FEW WEEKS AGO, Jeff Ostrowski, the intrepid and tireless leader of Corpus Christi Watershed, published a lengthy article detailing what he called his “ARTISTIC CREDO.” It’s a curious piece, in two broad sections: the first section champions the use of musical contrasts within the liturgy, offering a dozen recorded examples from recent Masses Jeff had conducted, while the second section strongly asserts the need for choir directors to stay grounded, using numerous quotations from Justine Ward as counter-examples of an ungrounded choir director. Let’s look a little at each of these sections.
1. On Musical Diversity
Dare I Say This? • I agree with Jeff, that a variety of musical approaches within a single Mass is important for engaging the listening ears (and singing voices) of the congregation. He mentions a period of time in which he directed a choir that sang nothing but the Gregorian propers and a Gregorian Ordinary. I have attended Masses at a convent where this was the practice. In that relatively intimate and austere environment, such an approach seemed fitting. But for Masses with a variegated congregation of people—old and young; married with infants, teenagers, or grown children; or those unmarried; or those with various physical or mental infirmities—such an approach might seem (dare I say?) boring.
Lacking Something? • In our own day, when music consists of melody plus harmony, then to have melody without harmony is to offer something that feels incomplete. Without the ongoing relationship between a developing melody and its changing harmonies, without that musical conversation of a principal thought (the melody) and the context it’s situated in (the harmony), we’re left with a melody alone, which is a little like a person sitting by himself in a room, engaging in a soliloquy with no one listening.
Don’t Misunderstand • Now don’t get me wrong: chant is beautiful, and all sorts of unaccompanied melodies can be moving, or gorgeous, or haunting. The church reminds us time and again that Gregorian chant—being the principal musical expression of the Roman Rite—is to be used liberally, having “pride of place” over other musical genres in our worship. However, a diet of nothing but that would quickly become tiresome. This was perhaps one of the things Father Valentine Young, OFM, had in mind in his gentle remonstrances to Jeff.
Where We’ve Been • A quick survey of Western music begins with unaccompanied single-line chant (a corpus of melodies whose composition and curation required at least a thousand years), then gradually expands to the multiple melodies of counterpoint and polyphony (this development required the next five-to-six hundred years), then evolves into something different, departing from the “every line is equal” polyphonic style and instead embracing the “melody and its accompanying harmony” approach so prevalent in the last 350 years or so. HOMO MODERNUS (“modern man”) has been brought up with the expectation that melody and harmony belong together.
My Approach • The music I select for my parish—where Mass is reverently celebrated within a NOVUS ORDO liturgy—includes: (a) traditional congregational hymns; (b) chanted-with-accompaniment Mass Ordinaries in Latin; (c) unaccompanied choral motets—mostly Latin, but some English as well—for the choir, and (d) unaccompanied chant (primarily in Father Weber’s English-language adaptations). I hope it achieves a balanced approach to the musical variety available in a liturgical setting.
2. On Justine Ward + Remaining Grounded
Greatest Tenor I Knew • I spent over twenty years living and working in New York City and the larger NYC diaspora, and during that time I had the immense good fortune of working with many spectacularly talented and accomplished musicians. One of them was a wonderful tenor, with the most beautiful lyrical tone I’ve heard, who phrased polyphonic lines with an ease and beauty that few will ever match.1 We talked on and off over the years about vocal technique, and he said this:
“Every voice teacher has an approach, a method, that they want you to learn. When you go into a lesson, you have to sing their way. But each voice teacher has a different method, a different vocal or technical focus, a different preferred sound or tone quality. As you study with different teachers—in high school, college, grad school, across private lessons and coachings—you do what the teachers demand of you when you’re working with them. But when you’re singing by yourself, you pick and choose which technical or sonic approaches work best for you, or best match your idea of good singing. You choose the best from what you’ve learned from each teacher. In the end, every singer becomes his own voice teacher, assembling a composite technique from all the different methods he has learned and practiced over the years.”
Perhaps this is obvious to some or many of you. To me, this sounds like a basic philosophy not just of singing, but of life in general: take what’s most valuable from all your various circumstances; use all the good stuff to your advantage. It’s redolent of St. Paul: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:8)
Inappropriate Infatuation • I mention this because Jeff’s seeming obsession over JUSTINE BAYARD WARD seems misplaced. Justine Ward was an important person in the history of Gregorian chant pedagogy, developing a method for teaching chant in Catholic schools. She published graded books of chant, so that kids learned simple chants in the early years, and progressed to longer, more difficult, more modally and rhythmically challenging chants as they got older and advanced in their other studies. She had a number of interesting pedagogical approaches, including the use of the body to illustrate the ascending pitches of the solfege scale, the use of numerals to assist in reading and hearing modes, various rhythmic and mensural signs, and so forth.
Jeff’s Mistaken Approach • So with Justine Ward and her method, do what my friend says about vocal technique: pick the elements that make sense to you, and use them when you teach children (or adults). Omit or ignore whatever doesn’t seem useful. So Justine Ward said a bunch of intemperate things about one of the monks at Solesmes? A monk who was seminal in the rediscovery / re-presentation of Gregorian chant? OK, well, don’t use those quotations in your classroom. Just use the pieces of her method that you find workable. Her intemperance does not invalidate her pedagogical work. We humans are a complicated lot. How many great artists are not great people—whether it was Weelkes drunkently urinating from the choir loft into the nave, or Miles Davis and his habitual mistreatment of women? Should we then avoid their music because they were imperfect people? It’s in fact a difficult question. But Jeff doesn’t get into that question at all. He simply says that because Justine Ward was ungrounded, she said some nasty things about important people. And so…what exactly? Do we ignore her method? Do we “cancel” her? Or do we just choose the best from amongst the mixed bag she has bequeathed us?
Staying Grounded • I agree with Jeff’s assessment that it’s important to stay grounded. His definition of “staying grounded” is the primacy of lived experience over academic theorizing, or what one might call the democratization of musical execution, by which I mean that—to the degree it’s possible—every person has some voice in the conversation of how and what music is done. Of course the choirmaster chooses music directly, and with his pastor (and the documents of the Church) has a shared vision of what that music should be; the singers may also offer their opinions on what they like and dislike, so that within this vision of liturgical music, the choir may develop some “old favorites” over time, and the tessitura of chant (and even much polyphony) may be placed in an “as-comfortable-as-possible” range for the singers at hand. (The difference between amateur and professional singers must also be taken into account, particularly in terms of range, dynamics, and endurance.)
Congregational Input? • Members of the congregation, too, may express their delight or disagreement with any given piece of music. To the degree their comments are in line with the already-established approach to liturgical music, and are delivered in a spirit of charity, then they too have a role, perhaps modest, in the shaping of a parish music program. In other words, while you can’t satisfy everyone, and you shouldn’t attempt it, yet still the comments of everyone are important to the balance of the program overall.
Deacon Schaefer Weighs In • This might be characterized as the distinction between an intellectual and a practitioner, and one excellent example of this came at the 2012 CMAA Colloquium—in fact the very occasion where I met Jeff Ostrowski, in the cab-ride from the airport! One of the workshops I attended throughout the week was Ed Schaefer’s deep-dive into the GRADUALE TRIPLEX, comparing the two sets of old neums (from the 11th and 12th centuries) with the Solesmes 4-line-staff approach (19th and 20th centuries), and teasing out the minute differences in interpretation (and sometimes considerable variations) contained within the multiple notations. At some point during the proceedings, I asked Ed, himself quite an intellectual: “Can we ever know the most correct way to sing a particular chant?” He turned to me, and after a moment had passed, responded:
“The most correct way to sing a chant is that those particular singers in that particular room at that particular time, singing under that particular conductor, all have a unified musical approach to what they’re doing.”
In other words, he didn’t say that you must execute the music with perfect fealty to [x] interpretive key; instead, the conductor guides the singers to a unified approach, which may include certain elements while omitting others. A sense of group musicality is the most important factor to beautiful chant singing; Ed’s intellectual understanding shapes but also gives way to the actual practice of singing a chant with other people.
3. Conclusions
In the main, then, I agree with Jeff, about both
M (A) musical diversity within the liturgy (within the constraints of fittingness and appropriateness that the Church has prescribed), and
M (B) the necessity of choir conductors remaining grounded (or to borrow Pope Francis’ colorful analogy, that the conductor “smell like the sheep” whom he is conducting).
1 After the passage of many years, this tenor told me that he actually found polyphony boring, and that he’d rather sing big operatic arias—but whatever his attitude toward polyphony, it didn’t stop him from singing phrase after arresting phrase whenever we worked together.
