The Recovering Choir Director

Chironomo poses the question: Can Catholic laity save sacred music? He answers his own question thusly:

The answer may be “yes”, but then the question becomes “how long will we be willing to keep trying”. Even the most fanatical advocates will draw the line at some point if their efforts aren’t acknowledged and rewarded.

My answer to the question is this: The Catholic laity can certainly preserve sacred music (as can the clergy), but in order for it to be “saved” – and I take “saved” to mean “employed on a large scale within the liturgical contexts for which it was composed” – the laity’s efforts require the full, active, conscious and proactive support, participation, and instruction of the clergy, especially ordinary bishops, pastors and rectors.

I tell all priests who ask me to sing/direct the chant at Mass that It’s wonderful for the official music of the Roman Rite to actually be in demand by its stewards. In the same manner, I remember being taken aback positively when my pastor took me up on my offer to give him singing lessons for our sung Mass in the extraordinary form. This gesture of, “I know what the rite asks of me; I need your help to execute it,” is far from being burdensome; actually it is energizing.

Similarly energizing is being able to teach the Latin chant to children, some of whom will become tomorrow’s choir directors, chant scholars, and clerics. Tom Parker writes of his experience of teaching the Salve Mater misericordiae to a children’s choir and hearing the fruits of his labor.

Lastly, Jeffrey Tucker at NLM compares the Catholic Church’s attempt at reviving Gregorian chant as the normative music of the Latin rite, with the concerted, sustained, and ultimately successful effort of the Jewish people to make Hebrew a living vernacular once more. The tool of peer pressure apparently was employed on occasion:

There are informal reports of how the most passionate among them would find someone speaking some other language and say to them: “Jew, speak Hebrew.”

Maybe it’s time for a similar motto. “Roman Catholic, chant Latin,” perhaps? Or maybe, with a minor change in punctuation: “Roman Catholic? Chant Latin!”