Text and style.

Well said, Kathy.

I don't accept that only chant is the ideal. Chant has an historical claim to legitimacy in the Church. However, the Church did not go into a deep-freeze mode at any one time, with all further musical development coming to an end. I suspect that the deep-freeze mindset may be the legacy of Trent, which as a council, may have done as much harm as good to both music and the Church. Pius X, although I admire him greatly, is certainly not the last of the popes and didn't have the last word on things liturgical. There has been another council since then, along with a few more popes. If one actually interprets Vatican II correctly, it seems the intent of the council was to preserve the best of the past while bringing the Church into the current age. Unfortunately, the U.S. church has not pursued and adopted the best of available liturgy and music, but has instead gone for the lowest common denominator. If your goals are not any higher than the bottom, that is likely where you will stay.

I really question the "high" and "low" division in the sense that you use it and whether it really applies to the Roman Rite. It really does seem to represent a class distinction that shouldn't have much relevance in the Catholic world (as vs., e.g., Anglican). I've seen many cases of cathedrals that use all the apparatus you list above but the net effect is absolutely nothing - except huge bills to pay. A Mass using one cantor in the loft singing chant propers in any language is far preferred to the most gussied up presentation of music that is not appropriate to the ritual.

It really does seem to represent a class distinction that shouldn't have much relevance in the Catholic world

Yah, hey! What ever happened to "noble simplicity"?

"in the presence of something greater than themselves and are at some sort of peace,"--yes, these seem to me to be the criteria.

If the use of chant and polyphony is limited, that is, in most concrete liturgical settings, you often have to choose one or the other for any given piece, I think. If I have to choose, I choose "the presence of something greater," for the Entrance Hymn. A big Entrance hymn has a vestibule effect, a passing through from the workaday world, that cannot be achieved by a folk song. We're not in Kansas anymore. We're praising God.

At Communion, I would choose "some sort of peace."

As it has unfortunately happened perhaps for others in the last two weeks, this ties into something I am writing, so I already had something a little longer mapped out. Call it an extended variation on a theme by CharlesW.

Keep in mind that the last time I really pushed to learn this stuff, I found merely more and more 'praise and worship" stuff. I did not know of the work that seems to have been going on unheralded in parishes, so my comments do not apply to that blessed work. May your efforts be rewarded richly.

I am coming at this one from a radically different perspective than some others here.

Basically, not only do I not have musical prejudices, but I actively seek to erase them. I decided to find out the beauty of Latin music, because I couldn't hear it, out of devotion to the Bl. John Paul II. I now play congas quite well, I am told.

The important point here is the one raised first: style conforming to content. I called up everything named “Missa Brevis” on Napster, and clicked on some composer with a very English name, thinking he might be some student of Tallis's or something. Oh, no. 20th Century: the Sanctus sounded a whole lot like Britten's Peter Grimes, or perhaps something suitable for when the Dark Riders broke into the Inn at Bree, or maybe Wotan and Siegried having a really bad day. I blurted out “horrible, evil music” and snapped it off, confusing my jazz guitarist housemate, who knows I like modern music.

Another story: the last Protestant youth group I worked with was largely boys, which was fine by me, because I have always been able to work with boys. Those who busy themselves with church work and carry clipboards assured me that the boys loved a 'Christian rock band' called the Newsboys. So I dutifully bought a CD. A great big,”eh,” but I thought if the kids were listening to it they were getting a good message.

So comes the first time when I am alone with my young charges. Keep in mind that the boys knew about my musical adventurism and had decided I was “cool.” I said something about how I understood they were in to the Newsboys, and was greeted with the stoniest adolescent silence I had experienced in ten years of teaching (at that point; this was a while ago).

Making a mental note that these boys lied to do-goody adults the way all boys do, even if the boys themselves are good, I found out what they really liked. Fortunately for me, it was all Alternative, which is what I have always liked best. (Oddly, it is called Alternative, but it is all derived from the music of the most popular band in history, but that is a different discussion.)

This discussion started with folk masses. I have 25 Dylan albums; I have played mountain music publicly.

And concerning the pop music played at Mass, I am one with those boys in my youth group.

This music is awful.

For a whole variety of reasons, but fundamentally it is because it does not use the musical tools of its own idiom to serve the Mass. It is all advertising, a way to make the Mass palatable. Just to take the Sanctus, the only one that seems to me to entail what it should is by David Hurd, and that is a plainsong chant. The perky ones are bad folk music, and they don't do what they should, which is bring us into the presence of the Great Mystery.

The only reason there is a whole “contemporary Gospel” section in the Grammies is because this music sells to a certain segment, and it would never get noticed competing against popular music seriously made. The music sounds like what I call 'corporate training film rock,” the lyrics are all hortatory or refer to God as 'you,' so they can double as love songs. (There is exactly one group that has had crossover success and I like. I made a playlist on Napster. Out of I think 6 studio albums, I got 13 tracks. I heard one song that is clearly directed at God but uses 'you' as the happy couple's first dance at a gay wedding. I don't expect anyone would pick for that purpose Spem in Allium.)

It's what I once heard brilliantly described as the kind of music you get when someone wants “something everyone likes,' but no one actually does.

Take the entrance. There are a whole host of song like Howie Day's Collide that have the perfect rhythm and tone. They aren't perky. They aren't designed to make you feel liberated. They are designed to bring you into a feeling, and that would be a good tone for an entrance. The key thing here: Collide is a great song. I have yet to hear a 'Contemporary Christian' song use this obvious idiom in an appropriate way.

If you take the Bl. John Paul II's chirograph on sacred music, you will hear the judgment of a man (or two men, if Joseph Ratzinger actually wrote it) who has been subjected to a lot of it, and found it wanting.

It seems odd to me that, with all the chantlike, gorgeous melodies that came out of the Celtic Highlands, drifted into the South of the US, and finally landed in the Mississippi Delta, there isn't one good modern chant for a Mass. There is the 'Celtic Alleluia,' which I certainly enjoy singing, but I had to sing it slowly, or as a jig, before I heard the Celtic part. Celtic Chant it just isn't. Enya and U2 both have things that are more chantlike.

So if someone immersed themselves in the teachings of the Church, studied what the Mass was for, really learned the musical idioms of popular music, and really worked at writing something, I don't doubt that we could yet see a great rock or folk Mass. But it hasn't happened. For whatever reason, when pop music goes to Church, it puts on its Sunday worst.

Kenneth

Most of you are too young to remember the days of door-to-door "salesmen" working their way through the residential neighborhoods of middle America, O so many years ago, trying to get people to buy - not encyclopedias or kitchen gadgets - but the latest translation of the Bible. There's an old story about one such attempt by a clean-looking, apparently well-meaning salesman trying to get a quite elderly lady to buy the new edition of scripture. She listened quietly and politely as he told her of all the scholarship that went into the translation and read several passages of (what would have been) familiar verses and compared them with the King James Version which she owned. The sweet lady smiled but expressed some hesitation about the new translation several times

Finally the gentleman asked her, "I understand that you have serious doubts about this, but could you please tell me, madam, what is the source of these reservations that prevent you from wanting to purchase this marvellous work?"

This dear old lady looked up at him with a saintly smile and replied, "Well, sonny, I'm sure that if the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, then it must be good enough for me."

Good points on the communion line. I have given up trying to keep singing going while the choir is receiving communion. The choir sings the communion proper, then I play something until the after the choir receives. When they are all back in their seats, a communion hymn is sung.

Pluth method: cantored Psalm while choir goes to Communion (cantor receives last if receiving), hymn, anthem.

(Charles, I know you, but I'm rolling my eyes, like yeah, right.)

Another way I thought to put it is this: to get my jazz guitarist with the program on modal music, which he resists for some music, I have been tapping on every album by a polyphonic composer and leaving Napster on after I go to teach. (The living situation works because he and I almost never share the music room, our schedules are so different.) Because of that, both he and the Jewish kid whose room is right above the music room (and who is also a frustrated musician) have fallen in love with Byrd and Tallis in particular.

I can safely say I have never had that kind of experience with Christian pop music.

I doubt that my oncologist/cantor friend and I solved any problems mumbling into our coffee, but at least we had our ecumenical moment together.

All of the comments are great and insightful.

Here's what got me thinking about all of this in the first place: A colleague and I were having a discussion when he told me that he was going to use "Glory and Praise to Our God" as the entrance hymn on a particular Sunday. I said "Why don't you use "Praise to the Lord" or something like that instead?" He replied "What's the difference? Both are in the same key, both are in 3, both have the same sing song quality, and both have the same textual message." He makes a point.

The colleague is not digging deep enough into either piece. Singsonginess comes from a secular waltz-like style where the underlying harmonies (chords) only change at the beginning of a measure, and sometimes extend for more than just one measure. Look at the keyboard accompaniments of both - do a Theory 101 analysis of them. Hymns contain constant movement in all parts. Songs limit this (maybe to make them easier for guitarists to accompany). They are NOT the same!

Maybe we should look at what both Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI wrote concerning sacred music.

From the Chirograph on Sacred Music written by Blessed John Paul II:

4. In continuity with the teachings of St Pius X and the Second Vatican Council, it is necessary first of all to emphasize that music destined for sacred rites must have holiness as its reference point: indeed, "sacred music increases in holiness to the degree that it is intimately linked with liturgical action"[11]. For this very reason, "not all without distinction that is outside the temple (profanum) is fit to cross its threshold", my venerable Predecessor Paul VI wisely said, commenting on a Decree of the Council of Trent[12]. And he explained that "if music - instrumental and vocal - does not possess at the same time the sense of prayer, dignity and beauty, it precludes the entry into the sphere of the sacred and the religious"[13]. Today, moreover, the meaning of the category "sacred music" has been broadened to include repertoires that cannot be part of the celebration without violating the spirit and norms of the Liturgy itself.

St Pius X's reform aimed specifically at purifying Church music from the contamination of profane theatrical music that in many countries had polluted the repertoire and musical praxis of the Liturgy. In our day too, careful thought, as I emphasized in the Encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, should be given to the fact that not all the expressions of figurative art or of music are able "to express adequately the mystery grasped in the fullness of the Church's faith"[14]. Consequently, not all forms of music can be considered suitable for liturgical celebrations.

5. Another principle, affirmed by St Pius X in the Motu Proprio Tra le Sollecitudini and which is closely connected with the previous one, is that of sound form. There can be no music composed for the celebration of sacred rites which is not first of all "true art" or which does not have that efficacy "which the Church aims at obtaining in admitting into her Liturgy the art of musical sounds"[15].

Yet this quality alone does not suffice. Indeed, liturgical music must meet the specific prerequisites of the Liturgy: full adherence to the text it presents, synchronization with the time and moment in the Liturgy for which it is intended, appropriately reflecting the gestures proposed by the rite. The various moments in the Liturgy require a musical expression of their own. From time to time this must fittingly bring out the nature proper to a specific rite, now proclaiming God's marvels, now expressing praise, supplication or even sorrow for the experience of human suffering which, however, faith opens to the prospect of Christian hope.

6. The music and song requested by the liturgical reform - it is right to stress this point - must comply with the legitimate demands of adaptation and inculturation. It is clear, however, that any innovation in this sensitive matter must respect specific criteria such as the search for musical expressions which respond to the necessary involvement of the entire assembly in the celebration and which, at the same time, avoid any concessions to frivolity or superficiality. Likewise, on the whole, those elitist forms of "inculturation" which introduce into the Liturgy ancient or contemporary compositions of possible artistic value, but that indulge in a language that is incomprehensible to the majority, should be avoided.


From the Spirit of the Liturgy by Pope Benedict XVI:

On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. "Rock", on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit's sober inebriation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments.


From Sacramentum Caritatis, by Pope Benedict XVI (this is what I think ties both what he wrote as Cardinal Ratzinger and what Blessed John Paul II wrote):

Liturgical song

42. In the ars celebrandi, liturgical song has a pre-eminent place. (126) Saint Augustine rightly says in a famous sermon that "the new man sings a new song. Singing is an expression of joy and, if we consider the matter, an expression of love" (127). The People of God assembled for the liturgy sings the praises of God. In the course of her two-thousand-year history, the Church has created, and still creates, music and songs which represent a rich patrimony of faith and love. This heritage must not be lost. Certainly as far as the liturgy is concerned, we cannot say that one song is as good as another. Generic improvisation or the introduction of musical genres which fail to respect the meaning of the liturgy should be avoided. As an element of the liturgy, song should be well integrated into the overall celebration (128). Consequently everything -- texts, music, execution -- ought to correspond to the meaning of the mystery being celebrated, the structure of the rite and the liturgical seasons (129). Finally, while respecting various styles and different and highly praiseworthy traditions, I desire, in accordance with the request advanced by the Synod Fathers, that Gregorian chant be suitably esteemed and employed (130) as the chant proper to the Roman liturgy (131).



These three documents, I believe, make some compelling arguments in favor of the traditional approach to sacred music.

CiCCA ... I hear ya!

Careful, JQ, you might wake the sleeping giant, FNJ, from his autumnal slumber. Shhhh.

As I suspect that a great Mass could come out of various forms of popular music, but haven't heard it, in fact my notes above were part of the drafting of something that takes the documents benedictgal does and show why all attempts have failed so miserably. It's along the lines of "I heard the theater once had a liturgical function, therefore let's do a Rogers and Hammerstein Mass."

Although in pop music I am a rhythm player (and drummer, but shhhh....), I played in a praise band with one of the finest guitarists I have ever heard. He used to quote his brother, an arranger for NBC, to the effect that there was only 100% of the music, so if there are two instrumentalists, they each get 50%--and amazingly, he did not hog the limelight. One time we were doing O Come All Ye Faithful, and I realized there was nothing for my beautiful warm sounding Taylor. I played exactly 8 notes per verse--what guitiarists call big fat notes, meaning resonant ones. "O Come Let us Adore BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM let us adore BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.." The pianists said it was so beautiful she found herself waiting for it...desperation breeds invention....

But that kind of thinking, as limited as it is, gets thrown out the window when guitars come in. Why? Too much Sixtiesitis, I think...democratic= sloppy...oh, let's be free, etc, etc, etc, etc.....Why Bob Dylan could instantly write the best praise song ever written during his brief sojourn as a Penecostal. He takes his craft seriously, somewhat...ummm, unusual man though he may be.

BG, the problem with documents/writings is that they aren't very good for dealing with items at the margins, as "high church hymnody" certainly appears to be. That's all I took Charles to mean, and I agree wholeheartedly.

Exactly, Mary Ann!

We need a permanent sticky for Adam Wood's satirical post about threads on this forum.

http://musicasacra.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=4368

My parodic cameo there was as "TraditionalistHeretic"
In my next sketch, I shall call myself "HereticalSelfPromoter"
:)

Kathy, the thread is about "high church" preference, which is a whole ball o' wax, not just hymns. The whole idea of "high church" is foreign to Catholic worship, and yet many faithful, bright and skilled musicians go with it.

But somehow discussion always veers around to "the hymns I like and don't". Which makes wonder, what is it about vernacular hymns that causes this? Note: I am not talking about LOTH hymns or the Gloria and I'm not saying vernacular hymns are all bad. Not at all.
But considering they are/ should be a relatively small portion of what we sing of the Mass, such reductions in discussion seems out of proportion to me. We take our eyes off the goal, and the reality on the ground dictates this, or at least we think it does.

MaryAnn,

A discussion about ordinaries (folk vs. high-church) would also begin with "I like" vs. "I don't like." A discussion about Gregorian ordinaries would do the same. That's not a good enough argument for ceasing to discuss these things! Hopefully it would soon take a turn for the objective.

There are perhaps a few scattered, rarified places around God's green earth where music directors don't, or rarely, use vernacular hymnody. For everywhere else, a discussion about the quality of hymns is necessary, and I don't feel it's something to do apologetically. We all have children to feed, so to speak.

If it would make folks more comfortable to talk about ordinaries--folk vs. high church--fine by me. And I did see in OCP's most recent that there are contemporary propers collections, so I suppose a folk vs. high church discussion of propers could be fruitful. But the question arose because of hymns, and I think it's worth exploring that area of liturgical music as well.

Kathy, (straw man alert!) I'm not calling for a discussion shut-down. I'm asking a simple question, and I honestly don't have an answer. I'll repeat it-

what is it about vernacular hymns that keeps us so distracted?

Look at the threads. What proportion of them are devoted to hymns? Does it reflect the proportion of vernacular hymns within the sung liturgy? No. Why not? I don't know; I just find it curious.

Charles, agreed that hymns are a de facto part of the OF Mass (and most places, the EF) in the US.
When they replace propers, the ordinary is mostly sung, and few or no responses are sung, we are left with... the direct descendant of the pre-conciliar low mass. This is the most common musical arrangement in my area. Ironically, the idea of low mass with hymns/ four hymn sandwich is precisely what MS sought to rectify with its three-degrees strategy. We were supposed to move in a corrective direction of the sung liturgy as an ideal (I'm not allergic to that word). Instead, we've moved away from that ideal, that "liturgical worship is given a more noble form when it is celebrated in song". Practical realities and a Church-wide identity crisis make this ideal very difficult. We all do what we can. But the ideal remains. And it doesn't scare me or irritate me just because I can't reach it immediately, if ever in this vale of tears and reticent priests and liturgy committees.

I digress. PGA, you've got me pondering your initial question and related questions- a lot.