Here are a few excerpts from
The Musical Prelude to Vatican II: Plainsong, Participation, and Pius X by Walter W. Whitehouse, concerning the condition of church music in the United States in the 1800s. Footnotes omitted, emphasis added. The book (actually a doctoral dissertation) is extremely interesting in toto for people who are interested in documentary accounts of the state and development of liturgical music “on the ground”:
There was cultivated music in certain places from very early on (John Adams writing to his wife in 1774 that “the assembly chanted most sweetly and exquisitely,” and later in his diary that “the Scenery and Musick is so callculated [sic] to take in Mankind that I wonder the Reformation ever succeeded.”), but also reports, such as from Bishop Fenwick of Boston in the 1830s, claiming that there was
no singing at all in two-thirds of American Catholic congregations, who “know as much about music of any kind as they do about Greek.”
. . .
The use of European concerted music in church served in some measure to give a sense of social elevation and pride for immigrants, as well to provide literally a “concert hall” for those who otherwise had no means or opportunity
to hear “great music”; it quickly became an established feature of US Catholic worship in the larger urban centers. Archbishop John Glennon of St. Louis would later quip, “On big occasions, the choir was buoyed up and sustained by a great orchestra.
Everybody came to the Mass – Turks, Jews, Protestants, and even some Catholics, and all went away from the performance delighted.”
. . .
Hyde among others agrees that both choirs and people in late nineteenth-century America seem to have a distaste for Gregorian chant:
They say this is all new to them. They ask, how are they to know the [Propers]? And some of them add that, anyhow, those [Propers] are set only in the Gregorian Chant, which is a strange language to them – and even if they could sing the chant they would not do it, as the people in the pews do not like it! . . . The people in the choir sing for the people in the pews, and this is why** they cannot, and would not, anyway, sing the Gregorian music**. . . .[This] is not a mere fancy of mine, but an actual fact. Gregorian Chant is going out of our choirs, and very fast. And why? Because the young singers of our choirs, who cannot sing it because they do not know it, are permitted to banish it.
Another writer in 1901 confirms this picture: “One often hear expressions of regret from the clergy that they never hear the Proper of the Mass from one year’s end to another, because their choirs cannot or will not make a proper study of the plain chant.” Archbishop Glennon again recalled, “Such composers as Gounod, Haydn, Cherubini and Giorza – reigned supreme. The music of the Mass was something wonderful and wonderfully rendered”:
If one should have said at that time, “How would it be to have some Gregorian music?”, the answer would have been, “Why that is all right, I suppose, for those who do not know any better – for monks and nuns that sing in choir, but for us people of intelligence – Catholics – why, we must please the people and we have to resort to these grand illustrations of music.”
. . .
A common reason given for the non-reception of chant, its distinct unpopularity both during this period and following the motu proprio, is the “vitiated” taste of the general public: “The stream [of chant tradition] has long been choked,” says Stockley, and quotes an English priest to the effect that “the taste of our Catholics in general for Church music is too vitiated, or perhaps rather totally corrupted by opera music and fiddling jigs, ever to relish serious tones.”
Another oft-cited reason for the unpopularity of chant recalls its poor performance in churches: “Why,” asks Stockley, “is Gregorian chant often so horribly sung, higgledy-piggledy, with no rhythm, even free, and with such braying noise, and such barbarous accompaniments?”
!!! I find all this frustrating and confusing, and I can understand why there are so few musicians willing to take a position in a Catholic Church. (Also, there is the fact that Catholic Churches don’t pay anything to musicians.)
