Reforming Liturgical Music
Posted by: tony on 11/21/2007 04:03 AM
Updated by: tony on 11/21/2007 04:03 AM
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Expires: 12/22/2007 12:00 AM
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Todd at Catholic Sensibility has a great post up regarding some suggestions on how to improve your parish music program. This is in response to a new document coming out of the USCCB (U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops).
Rather than predictions to fuel heated gossip, I’d prefer to offer suggestions on what will really make liturgical music better:
1. Bishops could found regional institutes for liturgy and music, and foster vocations to the ministries of the liturgical arts.
Excellent idea. The main idea of liturgical music is to bring people closer to God. It doesn't mean they have to be able to sing every song, or musically like every song (contrary to what those who misinterpret the meaning of "active participation" might say).
Regional institutes make more sense. And that doesn't exclude chant scholas if that is supportable in the region. But trying to cram chant down parishes' throats when they don't have the directorship or the training to do it is counter productive, and does not bring either the music ministers or the congregation closer to God.
2. Bishops and pastors could commission outstanding composers to write good and needed church music, bypassing some of the market-driven aspects of promotion and acquisition.
Wow. Arts partonage. The only patronage of the arts I've heard about recently has been by the government and resulted in our cricified Lord in a jar of urine and his holy mother covered in elephant dung.
This idea is really cool.
3. Pay church musicians a just wage.
If you want people with technical quality, you need to pay those people what they are worth, or someone else will, like the Methodist church down the street who values music more than your parish.
I understand that some parishes are not wealthy. Also some parishes have to rely completely on volunteers. In my current parish, I have sung in both a huge and diverse choir, and a small group of dedicated people. I felt a greater connection to God in the small group, and the people in the pews felt it too, judging from their comments.
4. Explore ways in which volunteer musicians in small rural and urban parishes could develop their skills and leadership, perhaps partnering with larger wealthy parishes.
We are being forced to do something of the sort with a sister parish with which we are linked. Though the musical integration has not worked to well as of late, but the attempt is young and there's time to do it.
In striving for quality, musicians will be far more inspired than some half-hearted appeal to loyalty to a document or to a new layer of Roman bureaucracy.
And this is the money quote.
The main advocacy of the NLM guys seems to be a desire for a Moses who will come down from the mountain with 10 musical commandments and shove it up the collective $#%es of those parishes who don't toe their particular line.
What we need is an example of a better way to sing to the Lord. And you can't do that by pointing out what's wrong, you have to point out what's right, and if nothing right exists, you need to either create it, or have it created.
What are the qualities of the old hymns that make them transcendental?
I don't think it's Latin, or someone would simply translate "On Eagle's Wings" into Latin and it'll magically turn it into good liturgical music. People seem to forget that polyphony was fought tooth and nail when it was first developed.
Once those attributes are developed, we can use them as a pattern for all subsequent liturgical music.
If we want more organists, we may have to pay for volunteers from the church to take organ lessons. Until then, four chords on a guitar might be the best a church can do.
But when our choir's (the six of us) harmonies are perfect, and the hair stands up in the back of our neck, I tell them that that is the breath of the Holy Spirit. And isn't that why we sing to our God?
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