Aurelio Porfiri, who long ago contributed to Corpus Christi Watershed and who has worked in Macau for some time, wrote this article on a Substack blog. As of posting, it’s free to read by all; just hit “X” when the window promoting subscription appears.

Frankly, I’m not sure to whom this is addressed. Porfiri does not understand the American context in particular. He’s Italian, living in a mixed Chinese-Portuguese context; there is English, sure, but less prominently than in Hong Kong. I don’t know if he has spent much if any time in the U.S.

Obviously what passes for sacred music is not, although it is not always of equally bad quality in terms of vocal and instrumental performance — and that with things that can be kept in the church for liturgical services after cleaning house. I have a huge soft spot for the Proulx arrangement of “I am the Bread of Life”; it’s beautiful. (It’s not accessible by volunteers without a lot of work, to grant Porfiri something.) But why are we focusing on the best of performance in the general classical/early-music sphere versus stop? I also don’t wish to straw-man or set up silly comparisons, but the Vatican’s chant performance leaves a lot to be desired.

Of course there are places where there is a high standard, but multiple groups coexist, and I would also argue both from experience and having heard it from others in sacred music who know a thing or two about program management, that you have to give parishioners ownership. If that’s only financial, so be it, but I find that having a clear budget and annual expectations, like the way that Fr Pasley structures the choral Masses, is the best, and then you have volunteers for the rest. You can’t not have volunteers and also hide being the professionals without making sacred music a true part of the parish.

The rest of my comments are reformatted from a post that Peter Kwasniewski made on FB. He started with the part about why we don’t turn to the conservatories:

1) because it’s hard for them to shut off their opera training even if they shut off vibrato. The sound of the best English choirs singing chant is not really what we expect from amateurs or with a mix of amateurs who are completely novice to singing when they come to sacred music and those who have some if not a lot of training. (I’ll agree to steel-man this over a comparison to the horrible Italian style of chant that’s also heavy on organ accompaniment for the easiest Gregorian ordinaries.)

2) the non-Catholic problem. It is hard if not impossible to sustain a program if you are always dancing around the Catholic identity of the choir and of the fact that it’s not a performance. You can say “it’s not a place for soloists” without eliminating an earthly vision of what is going on.
The director can be Catholic and a more or less serious one and still not get it.

3) in the largest cities, and sometimes the not-so-large ones, we are going to wind up making not only the choir itself but parishes an affair for singles, for the wealthy who can afford help with their children, and double-income no kids types. Everyone but families with children. I am not always the biggest fan of certain families where the parents are around my age. They coddle the kids too much, but there should be at least a few if not all of the weeknight HDOs in a year where the sung TLM, for example, is chanted entirely. I am a fan of putting our money where our mouth is and starting earlier. 6 PM works here if we must have evening Mass. if it’s a Saturday, have Mass at 9 or even 8, and get it over with, allowing you to do polyphony more reasonably.

This doesn’t address the main idealized (well, rather the opposite) situation. But it’s why even serious Catholics are like “lol, no”, and it’s at this point I can say too that “it’s because the Solesmes congregation sounds more like what amateurs can do than what pros do.”

It also costs a lot, and you have to make the people participate financially by being very upfront and transparent, especially in the American context, or else they will never accept that it isn’t a performance. Fr Pasley’s choral Mass fund and budgeting precisely for each feast with a polyphonic or orchestral mass is the way to go.

It costs a lot because we should pay people fairly for each practice and service, but also because it’s easy to let the choir size balloon. I know of a choir that can hardly function with a dozen+ members on a Sunday. The alto section keeps getting bigger and is hardly holding on because they struggle with the polyphony. When, frankly, they should have a paid quartet or octet on most Sundays if they don’t want to do that plus volunteers to augment them. (That is, either a quartet or octet, but if you need more, you get volunteers; the paid alto number is max 2!)

Oh yeah and these people have better things to do which adds to the costs if you wish to keep people around and even to attract them in the first place.

The other thing that gnaws at me is that “how much should we spend on pros, and how much of the choir should be professional, often non-Catholic or not aligned with church teaching” is a question that people agonize over given the problems: you have to sustain them. What happens if the money dries up? Your donor dies. You run down the endowment carelessly. You decide to leave, and a less charismatic or less experienced successor replaces you. Then you’ve got nothing. I’ve seen it happen. People are still somewhat choosy in church music once we get to the point where there are multiple churches in the same area paying multiple singers per week. For Catholics whose musical demands, for the TLM especially, are such that it is a great injustice to let the music cease if you no longer have anyone to sing adequately, this is unacceptable.