The Application of Sacrosanctum Concilium to Music in the Parish of St Peter and St Paul, Wolverhampton

Models of Liturgical Music & Model Liturgical Music: The Application of Sacrosanctum Concilium to Music in the Parish of St Peter and St Paul, Wolverhampton by Wilfrid H G Jones The University of Birmingham, Department of Theology and Religions Thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree Master of Arts (by Research) Department of Theology and Religions, College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham December, 2015 Copyright © Wilfrid Jones 2016. All rights reserved. University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT Active participation in the liturgy, which should be primarily internal and fostered by external participation, is the primary concern of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the sacred liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. Having investigated the historical effects of the Council and the ensuing liturgical reform on the music in the liturgies of St Peter and St Paul’s, Wolverhampton, this experiment gradually introduced the liturgical music envisaged by Sacrosanctum Concilium into a weekly Mass and uses ethnographic techniques to investigate whether the active participation of the people increased. This paper examines attitudes to active participation, to congregational singing and listening, and the construction of liturgical atmosphere. This experiment in reforming the post-conciliar liturgical reform shows that it is possible and desirable to provide music that is in continuity with the liturgical tradition of the Church and which, therefore, does not sever the chain of collective memory which that tradition has established over centuries. The results concerning whether the internal participation of the people was heighted by the experiment are inconclusive, but the atmosphere was perceived to have improved, and people were willing to sing their parts of the Mass and to listen to a cantor. 1 To Mark and the parishioners of St Peter and Paul’s: “God’s favourites” and with heartfelt thanks to Professor Martin Stringer The Archdiocese of Birmingham The Blessed John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music His Grace, The Most Rev’d Bernard Longley The Rev’d Msgr Mark Crisp The Rev’d Professor Paul Gunter OSB The Rev’d Dr Dom Alcuin Reid OSB The Rev’d Dr Philip Caldwell The Rev’d Fr Paul Moss Christopher Hodkinson and the parishioners of St Peter and Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, Wolverhampton To protect the privacy of certain individuals their names have been changed. 2 CONTENTS Table of Abbreviations 5 1. Introduction 6 Position 10 Aims 17 2. Context 23 Active participation in the music in the liturgy 23 Music as prayer and praise 36 A “consecrated culture” 38 3. Interviews: Musical practice at St Peter and St Paul’s, Wolverhampton 44 St Peter and St Paul’s, Wolverhampton 44 Perpetua and Agatha: Musical practice at St Peter and St Paul’s in living memory 47 James: new directions in liturgical music 51 Other liturgical music in the parish 57 Exceptions 62 Extra-liturgical singing 63 4. Observations: Preferences in and Spirituality of Liturgical Music 66 Liturgical music and meaning 66 Memory and nostalgia 68 Collective memory of the Second Vatican Council 78 5. Experiment: The Reform of the Reform 86 Methodology 86 Criteria for success 95 6. Questionnaire: Statistical Results and Preliminary Observations 101 Statistical problems 101 A “more comprehensible liturgy” 102 Singing 108 Atmosphere 115 Prayer 118 7. Conclusions 121 What did the Second Vatican Council do to liturgical music in the parish of St Peter and St Paul, Wolverhampton? 123 a. The influence of the conciliar documents 124 b. The vernacular 129 c. The influence of the “spirit” of the Council 131 Is a reform of the post-conciliar musical reform desirable or possible? 135 Bibliography 140 Appendix A – Research Questionnaire 145 Appendix B – Statement of Ethical Practice 147 3 Appendix C – Ethnography Schedule and Notes 152 4 TABLE OF ABBREVIATIONS AS Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani Secundi. Vol I.1 Pars 1. Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis. 1970. DC Pius XI. Divini Cultus. 1928. JRCW Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works, Vl. XI: “Theology of the Liturgy”. Libreria Editrice Vaticana & Ignatius Press. 2014. RL Bugnini, Annibale. The Reform of the Liturgy. Liturgical Press. 1990. SC Sacrosanctum Concilium. 1963. 5 1. INTRODUCTION They must throughout be watchful against innovations in music… counter to the established order, and to the best of their power guard against them… For a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions. - Plato, “The Republic”1 For ten years I sang each Saturday evening in term time at the Brompton Oratory and each Sunday morning I served Mass at my local parish. On Saturday evenings the liturgy would include the ordinary from a Mass setting by Byrd or Mozart or Palestrina or Haydn or the like and motets or organ music would be substituted for the sung antiphons which were then read from the sanctuary by the celebrant. The congregation participated in the music by listening to the choir. On Sunday mornings at my local parish church, the ordinary would be set in the style of folk music, written in the 1970s and 80s, and the antiphons were replaced by hymns in this same style. The congregation was encouraged to sing everything. The difference between the two was remarkable, radically altering the experience of the liturgy. How did such divergent practices come about? Certainly money is one factor. Few Catholic churches anywhere in the world could pay to maintain a choir to sing polyphony each week, let alone in the United Kingdom where only 1.6% of the population claim to attend Mass on Sundays and Catholicism has historically been a religion primarily of the working classes.2 Although a significant proportion (25.4%) of British Catholics are not of White British ethnic origin, it does not necessarily follow that British Catholics are a particularly economically 1 Plato. Republic. Book 4. 424b-c 2 “Recapitulation of Statistics”, Catholic Directory for England and Wales, 2011 6 disadvantaged demographic. However, Catholicism in the UK has historically been successful in “consolidating a solid working class base” and this strength has greatly benefitted today’s Church in terms of the numbers of the faithful.3 Choirs, on the other hand, cost large sums of money and so perhaps as a result of the Catholic demographics, there simply are not the resources to attempt to have choral music in parish churches. However, the other, and perhaps even more significant influence was the Second Vatican Council and the ensuing liturgical reform. In consultation with the vocations office of the Archdiocese of Birmingham I decided, to spend the year from September 2014 to 2015 living in a presbytery in the archdiocese and whilst there, conduct research into the parish’s music practice. The parish chosen for me was St Peter and Paul’s, Wolverhampton and the parish priest, Monsignor Mark Crisp, kindly agreed that part of my research could be an attempt to align the musical practice of one Mass, that celebrated on Saturday evenings, as closely as possible to the Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. In the Wolverhampton Deanery there was already a parish choir capable of performing chant, that of Corpus Christi, Ashmore Park, which costs the parish precisely nothing,4 and there are other places fairly close to Wolverhampton that have choirs that perform polyphonic music. The Birmingham Oratory, a short drive from Wolverhampton, at which the John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music is based, has a strong polyphonic tradition from which that Institute grew. St Chad’s Cathedral in 3 Parsons, Gerald. “A Question of Meaning, Religion and Working Class Life”, Religion in Victorian Britain: Controversies. Manchester University Press. 1997. 76 4 Cf Pius X Tra le Sollicitudini. 1903. 27 “It is not difficult for a zealous clergy to institute such Scholae even in smaller churches and country parishes, nay, in these last the pastors will find a very easy means of gathering around them both children and adults, to their own profit and the edification of the people.” 7 Birmingham has a professional choir. Both of these churches have the finances to support a choir and St Chad’s has a reason to maintain one by virtue of its nature as a Cathedral. The Oratory, by contrast, has a motive in maintaining a choir by virtue of its conceptualisation of the liturgy. It can quite easily be classed within that clumsy category of “traditionalist” (a term I use reluctantly and without negative connotation), an attitude manifesting itself most obviously in the fact that their Sunday parish solemn Mass is sung according to the Usus Antiquior. Why is it then that the Oratory is the only Catholic parish church near Wolverhampton to have a choir capable of singing polyphony when paragraph 114 of Sacrosanctum Concilium calls for choirs to be “diligently fostered”?5 When “other kinds of sacred music [than Gregorian chant], especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations”.6 Although the Oratory does have money to spend on music, when one actually comes to consider it, much of the music for which Sacrosanctum Concilium calls can actually be very affordable, as found at Ashmore Park, and some of the ways in which music in parishes generally differs from that envisaged by the Council would not cost anything more to provide than is spent already.

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