New Thoughts on the Historical Imperative
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    I wrote something last night that was new to me. I'm sure it's been said before but I hadn't quite thought of it this way. The argument goes as follows. Vast amounts of our liturgical life are devoted to retelling a historical narrative, celebrating events such as the birth of Christ, the visit of the Magi, the Baptism of Christ, various miracles, and so on. This illustrates something unique about Christianity. It is not just an abstract theological perspective. It is deeply rooted in empirical events - a real history that we revisit every week forever. But what about music? Shouldn't it partake of the same historical imperative? Why should it be so commonly believed that any music and any text is suitable and that there is nothing we owe to our deep history here? Surely the music should be as rooted in history as the liturgical subject matter is.

    I riff on this theme with about 1500 words here.

    See if you think there is any value here.
  • Adam Bartlett
    Posts: 533
    I thought the article was very good, Jeffrey. It reminded me of a theme that Fr. Douglas Martis, Director of the USML Liturgical Institute, also hits on often which goes something like this: When we're dealing with the liturgy we are dealing with the Christian culture, the texts of the Mass are from the Christian language. These are not things that we can reinvent with every passing generation, and so on.

    Here's a nice short article of his on the subject.

    I definitely think that this theme can roll right into the Church's musical tradition, heritage, and culture!
  • Ralph BednarzRalph Bednarz
    Posts: 489
    I have worked for years and years where the historical events of Scripture and the Liturgy were presented to the congregations as symbols as paradigms or archetypes to inspire us. The resurrection is a symbol, the Eucharist is a sign, the miracle of the loves and fishes was the socialist paradigm ( although there is capital investment, supply and demand need, and profit- which was not shared) If these historical events could be dismissed so easily as literary devices how could we verify that anything spiritual was happening at Mass, the economy of grace was no longer valid. I always thought the accounts of the resurrection were so plain that the read like a deposition and not like the typical myth or ode. The austere structure of the language was almost enough to verify it.

    But I am therefore more concerned with a present empiricism regarding liturgy. Choir members have told me that the noticed something different happening during Mass since we started chanting- especially when we sing the propers! Imagine that! The chants are showing us that there is Truth, and that we are present to it. And what we do (not how we feel) matters. I cannot tell you enough that this is working! The efficacy of Chant far out weighs the historical imperative.
    "a unique aspect of Christianity that it is a faith rooted in a series of empirical events,"

    After forty years :we are now blowing the trumpets and watching the walls tumble down (emperically).
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    Very interesting. Thank you.
  • incantuincantu
    Posts: 989
    A very well-framed argument, Jeffrey, and one I would like to share with my choir and liturgy committee.
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    give me some more typos and I'll clean them up. sacredmusic@musicasacra.com
  • francis
    Posts: 10,679
    Yes. It is happening that the people are awakening to "the" song of the church. I made a comment a few days ago to one of RR's posts about Latin being "in".


    The Latin Mass is not a trend... it just fell into a neglected state, but was truly the status quo of permanent practice



    and the same applies to it's native form of music... The chant.
  • Ralph BednarzRalph Bednarz
    Posts: 489
    Jeffery: Thanks for all your work and your great writitng!
    "If we rediscover something that we have lost that was once essential to our faith, we must make every effort to reclaim and make it ours again. We must educate ourselves and educate others. We must weave it back into our understanding and make it real again. It matters not how long it has been absent. It is also superficial to criticize the story on grounds that modern man can't get the hang of it. We must trust the ancestral narrative to point the way forward."
    That's excellent! A very clear description of a historical imperative that has not deteriorated into "older" is "better".
    I would like to quote this in our schola's publicity copy. svp

    The post Vatican II liturgical experiments were validated historically too. Often old standing tradition were turned into strawmen and attacked as aberrant innovations. I attended a lecture by a professor from the Catholic University who described the Holy Orders as a recent unjustified structure. She then focused our attention to a very specific place long long ago a when no record of clergy ( or anything else) could be found. It was like she found a blank scroll and wrote her own page in the history book. Many of our priests were her students.

    Chant has a documented history. It is and was both the normative and prescriptive music of the church. Today we experience it ( not just preserve it) when it teaches us the objective aesthetic principles of "quantity" and "consent", or relationship between its elements. it is objective beauty that tests us, in that way we participate in its truth and in redemption. Our response to this beauty is that same energy that operates our moral sense and nurtures our spiritual formation.

    Across the choir loft in our contemporary local parish church the neumes for Offertory antiphon for the Feast of St. Therese are depicted in stainless steel.- with all the ictus , episema and incises. This had puzzled me. Why was this ancient score placed in this contemporary structure? And why did this music disappear so quickly? My kids who were full of "Indiana Jones" and "Zelda" games would ride me on this issue. They told me that the chant was the key that unlocked a secret something :"if we sing that chant something would happen in the church." Well we did: and it did. and they all sing in scholas.
  • Michael O'Connor
    Posts: 1,637
    I once had a student who left CUA because one of her professors would not admit to the bodily resurrection of Christ. That place has some real problems.
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