But the utter banality experienced in some parishes is depressing. When the Church’s treasury of sacred music is discarded in favour of evangelical “praise and worship” accompanied by a loud electric guitar and the beat of the drum, I look around and see a quiet congregation.
I happen to be very fortunate that I can attend Mass on a regular basis, at a Benedictine monastery of the Solesmes Congregation where liturgy is taken very seriously and where the Ordinary Form Mass is celebrated exactly like Sacrosanctum Concilium intended. In Gregorian chant for the Propers and Ordinary, the rest in French plainchant of Gregorian inspiration. They also sing Lauds and Vespers in Latin, in Gregorian chant, every day.
However regarding the treasury of sacred music, while I agree with everyone that it is vitally important to preserve that treasury, the ability to perform it publicly requires skills that are not always within the reach of a small rural parish choir, or an inner-city parish impoverished for resources, to name a couple. The reality is that it will most likely find its preservation in religious communities.
I can speak with some authority on this as a member of a Gregorian schola for the past 14 years, who has had some training in it from the choirmasters of the abbey. Executing the Graduale Romanum in its entirety is not for the faint of heart and the weak of skill. Gregorian chant that is badly mangled sounds just awful. Monks practice it full time! They sing it every single day and even then, mistakes, sometimes blatant ones, are not unheard of. In addition one also has to master the ability to
read Latin fairly quickly and smoothly, without hesitation. That’s not so difficult for Francophones or any master of the Latin-based languages, but when I hear Anglophones who can’t roll their R’s try to sing Gregorian chant, it grates on me. Maybe other Anglophones don’t notice it but this Francophone certainly does…
Our schola sings once a month and we require at least two rehearsals prior to Mass to adequately master the chants. Some chants we have had come back on a regular basis and require less rehearsal now, especially the Ordinary, but new chants take a lot of prep. Some chants, such as offertories and graduals, are simply beyond the reach of non-professional choirs. There is the Graduale Simplex, where the chants resemble more the psalmody of the Divine Office, but even that is not obvious. Most amateur choirs don’t know how to properly psalmody on the Gregorian modes (I do, I teach it). There simply isn’t the concentration of talent required in most parishes now. Our schola sings in a small city; the others that I know sing in larger cities; we have managed to pull together a dozen and a half or so men, of which about 15 show up for any given Mass, who are enthusiastic enough about it to want to learn and invest themselves in it. At least one previously lived in a religious community, and several of us are Benedictine and Cistercian oblates with close ties to our community and its choirmaster.
The monks have many of the same issues: many chants from the Sanctoral and Temporal come back only once a year. For that reason, the eve of most solemnities or feasts with these chants, the monks outside the Mass and the Divine Office to rehearse them. They have extensive rehearsals at least once a week, more in liturgically complex seasons. It would be almost impossible to find someone in public to do that on a weekly basis unless they are religious and tied to a community.
It’s also important to note that some forms of the Vetus Ordo Mass allowed singing of popular hymns at otherwise recited Masses, before and after the “official” start of the Mass (and I believe, though I may be wrong, there was some latitude for the Offertory). There is nothing to suggest that this would not also be the case if the Vetus Ordo was still the only form of the Mass, and that it wouldn’t be the
predominant way Mass was celebrated in modern parishes, with the same situation existing regarding Gregorian chant: available from more experienced choirs, on an occasional basis in parishes with a visiting choir from time to time, or on a more regular basis in religious communities. The demographics of belief in God and Mass attendance would likely be no better today regardless of the form of the Mass; secular pressures would still be there. Therefore the ability to pull together the resources needed to execute the sacred treasury of music everywhere and at all times would be just as compromised as today.
As for sacred polyphony, take what I said above and multiply by 10. At my parish I have only heard good choirs doing polyphony on a very sporadic basis; again a visiting professional choir.
It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the reality. Just because some FSSP parishes manage to pull off chant on a regular basis, because it’s their mission to preserve the old Mass, does not mean that other than the simplest chants would find widespread use in parishes should the EF suddenly become the norm.
