The Recovering Choir Director

Peace, all.

Most Masses in the world have no choir. While I wouldn’t quibble that a choir makes liturgy better, you have to realize that the parishes that do have choirs do not have them at every Mass. If the choir should lead and inspire, is that a goal only for the Big Mass on campus, or for every liturgy?

“there was High Mass and Low Mass, and even other categories signifying differing levels of solemnity”

This is a distinction I wish might find new life.
I grew up thinking “high mass” meant the choir mass, and had no notion of the distinction between liturgical music and other sacred music.

The church choirs in which my parents sang were likely to sing the Ambrosian Gloria one week , a Gloria by Schubert the next; Praise to the Lord at one point during the mass and “The Palms,” at another and a Hovahness motet at another.

This was after VCII, and the nuns who taught private school (and Religious ed to those of us in public school,) down the street, had a guitar mass with Glory and Praise, which I despised, but purely on aesthetic grounds (not that I even knew the word, which I still cannot spell, but there’s no cultural snob as intractable as a 10 year old.)
All of it was very well sung, most of it was very good — and only some of it was appropriate, I came to understand.
There was also a great deal of really well rendered instrumental music.

I don’t recall ever going to a Mass with no music at all, even on a weekday. This may be true to some extent, becasue on weekdays we would be likely to go to a monastery, where the cloistered nuns sang exquisitely (different nuns!) but I suspect this is faulty memory.

But now for the last two decades, during which I have done a great deal of traveling, I found it was common for parishes to have one “silent mass,” one mass with four songs tacked on, and one mass with a great deal of singing, either supported by a choir, or mostly performed by one.
Those that featured performances seemed slightly, but only slightly, more likely to feature a contemporary ensemble than a traditional one.
However, the contemporary ensembles seemed drastically more likely to delude themselves that the assembly was singing along with them.

I laud and endorse the notion that no Sunday mass should be be entirely without singing (and I don’t buy the interpretation some put on the the rubrics that it is an entire Sunday’s worth of masses that should not be devoid of singing, rather than any given individual Sunday mass.)

But I can feel the palpable resentment of the 7:00 am regulars when they are asked to sing “One Bread, One Body,” and I can hear them, (heck, I can hear myself,) thinking “Oh no, not THAT Gloria, in THAT key, with THAT high note at THIS time of morning.”

And I think theri resentment is well founded.

I think they deserve to have their (nearly) silent mass returned to them.

Have the priest enter simply, with a bell to announce him. Sing a simple psalm response to a psalm tone (no Minnesota Trinity soupy arpeggios and aren’t-we-clever? chromatics.)
Sing a chanted Allelluia (any deacon or priest can chant the verse recto tono.) Sing the Eucharistic acclamtions in the simplest setting you can find.

AND LEAVE IT AT THAT!

We have choirs at both of our Sunday masses. Their purpose it to lead in and inspire to worship. We sing more than most Catholic parishes in America (my personal opinion).

Yes, Fr. Keyes, same old same old.

My personal preference is no spoken words at all, sing everything that must be pronounced aloud and have big gobs of silence in between to allow for contemplation. (One of the things I loved about the Byzantine church where I used to be a regular, hearing ALL the scripture chanted, epistle, Gospel, everything…. stunning.) Then a choral postlude that makes your heart feel like it’s going to burst with the beauty of it followed an organ peice that’ll damage the foundation of the building.
But I know there are people who would prefer less music, and I don’t think SONGS should be foisted on them. They should be asked to sing Mass, but people should stop trying force them to sing AT Mass. (And I’m even-handed on this, or at least as even-handed as someone as opinionated as myself can be — an exquisite marriage of Herbert’s words and Vaughan Williams tune has no greater right to intrude on those who would prefer less singing than does a piece of Rory Cooney drek.)