The Recovering Choir Director

OK, I’ll expose my complete ignorance (and PVII upbringing):
What was the White List?

>We do not let illiterates determine a reading curriculum, after all.

A better analogy is to the homily. Should we dumb down homilies to the lowest common denominator? Do we allow untrained folks to determine the content or style of homilies? Certainly there are churches in which LCD is the approach, but that shouldn’t be the standard churchwide.

I’ll expose my … PVII upbringing:What was the White List?

The White List was a white book of perhaps fifty pages from the Society of St. Gregory that listed approved music for liturgy. This was music that met the criteria of Tra le sollecitudini.

The Black List was about one page at the end of this book. Black-listed were not only operatic and sentimental music but also symphonic masses.

I lent out my White List some years ago, and that was the last that I saw of it.

I was born after the end of the second Vatican council, too, but I think that it is important to know this history. Especially because the 1962 Missal continues to be used.

Rev. Carlo Rossini, who, I understand, ruled the music in his diocese (Pittsburgh?) with an iron fist (must have made rapid scale work difficult,)

Hee hee! Seriously, the one person that I have seen accuse Father Rossini of this attitude is Fred Moleck.

Hume gives a balanced view of the strengths and limitations of the White List. In his words:

The “White List” is a list of music approved for use in church by the St. Gregory Society of America. The St. Gregory Society itself was approved by the Holy See some forty years ago and has done a big and valuable job since then. It was one of the pioneer organizations at work during the bleak days, when distinctions had to be made from scratch. It did a lot of the spade work from which we have all benefitted immeasurably.

But to believe that everything “approved” by the White List is necessarily of musical value is to deceive ourselves. The editors themselves would probably be the last people in the world to declare the infallibility of the list. If a new work is academically correct and contains no flagrant violations of liturgical rules, then onto the “White List” it goes…

Use the “White List” as a guide, by all means. It will give you ideas and will keep you from committing any sensational bloopers (like Gounod’s Convent Mass in C, which does keep turning up). But remember that the “White List” is cluttered up with quite a bit of musical junk. Apply a slightly more discriminating yardstick to your final choice of the year’s repertoire.

BTW - I’m unfamiliar with the Convent Mass - anyone know what Hume’s objections to it might have been?

George, you speak as if this is still possible? Where might one find the contents of the list now?

Geri, if I may interrupt: Mr. George is quoting David C. Hume’s 1956 book Catholic Church Music, which Mr. Esguerra is excerpting. I have to say that I missed that too, at first.

I was born prior to, but was not exactly sentient during, the Council.

But what a difference a, erm, half-decade makes! My first recollection of music at school was —. Carey Landry’s Hi, God! Things were a little better at church, where, besides some battered typed xeroxed bradded thing, we used the measly sissalette forever (and I imagine they still do). But as a piano student I never understood why people never seemed to sing or play real music at Mass. Music and liturgical music had absolutely no connection in my mind. I was asked to play the organ on exactly one occasion, in junior high school, Peloquin’s Gloria of the Bells; otherwise, I had no interest in participating in music at school as I did not have and did not particularly want a guitar to strum.

My eyes were only finally opened when I went to college in the 80’s. Even then, the main campus Masses were strummed by some outsider hippie. Much better was the biweekly chant and polyphony at the weekly Latin Mass, which completely sidestepped the electronic “organ,” and in second place the fairly mainstream CathoProtestant G&P/Worship II/choral music (with emergent Häagen-Dazs) at the seminary on campus.

So in a way, my experience was the reverse of yours.

Mr Logan, ask this question on RPINet.com.

There are participants there in the Pittsburgh diocese who may be able to help you.

> We’re pretty much in the same place we were fifty years ago with some complications. Discuss.

As far as I can tell, from what I have read, we are where we are (at least in the US) for the following reasons.

1. In 1963, Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) opened a few loop-holes, chief among them the phrase “other things being equal” and the delegation of musical choices to the diocesan level.

2. The revision of the Ordo Missae drove composers and musicians away from Catholicism.

3. Post-Vatican II guidelines (e.g. Musicam Sacram, GIRM) enlarged the loop-holes, sending a green light to the young generation of the 1960s to seize the initiative, which they did. Traditionalists were put on the defensive for a generation.

4. In the meantime, the profit motive kicked in and music publishing houses took advantage of official approval to glut a tight market with ‘new’ material.

5. Clergy became less and less educated about chant and polyphony and thus less and less in a position to guide parish music in the direction of fidelity to SC.

6. Despite his chirograph on sacred music, JP II was “youth-oriented” and wanted to applaud youthful energy. His attention was (understandably) elsewhere.

A modest and faithful implementation of SC was thus never implemented on a wide scale.

This is about to change. The baby boomers are aging, the internet has put conciliar documents in the hands of Xers who are reading them, and the vapidity, self-centeredness, and heterodoxy of some 1960s-inspired liturgical practice strike many young people as vapid, self-centered, and heterodox.

Where can I obtain copies of Carlo Rossini’s Propers in Latin for SATB and/or All male voices in 1-4 parts. Our tridentine choir is murdeing the chants from the Liber. We need to simplify.
Thanks

Look here and here.

Katie, I’m certain the “both” you mention are the Schubert adaptation and the Bach/Gounod; those two are ubiquitous. Various dioceses and parishes may have their own specific “blacklists” regarding wedding and funeral musics, but I would think that any repertoire found on them would be the result of arbitrary decision-making, albeit researched and deliberate, as opposed to any “official” guidelines. Banning either of the above, to me, seems counterproductive in that, despite the secular text origins of the former and whatever albatross hangs around the latter, the witness given by the singing of an “Ave Maria” at a wedding (by competent performers, of course) outweighs any such concerns.
I might suggest that the best choral alternative for you locally would be the equally pervasive and beautiful Jacques Arcadelt setting. It’s austerity and “ease of handling” make it a most appropriate choral choice. (Unless you have the forces to bring off Franz Biebl’s setting-the de jour favorite of the late 20th century!) And there are likely hundreds of settings for choir you can read/audition from the Choral Public Domain Library, including the Arcadelt.

Katie,
Way, way back when I taught middle school I had my advanced girls sing the original text Schubert set in German (which I speak as well) that had a fairly accurate English translation. The poem is more of a paean to the “virtues” of young femininity, or maidenhood if you will. But “banning” it for that reason is simply, well, silly. We should then ban the singing of “O God Our Help in Ages Past” because Orangemen Militia used to sing it en masse while slaughtering Irish in their various wars against Irish Catholics. Or we could abandon singing the National Anthem ’cause it makes me crave a warm Guiness stout; or let’s go all the way and ban “Ein feste Burg” (which actually wouldn’t bother me one iota. Anyway, glad your situation played out nicely. Do check out the Arcadelt, beautiful and easy.