Category: Liturgy and Music

Our friend MichiganCatholic wrote the above while commenting on Sal’s post below about the tendency for some hispanic/latino Catholics to embrace evangelical protestantism upon immigrating to the U.S. I understand why recent immigrants from countries that still have a Catholic culture would be turned off by many Catholic parishes in the U.S. Indeed, I attended Mass yesterday and had that very reaction.

What music does your parish do for Marian feasts? We’ll likely be doing the Stravinsky “Ave Maria” and if we have a chance we’ll do the Oswald Jaeggi arrangement of the “Salve Mater” chant.

Woo-hoo! Tonight was the first of twelve rehearsals of the Harvard Summer Chorus, and I’m in it this year. We’re meeting five hours a week to learn the Dvorak Stabat Mater under the direction of maestra Beverly Taylor, who taught at Harvard for 17 years and is back this summer. This is gonna be intense!
Prof. Taylor’s account of her journey to being a conductor appeared in Gregory Wolfe’s journal Image in 1997.

Amateur singers normally don’t sing without breaks in the sound that cut up the flow of the line. In music terms, they don’t know how to sing legato.
One cause of non-legato singing is the singer simply doesn’t know how to hold his breath while singing. You don’t push the air out to make sound, you have to hold your breath. The tension created in the torso is not something your average person is used to. The singer releases the tension whenever possible and that breaks up the line.
The other issue is that singers tend to close to voiced consonants to early. A voice consonant has a pitch: “ng” as in “King”, the letter n, the letter m are all example. Instead of giving the vowel the full duration, the sing will close to the “ng” and hold that on a pitch. That works for Sinata but no Palestrina. Even Haugen sounds crappy (crappier?) when not sung legato.
I can normally get good results if I just bring up these two points. It’s tough to create choral habits, but legato singing should be one of them.

Cantors have been known to cause heartburn, anxiety, dismay and hearing loss. Everyone could relate a story about the Cantor who made a liturgy nearly unbearable because of the volume, tone or gestures. Did he reach the high note that starts “On Eagle’s Wings?” Probably not, and neither did the rest of the congregation.
A cantor is supposed to lead the musical/congregational prayer of the liturgy. I try to be as unobtrusive as possible. I say as little as possible, I only move to bring the congregation in (usually with one arm) and I move away from the mic when the range is such that I don’t need the mic and when it’s time for the congregation to sing. There’s nothing worse than what Thomas Day calls “Mr. Caruso” – the cantor that has the mic planted firmly between his front teeth and is extracting every decibel possible from the parish’s shoddy sound system.
If cantors remembers it’s all about prayer to God rather than all about themselves, that usually goes a long way to helping the situation.
I could go on and on, but I’m out of time and I’m sure you have opinions.