Why choosing music for church should be a shared responsibility

An interesting post and comments on PrayTell.

From the quotes there, the American bishops anticipate that music selection is done by a committee which has received clear delegation from the pastor.

But most musical directors (at least the ones who post on internet forums) dislike that: they would rather be a committee of one, they would never dream of letting ignoramuses choose music, believe no one else has the knowledge and skills etc.

Thankfully a few of the commentators there are more reflective. The best is this one:

All too often, the question of “Who picks the music?” is answered in terms of power. More properly, it should be answered in terms of gifts. Who knows the repertoire and skills of the musical leaders? Who knows the singing abilities of the community? Who knows the resources at hand? Who knows how to blend worship into a seamless event (rather than a stop-start mishmash)?

It seems to me that

- even if you are a professional musical director, vastly more qualified in both liturgy and music than your pastor, choir, musicians and liturgy committee, and

- even if you have all musical decision making authority delegated to you from the pastor

the best way to use this authority is the same way a wise parish-priest uses his authority. Sparingly and with lots of consultation. Ideally in way that your people don't even know that you're exercising authority.

Why?

On a very personal level, for reasons of self-protection: The best way to encourage a pastor to change his mind about your role and his delegated authority is a stream of people complaining to him about the music. If people cannot give you input, and see that it is taken notice of sometimes, then you can guarantee they will make their feelings known. If that happens, then best case, the pastor will not let you make the choices any more. Worst case, he'll fire you. Meaningfully listening to other people and developing respectful relationships with them is your best protection against this.

On a more theological level wise stewardship of a community's musical resoures requires making the best use of all the gifts available to you. That means need to engaging people and make them enthusiastic about working with you. That won't happen if you're autocratic. What's more you have both human and theologcial weaknesses and blind-spots, no matter how talented and well educated you are. There will be times when you simply run out of inspiration, when you miss the implications of a scripture message - or when a crisis in your life means that you have to step back and focus on your own family priorities for a few days. Biology means you can only see things from the perspective for your own gender and ethnic group. This means that you need a team to ensure that "the show goes on" and that the message fully reflects the Gospel.

Educationally developing the spiritual lives, liturgical knowledge, musical skill and leadership gifts of the people in your choirs, ensembles and music teams may or may not be part of your formal job description. But I've never yet seen a parish where it wasn't expected, at least informally. If you let other people take part in your decision-making processes, then you will be present when teachable moments, times when you can share liturgical-music knowledge and skill will happen naturally, - people won't even realise that they are learning. But if you work alone, they won't happen - and you won't be there when they happen in the liturgy group meeting or school staffroom.

This goes way beyond the musical skill development that you can share in choir practise - it's about sharing liturgical and practical wisdom based on both Church teaching and your own experience.

And your voice will be most effective if you are seen as a warm and friendly as well as wise and liturgio-musical:   A music director's primary role is relational, not melodic.

Let us Go to the Altar of God

I found this while I was searching for examples of possible hymns for Sunday.

Most of the versions that YouTube gave me first were just horrid.   And then this appeared - with only 176 views.

The announcements at the beginning are weird - and must be stranger still if you're sitting in the church being welcomes by a disembodied voice.   But skip to about 1:25, and enjoy the hymn.

Mass "themes" and parish-school relationships

The sheer arrogance of this astounds me.

Readings, Propers and themes.

The church has invested an incredible amount of energy in selecting the combinations of Scripture readings, right down to the individual verses, specified for each liturgy. The first and Gospel readings are always linked to each other, they emphasise the message of the the feast or season - and the Sunday readings include some multi-week messages which build on each other eg the emphasis on light in the early Ordinary Time Sundays of Year A, and the Bread-of-Life series during the mid part of Ordinary Time in Year A

To say that these don't provide the basis for a theme of that day's Mass is just bizarre.

I am totally aware that the church has also chosen some small snippets of scripture, mainly from the Psalms, to use at transition moments in the liturgy.   And that sometimes these snippets can be enlightening - especially for a musician or technician who misses the main message of the longer Gospel reading because they were distracted by how the sound system is working or how to support the soloist who's singing next or whatever.

But they are just snippets. They don't present the full story, except to an incredibly well-educated congregation for whom the smallest mention evokes a memory of the whole psalm and the way it's reflected in Jesus life . They mostly don't quote Jesus words. They're the Old Testament - not the Gospels, ie the Good News of resurrection.

Significantly, when Vatican II required the use of "the vernacular" (ie languanges that people use every day), the Church did not see providing translations of these snippets as an urgent priority. The focus was on translating the ordinary liturgical texts, and on exposing people to a wider range of content from sacred scripture.

Despite this, some people claim that these snippets (technically called "Propers", as opposed to the "Ordinary" ie the pieces that are the same at every Mass) should form the backbone of the music content at Masses in general, and including at school masses - where most of the attendees (where I live anyway) will be parents and children who are rarely at church anyway, not the most faithful and devoted (whose children are generally thoroughly grown and left school).

The action at every single Mass is the prayerful remembering and reliving mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ. But that's not the end of the story. It's just the start. And because it's ever present, it doesn't give particular guidance for how to choose materials for any specific liturgy.   That's where the particular message from the readings, AKA the theme kicks in.   Which is handly becuase it's through the scriptural and teaching messages of each day's readings that liturgy informs and inspires the people present, and gives them hope of sharing in the mystery of resurrection. Music needs to re-enforce and support all these messages, not just focus on Body-and-Blood, or resurrections - or other tangential ideas from the psalms.

Parish music directors and school masses

As to parish music directors not having influence at school masses, having read some of their stories of woe on the Catholic blogsphere,  it's pretty clear that this is due to the behaviours of those music directors, and their often-astounding ignorance about education and human relationships.

So - some suggestions for the parish music director who wants to grow some influence in their school masses:

Firstly, learn some humility: the teachers may be liturgically ignorant, but you are pedagocially ignorant, and you aren't responsibly for the academic, social and spiritual development of 20/30 children five days a week. Their job is harder than yours, hands down.

Second, find out about the curriculum and teaching resources which the teachers have to work with. Mostly, they don't get to choose what ideas to present and what songs to use to support those. Probably they're working with their own musical limitations: if they choice is whatever they have a CD for vs no music whatsoever, then be grateful for the CD no matter how tinny it sounds to you.

Third, focus on building loving relationships, not liturgical correctness. If you're asked to help, choose mostly materials that the children do know - not just what you think they should know. Get over your pride and play those pieces which the education professionals know that the children and their marginally-churched parents will relate to, even if you hate them.   Do it with a gracious attitude - make sure that you're modelling Christ's love in every single interaction that you have with the teachers and the kids. Be kind. Praise people for things that went well. Focus on the skills and talents that you have, not the defects.

Fourth, get over the excuses. Yes, the teachers work in the daytime, when most musical directors are at their day jobs - so take a half-days leave when you need to meet them. Yes, the children practise during school time, when you're probably not around - so provide resources that the teachers can use.   Yes, most of them aren't getting the quality of musical education that you would like - get over it, and concentrate on what you can share with them.

If you do these things, chances are you will get to spend more time with teachers, and their pupils. You will be present when a teachable moment for making an liturgical point arises. And your voice will be listened to because you've made helpful suggestions in the past.

The 70's weren't so bad - but they didn't produce much music that we still use.

A fascinating article in Commonweal magazine about the reality of growing up as an American Catholic in the 1970s. The author just said "Catholic" - but I think that the country adds an important dimension: what happens in America is not necessarily the same as what happens everywhere else!

One thing that caught my eye, though, is the quote

"I do not remember much about the confirmation ceremony itself. I am pretty sure we sang “On Eagle’s Wings.” Don’t judge—it was the ’70s!"

Fascinating that she thinks this. Michael Joncas wrote On Eagles Wings in 1975-1976 for a funeral but it wasn't recorded until 1979. So unless the author was in his immediate circle, then I'd be very surprised if it was sung at her confirmation.

This corresponds with something I've noticed: traditionalists like to berate material as coming "from the 70's" - implicity from a hippy era.  But in my observation there's actually very little material from the 1970s that is still in use today.  My current parish has one item from the 1960's (Peter Kearney's "Fill my House"), lots of things that are older still, but little at all from the 70s when the work of transforming liturgy into the vernacular was carried out in earnest.   Without pulling out a spreadsheet, my sense is that most of the material we use was actually written in the 1980s and 90s.

I wonder what's happening in other places.

Congregational singing is always a living proof of the Faith

Recently I recently came upon an article from a Catholic priest and pastoral worker, writing in a magazine with a less liturgical focus.

There's one bit I disagree with:

Make sure you have the best musicians you can find (paid or volunteer) and use them; do the difficult things and ask people who are holding your program down or even making it worse to step aside.

"Best" is a subjective term - and often the best of musicians want to make great music, rather than to model God's love for their colleagues and parishioners.     I'd rather have a teachable musician with a heart to serve God's people, than a virtuoso any day.

But one of their key points is

It’s not exactly clear to us why that is so, but congregational singing seems to be a reliable bellwether for church health.

Like them, I believe this is true, even though I have no evidence, and no real explanation about why it's the case.

Then, today, I was totally stunned to find this gem in a Catholic hymn book published in Australia in 1952 - long before Vatican II was called.   I've included a picture of the key bit here - just because it's so stunningly different from what many traditionalist musicians would have us believe about church music pre VII, and the expectations about who (people vs choir) should be singing.

You can read the whole thing here:    http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn2152603-s4

A short history of sacred music

Ref:  http://blog.adw.org/2013/12/what-is-sacred-music-historically-its-a-bit-more-complex-than-you-may-think/

However, it focuses on the style of the music, rather than the content of the words, and I think this is a mistake: There is "gospel" style music today which is not Godly - and plenty of secular tunes which have been well-baptised.

The latter are even more interesting when the people who are using them for liturgy / worship / prayer don't have any idea about their origins:  not many Irish people realize that the tune they sing A Mhuire Mhaithar to started its life as a love song, and has been used for many things including the New Zealand theme tune for the Volvo Ocean race back in the day!

Music is NOT a universal language

In interesting article from a more evangelical perspective.   The key phrase that someone picked up on:

"Music is the universal language." How often have we heard the phrase? It's amazing-the power of an oft-repeated, unexamined aphorism. This one in particular, it sounds so, romantic-convincing."

Anyone who's ever listed to traditional music from Asian cultures will know that the line isn't true: somehow what sounds right to their composers sounds totally wrong to ears formed in Western patterns - even if we don't have the training or vocabulary to recognize and describe what's wrong.

So what does this mean in a liturgical / catholic / Catholic context?   In short, Gregorian chant is no more the universal musical language than any other. Jesus didn't use it the way we know it - any more than he prescribed sing the Psalms the way the Jewish people did as the only way to worship God.


Personally, I found this part interesting too:

"We Went, We Sang, We Conquered…
During the 19th and 20th centuries, as Western and European Christians went out around the world, ... some even tried to “help” the local music-makers by teaching them to sing in unisonand by encouraging the translation of Western Christian songs into local languages. Current
practice [does not] always demonstrate a value for the God-given musical and artistic resources of the host cultures.
... it never occurred to most Christian workers that just as they were learning new, complex, and “strange-sounding” languages in order to communicate with local people, they also needed to learn to understand the local music systems. Instead, they brought their Bible in one hand and a hymnbook in the other. Often the Bible was translated into the vernacular, but when it came to the hymnbooks, only the words changed (in translation), not the basic musical language of the songs."

I think it's even worse than that:

As well as margnalising the indigenous musical expressions, many of the missionaries weren't actually the best of musicians. So I've met people who were taught to sing Latin hymns that many Catholics regard as treasures of the faith to tunes that Western culture considers trite and disrespectful (eg Kumbayah). I've also met people who think that certain hymns are "traditional African hymns" because those (18th century and out of favour) hymns aren't widely used in European countries any more.