T HAS BEEN an exceptionally busy semester of teaching for me. I took on a few extra music history classes while a colleague is on maternity leave. It brings me such joy to teach this subject, especially because these classes have mostly dealt with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music, and most of my students have had very little exposure to such things. There’s nothing quite like introducing Monteverdi’s music to a bunch of college freshmen who have never heard it before.
It also means that my writing here, never very frequent in any case, has slowed to a trickle while I tend to my teaching duties. There is so much I would like to write about, and I haven’t found the time. Today, however, I would like to at least draw our readers’ attention to a couple of recent podcasts I have appeared on.
The first is a conversation I had with Mark Emerson Donnelly. There is a kind of interesting story about how I met Mark. I was in Vancouver, BC one summer about a decade ago to teach at a summer course put on by the Lute Society of America. Since we had arrived on the weekend, I was there on a Sunday, and I, naturally, made my way to the local FSSP apostolate to hear Mass. During the Mass, I sang along on the congregational ordinary well enough that someone near me insisted on introducing me to the choirmaster, who happened to be Mark. We instantly hit it off, and I even ended up attending their choir rehearsal that week, while he and his family came to a guitar recital that I gave at the workshop. We’ve been in touch off and on in the years since. He’s a very good and enthusiastic teacher of Gregorian chant in the Solesmes style, and he’s done a lot of work with the monks of Clear Creek and is also affiliated with the ongoing Laus in Ecclesia series of textbooks. He has recently started a Youtube series about chant, which you can find here. If you are interested in some practical tips about incorporating that style of singing into your parish choir, you might enjoy his content. I had a conversation with Mark recently on his channel, and he is releasing the conversation in multiple parts. Parts 1 and 2 are already up.
The other podcast I was on recently is Dr. Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka’s Square Notes. I’m sure our listeners will be familiar with this show, now in its sixth season. The show has featured some really interesting interviews; perhaps my favorite is the episode about Mary Berry from last season. I’ve actually been on the show five times now. My most recent appearance is here. The topic is how one might integrate the scholarly study of chant with the spiritual and liturgical life of a Church musician. One thing I discuss there is why one ought to learn as much as one can about how the editions we sing from come about. This is also leading up to a class I’m teaching this summer at the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music. Perhaps you sing from the Vatican Edition, or from the Liber, or from the Graduale Triplex or the Graduale Novum. It’s always worthwhile learning more about how those things came to be and why they differ from each other.
After this podcast came out, I got some interesting pushback from a student for saying, in the course of this conversation, that one really ought to sing the propers in a schola every week in order to be able to study chant well as a scholarly subject. That seems like a topic for another post, when I have more time to think about it, but I have a few initial thoughts. The issue is somewhat related to the distinction of emic versus etic perspectives in anthropology and related fields. My student’s is a good one, because, as he said, presumably I as a music theory teacher don’t feel that I need to be able to play a Beethoven concerto in order to teach about it at school. This has led me to ask myself, why do I feel differently about chant? Can I clarify my thinking?
It goes without saying thaat someone ought to be able to lecture or teach or write about chant, but isn’t there something true about the idea that one has to actually live with and in the liturgy in order to be able to do an excellent job teaching about the chant or describing it? Is it perhaps, that chant is a sacramental? That much of what makes it special and gives it its particular power is not able to be abstracted and removed from its proper context in the prayer life of the singer, at least not without depriving it of something essential?
