The Recovering Choir Director

One of the curiosities of the Diocese of Rochester is that, for all of the mayhem that seems to go on there, the silently suffering faithful have two televised outlets for truth, goodness and beauty. One is EWTN. The other is the 10 AM Sunday Mass broadcast live from Notre Dame on the Hallmark Channel.

While I have yet to experience the latter in person or via the tube, I did have the opportunity to view Raymond Arroyo’s interview with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger while visiting a friend over the weekend. One of things that stuck with me was Cdl. Ratzinger’s apparent approval of celebrating the Eucharist ad orientem (”towards the East”, essentially with priest leading the people in prayer both in word and posture, facing the same direction physically as well as spiritually, toward Christ).

While this makes supreme sense to me, I’m also compelled to ask: why limit it to just the priest?

If the cantor, choir and musicians were facing ad orientem as well, it seems to me that the issues of Thomas Day’s “Mr. Caruso”, performance choirs and repertoire would be greatly attenuated, if not eliminated entirely.

Item one: “Mr. Caruso”, the operatic virtuoso. Facing versus populum (as he currently is in most places), his style and demeanor attracts attention to himself. Additionally, his focus, while naturally on the music, can also drift to the congregation. Facing ad orientem puts the focus on why Mr. Caruso and the congregation are there in the first place—Christ in the Real Presence. Mr. Caruso need not change a thing about his style or demeanor, only his physical orientation. Suddenly, it’s quite obvious to the congregation and to Mr. Caruso himself that he’s offering his considerable talent towards the One who granted it to him rather than knocking the congregation’s socks off.

One can ask, “How will he lead the congregation in song? What about the body language, the arm movements, etc.?” He can keep the hand movements and body language just as he had before. The only thing that differs is that he no longer has the use of his face, which in certain cases is a good thing.

Briefly put: it focuses everyone’s attention to the “why” everyone’s at Holy Mass, and it takes the edge off a performance-based rendition.

Item two: the “performance choir” that receives applause each and every Sunday. Granted, for those churches with an active loft, the choir is usually already facing ad orientem. And in these very same churches, the congregation still feels compelled to applaud the choir for their efforts. Now imagine that the choir was facing the congregation (as it is in Milwaukee’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist and will be in Rochester’s Sacred Heart Cathedral). The compulsion to clap seems to be aggravated merely by having the performers/choir face the audience/congregation.

“Now wait just a minute,” you might say. “They’re not facing the congregation as much as they’re facing the altar of sacrifice!” Valid point, I’ll weigh in on that later.

Congregational applause for the choir can be eliminated by a pastor’s concerted effort, regardless of the choir’s positioning. I do posit, however, that the choir’s positioning can either serve to reinforce or combat such an effort.

To those who maintain that placing the choir in the loft serves to separate them from the congregation, and after all, the choir is a special part of the congregation, The Rt. Rev. Msgr. Hellriegel will speak on the matter.

Item three: repertoire. Many people are justifiably tired of the hashed and rehashed arguments about musical styles, singing in the vox Dei (”voice of God”), etc. I know this is a longshot, but perhaps composers would be more sensitive at least to the lyrics used if they knew those words were always going to be directed toward God and not at a congregation. And if composers weren’t as careful, perhaps music directors would take more care in repertoire selection, thus compelling composers to be more careful (as their more careless pieces would no longer fly).

I believe that with this simple change in attitude (hah!), a lot more good repertoire from diverse musical styles would be welcomed a lot more easily, and at the same liturgy to boot. Liturgical music is meant to praise God, so why not have the musicians put themselves in a position that unambiguously says, “We praise God”?

[Now, for the choir positioned behind the altar a la Milwaukee and Rochester: Yes, they are facing the altar of sacrifice, but have you seen how the altar is seemingly dwarfed by its surroundings? To reinforce that everyone is facing the altar of sacrifice, I propose the solution is to build a baldacchino in the manner, if not style, of that in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. That way, people's eyes can be more focused on the sacrifice and not on the people on the other side of the altar. Milwaukee's extremely stylized crucifix does that to a certain, but in my mind incomplete, extent.]