Music in the Mass 2

The nature of the music, too, has become a relativistic matter. I like pop; you like Classical music. They are both equally valid musical forms and can be used equally well to worship God. If you object to liturgical music in the pop idiom, that’s just an arbitrary choice based on the sort of music you happen to like.

The decisions of the Church across the centuries, again, should lead us to question this assumption. The history of liturgical music, at least in the West, is marked by repeated departures from and returns to a norm. In the late Middle Ages, polyphonic singing developed and elaborated until the text became inaudible amid the decoration; both Protestant and post-Reformation Roman Catholic Churches aimed to cut this elaboration back and return to the text. In the 18th- and 19th-century Roman Catholic Church orchestral settings of the Mass and operatic music became popular; Pope Pius X in the 1900s demanded a return to plainchant. This wasn’t because he disliked opera per se, but because he concluded it wasn’t an appropriate form for church music; it was a rational decision, not an arbitrary one based on taste. Of course very few people outside liturgical musicians know about it.
Why should chant, whether in Eastern or Western forms, have been across the centuries the standard of liturgical music to which the Church continually returns? What can this tell us about liturgical music generally?

Chant has little or no rhythmic property. It lacks that essential constituent of most musical forms, beat. Just as the natural model of instrumental music is the human voice, so the natural model of beat is the human heart. Music based on rhythm ties us to our nature, and to time; to our ephemeral state, to the heartbeat marking out our little time on earth. Slow beats are sonorous and stately, fast beats excite us. But only music freed from rhythm connects us to eternity and to spirit. I go so far as to suggest that beatless music stands a greater chance of allowing God to talk to us than more natural forms. This isn’t to say that plainchant is the only form of music suitable for the liturgy; but it does suggest that there may be forms which are actually unsuitable. I like many sorts of music, but wouldn’t argue strongly for the output of Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Dresden Dolls to find much of a place in church services.

This insight illuminates the use of instruments in church. Organs cause problems when organists become ostentatious, as with any musical specialists, and when they actively compete with the human voice, the primary instrument of worship. But the instinct that the organ is the model instrument for Christian worship is, I suggest, not arbitrary: it is based in the fact that staccato percussive rhythm is impossible to manage with an organ. At the other extreme, instruments that can produce nothing but staccato percussion, such as drums, should at the very least be carefully controlled and balanced with other instruments in church. I would suggest they come close to being completely unsuitable for worship.

But what of, say, medieval hymns and carols which are strongly rhythmic and yet seem (to me) unobjectionable in church use? I suspect a musicologist would be able to cast some light on the technical nature of the tunes which might distance them from contemporary rhythmic music; and perhaps that very temporal distance is part of the point. Venerability is incapable of being manufactured, and it’s worth remembering that of the vast quantity of music written at any time and in any form for Christian worship, only a tiny fraction of it is still used.