The Recovering Choir Director

Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Fr. Dwight Longenecker, a convert from Anglicanism, provides this reflection on church music.  While not claiming to know everything there is about it, he does make some points that have been made by others before him.

What we must do is trying to choose liturgical music is sort out some basic questions: First of all, what is music at Mass for? It is not to make us feel good or even feel holy. It is to give us voice to worship God. There are secondary functions: it may inspire us. It may help us to express our love for God and our desire to serve him. It may build esprit de corps. It may encourage and uplift us. However, all of these functions, while worthy, are secondary. First of all a hymn is supposed to give us the words and music to worship the Almighty.

Outside of the focus on the hymn (which, to Fr. Longenecker’s defense, is the de facto first option in many parishes worldwide despite instruction to the contrary), these are astute observations.

More from Fr. Longenecker (while studiously avoiding the traditional/contemporary^[1] focus of his, and many, viewpoints):

There are some devotional hymns that express personal devotion and work well, but they are better suited as communion or offertory hymns.

I remember back when I was at Cornell — before I discovered the General Instruction of the Roman Liturgy or the Gregorian Missal for Sundays and supporting volumes — selecting primarily contemporary music for the Offertory and Communion, while “bookending” the Mass with traditional hymnody.  (In all cases, all of the verses were sung.)

Why does it makes sense to sing the words that God speaks to the prophet or words Jesus said to us back to God? This is not worship, it is a musical Bible meditation.

If you go through the official music of the liturgy as found in the aforementioned books, you will see more than a few “voice of God” passages set to music.  However, the difference between this and what Fr. Longenecker describes is that the selected passages are: (1) ratified by the Church’s worship tradition; (2) in the Church’s language of worship — in our particular rite, Latin; and (3) set to Gregorian chant, the Church’s most ancient musical iconography.  The Catholic Church is a church of both/ands, and in this case, the chant of the church serves as both worship and meditation music — even as one sings it (speaking from personal experience).

These type of Scripture quotation hymns are often also what I call ‘comfort hymns’…While these are wonderful Biblical promises, again, they are not hymns of worship directed toward God. They are hymns of comfort directed towards us.

I was reminded of Greg Krehbiel’s 2003 reflection, “On fear and the liturgy” and my reaction to it when reading this passage.  (I haven’t reread either of them — just pointing out the memory jog.)

They are frequently about us, the people of God and our mission in the world…While there is certainly room for some hymns to be about our mission in the world (especially as a recessional hymn) when they are all about us, the community and our mission to change the world it changes divine worship into a sort of pep rally.

I have to say that because of my increasingly lessening familiarity with the oeuvre of which Fr. Longenecker speaks, I cannot speak to this point nearly as well as I may have in the past.  However, I will say that the chants that we sing — when we delve more deeply into their meaning and even construction — do serve to challenge me a lot more than the music that I used to select, regardless of the genre.

He closes,

When I speak on this topic I am often accused of elitism or snobbery or ‘being Anglican’. Perhaps some of this is true. I would simply counter that I am only trying to do my job, that I am supposed to know something about worship, and I don’t pretend to be an total expert in the field, but I should know a little bit and try to apply it.

Seeing others in the comment box inform Fr. Longenecker about the official music of the Church was heartening to see in the least.  You would have had only a handful of people commenting on this point not even five years ago.  Word seems to be getting around, thanks be to God.  Now we need people to take up this musical yoke, whose burden is lighter than many believe at first.

As far as hymnody goes, I’ve come to the stance that, where the liturgy doesn’t explicitly call for it, should be at best additive, not substitutive.  That is, hymnody, if used, should be employed in addition to propers, not as a de facto replacement for them.