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Views from the Choir Loft

Mueller’s Artistic Credo • “Same But Different”

Christopher Mueller · January 4, 2024

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.

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

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Justine Bayard Ward Method of Singing Last Updated: January 5, 2024

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About Christopher Mueller

Christopher Mueller is a conductor and composer who aims to write beautiful music out of gratitude to God, Author of all beauty.—(Read full biography).

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Corpus Christi Watershed

President’s Corner

    Luis Martínez Must Go!
    Sevilla Cathedral (entry dated 13 December 1564): The chapter orders Luis Martínez, a cathedral chaplain, to stay away from the choirbook-stand when the rest of the singers gather around it to sing polyphony—the reason being that “he throws the others out of tune.” [Excerpt from “The Life of Father Francisco Guerrero.”]
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    Urgent! • We Desperately Need Funds!
    A few days ago, the president of Corpus Christi Watershed posted this urgent appeal for funds. Please help us make sure we’re never forced to place our content behind a paywall. We feel it’s crucial that 100% of our content remains free to everyone. We’re a tiny 501(c)3 public charity, entirely dependent upon the generosity of small donors. We have no endowment and no major donors. We run no advertisements and have no savings. We beg you to consider donating $4.00 per month. Thank you!
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Booklet of Eucharistic Hymns” (16 pages)
    I was asked to create a booklet for my parish to use during our CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION on 22 June 2025. Would you be willing to look over the DRAFT BOOKLET (16 pages) I came up with? I tried to include a variety of hymns: some have a refrain; some are in major, others in minor; some are metered, others are plainsong; some are in Spanish, some are in Latin, but most are in English. Normally, we’d use the Brébeuf Hymnal—but we can’t risk having our congregation carry those heavy books all over the city to various churches.
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Quick Thoughts

    Pope Pius XII Hymnal?
    Have you ever heard of the Pope Pius XII Hymnal? It’s a real book, published in the United States in 1959. Here’s a sample page so you can verify with your own eyes it existed.
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    “Hybrid” Chant Notation?
    Over the years, many have tried to ‘simplify’ plainsong notation. The O’Fallon Propers attempted to simplify the notation—but ended up making matters worse. Dr. Karl Weinmann tried to do the same in the time of Pope Saint Pius X by replacing each porrectus. You can examine a specimen from his edition and see whether you agree he complicated matters. In particular, look at what he did with éxsules fílii Hévae.
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    Antiphons Don’t Match?
    A reader wants to know why the Entrance and Communion antiphons in certain publications deviate from what’s prescribed by the GRADUALE ROMANUM published after Vatican II. Click here to read our answer. The short answer is: the Adalbert Propers were never intended to be sung. They were intended for private Masses only (or Masses without music). The “Graduale Parvum,” published by the John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music in 2023, mostly uses the Adalbert Propers—but sometimes uses the GRADUALE text: e.g. Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June).
    —Corpus Christi Watershed

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He stood firm against nepotism, rebuking his predecessor Pope Pius IV to his face when he wanted to make a 13-year-old member of his family a cardinal and subsidize a nephew from the papal treasury.

— Re: Pope Saint Pius V (d. 1572)

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