The Recovering Choir Director

Since the media has seen fit to place former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland in the news, I thought it would be useful for some to get another angle on his background.  I first encountered his name in 2002 when reading Thomas Day’s 1990 book Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste.

I reproduce below, with comments, emphases, and links, an excerpt from pages 95–97 of the book, in which Day dissects an influential article about liturgical music by the Archbishop.

In the United States, every International Style liturgical expert, at one time or another, pays homage to an article entitled “Music as Art in Liturgy” by Rembert Weakland, archbishop of Milwaukee.^[1] The author, a Benedictine archabbot when he published the article in Worship in 1967, is an accomplished musician (a graduate of Juilliard) and a first-rate scholar (he helped prepare the text for the New York Pro Musica’s production of The Play of Daniel, a medieval drama).  The International Style experts frequently invoke his name as the expert above all experts and try to include him in their ranks by quoting from “Music as Art in Liturgy,” but the archbishop’s modesty and tolerance really disqualify him for membership among the “affliction” experts.

In the article, Archbishop Weakland informs his readers that “there is no music of a golden age to which we can turn, because the treasures we have are a product of ages that do not represent an ideal of theological thinking in relationship to liturgy.”  Gregorian chant, the product of an era which had misunderstood the theology of worship, can offer nothing to the modern church.  [This is in direct contradiction to the Second Vatican Council and the Liturgical Movement that preceded it.  The question may be asked, does the age in which this article was written possess an ideal of theological thinking in relationship to liturgy?  Does our age possess it?] Looking back to the past for musical solutions to today’s liturgical needs “ends in a cul de sac, even if we try fruitlessly to abstract from the bad theological opinions on liturgy that gave birth to the music.”

This is Gropius all over again: “Start from scratch,” because the past has nothing to offer. Archbishop Weakland states this in absolute terms and without qualification.  There is nothing useful in the past.  Zero.  We must presume that even the do-re-mi scale is suspect.  Corrupt theology produced corrupt liturgy which produced corrupt music.  All of this must go.  [Can this call to action apply to much of the current dominant music marketed as liturgical?]

Like Rahner and Vorgrimler, Archbishop Weakland seems to demand a lobectomy.  The liturgical and musical past was simply wrong and must be cut out, in order to save “the people” from the infection of artistic decoration and mystification. In the past, the church justified artistic music “by describing it as a gift to glorify God — the sublimist creative act of man being given back to God. It [church music from the past] is like a package wrapped in a golden cloth with a golden ribbon.  Whether the people understood the contents of the gift is secondary.”

“Package,” golden cloth,” “golden ribbon” — this is undiluted Bauhaus contempt for decoration.  One must strip away unnecessary wrappings and ribbons.  Get down to the functional essence of things, the bare bones.  Of course, the unstated and thoroughly embarrassing fact here is that “the people” love packages and ribbons and gold and things they do not completely understand.  [Beauty as expression of joy, and mystery.] But, according to Bauhaus dogma, this kind of bourgeois delight in frivolity must be rooted out, for the good of humanity…

In his article, Archbishop Weakland … [stated] that the past does not provide some kind of magic-wand music which automatically solves all musical problems for all time.  [True enough.  Yet the past, the Catholic past, provides us a model for music within the rite.  The Christian East provides us with the model applied to their own rites.] The church needed to change its musical priorities.

Up to this point, all of the archbishop’s observations are on target, but the article takes a turn for the worse:

If on the other hand, the liturgical experience is to be primarily the communal sensitivity that I am one with my brother next to me and that our song is our common twentieth-century response to God’s word here and now and coming to us in our twentieth-century situation, it [music] will be something quite different.  We will not expect to find the holy in music by archaicism, but in our own twentieth-century idiom.

At the rhetorical climax of the article we do not find words like “Christ” or “worship” or “sacrifice” or “thanksgiving for redemption.”  Instead, the highpoint is the expression “communal sensitivity.”  The liturgy becomes the community sensing itself. Because the editor or the author left out some important qualifiations here, the article leaves the impression that, during Mass, God merely looks on while the congregation senses itself, partly with the help of music.  [I would like to see the "On one hand" statement that preceded this block quote citation.]

Some readers may have come to a screeching halt at the archbishop’s use of the words “our own twentieth-century idiom” of music.  Exactly what does this mean? Rock?  Jazz?  Stravinsky?  Lawrence Welk?  Messiaen?  Country and Western?  Rap?  The author does not say.  He gives no examples.

In a sense, Archbishop Weakland is correct.  Liturgical music cannot be chosen just for its historical significance or for its long-ago-and-far-away sound. It must be “contemporary,” and this word has a broad interpretation. [To this I would add the liturgical context in the texts as given by the Roman Gradual, the official "songbook" of the Roman Rite.] Today, “here and now,” it so happens that a thoroughly “contemporary” musical composition which speaks eloquently to a contemporary congregation might be something written yesterday or a motet from the sixteenth century or Gregorian chant or a nineteenth-century hymn.  Modern people can “understand” a wide variety of musical idioms.