The Recovering Choir Director

Matthew Newsome of the Western Carolina University Catholic Campus Ministry contributes this post on liturgical music as it stands today.  He makes the following observation about the various options for music allowed by the liturgy:

The end result, unfortunately, of taking all of these “options” (even those we don’t really have) is chaos. You don’t know what you might encounter when you enter a parish church for the first time as a visitor. Will you be asked to sing from a hymnal filled with old classic Protestant hymns accompanied by an organ? Will you be asked to sing along with a “contemporary choir” using throw-away misselletes or “song sheets”? Or will you maybe, just maybe, get a chance to hear the traditional music of the Church, which is proper to the Roman Rite?

If you were a person whose only experience with Catholic worship was what you have read in the liturgical documents governing the worship of the Church and the documents of the Second Vatican Council, you’d expect to hear a lot of Latin, a lot of Gregorian chant, and to hear the proper antiphons for the Mass most of the time. You might think that you’d hear the occasional other hymn, perhaps after the proper Communion antiphon has been sung, or as a recessional hymn. (Which, by the way, you won’t read about in the GIRM, because it really is not part of the Mass — it occurs after the priest says Ita Missa Est. The Mass is ended!)

You would be very surprised, having read these documents, to discover parish after parish, and even cathedrals, where the music director’s weekly job is to select four or five “other suitable songs” for the Sunday Mass. The proper antiphons are not even considered, if indeed they are even known about!

And I think this is the real key. Most music directors and choir members are well meaning people (in many cases volunteers) who simply do not know what the liturgical documents say, or that the Church has an ideal in mind when it comes to our sacred music, or that things such as “proper antiphons” exist at all. And this is a sad commentary. These documents are all readily available, many of them free on line (I’ve supplied links above in many cases). With today’s information technology, there is really no excuse for those involved in music ministry not to be aware of what the Church expects of us in this regard.

And no, we may not be able to meet this “ideal” in many cases, at least not immediately. But it does present us with something we can strive for, a rule against which we can measure our own efforts.

As for me, personally, the more I learn about sacred music and study the liturgical documents, the less satisfied I become with the current model of “let’s select four hymns for this week.” I long to hear the tones of the proper antiphons, setting the tone (literally) for the Mass itself.

You may wish to read my series, “A Musical Journey through GIRM” for more information on the options which he refers to.