Odds and Ends

Some Thoughts on Liturgical Music

Protestant Paradigms

By granting Catholics the ability to worship in vernacular languages, and encouraging the participation of the laity, the Second Vatican Council opened up to Catholics the vast musical resources of the Lutheran and Anglican traditions. Centuries before the Second Vatican Council, Lutherans and Anglicans had demonstrated successful paradigms for congregational music within a liturgical setting. Drawing on the vernacular religious music of Mediaeval Germany, the Lutherans adapted many ancient liturgical texts into congregationally manageable chorales which, having been cultivated by the great German Renaissance and Baroque composers, exist in either simple or highly intricate forms. Anglicans vernacularized plainsong and created a new style of chant for the congregational recitation of the psalms. Even Calvinist composers drew on the great Catholic Renaissance Polyphonic tradition to create a repertoire for congregational psalmody from the stilus familiaris.

In the nineteenth century there was a blossoming of the Anglican liturgical use of hymnody. The greatest German chorales were translated into English, and the Oxford movement saw a renewed interest in the ancient Latin hymns of the Sarum and Roman uses, as well as the ancient songs of the Greek Churches. Theologically rich texts were gathered from sources as diverse as the Methodist Charles Wesley, the Anglican Christopher Wordsworth, the German Martin Luther, the Catholic St. Ambrose, and the Syrian St. John of Damascus.

As if in penance for the excesses of secular music, the nineteenth century saw also a great revival of plainsong, the ancient music of the Church. While Wagner and the Romantics stretched musical language with rampant dissonance, vast sonic experiences, and operatic, theatrical effects of every sort, monasticism began the slow revival of the ancient, sacred melodies. Whether by accident or design, the plainsong revival began to purify church music. It combated the operatic, theatrical, and sentimental tendencies of the Romantics, giving rise to a new generation of early twentieth century composers who eagerly assimilated the ancient church modes and melodies into their compositions, creating music which retained the power and grandeur of the nineteenth century, but rejected sentimental theatricality in favor of grand nobility.

A Composer's View

Music in the Church - Camille Saint-Saëns (1916)