Here’s a very, very helpful comment on music – our topic of the week – many thanks to the reader who took the time to write and share this:

I have been reading with much interest the thread about the why the Church in the US has not implemented the directives concerning music which have been given in recent Church documents (especially, Sacrosanctum Concilium, although similar directives can be found going back to 1749). A good summary of the state of the liturgical documents in the church can be found here:

For the last two weeks I have found myself at mass getting angrier and angrier at having to sing songs where, apparently, the publishing company felt the need to “improve” the original composer’s lyrics by inserting such extremely needful stanzas telling us that the Faith of Our Fathers is really the faith of our mothers, too and wondering to God why the Bishop’s don’t do something about it. Apparently, they will be, but as you mention, there may not be much improvement other than codification of the mess.

May I offer a perspective as a musicologist (ten years of doctoral study, with specialization in medieval and twentieth century music) and performer (doctorate in instrumental performance)? The proliferation of (to paraphrase Ben Bradley), “non-worship” worship music in the US (liturgical music which defeats its own purpose) is a fascinating topic, well worth the time for a doctoral or master’s thesis, in part because the problem is not simply a lack of adherence to a set of directives laid down by Rome, but because of the entire mechanism at play. In fact, strictly speaking, this is a job for an ethnomusicologist to untangle, since the reasons for the development of this type of music seems at least somewhat culturally influenced.

In the entire history of the Church, there have been many reform movements which have affected the status of musical composition. The two most notable having been the Cistercian reform which began shortly after the height of the Abby of Cluny (c. 1100 – 1150 AD) and the post-Trent reform (c. 1570 – 1600 AD). Unlike the situation after Vatican II, both of these reforms were of a universalist nature. Although the Clunaic reform started within the Cistercian Order, these were the go-to guys for music and what they did influenced everyone (including, Rome); in the case of the post-Trent reforms, these were instituted in a no-nonsense environment and as most of the other reforms were of a universal character (universal requirements for priest formation, for example), music reform got implemented, as well, wholesale, across the Church. In fact, the Church seems to thrive on reforms of this sort, because the Cistercian reform paved the way for for the French composer, Machaut, to write one of the earliest “modern” polyphonic mass settings (C. 1360 AD – the famous Messe de Notre Dame – the first Mass setting by a single composer), and the Tridentine reforms paved the way for Palestrina and Victoria.

The modern problem, and one reason why the music at many American parishes doesn’t really sound "Catholic" is because the impulse and directive within the American Church right now has not really been catholic (in the sense of universal). Individuality in musical expression, in the mind of Vatican II, was primarily supposed to be reserved for missionary countries as a means of slow enculturation (actually as a means of starting with something familiar and gradually pulling them towards the more correct Catholic and Universal style). It is interesting that the United States was missionary territory until around the time of Vatican II, and I suppose the new composers immediately after Vatican II, could have, ahem, appealed to that as a reason for using the then current colloquial styles (but the US was been removed from the list of missionary countries, so more modern composers have no excuse).

What happened to bring about this situation in the United States? Frustration. Most of the other European cultures already had indigenous music for worship going back hundreds of years – music which had already withstood the earlier reform movements. The Church in the United States had no such similar corpus. As Fr. Augustine pointed out, there really wasn’t much of a need, since most of the masses in the US until the reforms of Vatican II tended to be dry masses (without music) or masses where the priest used simple chants with any additional music being supplied by a choir, which often borrowed pre-extant European music, particularly of the Germans and the Irish . The impulse, after Vatican II, was to create an American type of worship music (but not really music for the Mass, which is a subtly different thing). The composers used the indigenous styles of both the current secular (unfortunately, soft rock/ folk, at that time) and sacred (mostly Protestant hymns) music. If Vatican II has occurred in 1900 instead of 1965, most of our Church music would have sounded like touch songs (now, there’s a thought!) or parlor music.

As for why the Bishop’s haven’t done anything, that is easy to explain: they haven’t had to. There is no central office at the Vatican which is overseeing the music for the Church that has any real teeth. Technically, the Liturgy Dicastery could, but I wonder if they have experts in music on their staff. It seems as though each country has been left to fend for itself. Most European music sounds more traditional than in the United States (as Old Zhou pointed out) simply because it pre-existed before music in the United States and really didn’t have to be changed. That, of course, does not mean that they use the music in Europe much, anymore (Mass attendance, being what it is).

All of the earlier big reforms in music were implemented universally, with Rome eventually taking the lead. I fear that the bishops in the United States are, for the most part, not trained enough to understand the organic unity between the liturgy and music (as it has developed, historically) to really know what a kind of distinct but acceptable American Church music should sound like. Will they consult trained music experts in orthodox Church music? Probably, not, because, I suspect that if they did, they would not like what they heard.

Sacred music containing lyrics with suspect theology sung in quasi-popular styles makes the liturgy more of a popular celebration that a public encounter with an unknowable God and that is a part of the American mindset. Americans are very much temporalists, concerned pragmatically with the here-and-now – this characteristic is what has made this country great, but this mindset is poison to the unity of music and and a transcendent Mass. Music in worship can be used, subtly, to ingratiate with the secular, and given the degeneration of the modern American aesthetic in music (Rap, anyone?), a music that is distinct for worship hardly seems worth the bother to some, and yet, part of the function of music is not only to elevate the mind and heart to God, but to give the often unheard God a voice and that voice must be the voice of faith – a universal, transcendent faith.

Because of the need to match a music oriented to the eternal with the eternal Mass, folk music accretions to sacred music have had a very rocky road in Church music history. One of the reasons for the Cistercian reform was not only to reform the Divine Office (which, literally, took all day to say at the Abby of Cluny), but also to reform sacred music, in general. There are only two or three sequentia which have been retained by the Church (victimae paschali laudes, at Easter, for instance), but during the 900 – 1100 AD period, there were tens to hundreds of them (some with nearly heretical lyrics).

A little later in Church music (1250 or so, if memory serves), the medieval chorale (not the same as the Renaissance chorale developed by Luther) developed into a trilingual motet which had two or three voices: the lower voice usually being a chant tenor in Latin, the second voice being a commentary on the tenor or even a new, unrelated song, and was usually in Italian and on occasion, a third voice was added in French. Imagine having to listen to (or sing!) a song where each part were in a different language! Some of the lyrics in the upper voices degenerated into a secular and sometimes scandalous nature. Motets of this type were quickly supressed.

In the Renaissance, the six-part madrigal structure common to secular performance, with its highly contrapuntal imitation, began to be imitated in sacred music, as well. This type of music got quashed by Trent, which insisted in only short points of imitation so that the words could be understood.

Vatican II allowed for a little (a very little) loosening of the influence of indigenous musical styles on sacred music (outside of missionary countries). If Vatican II were really implemented (and not the fictitious "spirit"), then the Church would do to most of the modern music song at masses in the US what it has done to most folk music in the past: remove it.

This is not to say that cultural and regional influences have not been appreciated by the Church – these survive in the various chants of the different rites, but the difference between this type of folk or regional influence and the type in American Catholic "hymnology" used indiscriminately in modern Mass settings is that the chants of the different rites were tied organically to the Mass (and usually composed by bishops, such as Ambrose and Chrysostom) in the sense that they developed along side of the developing liturgy. What exactly is the development in the liturgy that Vatican II wished to implement (this seems very murky to me)? If we understood this, then composing music which were an organic unity with this would be easy. I suspect that either there is nothing essentially new in the Vatican II reforms (if, indeed, the new Mass is still the old Mass, only in the vernacular), in which case a new type of music for the Mass cannot be supported (and hence, the older rules would continue to prevail) or else the Church has not yet begun to understand the sorts of subtle changes which it has made, because musicians, being sensitive to their environment, would have detected it by now. The wholesale chaos of sacred music in the US must either be reined in or given a proper direction. Either path will take a great deal more study that I suspect will happen at the bishop’s meeting. In any case, it is the lack of organic unity of music and the Mass which shows many of the current popular Mass songs used in the United States to be the mistakes that they are. Such a union is possible, but I do not know if the Bishops (or the Church) understands what this means for the post-Vatican II era. Pope Benedict is on the right track (and he is a trained musician). I hope that before long he will look into this question. The result could be a revolution (and a return) to musical greatness within the Church.