Sing Like a Catholic Sing Like a Catholic Jeffrey A. Tucker CMAA Church Music Association of America Many essays are drawn from articles that appeared in The Wanderer, The New Liturgical Movement, Inside Catholic, and Sacred Music. Cover design by Chad Parish. Copyright © 2009 Church Music Association of America and pub- lished under the Creative Commons Attribution license 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Church Music Association of America 12421 New Point Drive Harbor Cove Richmond, Virginia 23233 Fax 240-363-6480 [email protected] website musicasacra.com ISBN: 978-1-60743-722-2 Contents Preface by Scott Turkington . .ix Introduction by Jeffrey A. Tucker . .xi 1. WHY CHANT? . 1 Why Chant Now? . 3 The Sociology of the Chant Movement . 6 The Mansion of the Past . 9 Music Without Borders . .13 The Musical Intentions of Vatican II . .16 The Changing Music Environment . .21 2. STRATEGY . .25 Israeli Hebrew and Latin Chant . .27 A New Model of Musicianship . .30 Remove the Roadblocks . .34 Three Paths to Sacred Music . .38 The Heroic Generation of Chanters . .41 Pay for Training . .44 3. PARISH LIFE . .49 Why the Stasis? . .51 Sing or Else . .55 Should Liturgy Cater to Our Differing Needs? . .58 To Be Young and Singing . .61 v vi Sing Like a Catholic When the Liturgy Committee Strikes . .65 Father Scorched Earth . .67 Rip Up Those Carpets! . .71 A Letter to Praise and Worship Musicians . .74 4. THE MASS . .81 Music for Real Parishes . .83 Should a Parish Impose Uniformity in Music? . .86 The Gathering Song . .89 The Trouble with Hymns . .92 Working Our Way to the High Mass . .96 Happy Birthday, Graduale . .98 The Vatican Said It, and It Was Done . .102 5. THE TEXTS . .105 The Church’s Open-Source Musical Culture . .107 The Problem with Options . .117 The Mass Translated at Last . .119 The Trouble with ICEL . .123 Tethered Psalms . .127 Questions on the Psalter . .131 The Mysterious Sixties . .134 6. CRITICISM . .139 The Hidden Politics of Liturgical Commentary . .141 The Problem with Glory and Praise . .145 Pastoral Musicians Embrace Chant? . .148 Carefully Editing Pius XII . .153 Are People the Only Concern? . .158 7. PROGRESSIVES AND REACTIONARIES . .161 Music to Remember . .163 Guido the Innovator . .167 A Hero of the Century . .171 Four Catholic Musical Masters . .174 The Gregorian Missal . .180 Contents vii 8. REVIEWS . .185 Music for the Soul . .187 National Treasure . .190 The Glory of Byrd . .195 A Turning Point in Recordings . .200 9. THE FUTURE . .205 The New Youth Mass . .207 Support Your Local Organ Recital . .210 Can the Catholic Church Again Be a Patron of the Arts? . .213 APPENDIX . .217 Resources for Catholic Musicians . .217 INDEX . .219 Preface Scott Turkington There exists an urgent need in the Catholic Church to upgrade the music at all our parishes. This means forming scholas that take their liturgical task seriously. It means teaching people the chants that are part of their heritage, and making this music part of their liturgical lives. It also means that priests who celebrate the Mass need to seek training in singing their parts of the Mass, including the readings. A vast tradition is out there waiting to be rediscovered. At the parish in which I direct music, we are making progress toward the ideal, and many other parishes are doing the same. There is a bur- geoning movement in place that is seeking to do what the Church is asking. That means going beyond the standard fare given to us on a platter by mainstream publishing houses. It requires the added work of seeking out music and education. The willingness to undertake that work requires two things that this excellent book by Jeffrey A. Tucker provides: inspiration and direction. With those in place, the next step is training fol- lowed by implementation. The chant movement in the United States is growing fast but still in its infancy. I look forward to the day when every parish has a schola, when Catholic musicians will look to the Catholic Church as a place in which they can fulfill their professional dreams, and when the Catholic Church generally becomes known as having high standards of excellence in music. It’s been my pleasure to work with the author of this book in connection with the Church Music Association of America and its publications and programs. I enjoy his regular blogging on the ix x Sing Like a Catholic topic of sacred music and his writings in Sacred Music, The Wan- derer, and elsewhere. He is also a good colleague. I’m very pleased that he has gathered many of the insights he has shared in those venues in a single book that is of great value to many musicians working in the Catholic Church today. St. Paul said in a letter to the Colossians that part of the evi- dence that Christ is dwelling in us is that we sing “psalms, hymns, and spiritual canticles” (3.16). The Catholic tradition takes this task seriously, and has in every age, giving us a musical tradition that Vatican II said is of “inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art.” May this splendid volume, combined with the work and prayer the author implores of us all, make a contribution to bringing this tradition to life in all our parishes. L Scott Turkington St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church Stamford, Connecticut March 1, 2009 Introduction Jeffrey A. Tucker In 1990, Thomas Day published a book called Why Catholics Can’t Sing. It was daring and brave, and it shocked many Catholics out of their stupor. He wrote that Catholic music is in dreadful shape. Our hymns are pathetic. Our Mass settings are uninspired. Our singers are weak and egotistical. Our parishes don’t pay musicians and don’t reward excellence, and we are paying the price for this. Our cele- brants don’t sing. Even our hymnbooks are an embarrassment. We’ve lost our traditions, he continued, among which even simple plainsong and chant. Some cheered him; some condemned him. But it did get atten- tion. It was a wake-up call. The book wasn’t filled with new revelations about the particu- lars. The revelation for many was that the problem was not limited to their own parishes. It was a pervasive problem, one that defines the whole. As a columnist and daily blogger in Catholic music, I have to admire the courage it took to say what he said. I can’t even imag- ine what kind of abuse he must have dealt with from the Catholic music establishment (for lack of a better term), which until then was a self-satisfied lot. To say, as a professor of music at a Catholic college, that the Catholic Church had been led into a pit of bad taste and shoddy practice must have caused the ceiling to crash in on him. xi xii Sing Like a Catholic That was fifteen years ago. Today we are fortunate that some- thing is being done about the problem. There is a new debate, and, more importantly, there are new solutions being put into practice in our parishes. This new debate is what this book is about. It chronicles how we are moving from the world of Professor Day, one in which Catholics can’t sing, to a world in which singing like a Catholic is considered a glorious thing. It is the fulfillment of a brilliant her- itage of singing that began in the Apostolic age with chant, contin- ued through the middle ages with the invention of the musical staff and the Renaissance with soaring heights of the polyphonic idea, and all the way through the later centuries with orchestral and organ Masses. Now, a bit about me. My father was a church music director, and I sang under him as a kid. Today I am director too, with an unpaid position as director of polyphony for a local Catholic parish choir, the St. Cecilia Schola, in Auburn, Alabama. Indeed, I’m a complete amateur who dropped out of music school because I couldn’t stand the secularity and arrogance that seems integral to the craft. I turned to economics as a vocation. Later in life, I dis- covered Catholic music and after some years of study and practice, I jumped back in. I now write monthly, weekly, daily columns on the topic, and lecture and teach as time allows I’m also the managing editor of Sacred Music, under the men- torship of editor William Mahrt of Stanford University. The jour- nal, which has been around 135 years, provides a publishing venue for Catholic musicians to share insights, debate, communi- cate, offer results of research, and explain the seemingly infinite variety of spiritual and intellectual implications of music for liturgy. Its specialization is sacred music, which is not just any music but music especially suitable for liturgy, which leaves time and strives to touch eternity. I also serve as the publications direc- tor, and was involved in the production of The Parish Book of Chant (CMAA, 2008). I’m also involved in the workings of the Church Music Associ- ation of America and its visionary programs under the direction of Arlene Oost-Zinner. These are the training grounds of the new epoch. The crowds and its programs are too varied to characterize simply. The average age is 40 or so, and most people are parish Introduction xiii music directors or musicians. There are also many priests who come to learn to chant their parts. We divide into polyphonic choirs and chant choirs. We prepare propers and ordinary settings for Masses, as well as Motets for Holy Hour, and Psalms for Ves- pers.