seems a pity at first, for I have overcome a fiercely
anti-Catholic upbringing in order to attend Mass simply and solely to
escape Protestant guitars. Why am I here? Who gave these nice Catholics
guitars? Why are they not mumbling in Latin and performing superstitious
rituals? What is the Pope thinking of?1
So Annie Dillard in an essay entitled "An Expedition to the Pole"
describes her experience of a solitary yet representative sample of
contemporary Catholic liturgical music practice in the United States. My
intent in the following presentation is to trace how this practice got
that way. Because of limitations of space and competence, I will
concentrate on English-language composition intended for use in the
Roman Rite in the United States in the past three decades.
I will first record and explore the mandate given to liturgical music
composers in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. Next I will sketch
four broad compositional strategies in response to the mandate. Third, I
will offer a concise chronology of three phases of compositional
production over the past thirty years.2 Finally, I will suggest some of
the issues facing contemporary liturgical music composers for the Roman
Rite as they continue to refine their craft.
I must confess at the outset some difficulties confronting my
presentation. The task of the historian is daunting: not only to present
an accurate listing of events in a foundational chronology but to
configure these data into a framework of interpretation, to suggest
correlations and causes that may or may not have been evident to those
enacting the events, to declare what was "going forward" and what was
"in decline" in the period under investigation.3 Though my intent in the
presentation is broadly historical, I believe the events being explored
are still too close to the present for any global assessment. Nor can I
claim an Olympian detachment from the events being described; as a
published church music composer still producing compositions intended
for the church?s worship and as a co-editor of a widely employed hymnal
(Gather), I might be accused of (at best) reportage and (at worst)
special pleading in the following essay. I can only plead that I have
tried to account for my biases and exercise sympathetic insight into
stances toward liturgical music composition that are not my own. How
well I have succeeded in this account I leave to others to judge.
1. The Mandate
On 4 December 1963 when the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was
promulgated by Pope Paul VI in union with the Fathers of the Second
Vatican Ecumenical Council, an agenda was set for liturgical composition
in the Roman Catholic communion for the at least the second half of the
20th century. All of the documents stemming from that Council have
implications for the work of a Roman Catholic liturgical composer since
they provide a vision of life for the community he or she serves. The
most direct challenge, however, is provided by Sacrosanctum Concilium,
especially in its sixth chapter on sacred music. Article 121 provides
the document's exhortation to composers:
Composers, filled with the Christian spirit, should feel that their
vocation is to develop sacred music and to increase its store of
treasures. Let them produce compositions having the qualities proper to
genuine sacred music, not confining themselves to works that can be sung
only by large choirs, but providing also for the needs of small choirs
and for the active participation of the entire assembly of the faithful.
The texts intended to be sung must always be consistent with Catholic
teaching: indeed they should be drawn chiefly from holy Scripture and
from liturgical sources.
I highlight six elements from this article that have had profound impact
on liturgical music composition in the United States in the last three
decades.
The exhortation first challenges the prevalent self-understanding of
church composers. The document uses the term musicae artifices,
literally "artisans of music", to image composers as craftspeople who
put their skills at the service of their communities. This
conceptualization has much more in common with medieval notions of a
composer anonymously contributing to the community's good, than with
classical era ideas of a composer as an indentured servant of the
aristocratic classes, or Romantic era notions of the composer as a
solitary artist wrestling with the psyche and transforming that
individual struggle into art for the enlightenment of the masses.
Second, the exhortation raises the question of the relationship between
explicit faith commitment and the ability to write genuine liturgical
music. Is it possible for one who does not worship regularly with a
community, who belongs to another faith tradition, who is an agnostic or
an atheist, to know how to mold a community's sung prayer? (In fact, a
number of today's liturgical composers find their base in academia or
with publishing houses rather than with particular worshiping
communities. Some belong to other Christian denominations: Marty Haugen,
for example, who is Lutheran by heritage and a member of the United
Church of Christ for family reasons. Yet others have declared their
disbelief in the Christian understanding of God [e.g., John Rutter] or
are avowedly atheist [e.g., Ned Rorem]. Yet compositions by all of these
composers and others who share their diverse faith-stances are employed
in contemporary Catholic liturgical music programs without much critical
reflection.) On the other hand, do Catholic communities of faith always
welcome the possibly disturbing sounds created by their
composer-members? We have yet to think through the complex question of
commissioning, distributing and evaluating liturgical compositions
intended for use in the Roman Rite in the United States.
Third, the exhortation specifies the nature of the vocation of
liturgical composers in two ways: they are to "develop sacred music" (ad
musicam sacram colendam) and they are to "increase its store of
treasures" (ad thesauram eius augendum). The Council Fathers recognized
that composers, inspired by the liturgical texts and the ceremonies of
Christian worship, have produced past masterpieces of universal human
import: one need only think of the masses, requiems, anthems and motets
of Guillaume de Machaut, Josquin Des Pres, Giovanni Pierluigi da
Palestrina, Franz Josef Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig von
Beethoven, or Franz Schubert to see what impact Catholic Christian
liturgical composition has had on the history of Western art music.
Contemporary composers are bid to learn from the study of such
masterpieces how to employ the musical language(s) of their own day in
creating liturgical music of the highest excellence. But they are also
directed to "develop" sacred music. The root meaning of the term
colendam is "to cultivate" or "to till a field." The past
musicoliturgical solutions to compositional issues (for example,
treating the Sanctus-Benedictus as a multi-movement suite providing an
aural background to the sotto voce recitation of the Eucharistic Prayer
and framing its Institution Narrative) may not dictate how liturgical
composition is to be done today. Changes in the agents, rites and texts
of liturgical prayer produce changes in liturgical composition.
Fourth, article 121 challenged liturgical composers to "produce
compositions have the qualities proper to genuine sacred music". This
challenge provides the impetus for the vast amount of liturgical
composition in the past three and a half decades. But I contend that the
greatest difficulty facing present-day liturgical composition is a lack
of consensus on what constitutes the "proper qualities" of Roman Rite
liturgical music in the wake of Vatican II's liturgical reforms.
Admittedly, article 112 declares that the purpose of sacred music (like
the purpose of the liturgy itself) is "the glory of God and the
sanctification of the faithful", and further specifies that sacred music
1) forms "a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy"; 2)
provides a genuine "ministerial function" in the liturgy; 3) may "add
delight to prayer"; 4) may "foster oneness of spirit"; and 5) may
"invest the rites with greater solemnity". But I believe that the
controversies we have experienced in the types, idiom, intent, and
evaluation of liturgical compositions written in the past thirty-five
years stem from varying understandings of how to apply these conciliar
guidelines.
Fifth, article 121 requires liturgical composers to contend with a new
element in producing their works: the "active participation of the
entire assembly of the faithful" (actuosam participationem totius coetus
fidelium). While the exhortation that composer write not only for large
but for smaller choirs does not directly challenge the practice of
writing art music for groupings of more or less trained musicians, the
composer's craft is transformed by the call to provide scores for
nonchoir members with little or no musical training or literacy. The
composer must therefore write not only challenging and expressive music
for the skilled, but Gebrauchmusik for the ecclesial assembly.
Finally, the document notes that composers must make critical judgments
about the texts they set. Rather than being expressions of vague
religious sentiment, these texts must be doctrinally correct and drawn
chiefly from scriptural and liturgical sources. Since most liturgical
composers are not theologians, historians of worship, scripture scholars
or lyricists, this challenge involves them in collaborative efforts to
produce liturgical composition.
2. A Taxonomy of Compositional Strategies in Response to the Mandate:
Traditionalist, Eclectic, Contemplative, Transformative
In the light of the compositional mandate offered in the Constitution on
the Sacred Liturgy, I would offer the following four-element taxomony of
compositional strategies. As in all taxonomies, one deals here with
"ideal types" or "models" that serve to organize the data, but should
not be taken as slots into which all composers and compositions must be
pigeonholed.
The first strategy, based on official Roman Catholic liturgical music
documents from Pius X's Tra le sollecitudine of 1903 through the 1967
implementation document from the Congregation for Divine Worship
entitled Musicam Sacram, recognizes a transcultural "universal"
liturgical music in Gregorian chant. The claim here is that, in
conformity with the Council's demand that any new liturgical forms would
grow "organically" from earlier forms,.new compositions for the Roman
Rite should arise organically from Gregorian chant which remains the
proper music for that rite.
A consistent and intelligent spokesperson for this "traditionalist"
approach in the United States is Msgr. Richard J. Schuler in editorials
written for the journal Sacred Music. Chant theorists such as Robert
Skeris of Christendom College and ethnomusicologists such as Peter
Jeffery caution against the wholesale abandonment of the chant and
polyphonic heritage of Roman Catholic worship music. On an international
level, this approach find expression in the congresses and publications
of the Consociatio Internationalis Musicae Sacrae.
Although very few composers known to me are producing vocal monody to
traditional Latin, Greek, and Hebrew texts for the Roman Rite (perhaps
only Dom Jean Claire and his confreres at Solesmes in preparing chants
for the new texts of the reformed Roman Rite liturgical books), some are
attempting to create an English-language monody. Paul F. Page, for
example, is busy creating a chant "Simple Gradual" in English, while
Daniel Consiglio has been producing English monody as a member of a
Camaldalese community in California. Other monastic composers have
engaged similar projects, but their compositions are almost always
confined to their own home communities or confederations and relatively
rarely impact non-order parochial worship.
More widespread that the composition of monodic chants in the
traditional languages or the vernacular is the use of chant elements as
foundational or decorative in new compositions. A time-honored
compositional strategy harkening back to the days of organum and cantus
firmus, in the contemporary era this approach may involve inserting
vernacular tropes into a chant line, alternating traditional chants
(sung by choir or assembly, usually with instrumental accompaniment)
with new vernacular embellishments (sung by cantor, choir or assembly),
or appropriating chant themes for instrumental interludes in completely
vernacular compositions. However, with the widespread abandonment of the
chant heritage, there are few composers in the English-speaking world
producing creative fusions of chant and contemporary composition as
pioneered by French composers such as Maurice Durufle.
A second strategy, influenced by post-Vatican II ecumenical
convergences, seeks inspiration from the variety of sung prayer forms
generated by other Western Christian traditions: Reformation hymnody,
African-American spirituals and gospel songs, harmonized chants (such as
Anglican psalm-tones in four part harmony), charismatic songs. This
strategy claims that since Sacrosanctum Concilium refused to prescribe
one genre or style of liturgical music as normative, "oneness of spirit"
can best be fostered by expressing the richness of diverse
denominational responses to the gospel.
I suspect that this "eclectic" approach characterizes the majority of
parish music programs in the United States today. It is fostered by the
majority of the contributors the journal Pastoral Music, the official
publication of the United States-based National Association of Pastoral
Musicians. Its strongest theoretical exposition appears in The Milwaukee
Symposia for Church Composers: A Ten-Year Report issued in 1992 by the
Archdiocese of Milwaukee under the leadership of Archbishop Rembert
Weakland. This approach finds international expression in the meetings
and publications of Universa Laus.
The eclectic approach has been adopted by the majority of the Catholic
church composers operating in the United States in the last three
decades. In the area of hymnody, one thinks of Omer Westendorf's and
Robert Kreutz' "Gift of Finest Wheat", Delores Dufner's "Sing A New
Church into Being" (set to an American folk-hymn tune), or Marty
Haugen's "Gather Us In" among a myriad of other examples. However it
must be admitted that the United States has not produced a hymn-text
writer in the Catholic communion of the stature of a Thomas Troeger, a
Brian Wren, or a Timothy Dudley-Smith. (The closest may hail from the
British Isles: James Quinn, SJ.) Following the lead of Clarence Joseph
Rivers, a new generation of African-American composers are enriching
American Catholic worship with their compositions in gospel idiom.
Foremost among them would be Grayson Warren Brown, Rawn Harbor, and Leon
Roberts; non-African Americans are also appropriating this idiom (e.g.,
David Haas in his 1990s compositions) and expanding it (e.g., Rob
Glover?s incorporation of jazz elements in his liturgical music). The
redoubtable Howard Hughes has led the way in the creation of chant
tones, both monodic and harmonized, both for the psalmody and canticles
of the official English-language version of the Liturgy of the Hours and
the new ICEL Psalter; Abbot Marcel Rooney, OSB, must also be mentioned
in this context for the six volumes of his "Musical Supplement to the
Liturgy of the Hours" created on commission from the Visitation order in
the United States and published by Conception (MO) Abbey (1978-1984).
Servant Music, associated with the Catholic charismatic renewal in the
United States, has produced many volumes in its ?Songs of Praise?, but
local initiatives like the National Evangelization Team based in St.
Paul, MN, have also produced a repertoire of material strongly
influenced by the praise choruses of Pentecostal worship.
A third strategy, inspired by the meditative practices of Eastern
Christian traditions, use repetitive patterns and mantralike texts to
provide a nondiscursive aural background to community prayer. Individual
meditation done in common seems to be the goal of this style of
liturgical music, which is an attempt to foster "oneness of spirit"
without explicit reference to potentially divisive doctrinal issues.
I believe this "contemplative" approach is best represented by the music
for worship generated for the ecumenical community at Taize by the late
Jacques Berthier. Since being introduced and promoted in the United
States by GIA Publications, some United States composers (most notably
in the recent work of Sr. Suzanne Toolen) have attempted to write in
similar formats.
A fourth strategy, taking seriously the Council's recognition of
liturgical music as "sacred song closely bound to the text", has
provided "ritual/functional" music, frequently wedded to controversial
new translations of scripture and liturgical texts with strong
social-justice implications. The claim by this approach is that "oneness
of spirit" is found in human communities counterculturally committed to
resistance and liberation and that liturgical music must serve such an
agenda if it is to be authentic.
In the United States an articulate spokesperson for this
"transformative" compositional stretegy is Tom Conry, though Miriam
Therese Winter, Rory Cooney, James Hansen and others have also espoused
this stance. Internationally, the foremost representative might be
Bernard Huijbers whose musical collaborations in creating a Dutch
liturgical music repertoire and whose book The Performing Audience
provides groundbreaking insights into this approach.
Unlike the first three strategies which look to past Christian musical
practice (traditionalist = chant and chant-based polyphony of the Roman
Rite; eclectic = the hymns and service music of other Western Christian
denominations; contemplative = the music of Eastern Christian
traditions) for guidance, the "transformative" strategy looks to
contemporary secular music practices for inspiration. It is usually
explicitly informed by the theoretical concerns, from the human sciences
(sociological analyses of music-making by particular groups, the social
impact of music practices, the economics of music-distribution and
reproduction; anthropological understandings of culturally coded "folk",
"popular", and "art" musics; psychological explorations of the use of
music to inculcate information, stifle reflection, or facilitate group
action), the performaing arts (theatrical theory applied to Christian
liturgy), economic and political theory, as well as theology.
3. A Chronology of the Composer's Craft: 1965-1995
As I survey the past three decades of liturgical composition in the
United States, I note three phases in response to the agenda set by
Vatican II. In the first phase, the primary issue was producing a
vernacular musical repertoire. In the second, the primary issue shifted
to improving the quality and sources of the texts and music being
produced. In the third phase, the primary issue seems to be clarifying
the relationship of liturgical composition to the underlying ritual
prayer structures. I will now explore each of these phases by describing
characteristic engagements with rite, text, and music.
During the first phase the focus was on producing an English-language
musical repertoire. Some composers treated the change in language and
rite as purely cosmetic: the texts might be spoken or sung in the
vernacular rather than Latin, a few ceremonies might have been pruned,
but nothing "essential" in the rite was changed, and therefore nothing
different in compositional craft was required. The liturgical composer
taking this stance would continue to write a Gloria as part of a
five-section "Mass suite". The opening phrase would continue to be
intoned by the presider a cappella, and the rest of the text would be
set as a series of solos, duets, quartets, and instrumental interludes
alternating with choral writing. The only change from the "Glorias"
produced in the Baroque, classical and romantic periods would be the
vernacular texts and perhaps the musical idiom.
Other composers looked to the experience of other vernacular worship
traditions to discover what they had to teach. Finding rich congregation
participation through metrical hymnody among the Anglican/Episcopalian,
Lutheran, Methodist, and Reformed churches, hymns began to be standard
fare in the celebration of Catholic Eucharist. The so-called "hymn
sandwich" of entrance, offertory, communion and exit was promoted as a
means to achieve sung participation in the Mass, even though the spots
chosen were hardly the ritual high points of the reformed eucharistic
liturgy. Frequently these hymns were simply translations of European
forebears, though some genuinely new English texts and tunes did appear.
Still other composers looked to contemporary social-political models for
human engagement: hootenannies, happenings, political protest meetings.
The concern here was to write instantly accessible assembly-based music,
rich in shared feeling, popular and relevant to the issues of the day.
Choosing one's stance toward the compositional task also determined the
texts one set. The first approach generated rather bald English
translations of official Latin texts, intended to be sung to the
traditional chants. While some success was achieved with syllabic Latin
hymnody, the nematic and melismatic chants foundered on distorted
accentual patterns and a changed ethos. The second approach produced
more singable lyrics, given the propensity of sharply accented languages
like English toward metrical singing. The texts, however, were rarely
evocative or creative expressions of "the people's theology" (to use
Eric Routley's telling phrase). More often they were thinly disguised
Bible stories set to verse, catechetical indoctrinizations, or rubrical
directives (how else to judge a text such as "our priest is presiding /
in Christ we are abiding"?). The third approach rediscovered a genuine
stream of folk hymnody whose textual naivete might clothe profound
theological insight, but more often simply produced vague paeans to
peace, love, joy and "brother"hood.
Plainsong "propers" and "ordinaries" appeared, most notably those
created by Dennis Fitzpatrick for FEL, the "Friends of the English
Liturgy?. Other composers created Masses in English for choirs with
organ accompaniment, embellished with a few optional phrases tossed to
the congregation. World Library of Sacred Music's The People's Mass
Book, The Liturgical Press's Our Parish Prays and Sings, GIA
Publications' Hymnal of Christian Unity, and FEL's The English
Liturgical Hymnal all appeared during this period to graft a vigorous
vernacular hymnody as an element in Roman Catholic worship. Culled from
the prolific works of "liturgical troubadors", the Hymnal for Young
Christians represents the compositional style of the third approach:
genera-pop" melodic lines with simple vocal harmonies, chord symbols
rather than keyboard accompaniments. "Pioneers" in this style included:
Willard Jabusch ("Whatsoever You Do"), Carey Landry ("Abba, Father") ,
Jack Miffleton, Tom Parker, Paul Quinlan, Cyril Reilly, Ray Repp ("What
A Great Thing It Is"), Clarence Rivers ("God is Love"), Sebastian Temple
("Make Me A Channel of Your Peace"), James Thiem ("Sons of God"), Miriam
Therese Winter ("Joy is Like the Rain"), and Joe Wise ("Gonna Sing My
Lord"), among others. Groups such as the Dameans and the Montfort
mission were likewise representative of this movement.
The second phase of North American composers' response to the challenge
of Vatican II took as its primary concern the desire to improve the
quality of both the texts and the music in liturgical composition. In
1972 the Bishops' Committee on the Liturgy issued a landmark document
entitled Music in Catholic Worship that moved beyond the prescriptions
of Sacrosanctum Concilium and Musicam Sacram to a new set of guidelines
for the new cultural situation in which Roman Catholic liturgical music
was being produced. By classifying the musical elements of eucharistic
worship as acclamations, processional songs, responsorial psalms,
ordinary chants, and supplementary songs, Music in Catholic Worship
provided composers with a new "functional" understanding of each element
of the rite.
Such clarifications soon led to a concern for higher quality in the
texts being sung. Some composers consciously restricted themselves to
setting only official texts, even when the English translations were
less than felicitous (e.g., "terebinth" is not an easily sung word!).
Other composers found or created idiomatic paraphrases of scriptural and
liturgical texts more conducive, in their opinion, to sung community
prayer.
Among classically-oriented composers, a search developed for a genuine
"American" sound, somewhat similar to the search undertaken by art music
composers such as Copland and Gershwin in the 1930s and 1940s. Richard
Proulx pioneered a rediscovery of authentic American folk hymnody; Ed
Summerlin and Eddie Bonnemere looked to jazz. Perhaps the most
influential (as well as most idiosyncratic) was C. Alexander Peloquin
who embraced the idiom of the American musical theater in his liturgical
composition (e.g., the "Gloria of the Bells", the use of cantor with
microphone). The so-called folk-oriented composers continued to draw on
African American and Appalachian traditions. Gregory Norbert of Weston
Priory forged a lyric chant "endless melody" style. But it was the St.
Louis Jesuits who took biblical paraphrase in American idioms most
seriously and produced a body of work that began to crossfertilize with
non-Roman Christian traditions in the United States: e.g., John Foley (
"The Cry of the Poor"), Dan Schutte ("Here I Am, Lord"), Bob Dufford ("D
major Holy, Holy and Amen"), Roc O'Connor ("Lift Up Your Hearts to the
Lord, In Praise of His Mercy"), Tim Manion ("To You, Yahweh I lift up my
soul, O my God").
The third phase, while building on the experiments and insights of the
earlier phases, focuses on the creation of ritual music. If the interest
in the earlier phases was to a great extent on writing individual songs,
the challenge now was to write liturgical units, that is to say, to
conceive how texts and gestures might interact with music in unified
movements of ritual prayer. This concern has led to a critical
reassessment of the rites as they are presently celebrated: their deep
structures, their relation with the culture, their nonverbal
constituents.
Composers today are less concerned with writing a "Gloria", for example,
than with determining how the "Glory to God" functions as part of the
introductory rites. They take into consideration how music can
underscore the gathering of the assembly and prepare worshipers to
celebrate the Word of God. This kind of composition demands
collaboration with other experts in ritual prayer and attention to the
reflective experience of worshiping communities.
This analysis of the rites leads to a parallel concern for the texts
being set. How do words, phrases, sentences, interweave and overlap to
communicate religious truth in the liturgical act? How does our
deliberate or unconscious choice of verbal images for God and God's
activity mold a community's faith-life? How do our verbal self-referents
and declarations concerning the objects of our sacramental worship
disclose our religious vision? Feminist and liberation critiques of our
present rites and texts are especially trenchant, and liturgical
composers must be informed on this debate and its implications for
future worship.
The concern for these issues of ritual integrity has led composers to
create in larger divisions of the rite, as well as to provide more
flexible and alternative methods of realizing a score, based on varying
resources in local communities. Perhaps the premiere example of such
ritual composition is Marty Haugen's setting of Eucharistic Prayer III
with Sunday Preface V in his Mass of Creation. Not only is this
composition scored for brass/organ/timpani or guitar/woodwinds/piano
sonorities, Marty has revisited the composition to provide further
preface texts and to employ its acclamations in a Eucharistic Prayer for
Children. Similar projects have appeared for the Rite of Christian
Initiation of Adults (David Haas), and the Liturgy of the Hours (Mike
Joncas: Praise God in Song, O Joyful Light, God of Light be Praised, St.
Francis Vespers). There is a crying need to develop further ritual music
projects for the Triduum, funerals, and celebrations of Christian
marriage.
4. Present Concerns
As Catholic composers continue to respond to the mandate of the Second
Vatican Council by producing increasingly sophisticated and practical
ritual music, further issues are challenging their craft. I will
conclude this presentation by briefly considering five: textual,
musical, leadership, technological, and mass marketing concerns.
4.1. Textual
I would claim that the United States, Canada, and Australia have much to
offer the world-wide Catholic communion in terms of multicultural and
multilingual worship. While the papal liturgy from early days was marked
by a bilingual character with the gospel being proclaimed in both Latin
and Greek, the introduction of vernacular languages in Roman Rite
worship has led to a recognition of the multilingual makeup of many
communities in North America. The following strategies seem to have been
adopted: some composers have enshrined English-language texts with
melodic and accompaniment patterns associated with other cultures (e.g.,
Israeli folk-song melodies; bolero rhythms); others have set other
vernacular languages to melodies and harmonies characteristic of
English-language sacred music (e.g., strophic hymn-tunes; harmonized
chant); still others have attempted to create bilingual compositions.
The experiments of Bob Hurd, Dona Pena, and John Schiavone in creating
English-Spanish liturgical music range from providing verses in both
languages for alternation in performance, through creating refrains
employing both languages in alternation, to constructing quodlibets
where completely different melodies in different languages may be sung
at the same time over the same harmonic figurations. Although criticized
for their hybrid character, these compositions represent an American
adaptation of the multilingual compositions used at Taize, though
usually without an assembly refrain in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. At core
the question these composers address is: "Whose vernacular shall be used
in particular communities at prayer and why?" The situation will only
grow more acute with the increase in the Catholic population of those
employing various Asian and native American languages.
A issue facing contemporary composers is what register of language is
appropriate for liturgical song. Once one ventures beyond the officially
approved liturgical texts and direct biblical settings, one is
confronted with a bewildering range of possible public prayer texts.
Does one choose to set the finely honed phrases of a Richard Wilbur ("A
Stable Lamp is Lighted") or are these texts considered too subtle for
the sung worship of the masses? Does one employ the language of personal
witness (as in much of the material produced for the "Lifeteen" program)
even if its sentiments seem at variance with the traditional objectivity
of the Roman Rite? Does one emulate the naivete of praise choruses, with
their repetition of hallowed phrases from a neo-King James language
register? Does one attempt to use "street language" in the hope of
producing an immediate connection between worship and daily life,
recognizing that such texts quickly become out-of-date with the constant
evolution of colloquial language and slang? Deeply problematic is the
programming of pieces for the liturgy originally intended by composer
and lyricist for another venue, as when "show tunes" from Christian
musicals such as the Song of Mark or Agape or catechetical pieces such
as "His Banner Over Me Is Love" appear at Lord's Day eucharist.
4.2. Musical
Since Vatican II we have witnessed an extraordinary expansion of the
instruments allowed in Catholic churches in the United States. Not only
the sound of organ, supplemented by brass and timpani on festive
occasions, but the timbres of pianos, guitars, string basses, woodwind
and percussion obligati resound in our houses of worship. Perhaps even
more significant is the use of electronic instruments as a normal method
of accompanying congregational song, not only electronic organs, but
synthesizers capable of sampling and emulating any orchestral instrument
and a variety of sounds impossible to produce on purely acoustic
instruments. Such an expanded tonal palette has led composers to create
pieces whose instrumental elements are an integral part of the
composition.
Unfortunately and probably unintentionally this compositional practice
has obscured the primacy of the vocal in Roman Rite liturgical music.
The impression is given that the liturgy is incapable of being sung
without sophisticated musical accompaniment. One "solution" to such a
perceived crisis is the creation of pre-recorded scores to be played
over the church's sound system to which the assembly is invited to sing.
Not only does this obscure the role of the music ministry (for example,
no one has suggested that a "solution" to the frequently dismal public
proclamation of the scriptures is to record actors reciting the
pericopes for later playback during eucharist), but it reveals how the
voice of the assembly has been downplayed in favor of polished
instrumental performance.
While few North American composers are writing purely vocal music for
the liturgy, the influence of Andre Gouzes (who has adapted the
harmonized chants of Orthodox liturgical tradition to French vernacular
texts) and the Scots Presbyterian minister John Bell (whose delight in
unaccompanied singing is manifest in his compositions and the
compilations of his Wild Goose Worship Group) will probably make itself
felt in a North American context in the future.
Perhaps most painful is the apparent inability of the church to attract
front-rank art music composers to create for the reformed liturgy. While
one can point to Masses by Gian-Carlo Menotti and Leonard Bernstein (the
latter much more a theater-piece than something able to be employed in
Catholic worship) and Requiems by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and John Rutter,
the masters of the contemporary concert hall seem by and large
uninterested in liturgical composition. Perhaps they feel that their
idiom is too advanced for the church's worship; perhaps they are
unwilling to expend much energy in creating music which may become
obsolete within a few decades due to new official translations of the
liturgical texts; perhaps they feel that they are incapable of making
genuine contributions to a tradition that seems to have reached its high
point in the masterpieces of the classical era. Nonetheless it remains a
painful truth that the best art music composers are conspicuously absent
in contemporary liturgical repertoire. For that reason, it is all the
more important to engage the work of so-called "holy minimalists" such
as John Tavener and Arvo Pärt so its possible influence on future
liturgical composition.
4.3. Leadership
Liturgical music leadership has taken significantly different forms in
United States parish life since Vatican Council II. Prior to the
Council, liturgical music leadership would have been the responsibility
of a volunteer choir director/organist, except for the cases of
cathedrals or affluent parishes. Rather than providing musical
enrichment for all worship events transpiring in parish life, this
volunteer leader normally was responsible primarily for choosing the
repertoire, rehearsing with and directing the parish choir for the
Sunday "high Mass". Some also provided organ accompaniment for hymns
sung during the "low Masses", accompanied soloists at weddings, and
directed a schola or choir (frequently a children's group) for funerals.
None were expected to provide music for the baptism of infants,
reconciliation, or the anointing of the sick. The volunteer choir
director/organist could be a layman (less frequently a laywoman), but
presbyters (usually associate pastors with musical interests) or women
religious (frequently the music teacher in the parish school or choir
director for the parish convent) also took on this role. Volunteer choir
directors/organists per se were not considered part of the parish staff
and did not attend planning meetings (except for extraordinary or
complicated events such as Confirmation). They may or may not have had
formal musical training, but could read both chant and standard
notation; they may or may not have had formal liturgical training, but
could decipher the ordo to determine which chants and texts would be
appropriate for a given celebration. Education for the role was usually
a matter of apprenticeship rather than academic credentialing.
In the wake of Vatican Council II, many parishes developed a paid staff
position of "Director of Music Ministries [hereafter DMM]. Unlike the
earlier model of choir director/organist, the DMM was responsible for
the musical elements of the life of the parish: not only in public
liturgy and devotions, but also in evangelizing efforts, catechetical
programs, fellowship experiences, and healing ministries. The DMM worked
as a professional alongside other clergy and lay professionals. While
the DMMs might serve in one of the particular liturgical music roles,
their primary task was one of coordination: recruiting, forming,
scheduling, enriching and assessing vocal (choir members, cantors) and
instrumental (organist, guitarist, pianist, ensemble musician)
liturgical musicians. A DMM was usually academically certified with at
least a B.A. in music and/or liturgical studies.
From the mid-1980s on, however, probably as a result of shifting
demographics and giving patterns, we have witnessed a downsizing of
parish staffs; the multi-personed complex of specialists has given way
to a reduced number of generalists. Frequently the DMM's role has been
combined with that of parish liturgist, or even been subsumed into the
responsibilities of "directors of adult formation" or "directors of
parish worship and spirituality". The professional credentials,
formation, method of working with clergy and other ministers, and
reimbursement of liturgical music leaders are all topics under great
debate at present.
Meanwhile some commentators have pointed to a gap in programs of
liturgical music leadership aimed at youth. While the pre-Vatican II
period could point to programs of informal apprenticeship based in the
parish and the immediate post-Vatican II period developed academic
credentialing in the development of music ministers, there is a deep
concern for whether and how young people are being attracted to and
formed in music ministry today.
4.4. Technology
A fourth area of concern lies in the technological developments that
have marked church music in the United States in the last thirty years.
First, one notes the change in acoustic environment for worship that has
been wrought by the wholesale adoption of artificial amplification. On
the one hand, such amplification can make preaching accessible to
greater numbers of people and can allow solo voices to be balanced
against choral and instrumental forces without strain or changes in tone
color; on the other hand, such amplification can also lead to a false
sense of intimacy and passive consumption rather than active production
of worship music.
Second, cultural changes in our acoustic environment have implications
for our worship music practices. One hundred and fifty years ago, if one
wanted to experience music one either made it oneself or went to a place
where others were making it. With the rise of recording technology, one
could "re-play" an earlier musical event, but it still took place in an
acoustic environment potentially shareable with others. With the rise of
the Sony Walkman, individualized acoustic environments were created in
which one can "consume" precisely the music of one's choice without
sharing that music with others in immediate physical proximity. Such
individual consumerism stands in marked contrast to the church's
expectation that worshipers will not only produce musical events in real
time (rather than as pre-recorded experiences), but that one's
individual tastes may be downplayed for the sake of the common good.
Third, electronic sound generation and broadcast has become increasingly
sophisticated. From the early days of the Theramin, we now have
instruments capable of sampling, reproducing and combining musical
events generated by acoustic instruments as well as constructing sounds
incapable of production by acoustic instruments. This is changing our
soundscape in radical ways, but it also raises questions of the cultural
codes associated with electronic music making. Are the typical sounds
produced by rock, rap, and hip-hop electronic instruments so connected
to secular cultural codes that they will only be perceived as
incongruous in public worship?
4.5. Mass Marketing
Finally, there is a concern about the mass marketing techniques used at
the end of the twentieth century for the dissemination of liturgical
music. One must ask if the vast amount of new liturgical music being
produced is market-driven rather than ministerial. In other words, is
the impression given to worshiping assemblies that their music programs
are "out of date" unless they are employing the newest material released
by the major publishing houses? Does this produce a faddish and
ephemeral repertoire rather than a stable and faith-grounding one? Are
liturgical music composers being treated as entertainment "stars" rather
than as servants of the sung prayer of communities? Comparing the
liturgical music situation in countries with a national hymnal (such as
Canada) in contrast to the United States (where repertoire is a matter
of advertising and sales rather than a national standard) may offer
insight into the strengths and weaknesses of mass marketing applied to
liturgical music.
5. Conclusion
This presentation concludes with a few sentences from the "Afterword" of
The Milwaukee Symposia for Church Composers: A Ten-Year Report
(Washington, DC-Chicago, IL: The Pastoral Press-Liturgy Training
Publications, 1992). Substantially the work of Don Saliers, a musician
and theologian teaching at Emory University, these words evoke the power
and promise of the psalms, hymns and spiritual songs marking Roman
Catholic worship music in the United States since the Second Vatican
Council:
[M]usic is a gift from God whereby we express and ponder the deepest
aspects of life and death, of human aspiration, suffering and joy....
Music -- whose scope, complexity and power can sustain and reveal as can
all art -- allows us to experience God in human form. In and through its
worship, the Christian assembly challenges composers, musicians and all
liturgical ministers to grow ever more deeply into the dispositions,
capacities and musical forms that make Christian liturgy a vehicle of
the transcendent and a supremely humanizing art. Together may we be
prepared to receive "what eye has not yet seen, nor ear heard".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
(New York: Harper and Row, 1982) 17-18.
2For the first three sections of this presentation I will be revisiting
and updating material I have previously explored in "For the Glory of
God and Our Holiness: Roman Catholic Liturgical Composition in the
United States", Liturgy 9/1 (Fall 1990) 43-53.
3My understanding of the historian's task is heavily influenced by
Bernard Lonergan's treatment of the topic in Method in Theology (New
York: Herder and Herder, 1972) 175-234.
