The Recovering Choir Director

A commenter to the previous post spoke about the average church musician’s relative inability to make contemporary music sound compelling. To that I would add that my experience leads me to believe that the average church musician is relatively unable to make hymnody sound compelling.

(I consider my liturgical musicmaking abilities just above average—they’d be higher if the music compelled me to practice, but as I can get away with melody/arpeggiated chords for most contemporary pieces, I lean on that ability.)

Time and time again the Church documents have praised Gregorian chant and put it in the “first place”—the first choice, the one most proper to the Roman liturgy. The words “Gregorian chant” evoke many things in the minds, hearts and ears of men, to be sure, but there is one word it evokes in me that I would like to praise it for within the context of this post.

Simplicity.

The cantor/choir/congregation only has to learn a single melody line. The melody line can be simple (as in the Graduale Simplex) or more complex (as in the Graduale Romanum), but it’s a single melody line, nothing more (unless you want to add/refine nuance, dynamics, tempo and (yes!) harmony).

Plainsong, in its simplicity, is compelling the way that most other music (contemporary or traditional) is not. And the simpler chants invite participation. Really.

This Easter, I was ‘pastorally insensitive’ and sprung on the congregation a neumatic antiphon for the Sprinkling Rite: “Springs of water, and all that move in the water, sing a hymn of praise to God, alleluia.” (This chant may be found in By Flowing Waters.) As the cantor, I sang the verses (excerpts from the Book of Daniel’s Canticle of the Three Young Men). The first three go-rounds, the congregation did not sing, instead opting to listen to the choir and cantor (which, by the way, is a perfectly valid form of active participation). But as the antiphon repeated and repeated, they eventually became comfortable with the melody. By the last two repeats, a fair amount of the congregation were in fact singing the melody and quite well.

A piece by Mr. Schutte, however perfectly played, does not move me the way to the extent that a bunch of ragtag singers attempting to sing psalms to psalm-tones does. Because in part (and I have said this before here on this site), while the former is allowed by the Church, the latter is asked by the Church. That is a significant difference.

What would happen if instead of being laden with having to learn music for two hands, worrying about time signatures, key signatures, and possibly singing from the console, our average church musician only had to learn how to read square notation (resources are online, you know) and Italianate Latin pronunciation? (If the average church musician was able to work with By Flowing Waters, he would merely have to bone-up on sightreading and sightsinging.)