I play in my church’s band. We rock the house with the likes of Lincoln Brewster, Third Day, Hillsong, et.al. I think Christian Rock is better today than anything in the “secular” world.
Good post. As an Evangelical Christian, I can say I experienced much of the same as Catholics and long for a return to humility and prayer during the worship service experience.
I must say that I also appreciate the modern praise and worship experience and feel that it was a necessary part of my faith journey. I still like it today, but don’t expect a deeper experience from it.
Ping to read later - looks interesting.
If the Latin mass was good enough for Jesus then its good enough for the rest of us ;)
The author seems to be addressing an audience that exists only in his own head. This is a tiresome literary style that he would do well to drop; instead, he could exercise the humility he professes to admire and simply state his opinions as such.
Really and truly, “lex orandi, lex credendi”: the way we pray (i.e. worship) profoundly affects the way we believe - even in those effects are incremental over time. To pretend as though the Church got it way, way wrong for nearly 2,000 years in composing and preserving Gregorian chant in her liturgy is foolish, imho. It is ridiculously cavalier to assume that we are sooooo much smarter than those who saw value in preserving the special and unique musical components of the Mass.
If you argue that “chant was fine for people back then because it was a different time, we need modern music to make worship more relevant,” I'd say your very confused. You see, chant has always been the purview of the Church and only the Church - it was, and always has been, intimately connected to and associated with divine worship. There has ALWAYS been secular music apart from the music of the Mass. Why we have become so arrogant so as to think that WE know better than the past two millenia of Church members and that we not only CAN but SHOULD mix and confuse sacred and secular music is beyond me...
Just my 2 cents. Tucker is ahead of his time if you smell where the liturgical wind is blowing in the Catholic Church...
Music! I was wondering what that awful racket was throughout the Mass. Now I know.
Your church's man made tradions are nothing more than legalism that puts the focus on your religion instead of God...
So who do we listen to, your church, or God??? That's easy for some of us...
You are part of a Catholic generation that has chosen music as a path of spiritual discovery and expression within Catholicism, and music has been central to your own path toward greater understanding of the faith and its place in your life. You are using this gift to give to others, precisely as St. Paul instructed the Corinthians to do. You do this in retreat settings but, more and more, in worship settings, including Mass, as a means of helping others find what you have found.
I’m a little older than the audience, but last summer when I chanted as a cantor at Mass on a retreat, the reviews were mixed. Not everybody liked it.
When your parents were very young, the standard music was new and innovative, but by the time you heard it, it had grown old and tired.
I guess I must be about the parents’ age, because it was new when I was a kid - and it was bad then. My records were Fantasia, The Nutcracker, The Introduction to the Symphony, Peter and the Wolf and the Jesuits. There was no comparison and I knew that as a child.
And there didn’t seem to be much of it: the same few Glorias and Holy Holys, and about 20 or so songs sung again and again, most of it suggestive of half- hearted attempts at folk music of some sort.
I’d say there were more like 30 songs and most of them weren’t even sung right.
This was what was considered “ traditional Catholic music,” and it didn’t seem to mean much to young people by the time you were coming of age.
When I was a teen, a member of my parish told me this - that this is the new music and it replaces the old. Well, you don’t replace a body of work the size of that which has been written for the Church with kitch and schlock. And they kept telling me I was wrong.
The next two-three paragraphs…yeah, that’s about right. Gregorian chant was the same. It variously became popular on the radio and in bestselling CDs but it was sung by monks in far- off lands. It wasn’t the music of the parish. Even such common tunes such as Pange Lingua and Adoro Te — the last remnants of a repertoire of tens of thousands of chants — were finally put to rest sometime in the 1980s. No one in the parish knew a thing about chant, and neither did there seem to be a way to find out more.
I knew a lot of chant because I have a parent who loves it. The first time I heard the Pange Lingua was in 1985 or 86 at the progressive, social justice parish to the east. The people sang, so my parent convinced our parish to start singing it and suddenly the old, cranky pastor didn’t have so many problems with us. And the people sang. They sing in the big house, too.
The essential musical structure of the Mass as it emerged in the Middle Ages had an entrance prayer that was set to chant. This is called the Introit. Sometimes you hear the first word of the chant used to describe the Mass of the day. This is where we get the terms “Gaudete Sunday,” “Laetare Sunday,” and “Requiem Mass.” What is called the “gathering song” or the “processional hymn” is really a replacement for this Introit.
These are the interesting tidbits and yes, the chants are available if the music directors will let you sing them. Some are meant for a single cantor.
It is true with other parts of the Mass too. The offertory is not a musical intermission but the name of a real prayer that is set to music. The same is true of Communion. These are gorgeous chants.
I guess motets and octavos don’t count? Even a cappella Renaissance and early Baroque? Early Mozart before he defected to freemasonry?
Often the melody clearly reflects the story of the text, so that the melody goes up when speaking of Heaven and down when speaking of humility. The complexity of them can be enrapturing the more you study them. You find beautiful presentations of Gospel narratives and parables. Each chant serves a particular musical function. The introit and offertory are processional chants, for example, so they have a forward motion with less elaborate musical expression on individual words. The Psalm chants are more for reflection, so they are long and elaborate.
So, are these public domain so church choirs can afford to actually do them?
The chants mentioned above are called “propers” and they change week to week.
We change them by season.
There are also chants for the “ordinary” of the Mass, so-called because their text remains the same. There are parts for the people: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Agnus Dei. You have heard a few of these, most likely the ones people have started to sing for Lent. But the Church has given us fully 18 sets of these pieces of music, and you can see from their structure that they are intended for everyone to sing.
The author forgot the Sanctus and frankly, the Gloria of number 18 is not all that easy. It’s really supposed to be sung in canon and there are parts no congregation can do.
In the experience of our parish, people can pick up these ordinary chants rather quickly. They love singing them. They don’t need accompaniment.
Most people will try just about anything, but an organ is nice to keep the pitch from dropping.
Another feature of chant is its humility.
No sopranos or tenors in this guy’s choir?
A major problem with Praise and Worship music is that it tends to focus everyone on the person doing the performing. The bands are featured in the front of the church. The band members are showered with compliments. The singing style elicits a kind of egoism that probably makes you uncomfortable but is integral to popular styles.
This is has been one of my complaints for years.
Chant is completely different because it does not seek to put the talent of the singer on exhibit.
This guy has never heard me sing.
Instead, it is all about community prayer.
IF people would sing along. Catholics don’t sing. It ain’t cool.
The chant leads the embrace of a completely different approach to liturgy itself. The music serves the liturgy and the liturgy serves God. Where does that leave the singers and the community? Precisely where we should be: not as consumers but as servants.
A lot of singers I know need to work on that ego thing - including me. Choir members and cantors do serve the people. Sometimes just listening lifts the soul and in that way hearts are touched.
Uh, what does he mean it wasn’t deliberate? All signs point to various forces trying to destroy the Church and dumbing down and making Mass a pop experience was part of that effort.
Where does Praise and Worship fit into this divide?
As fuel for the Easter Vigil bonfire.
Everyone is asked to make a sacrifice and defer to the ritual. Musicians are being asked to do this too.
Ever been in a choir for a priesthood ordination? A complete Triduum beginning with the Chrism Mass? Sacrifice of time is just the beginning.
Renaissance composers sought to elaborate on the chant with new forms that retained its spirit, and many modern composers are doing the same.
Who? I want names. Durufele did well, but not many others.
There is also a place for English chant and for newly composed Psalms. What the chant provides in these cases is a standard to measure its suitability.
They’re okay, but Gregorian flows better.
If the enterprise of learning something completely new sounds daunting, keep in mind that no one can become completely familiar with all chant. That would take several lifetimes.
Bears repeating. There’s so much and it never ends.
I don’t want to take away from the authors points, but sometimes sweeping statements do not reflect reality. As it should be, maybe, but the human condition negates the “should be” part.
There’s more to it, though. Music education in the Church and the Catholics schools was jettisoned in the late 60’s and we’re having a very hard time recovering. For a lot of us, music education happened because we pursued it elsewhere and learned classical methods rather than chant and what is sung in church. The gathering notes at the beginning of any Gregorian Chant had to be overcome in other forms, too.
There’s no single answer to what happened or where to go from here. One thing’s for sure, though, the entire idea that being in any choir Gregorian, traditional, or folk fosters humility is just not realistic. You have to ask for help from a higher power for that one.