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Views from the Choir Loft

Basic Steps To Improve Music At Your Parish — Part 5

Fr. David Friel · July 20, 2014

EING THE FIFTH contributor to this series is no easy task, as so many excellent ideas have been proffered by the bloggers who have preceded me. I do not envy the task of Jeff & Aurelio, whose thoughts are still to come tomorrow & the next day. For my part, today, I will add two small ideas to the many more important thoughts already shared.

IRST, an important early step toward promoting good music at your parish would be to promote silence in your liturgies. Silence is one of the most important sounds of the liturgy. Anyone who lives in a home with other people knows that silence is an asset that must be fostered if it is not to be forgotten. There is a beauty to silence that cannot be ignored; it possesses its own noble role, a sort of a priori legitimacy that deserves a fair hearing.

How might one bolster silence in a parish setting? Working with your pastor—always a delicate task—move towards lengthening the moments of silence already built into the Mass. For instance:

•  End your prelude a minute or two early, so that the Mass is immediately preceded by an atmosphere of silence.

•  Train your lectors & psalmists to pause between readings. A solid, 20-second pause sends a message to the congregation that invites them to enter into meditation on the Word of God.

•  Talk with your priest about observing the silent pauses called for during the Act of Penitence and after each Oremus.

•  Encourage your priest to sit down briefly after his homily, rather than bursting right into the Creed.

•  Once the tabernacle door closes after Communion, consider forgoing your usual organ instrumental in favor of complete silence.

There are other potential moments for silence, too, but inserting or expanding the silence in these places would go a long way toward reclaiming the sacredness of both silence and sound.

ECOND, encourage your priest to do his part. (Okay, this point has already been made within this series by my fellow bloggers, but I hope to bring something extra to the point as a priest, myself.) Even if you must continue for a time with the four-hymn sandwich (an undesirable, but sometimes inexorable state of affairs), simply having the priest chant the dialogues can still give the liturgy a distinctly sacral tone. A Mass in which all the dialogues are chanted and four hymns are sung would be a vast improvement over the status quo in many places. Once the dialogues are in place, it will be easier to start stripping away the hymns, because they will start to appear as extraneous as they are.

Is your priest scared to start? Does he feel ill-equipped? Chanting the dialogues is really very easy, and there are many resources available to help priests get started. Even starting out recto tono would bring a tremendous increase in beauty to the liturgy. If your priest needs assistance, direct him to one or more of the following:

Practice videos from CCW

Tutorial videos from CMAA

Scores from ICEL

Article from NPM’s Pastoral Musician

Discussion thread from the CMAA Forum

Cultivating silence and singing the dialogues are two simple, practical, and essential steps towards improving music at your parish.


7-part series:   “Basic Steps To Improve Music At Your Parish”

FIRST PART • Andrew Motyka

SECOND PART • Peter Kwasniewski

THIRD PART • Richard Clark

FOURTH PART • Veronica Brandt

FIFTH PART • Fr. David Friel

SIXTH PART • Jeff Ostrowski

SEVENTH PART • Aurelio Porfiri

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: ICEL Chants, Singing the Mass Last Updated: January 1, 2020

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Fr. David Friel

About Fr. David Friel

Ordained in 2011, Father Friel served as Parochial Vicar at St. Anselm Parish in Northeast Philly. He is currently a doctoral candidate in liturgical theology at The Catholic University of America.—(Read full biography).

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Quick Thoughts

Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski

Random Quote

Legitimate and necessary concern for current realities in the concrete lives of people cannot make us forget the true nature of the liturgical actions. It is clear that the Mass is not the time to “celebrate” human dignity or purely terrestrial claims or hopes. It is rather the sacrifice which renders Christ really present in the sacrament.

— Pope Saint John Paul II (20 March 1990)

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