Gregorian Chant Brings Tradition Back to Church

CantonRep.com ^ | August 23, 2006 | William Weir

[Alex Murphy]

BETHLEHEM, Conn. -- 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?

Going to church, critics say, should not sound like shopping at the mall or driving your car. They charge that ``liturgical pop'' is spiritually bereft and demands nothing from the churchgoer. It's friendly, pleasant and easy, they say. They mean that in a bad way.

Understanding God is hard work, the argument goes, and similarly, music in church should challenge us. A sermon that says only what people want to hear would lack moral authority. The same goes for music.

``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 blues legend 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.

A few times, she holds her hands in prayer and makes an angelic face to gently mock the ``niceness'' of contemporary music. It's got a steady 1-2-3 beat, she says, swaying her arm in rhythm. But life isn't steady, or blandly inoffensive, for that matter. It has tumult and strife. So does chant, with a beat that goes back and forth and never settles. Rhythmically, she says, chant's closest cousin may be jazz.

``The contemporary music, it does ... something, but for me, it doesn't cut as deep,'' she says. ``There's something in chant that calls to you even if you don't understand the words.''

But the folk Mass and other contemporary Christian music has its champions. It's easier to sing than Latin chants. Why begrudge any music that draws people in? Why not have polka Masses and jazz Masses -- which have cropped up at churches in recent years -- if that's what inspires parishioners? And didn't we already have this debate when Pope John XXII banned polyphony in the 14th century, back when new-fangled harmony threatened our morals?

Taking a Eurocentric approach to music can be a thorny issue for a church that wants to cut across cultural boundaries.

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.''

O'Connor says he'd hate to lose the ``rediscovery of community'' that came from songs that everyone could understand and sing along with.

Learning to sing Gregorian chant is difficult, maybe, but not impossible, says William Mahrt, a Stanford University music professor.

``It may not be immediately sing-along-able; it may take some practice,'' he says.

A parish should be able to pick up most chants over the course of three or four Sundays. Music is like anything else, he says; you get out of it what you put into it.

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.

``I think it's kind of a generational thing,'' says Kurt Poterack, editor of the journal Sacred Music. ``You had one generation in the 1960s that had the general mode of questioning authority. 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.'''

[The_Reader_David]

It's supposed to sound like Gregorian chant, or Byzantine chant, or Znameny chant, or. . .

St. Gregory the Dialogist ('the Great' to you Westerners) gave the Latin West a system of eight tones just like the East has always had, and it was a good thing too. Pope Benedict, besides 'speaking patristics', is also given to quoting even post-schism Eastern fathers on liturgical and aesthetic matters, a fact that surely makes him one of the most agreeable post-schism Popes of Rome to us Orthodox.

[ClaireSolt]

I am getting real sick of this kind of thinking and commenting. "Not everyone can afford an orchestra or singers who can handle it." Everything has to be referenced against a hypothetical poor person that doesn't even exist. Let me introduce you to the poor who smoke two packs of cigarettes a day and drink Bud with them. We don't need to assume that they can't afford anything, because they can.

[Claud]

The new music helped fill pews,

Uhhhhhhhhhhhh............

(me looking around the room puzzled)

[Claud]

Taking a Eurocentric approach to music can be a thorny issue for a church that wants to cut across cultural boundaries.

"The native Americans have a natural disposition to music. Their feelings are readily expressed by tones. . . . The rules of Harmony being too complicated for them, and the strict mathematical division of time in modern music, retarding the spontaneous expression of their heart, account for the preference that they give to melody above harmony, and to the Gregorian Chant above the Figured Song. The solemnity of Church-music suits the Indians, who are generally grave even to sadness, and who have none of the giddy vivacity peculiar to some nations of Europe, and who despise it."

-Rev. Eugene Vetromile, missionary to the Abenaki Indians, 1858.

[Claud]

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.''

Roc my friend, let me speak to you as someone from a parish that does Gregorian chant *every blessed week*. I have zero voice training, and have learned to sing chant quite easily, and read it as well. The people in our parish follow along quite well with various ordinaries from the Mass of the Angels or whatever Mass we are doing that week. You absolutely do NOT need special singers. My wife went to a parish where members of the congregation sang the propers week-in-week-out. And did a bang up job of it.

pinging AnAmericanMother for some much-needed musical sanity...

[Pyro7480]

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.

In other words, these Brazilians are too stupid to learn Gregorian chant. What a typical left-wing attitude!

[siunevada]

Not everyone can afford an orchestra or singers who can handle it.

Well, Roc on! It's a 'performance' issue for Roc. How about a big round of applause from the audience?

I love the presumption that one needs an orchestra and trained singers to chant. I guess the words 'a cappella' are no longer in his vocabulary.

[Campion]

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

On the other hand, I frequently visit wealthy churches in America where the parishioners sing lame music by the St. Louis Jesuits, and I think, "How can these people make sense of Roc O'Connor?"

[NYer]

History of Gregorian chant

Gregorian Chant is a musical repertory made up of chants used in the liturgical services of the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, the liturgical tradition which the Church has given us is a vocal, monophonic music composed in Latin using sacred texts from the Ancient and New Testaments. This is why Gregorian Chant has often been called a "sung Bible". Linked intimately to the liturgy in this way, the goal of the Gregorian melodies is to favor spiritual growth, reveal the gifts of God and the full coherence of the Christian message.

What we call Gregorian chant today first appears distinctly in the Roman repertory of the fifth and sixth centuries. Its implimentation and perhaps some of its composition was in the hands of a group of ministers in a service specially dedicated to the Roman basilicas, the schola cantorum. Gregorian chant also appears to have been an aural music, that is, transmitted by ear and committed to memory - like all other music of the world at the time.

In the second half of the eighth century, the political rapprochement between the French kingdom of Pepin and Charlemagne, and the papacy, widened the Roman liturgy's field of application. The French crown decreed its adoption throughout the kingdom. This is when the first written records which have come down to us begin to appear, first in France, then all over the Empire and beyond. Despite wide graphic differences, their uniformity of content clearly records a single reading of an unbroken tradition.

The texts (words and some musical notations), committed to writing in books, become at this time an official reference text. The general allure of the Roman chant with its modal architecture was very attractive to Gallican musicians. They dressed it, however, in a completely different way. The term "Gregorian chant" was first used to describe this hybrid of Roman and Gallican chant.

At first, written records served as memory prompts with only artistic directions for correct interpretation and performance. The musical tones were still taught by ear and transmitted by memory.

But with the gradual increase of pitch indications in the manuscripts came a corresponding decrease in the interpretive directions, and with it, a decrease in the role of memory. As a result, Gregorian chant fell into complete decadence by the end of the Middle Ages: the manuscripts offer little more than a "heavy and tiresome succession of square notes". The Renaissance brought with it Gregorian chant's coup de grâce. The melodies, which show the correct reading of the literary text by highlighting keywords and phrases, were "corrected" by official musicologists - the long vocalises, for example, reduced to a few notes each. Worse, the words, literary compositions which are the official text of the Roman liturgy, and that constitute a lyrical catechism, were also officially "corrected" against a verbatim reading of the Vulgate Bible. The mangled result which persisted for two hundred years is generally known in English as "plainsong".

In 1833, a young priest of the diocese of Le Mans, Dom Prosper Guéranger, undertook the restoration of benedictine monastic life on the site of an old priory at Solesmes, after forty years of silence due to the French Revolution. He seized upon the restoration of Gregorian chant with enthusiasm and began by working on its execution, asking his monks to respect the primacy of the text in their singing: pronunciation, accentuation and phrasing, with an eye to guaranteeing its intelligibility, in the service of prayer. Dom Guéranger also placed the task of restoring the authentic melodies into the hands of one of his monks.

The handwriting, in "thin flyspecks", of the original manuscripts was indecipherable at the time. But the invention of photography soon brought unforeseen benefits with it. Little by little, an incomparable collection grew at Solesmes, facsimiles of the principal manuscripts of the chant contained in the libraries of all Europe. this was the genesis of the Paleography of Solesmes.

THE PROPER CHANTS OF THE MASS

[Claud]

In other words, these Brazilians are too stupid to learn Gregorian chant. What a typical left-wing attitude!

Exactly! Unbelievable condescending! I wonder just how developed the musical culture was in the Jesuit Reductions at Paraguay. They weren't singing no St. Louis Jesuits, that's fer darn sure!

[AnAmericanMother]

Ol' Roc is like a dinosaur who just caught a whiff of tar somewhere down around his feet. The Saint Looey Jebbies are so last week, and he doesn't like it very much.

. . . plus of course he's an elitist who thinks that you have to have a degree from some high-falutin' music school to be a 'real musician', and you have to have a high-priced sound system and expensive instruments (preferably I guess electric guitars and a pricey keyboard?)

Gregorian chant is simple to sing, especially if you follow the practice of phrasing it like speech. The notation is NOT difficult to read - easier in fact than staff notation. I had never attempted to read neumes until the summer of 2004 . . . guess what, I picked it up easily, not quite in 'three easy lessons', but still . . .

And calling the straightforward harmonies of the Renaissance "polyphony" is for Roc just a way to intimidate a not-very-knowledgeable reporter. WHY don't the papers send a reporter who knows enough about music to call these guys on it when they get out of line?

[JoeFromSidney]

Last week my stepson made his final vows as a Religious Brother. The event was part of a Solemn High Mass in Latin, with Gregorian Chant. It was one of the moste beautiful ceremonies I've ever attended. I found it really moving. It would have been so even without the involvment of a family member.

The congregation sang along with the choir. It isn't that hard to learn Chant, and most people can do it. I can't understand those who say ordinary people can't sing Chant, or can't relate to it.

[JoeFromSidney]

Last week my stepson made his final vows as a Religious Brother. The event was part of a Solemn High Mass in Latin, with Gregorian Chant. It was one of the moste beautiful ceremonies I've ever attended. I found it really moving. It would have been so even without the involvment of a family member.

The congregation sang along with the choir. It isn't that hard to learn Chant, and most people can do it. I can't understand those who say ordinary people can't sing Chant, or can't relate to it.