Musicianship at Mass

Building a Musical Foundation on Rock

Over the summer I had the fortunate opportunity to work on an ongoing research project concerning sacred and liturgical music and the Roman Rite of the Mass under the mentorship of Father Michael Joncas, professor of Catholic Studies and Theology at the University of Saint Thomas. The summer afforded me the chance to look at Church documents and the Mass and music in a way I could not in the classroom yet had wanted to explore for a long time.

For the first phase of my research, I read numerous documents from Pope Pius X’s Tra le Sollecitudini through Sing to the Lord! Music in Divine Worship written by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2007. I quickly realized sacred music and liturgy do not have the clear cut explanations I thought they might. In fact, I just became more and more confused as the research progressed. I began a second phase of the research which involved “participant observation”, that is, attending a Mass while observing reactions from the congregation, music style and performance, attention to rubrics, and other elements of the experience of Mass at any given parish.

These observations are not immune to my own personal reactions. In fact, my reactions are key. I was raised in a fairly “traditional” parish; many of the more “progressive” parishes stretched my sensibilities and made me ask serious questions about my own faith and prayer life, areas of critical importance when planning a career as a Church musician. Through all the subjective and varied opinions, I had to take a step back and search for the objective, some grounded truth on which I could be as one “who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock [which] could not [be shaken]…because it had been well built” (Lk 6: 48). Music at Mass is not just a service to the Mass. It is meant to become the liturgy itself. Hymns are secondary. The true music at Mass are elements like a chanted Eucharistic Prayer, the Great Amen, or a sung Responsorial Psalm. If music is liturgy, then how is musical artistry appropriately used?

Benedict XVI, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote Spirit of the Liturgy in 1999. As a theologian from the Second Vatican Council, as one deeply devoted to music and liturgy, and as one elected to the Apostolic See of Saint Peter, I figured he would be a good place to start. He writes in his chapter, “Music and the Liturgy” that “Artistic freedom increasingly asserts its rights, even in the liturgy. … It is clear that these opportunities for artistic creativity and the adoption of secular tunes brought danger with them. Music was no longer developing out of prayer, but, with the new demand for artistic autonomy, was now heading away from the liturgy; it was becoming an end in itself…[and] alienating the liturgy from its true nature” (145-146). It is prudent to note, he was talking about the “Great Tradition” of Catholic music, that of the Middle Ages!

In our transitions as a culture from one age to the next, we find trends in the any era but especially the modern one, to see “music as pure subjectivity, music as the expression of mere will” (155). The Catholic musician must ground himself in the doctrine and devotions of the Church, using it as the inexhaustible source for further artistry and expressions of faith. Benedict reminds musicians that “Humble submission to what goes before us releases authentic freedom” (156) in the life of service to the Church.

As a musician, it is easy to fall into the “musician’s ego”, to worry about each last detail and be so consumed by the music you forget about the Mass and Who you glorify in the work. As Catholics, musicians need special devotion away from making music. Daily Mass and reception of Holy Communion, Eucharistic Adoration, devotion to the Blessed Mother, and contemplative silence are just a few concrete ways to build a steady relationship with the Divine. Many of the problems in maintaining a sense of orthodoxy to the Church and making the Mass accessible to all is a loss of the foundational devotion that has fed the Church for centuries. My purpose here is not to condemn or lift up one musical style over another. All genres must be analyzed with an orthodox heart and conscience.

The music before the Second Vatican Council was not broken; it worked and fed thousands of saints on the way to holiness! The test of time proves what works and what does not. Contemporary musicians ought to draw on the success of the Catholic Church’s store of musical treasures and once the house has been built on rock, then move forward to develop the Church in the new millennium, in the call of Pope John Paul II, “The New Evangelization”!

Trust Mother Church in all things. She has never steered a saint wrong yet!

This article was written for The Signature, the student-run newsletter of the Department of Catholic Studies at the University of Saint Thomas, Saint Paul, Minnesota.