May 2024 Print

Reflections and Considerations of a Vocal Pilgrim

Andrew Childs

The Church requires participation in the Liturgy, either by assisting at Mass, a focused but passive participation, actively as a schola member or altar server, or ultimately, as a consecrated soul able to celebrate the Holy Sacrifice. Singing Gregorian chant allows every member of a congregation to bridge the gap not only between passive and active participation, but also that which exists between heaven and earth. Miraculous stories may exist, but angels do not ordinarily serve Mass; every one of them, however, sings the Sanctus.

What follows will not provide a detailed technical consideration of Gregorian chant theory, practice, or style, and for this I offer a threefold excuse. First, a serious technical examination of chant would fill the entire present volume many times over. Second, I leave this to more competent scholars, because to propose an authoritative opinion on chant invites a singular sort of scrutiny and ire. Chant occupies an area of particular specialty, and those intellectually and academically invested in it develop a fiercely protective posture, especially as it relates to their specific area of expertise (want to weigh in on the questionable superiority of chant informed by the diastematic shorthand of the Sankt Galen school? Engage in a chironomy duel? Angels fear to tread…) Last, I hope by focusing on more personal, historical, and practical aspects to inspire a greater affection for and more confident willingness to participate in the Liturgy by singing chant.

Reflections

My formal introduction to chant apart from the perfunctory gloss given in college music history class happened at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota during my conversion in the late 1990s. Though I had begun something like a career as a professional performer (in the pre-YoubiquitousTube days, so don’t bother…) I had never sung chant, and never listened to it with any seriousness. As a pre-convert becoming intimately and functionally familiar with the standard song, concert, and operatic repertoire, chant seemed to me little more than an academic religious artifact, and seriously lacking as music: how could monophonic monastic murmuring possibly compete with Monteverdi, Mozart, and Mahler? No ordinary exposure would convert me to chant, either hearing a parish schola or listening to recordings (and recall these were the heady days of “Chant: The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos,” the 1994 double-platinum album selling itself as an “antidote to the stresses of modern life.” Who living a modern life could have guessed? And who could forget that cover art? Nobody knew how that monk cloned himself, or why all of him were floating among the clouds, but it was a memorable visual). As for an extraordinary exposure, hearing the Divine Office chanted in choir by the entire seminary, a chapel full of consecrated and those aspiring to be consecrated souls singing as a single voice served the purpose. It was the first truly spiritual musical experience I had ever had, and one of overwhelming impact. Monastic murmuring indeed.

About those consecrated voices. When I began to sing chant, I found it easy enough technically and simple enough musically. Please don’t misunderstand: the “simplicity” of a single (monophonic) line of chant does not make it simplistic or underdeveloped, and as I’ll discuss below, though it may be easy to sing technically, it can present tremendous challenges, as anyone who has lost control of a Mode 7 doozy can attest. If the technical demands of singing a professional art song recital compare to running a sub-40-minute 10k and an operatic role a sub-three-hour marathon, then chant is a brisk walk, though potentially a very long and unexpected one.¹ A competent musician can master reading chant in days not weeks, and reading neumes rather than modern notation is comparable to reading cursive script as opposed to printing: it looks different, but the notes represent sounds in relation to each other the same way in both four- and five-line staff notation (both indicate identical distances between lines and spaces), and the particular character of the numbered modes indicated at the beginning of the chant notwithstanding, the singer’s job remains to read intervals correctly and in time in both systems. The five lines in the modern staff simply accommodate music of extended range, and chant written in five-line staves does exist. The “I only read ancient notation” guy is trying to impress you: the standardized chant notation of Solesmes (more below) is both more intuitive and rhythmically more accurate and nuanced than modern notation, certainly when it comes to word stress and melodic shape, but modern notation is both simpler and easier to read, even though it may present more complicated music.

So why does mastery of singing chant prove so elusive? Leaving aside the most fundamental vocal experiences (though these can prove incredibly meaningful musically and socially) solo-caliber singers must have a strong technical, linguistic, and stylistic foundation to deliver believable performances of concert repertoire. Though the acoustics of the shower can foster delusions of competence, most bathroom belters would fail to finish a performance of a favorite aria on a stage, at the actual written pitch, over a full orchestra. The classical vocal athletes you pay money to hear—professional singers—must produce sound technically correctly, or damage can result. And we don’t invite that sound to the schola. Singers of chant sing technically differently—low and slow vs. full-throttle—whether they understand the mechanical nuances of vocal production or not, and the sound occupies an ethereal sort of no-man’s-land between style and technique. Achieving perfection in singing chant is an asymptotic function. I have never worked harder at working less hard at a thing more difficult to master after more time spent in the pursuit of its mastery, and here I will admit a sort of defeat: having tried continuously for a quarter century to sing chant better—and having heard chant sung by lay and religious—I have become increasingly convinced that God reserves true mastery of chant to those souls and voices consecrated to Him. My stalwart schola will never sing like a schola of priests, or a monastery filled with religious monks or nuns, or a seminary full of men in various stages of religious commitment; without that commitment and the accompanying grace of state, we occupy a different musical realm, at once frustrated at our shortcomings, and in wonder at the sound a group of consecrated voices can make.

A Thing Apart

This makes sense. As the sung prayer of the Church, chant is a holy thing, whether in the Divine Office—the prayer of the consecrated—or in the liturgy. Those unfamiliar with chant as functional music—or perhaps better said, those who view chant from a purely academic perspective—will mistake the sonic character as specific to a time or place. This misses a crucial aspect. Though certainly possessing some undeniable historical characteristics, chant does not exist as a product of a particular time, but rather outside of time. It is distinct musically, but as music, unique functionally; though chant can certainly edify and even entertain, its purpose defines it. From the first instance of its implementation as the sung prayer of the Church, God set chant apart not only as musical adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication, but as a tool for the reconciliation of everything in the universe: the new and old dispensation, the Classical and Christian world; past, present and future; heaven and earth.

The Divine Office

The world may well have continued to spin on its axis during history’s temporal parade of sin in large part due to the unceasing prayerful utterances of religious communities chanting the Divine Office. More than any other human activity, it serves as an anchoring force, ordering—not ordered by—time. Based on King David’s Seven Hours of Prayer—and proscribing within each weekly cycle the singing of all 150 Psalms—the Divine Office marks the hours of the day and days of the week: Matins at midnight, Lauds at 3:00am, Prime (the first hour of daylight) at 6:00am, Terce at 9:00am, Sext at noon, None at 3:00pm, Vespers at 6:00pm, and Compline at 9:00pm. Our Lord did not come to abolish but rather fulfill the old law, and the Church builds Her sung prayer life on the foundation of the Old Testament Psalms. The ordering of the hours reflects that of the Classical world, where both the Greeks and Romans habitually divided the day and night into 3-hour segments.

Throughout the day, the chant reflects not only the continuous prayerful petition of souls but also the particular character of the hour. Matins, though cloaked in the darkness of the night, looks towards the east and the dawn, nature’s daily resurrection, figure both of Our Lord’s victory over death and our invitation to die to sin and be reborn in Grace. Lauds welcomes this dawn and faces the day refreshed. At Prime, preparation for the day’s battle begins in earnest: fully awake, and fully aware not only of our own sinfulness but of the potential peril of the day ahead, we sing with courage for preservation from all that may hurt us. In Acts 2:15, we read that the Holy Ghost descended at the third hour, and the Church fills the hour of Terce with contemplation of Pentecost and invocation of the Holy Ghost. At noon, the hour of Sext, we see before us Christ crucified, and contemplate the brutal reality of God’s required satisfaction for sin. We meditate on Calvary and the slaughter of the paschal Lamb at the ninth hour, Nones. At Vespers, the Church has us focus on thanksgiving and the petition for renewed courage. Compline, the “ideal evening prayer for the religious soul,” refixes our gaze on God, and reassures us of the consolations of His protection.

Hour after hour, day after day, year after year the prayer of the Office resounded throughout the world not as a public display of cultural grandeur, but as the ominous and beautiful rumble of a distant thunder, or the sound of the surf continually breaking on the shore. How many voices sang these chants? How few sing them now? The Church of our times has neglected Her prayer and silenced Her consecrated voices to a heart-breaking extent, but some still sing on. The thunder has become a whisper, but just as a single candle shines brighter in the deepest darkness, these prayers sung continuously by the precious few who have remained faithful to their Office sound out more clearly, one of the best of deeds in a naughty world. And God hears.

The Chants of the Mass

I had intended after my conversion to assist at Mass as discreetly as possible, which would include having no involvement with music-making. My thinking: I had been paid to sing for just about every denomination imaginable—including for the Jewish High Holy Days at a Reform Synagogue—and wanted to avoid having Mass feel anything like work. I also didn’t want to be “That Guy,” the Opera Singer who fills the sanctuary with the bleating of goats and the bellowing of heifers. You don’t have to sing that way. If you can sing loud but not soft, you have technical issues, but That Guy, his vocal honor evidently at stake, bellows away. Nobody likes this, and it seemed safer to me just to listen. My plan to remain incognito went poorly. I had been attending Mass in Ridgefield, Connecticut for only a few weeks when a seminarian who had heard one of my talks in Winona recognized me and made an offer to sing in the schola that I couldn’t refuse. I bought a Liber Usualis.² After tripping over a salicus or two, and wrestling with the estimable torculus under episema, there was I, Schola Guy trying not to be That Guy. A month later, the former seminarian was gone, and there was I, Schola Director Guy. That was 1998.

The chants of the Mass form an entire musical universe, enclosed in the Liber which contains chants for the Common (one of eighteen remaining Kyriale settings) and Proper prayers for all Sundays and almost every named Feast. There are planets and stars, suns and moons, searing heat and frigid cold, perpetual motion, and infinite calm. It dazzles with kaleidoscopic color, and yet there exists a nearly boundless depth in its infinite simplicity that is difficult to describe other than to say that in this boundless simplicity, chant provides a musical reflection of God Himself. Music of the standard performance repertoire seeks out the listener, some of it in a predatory manner: it comes after you, impossible to resist or ignore. This can be incredibly exciting—addictive, really—but for a listener looking for that sort of experience, chant may seem static and aloof. Chant beckons, slowly, quietly: you must go to it. The silence in which God dwells is as much peace of soul as it is a lack of sound, and music can help to create an inner silence in which God can abide. If the greatest music has the power to restore natural order within us, chant fosters in us supernatural order as well. An evening in a concert hall or opera house can seem like a sporting event—exhilarating, full volume, and full contact. Chant on the other hand provides the text of the prayers with organic, conversational melodic contours, sometimes leading, sometimes following, but always intimately synchronized. It would be a mistake in my opinion to see the fact that certain musical figures or even entire chants recur as an indication of a formulaic nature. This repetition mimics the rhythm and cycling of nature rather than representing an exercise in thoughtless borrowing,³ and creates an overarching cohesion as seasons and events are subtly, subconsciously connected in delightful and often unexpected ways, not mechanistically with recognizable leitmotifs, but rather with the assurance of consoling familiarity.

Like many great cultural traditions, chant originally relied on oral transmission. Though secular scholars bristle, the legend rightly persists that Pope St. Gregory the Great (r. 590-604) received some number of the chants that bear his name directly from the Holy Ghost, depicted as a dove singing into his ear. Gregory then sang these chants to a scribe, who notated them. Somehow. The very earliest written notation indicates something like melodic shape and word stress, but not recognizable notes. Singers learned and passed these on by rote. Clearly, chant had existed from the very beginnings of the Church. Our Lord and the Disciples sang a hymn before going to the Mount of Olives on Holy Thursday, and we could more accurately say that Gregory the Great codified preexisting chant rather than invented an entire system.⁴ The notational system in use now developed over hundreds of years, not taking final shape until the monks of Solesmes captured and codified it in the late nineteenth century, and St. Pius X canonized it in the early twentieth: we sing chant from the Liber in a modern notation.

Liber Usualis

Though the “Usual Book” immediately impresses for all it contains, what it doesn’t contain—all that the Church has chosen to omit of the two millennia-long development of chant—nearly defies description. As any gardener will attest, pruning may seem to inflict supreme violence on otherwise innocent and healthy plants, yet without it, unchecked growth can become chaotic and unhealthy. Responsible cultivation necessarily involves sacrifice of some healthy part for the ultimate good of the whole. The Church—One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic—spread Herself across the world in the early centuries slowly and with great effort, and only the Divine assistance of the Holy Ghost could ensure any measure of universal cohesion, perhaps the most miraculous of Her marks given the inability of prideful men to agree on anything. The Mass—with no undue respect given either to the predictably iconoclastic secular historian ninny or the progressive primitivist modern churchman of unhappy recent memory—received an extra measure of protection for obvious reasons, but supporting liturgical elements developed relatively independently, and along widely and wonderfully varied lines of local custom. Several distinct and marvelous chant dialects existed for centuries: Roman, Byzantine in the East, Celtic in Ireland, Beneventan in southern Italy, Ambrosian in Milan; most importantly Gallican in France, and most fantastically Mozarabic in Spain.⁵ Multiple fully-developed chant dialects no longer exist, and the Church suppressed them, an incalculable cultural loss, yet the pruning proved necessary and for the best: She sacrificed diversity—modern man’s god of gods—for the sake of unity.

What we sing now represents primarily a combination of Roman and Gallican chant, but though most of the musical ingredients come from Italy, chant ultimately comes out of a French kitchen. Here, another miracle: the concept of capturing with any degree of accuracy fifteen centuries of chant from multiple countries and dialects with a single notational system seems frankly impossible, and yet the Liber exists, the single greatest cultural homogenization project in the history of the world. Only the French. Nationalist sensibilities—temperamental, linguistic, aesthetic—color art in wondrous ways (only the Italians could have invented opera…). I speak generally here, but a relative lack of stress marks the French language: compared to English, or more dramatically Italian, which depends on very noticeable arsis and thesis, French is peacefully non-ictic. The chant in the Liber purposefully, necessarily lacks the subtle flavors or nuances of the original sources, forced into a single notational system made coherent by a distinctly French rhythmic sensibility. A trivial analogy perhaps, but though a native speaker will note that the “accent” of the answering machine lacks a certain authenticity, everyone understands. If Liber chant sincerely sung by a group of unconsecrated souls sounds a little bland, so be it. The authentic chant lies beneath the surface, and not far beneath, waiting there for discovery and animation by souls and voices yearning to think, pray, and sing with the Church.

So, after all that, what to do? Take up your Liber, take up your Divine Office, take your hymnal out of the pew, and chant. You can’t sing Puccini, fine: you can chant the Propers. You can sing Puccini? Don’t. Relax, chant the prayers of the Divine Office, chant the prayers of your Mass. Calmly, like the breaking of a gentle surf. And God will hear.

Endnotes

¹ A singer feeling strain singing chant needs to relax. Immediately. Singing with tension is like driving with the parking brake engaged: possible, but uncomfortable at any “speed,” and increasingly uncomfortable at higher intensity and longer duration. Careers are shortened by tension, and pitch suffers mightily.

² The Liber Usualis can be purchased online through Angelus Press. The specific edition carried is: Liber Usualis: Missae et 0fficii pro dominicis et festis cum cantu gregoriano (Tournai, Belgium: Desclee & Co., 1961).

³ On the contrary, the borrowing proves very thoughtful indeed: that the Requiem and Nuptial Masses share a common Gradual chant is both profound and witty.

⁴ Add to the marvels of Holy Thursday—where Our Lord established the priesthood and bestowed the Eucharist—the institution of the Divine Office.

⁵ See page 760 in your Liber for the faintest echo of Mozarabic chant, not quite hiding, but certainly presented with no fanfare as an ad libitum. You find a recipe there, but no indication of the local spices or their quantities: all of the unwritten ornamentation and subtle variation in duration and inflection are lost.