From this new issue 1957 of Caecilia posted here

Sing the Chant

A reader writes that he is confused. "I thought that we were
getting some place, but what do we do now?" The answer is simply:
sing the chant! Not that singing it is always so simple. And not
that seeming difficulties are insurmountable. It is not only a matter
of acquiring the proper books (an adequate list of which appeared in
Vol. 84, No. 1 of Caecilia) which, after all, we are presently bound
to use. The impression that we have opined for two generations
that the book was all we needed will not down.
This may lead us to our first point. The most important thing
about singing the chant is singing. It is manifestly absurd to suppose
that chant is something quite apart from the broad stream of music,
and that the sound vocal procedure necessary to any other type of
singing does not apply to it. Yet one fears this has been happening
for too long. Why do Mr. and Mrs. average worshipper not get
especially excited about chant? Because most of its sounds bad. This
has nothing to do with one chant book or another. Listen to the
Requiem Mass from one end of the country to the other. On the
face of it, it might be read from fifty different versions, but proper
vocalization and some musicianship would make amends for a great
deal else.
It is not an uncommon experience to behold chant educators
who have taught their charges everything but the most basic things.
These will know the horrificent names of all the neums and combinations
thereof (the picture, if your please, is more important than
the name), they are liable to know the minutest detail of emerge and
submerge in matters chyronomical, and probably can place an ictus
even when it isn't marked. They can, for that matter, know the
intricacies of the modes, and have the Vatican Preface at their fingertips.
But start singing-and the musical voice, the elementary
rhythm of the neums, and sensible phrasing of text and vocal line is
missing. If one does not have necessary knowledge of voice placement
and other tonal matters, what should he do? Either stop
teaching any kind of singing or seek to learn from someone who does.
The Holy Fathers have been as e:xplicit about sufficiently qualified
personnel as anything. Reading will help-even so small and tidy
a brochure as Father Finn's "Epitome of the Choral Art". Make
no mistake about it, chant, though unisonous, is part of the choral
art, and not an easy part at that. So that one might conclude this
paragraph with a word of caution about professional voice teachers,
who manage so often to coach great voices and ruin the rest. Ours
is not so much a problem of "training" voices as of eliminating vocal
defects which God did not usually give us.
Next in order, and not to be confused with singing the chant,
is reading it. It is perhaps not musically unorthodox to remark that
good singing of bad material is preferable to bad singing of good
material. The contemporary penchant for reading music often ig'
nores other important considerations. We are faced with the dis'
tressing fact that competent readers are very often incompetent
singers and vice'versa. Having said this, one can, however, state
confidently that the reading problem is by no means insurmountable.
Here, again, without putting up straw men, one is not beyond en'
countering college people with decent marks in "Chant I" or "Chant
2" who cannot sol'fa a Proper. This is a totally unnecessary state
of affairs. Grade School and High School students certainly can
and do read chant. It is the writer's experience that this very simple
manner of reading the chant in chant script is the best approach to
reading of any kind. The diatonic scale, like the alphabet, is an
admirable crutch, even if you never get beyond the moveable "do".
Grade school children, and not only the bright ones, certainly can
make chant reading part of their existence, and the sky can be the
limit for high school folk. If takes only the doing. You may call
this business of scales drudgery if you wish, but it is nothing like the
drudgery of rote teaching to the not'so'young, and this will be the
penalty for one who has not begun with scales and intervals in the
first place: a devastating penury of repertoire.
The writer has in his possession a collection of chant recordings
of grade school children of a very small rural parish in Wisconsin.
They are among the finest he knows, and his own charges sing the
proper the year around, with some of the better students singing the
solo parts of the Graduals. Traditions are hard to come by, especially
when, as any pastor will tell you, there is a constant tum'over of
music teachers. But the fact that they can be established, even on
a school level, is indisputable. Why catholic high school students
cannot supply propers is a mystery-unless the song of the church,
which ought to have primacy in any music program in the catholic
school-is given niggardly time. Mind you, once a tradition is
established, once the younger folk hear, read and sing the Proprium
de Tempore and de Sanctis year in and year out, the actual practice
for propers need not take more than 15 minutes a week!
Now a word about methods and text'books. First of all, the
teacher must be both the method and text book. It is less than fair
to expect teachers and choirmasters to establish sound traditions if
they have not been given a chance to drink deeply at the wells of
liturgical song throughout the liturgical year. This need not have
been in the monastery, the convent, or the seminary. For the Popes
did not write their encyclicals and allocutions only for monks.
(There persists too much the notion of transplanting strictly monas'
tic elements in the parishes; and religious teachers in diocesan semin'
aries have no right to use the monastic rather than the Roman books
in their classes or worship.) In the very first line of the Motu
Proprio, St. Pius X marks these matters as foremost among the
pastoral cares of every individual parish. The teacher, then, must
have assimilated the meat, spirit and directives of the liturgical
books, to a point of feeling a necessity to impart them. The best
and only necessary text books are the Kyriale and the Graduale.
One may add to these the Vesperale and the "Chants diversa mente".
From the point of view of chant education, one might suggest the
Kyriale for grade school students, and the Graduale for High School
students. Through their formative years children may become
completely conversant with these, and carry them, let us hope, into
their adulthood. One might use a book like P. Baldinus van Poppel's
elementary course, (see Caecilia, Vol 84, No.1) but it is perhaps
just as well to get into the middle of things, using brief home'made
exercises to lead into any particular piece in the Kyriale. Sometimes
reading exercises (and vocal exercises) might well be performed on
the material at hand. The results are just as effective, and time is
saved.
Then let us not forget the overwhelming importance of the
text. It is absolutely essential that the teacher be as resourceful in
this matter as the rest. The texts are not difficult to understand by
comparative study-Father Bouyer has said that the work of the
Belgian Benedictines at Bruges (Saint Andrew's Missal) is one of
the highest contributions to liturgical renewal-and our schools, de'
signed primarily for the preservation of the faith and participation
in its mysteries, ought not be remiss in teaching the rudiments of the
language of these mysteries, even if it finally devolves upon the
religion or chant teacher to do so. It is a fair conjecture that
if the time, energy, and enthusiasm spent on vernacular notions
were applied in the opposite direction we might be happily on our
way. "Sacred music as an integral part of the solemn liturgy
shares its general purpose ... and since its principal function is to
adorn with suitable melody the liturgical text proposed to the under'
standing of the faithful, its proper purpose is to add greater efficacy
to the text itself, so that by this means the faithful may be more easily
moved to devotion and better disposed to receive in themselves the
fruits of grace proper to the celebration of the sacred mysteries."
(Pope Pius X, Motu Proprio)