The Ark and The Dove

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's resident expert on the Church Fathers

I discovered that Jesus is present in the Eucharist. Not symbolically present. Not kind of present. He is really there, under the appearance of bread and wine. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch in the first century, wrote about the truth of the Real Presence in the Lord’s Supper. And he sat at the feet of St. John who penned John 6:25-69.

How often do you have the pleasure of seeing something like this prominently featured on the official website of a rock and roll icon?

The Fathers of the Church blog reminded me about Dion Dimucci.  Even if you're young and don't recognize the name, like a lot of my friends seem not to, you've probably heard some of his famous songs that were no. 1 hits back in the day, like The Wanderer and Runaround Sue.

I didn't know until one day when I was flipping channels and saw him telling his story on EWTN, that he is a high-profile active and faithful Catholic.  His spiritual autobiography, recounting how he drifted away from the Church and found his way back after much soul-searching (and reading of the early Church Fathers, which he alludes to, but talked about at length on tv) can be read on his website.  Wikipedia notes that he is active in prison ministry and works with men struggling with addictions.

Musically, I knew him for the music he recorded in the 50s and 60s, but I hear that he has recorded a critically-acclaimed blues and country cd recently, so maybe I will give it a listen.

Please, more celebrities like him!

It's just good music

From Britain's Catholic Herald (hat tip to Amy Welborn for the article) - England parish's children find traditional sacred music exciting as well as eminently singable.  (Yes, I love talking about music; I enjoyed hearing about this).

A mass of bouncy children appeared at my feet in the main hall of St Wulstan’s in Wolstanton, Staffordshire. They had run down from their choir practice in the organ loft, where they had been rehearsing the plainchant Orbis Factor Mass and a couple of Renaissance motets.
Were they enjoying it, I asked?      “Yes!” they screamed.
And what was their favourite piece to sing?
“Agnus Dei and the Sanctus from the Orbis Factor,” said a couple of the nine-year-olds, quick as a flash.

David and April West...converted from the Anglican faith in 1993 and had no sooner entered their new Catholic community than they had begun to reorganise its musical foundations.
They were trained musicians and were sick of hearing people say there was no decent music in the Catholic Church. “It was crazy to think people actually believed this. I mean, think of all those great Catholic composers,” says David.
So, instead of grumbling, they decided to do something about it.

“We’ve never sung ‘Bind us Together’, nor have we done a single Israeli Mass, nor the [shudder] ‘Gloria, clap, clap,’ ” says David with pride. Contrary to popular belief, these pieces did not have a cachet with the young.

So when the Wests set up a junior choir to run alongside the senior one, they didn’t shy away from the hard stuff – they embarked upon teaching the children serious, unadulterated Church music.
There was to be no talking down to the young’uns; instead, they were to be introduced to some of the finest music ever written. The kids loved it, and were eager to learn.
As a result, they quickly got the hang of the plainsong notation and the Latin, and now have several heavyweight pieces under their belts...

Parish music directors, congregations on different page when it comes to singing

As if we didn't know before, but here is a study confirming it.

People not involved in parish music ministry (or whatever you want to call it) consistently said that the things that make it easy to sing in church are music that is familiar and music that is simple.  People who are involved in said ministry consistently put these at the bottom of the ranking, and "leadership of organ or instruments" at the top, along with other things most people don't really care about that much, such as whether the song is thematically linked to the liturgy of the day or season.  Normal people were also more likely to value "traditional" music than music directors, although music directors dismiss this, chalking it up to a familiarity issue.  Let's hope they take some hints.

Perhaps I will elaborate on why I think these results are the way they are - for instance, why most people do not find that a "meaningful text" helps them to sing the music, but why musicians would think it would.  I think I am in a good position to comment because although I am a huge geek who geeks out on everything he's interested in, including music (and liturgy), and have had the privilege to study and perform in settings appropriate to those headed for a career in music, I am not a professional-level trained musician and thus remember what it's like to be a "normal" person about music (in no small part because I have not freed myself entirely from the limitations associated thereto).  Nor am a liturgist, meaning that I reside closer to real life than to la-la land (my apologies to all the good liturgists out there).

Christmas music

My mom just found this old book of Christmas songs.  A good one, with pictures and lengthy historical notes to go with each song.  Maybe only 20% of the songs are songs I know or have heard of.  The rest are new to me.

There is one that may well become one of my very favorite Christmas songs - In dulci iubilo, which previously I knew only by name, from the credits of Good Christian Men Rejoice, which is a very loose paraphrase of it.  It was written half in Latin(!) and half in German(!) by the Fourteenth Century Dominican mystic Bl. Henry of Suso(!), or perhaps by the angels he saw in his dream(!!).

Also in the book, a traditional Irish carol full of the Church triumphant and militant exulting in Christmas. 

Church music

Fascinating... also a meditation on the utter uselessness of the labels "liberal" and "conservative" adequately to describe Church matters.

Has anyone ever read that book "Why Catholics Can't Sing"?  I have not, but I ran across a chapter from it on the internet.  What it said was something I had never heard said explicitly, by anyone.   Ever.  It's probably not what you expect, either.  But when I thought about it for a minute, it seemed to fit the facts I knew better than my current working model I had of the last hundred years or so of Church music history.  While you read the article, think about the following (it'll make sense in a minute): Dorothy Day - big promoter of Gregorian chant; Hilaire Belloc - liked his Masses "low and short."  Baroque conservativism - maintaining the mentality of the musical status quo railed against by popes from Benedict XIV to Benedict XVI; the reform "Liturgical Movement" of the 1800s - trying to restore Gregorian music (think Solesmes).  It also helps explain the broad range of people who consider me something of a bothersome troublemaker when I start to talk about Church music.

Please take a minute and read the whole thing, or come back and read it and then tell me what you think.  I know it's long for a blog post - it's a couple pages.  If you are a little weirded out by the "play" thing, be open-minded and give it a chance - Pope Benedict (well, Cardinal Ratzinger, but he stands behind his writing) uses exactly that language in the foreward to his book "The Spirit of the Liturgy."  The link follows:

Thomas Day on "De-ritualization."

In case you are curious, here is a link to a fuller version of that H.L. Mencken passage that Day references.  You should probably read the other article, the Day link above, before you read this one so that you have more context.

Keeping Satan in Christmas

I didn't think of the title myself, but it was so eye-grabbing I borrowed it from Mark Shea.

Touchstone Magazine article.

By the way, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen is modal - it's the Hypodorian Mode (Church Mode II) if I'm not mistaken.  That's why the music has that gravity without really being in a minor key.

Singing the Mass

I think that because what people are most accustomed to is a spoken Mass as opposed to a chanted Mass, they assume that this is the "basic" form, and singing is a later imposition, like maybe a later accretion or something.

But actually it's more the other way around.  Which is more natural?  To sing alleluia, or to say it like you're reading a telephone book?

St. Cecilia, ora pro nobis

If I had been on the ball, I would have done a novena for the renewal of sacred music, but that doesn't mean we can't pray about it.

Prediction

Tomorrow being St. Cecelia's day, Pope Benedict will make some sort of statement about sacred music.  The people who are least in need of it will be the ones who pay the most attention, and vice versa.

Beatles/Chicago

I just heard "My Guitar Gently Weeps" this morning.  I couldn't help noticing that the guitar riff from Twenty-five or Six to Four is the exact one from the Beatles song, only revved up to a higher tempo and energy.  In my opinion, Chicago made better use of it, though.