Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Reposting "Contemporary* music and the liturgy"

I've been thinking much lately on the current cultural trend toward so-called "contemporary" music in liturgy, and the more that I think on it, the more discomfited I become.

A frequent argument cited by proponents of "contemporary" music is relevancy. "We need to be more relevant if we're going to reach people effectively" is the philosophy which translates in practice to the adoption of Top Forty-esque music in liturgy. This argument is frequently cited in discussions involving youth and liturgy.The premise seems flawed to me on two levels: one, a misunderstanding of the proper function of liturgical music; and two, a reversal of the attitude with which liturgy should be approached.

As for the first, the function of music in the liturgy is to be an organic part of the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Raucous instrumentation, whooping and hollering, hand-clapping and motions are all at odds with the formal, elegant, highly structured rituals of Mass in the Catholic church. Not that there is not a time and a place where all of those things are not inappropriate, and not that those things are intrinsically bad; they're just the liturgical equivalent of redecorating the entire White House with Pucci prints and Ikea furniture. Whenever something jars the worshipper's focus away from the celebration of the Mass, it becomes liturgically problematic. If the congregation feels unsure whether or not it should applaud after a piece of music, it is liturgically problematic. The focus has shifted from the communal celebration of Mass to a performance, which reduces the congregation to the role of audience.

"But the people can't sing Gregorian chant!" is another frequent complaint, to which I reply "Nonsense!" I've taught a group of teenagers who can't read music how to sing the chant "Ave Maria" in under fifteen minutes. I find that the structure and tessitura of chant is easy to understand even for non-musicians -- people who can't read music can still see on the page whether a line rises or falls and feel naturally where a line resolves. Chant is simpler to sing than 95% of "contemporary" music, which generally has irregular rhythms, uses odd harmonic structure, and has a broad or uneven tessitura. Much of it is sung in a range that's very uncomfortable for women's voices, as it's too low to be sung comfortably in the range where it's written but high enough that singing it up the octave isn't pleasant, either. The lower male voice suffers, too, as the music as written is too high but down the octave is too low. In the services I've attended where I have not had a hymnal in front of me, I've found it easier and faster to catch on in a chanted service than I have in "contemporary" services where the words to the songs are flashed up on a large screen.

To the second, the idea of relevancy, when explored by its proponents, seems to entail an injection of God into the modern culture. I believe this raises two questions: one, is God not already present in our culture, at least liturgically speaking; and two, since God is timeless, why the necessity to make His worship "timely"? I submit that the driving force in the relevancy argument is actually the reverse: an attempt to inject secular culture into sacred liturgy.

As Paul instructed us, we are not to be conformed to this world. Using the musical language of secular culture conforms our worship immutably to worldly standards. Liturgy should be sacred -- set apart -- in all its components so that we understand just what it is that we do.

One of the theological concepts I so love in the Eastern Catholic Church is the knowledge that the liturgy is where Heaven and Earth meet, and the liturgical space and music and prayers all acknowledge that reality. The Western rite could certainly use a dose of that uniformity of purpose and intention. The Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine church I now attend feeds my soul in its embrace of the mystery and sanctity of God in a way that pop-culture Masses are simply incapable of doing.

*I chose to put the word contemporary in quotation marks because as it is a term of art as applied to liturgical music. Contemporary comes from the Latin con tempore, meaning with the time. Arguably, the work of living composers is contemporary by definition, but I have yet to hear someone calling for Arvo Part's "O Antiphons" in the name of contemporary music! Contemporary, in the current discussions of liturgy, is applied solely to music which shares the lyrical style, structure, and setting of pop/rock/Top Twenty hits.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

The new apologetic

To quote one of my students -- "I just want to throw this out there."

Back from the NCEA convention and it was a whirlwind day; I was once again reminded how small this world of Catholic education really is in some ways when I ran into my grade-school principal along with two of my grade-school teachers within five minutes of arriving onsite. Plus, the new president of the NCEA was working at my college when I was a student there.

I'll post a bit later about the two sessions I attended -- they were both substantive and reaffirming of the ministerial nature of Catholic educators. While it's still fresh in my memory, though, I'd like to say a bit about Bishop Braxton's keynote address this morning, titled "The New Apologetic."

It's my hope that the full text of his remarks will be made available online sometime in the near future, but he issued a call and a challenge for a new apologetic in the twenty-first century. Acknowledging the reality that our young people are more willing to ask their questions in the chat room than in the classroom and more apt to do their research on the Web than in the library, he challenged those who are committed to the strong formation of young Catholics to have a bold and compelling presence in cyberspace (Catholic bloggers, unite!)

The four points that this new apologetic needs to address are the new atheism, the lack of substantive instruction in Scripture and Tradition, the rise of Islam and what it means to Christians, and...argh. Drawing a blank on the fourth point, and I know it was a good one.

In a world that is so often hostile to the message and messengers of Christ, the only thing that will effectively arm us to defend our faith and our hope is reason coupled with deep knowledge, which means that we who teach in Catholic schools need to communicate the Gospel and to catechize our students at all times. We teachers also need to be aware of what's out there in the world around our students so that we can effectively address their questions.

The day reminded me yet again why I'm proud to teach in a Catholic school.

(Lest you think, though, that all was sunshine and roses, the session on liturgical music was run by none other than David Haas. Grrr. I did not attend.)

Monday, April 17, 2006

Christos Voskrese!

Voistinu voskrese!

And that is my entire Church Slavonic vocabulary.

Your resurrection, O Christ our Savior, is praised with songs by the Angels in heaven, make us worthy to praise You also here on earth and to glorify You with a pure heart.
-- Resurrectional Stichera

A blessed Pascha to all!

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Going East, part I

I know this isn't really anything to do with teaching, but all of the rumors currently swirling about the possibility of a general indult for the 1962 missal have got me thinking a bit...

About six months ago, I started attending a Byzantine Catholic church full-time. One of the primary differences between the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the Novus Ordo Liturgy is that the priest faces the altar during the Consecration in the Eastern rite.

Having been brought up in the post-Vatican II Roman rite, I'd always heard that to have the priest facing away from the congregation was a bad thing (or if not precisely bad, then certainly undesirable). Now, it's one of the things I cherish in the liturgy.

In the back of my mind, I had a sense that the priest facing the people turned the liturgy into a bit of theater, with the community focusing on him and his gestures instead of on the Eucharist. When I went to a Roman rite Mass after having spent six months away from it, that sense intensified sharply, and I found the priest facing the congregation most distracting.

When the priest faces the altar, it creates a sense of community -- he is leading us, but the focus is on the Holy Mystery taking place in the room and the words of the prayers, reducing the "spectator sport" aspect.

Holy Week...

Or as we like to call it around my school, "Spring Break Redux."

It's really rather depressing when the principal at a Catholic school feels he must give multiple reminders via the public address system and through newsletter notes home that we are asked to keep this week holy, which at a minimum requires that we attend church on Easter Sunday, and a student in my class scoffs openly as though this is the most ridiculous thing he has ever heard. (Other students just sighed or got Expressions of Supreme Teenage Boredom at Adult Inanity on their faces.)

Holy Week? You mean the point of Holy Week is not to go to Florida and lie around on the beach?

Generally, I like and respect the majority of the parents who send their children to this school, but I believe that this attitude begins at home. Parents need to be told that they're derelict in the duties to which they swore when they baptized their babies when they don't act like the spiritual heads of their households, leading by action and example.

Oh well...it reiterates to me the importance of our young people's seeing good and faithful examples of Catholicism and Christian living in their daily lives. And when they asked what I was doing for Easter recess, I was happy to tell them that The Greatest Man in the World and I were staying home and going to church. Lots of church. Two services at his church and three at mine over the course of four days. If nothing else, it maybe plants a seed...

Friday, April 07, 2006

Long time, no post

Every spring, I feel like I don't accomplish very much. The kids don't want to be there; I don't want to be there, and we generally end up antagonizing each other past the limits of reasonable human endurance.

But. There are moments of greatness along the way. One class had a great discussion today about sexual morality (only tangentially related to Byron's poetry, but so substantive that I hated to bring it to any premature ending). The weather is gorgeous, bar the insanely high pollen counts. The research papers I'm grading are better, mostly, than last year's batch of papers. My dog still thinks I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. I got the funding to do summer study in Oxford. Life is pretty darn good.