Given the respectability of First Things, I was a little concerned about the possible influence of some of his remarks, which appear to be uninformed.

I'm wondering if someone here, who's better informed about these things than I am, could briefly address these comments from the article:

Musicologists have proved that the 'ancient chant' promulgated in the nineteenth century by the Benedictines of Solemnes [sic] was, in fact, their own invention rather than a historical reconstruction

We know almost nothing about the music that so deeply moved Augustine in Milan

[Flemish contrapuntalist Johannes] Tinctoris remarked in 1470 that all the music worth listening to had been written in the preceding forty years -- at the only moment in music history when a leading musician would have made that remark, and when it would have been true

For reference, these quotations all come from "Sacred Music, Sacred Time" in the November 2009 edition of First Things.

Thanks!

David Goldman studied music principally at the Schiller Institute, which is an international think tank closely associated with Lyndon LaRouche.
David Goldman was a close associate of LaRouche for a number of years and co-authored a book with him.
The Schiller Institute was founded by LaRouche's wife.

"Musicologists have proved that the 'ancient chant' promulgated in the nineteenth century by the Benedictines of Solemnes [sic] was, in fact, their own invention rather than a historical reconstruction"

If that were true (it's not) my hat, along with that of every other musicologist in the world, would really be off to them!!!

I am familiar with the comment by Tinctoris, and this is usually interpreted to show the general trend (of those times) to pay more attention to the newest things. However, I am told that the music of Josquin never completely went out of style.

And what about the Augustine/Milan line? Is the music we now call "Ambrosian chant" named only in honor of St. Ambrose, or is it generally understood to be the actual music that St. Augustine would have heard when St. Ambrose reigned in Milan?

(he's a former LaRouchie, BTW -- he describes the LaRouche movement as a cult and has been out of it for over 20 years: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/05/confessions-of-a-coward)

The glory of Solesmes and its (most responsible) disciples is that they are about opening doors, not slamming them shut. You tell me which attitude better reflects the mind of the Church.

But what is his goal? to enlighten his First Things readers? or to prejudice them against any attempt to include chant in modern worship?

I doubt the latter -- Goldman himself is an observant Jew and, oddly, he rounds off the article with a final paragraph to the effect that "anyway everything I've just said cannot be applied to Jewish worship, which is only at home with melismatic chant". That's the first serious mention of liturgical chant in the article, and pretty much the last sentence.

The article's thesis is hard to discern, but it seems to involve the premise that Western sacred music is "sacred" by virtue of intrinsic tonal and rhythmic properties, without significant reference to any liturgical purpose it may or may not have. That throwaway line about Solesmes may just be a rhetorical device designed to prepare the reader for this premise.

I'm inclined to suspect that, as opposed to having an axe to grind against Catholic chant, Goldman just isn't very familiar with it. And, not being Catholic, he's not likely to be conversant with the practical implications of the claim that chant was "invented" at Solesmes.

I only wish someone had caught the line and cut or reworked it before the issue went to press. But then, that sort of thing is Goldman's job.

But seriously, is there any reason to suppose that modern Carthusians, for example, sing chant much differently now than they did 900 years ago? Unlike the Solesmes congregation of Benedictines, the Carthusian order reaches back uninterrupted to St. Bruno and even now retains a distinct liturgy.

And what about Heiligenkreuz, which has been in continuous operation since the Middle Ages? Would places like that have been much influenced by the Solesmes revival? Or, conversely, is there any evidence that Solesmes may have been influenced by that sort of living tradition?

The question as to how this is possible in poems that are tens of thousands of lines long was given a surprisingly modern answer in the 1930's by the American scholars Milman Perry and Alfred Lord, who travelled to Yugoslavia to study the bards who sang similar songs of thousands of lines. Oral tradition is now a commonly accepted theory of how songs (or poems) can be handed down for centuries with little change.

On the subject of Carthusian chant, readers might enjoy the passages on the subject in An Infinity of Little Hours , where one postulant thought that the monks were performing some subtle form of ancient harmonization and it turned out that they were simply massively out of tune.

http://www.amazon.com/Decadent-Enchantments-Gregorian-Solesmes-California/dp/0520210085

I am very conservant with the "practical implications of the claim that chant was 'invented' at Solesmes." Chant was NOT invented at Solesmes; the specific kind of chant propagated by Solesmes was invented there. There was a broad spectrum of chant traditions, but not the "Ur-chant" that Solesmes claimed to have discovered through methods lifted from the philologists and inappropriately applied to chant. The implication is that some 19th century Catholics invented a fake Middle Ages ("Romanticism") that never existed -- just as Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels did in literature. On the latter, see Heinrich Heine's "The Romantic School." This was consistent with the revival of throne-and-altar Catholicism after the French Revolution, and the revival of the Benedictine order itself, which had been reduced to a few thousand monks by 1805. This view is quite consistent with Russell Hittinger's work on ecclesiological history published in First Things (see his brilliant piece "The Churches of National Salvation"). It is NOT an anti-Catholic view, although it conflicts with SOME Catholic views. "Christendom," such as it was, happened to be far messier than the Romantics liked to think.

2) Contrary to some scurrilous comments above, my professional qualifications in the field are not in question. I finished all but the dissertation in the music theory PhD program at City University of New York (rated one of the top five in the US). A great deal of my course work was with Carl Schachter, the world's leading theorist of higher-order metrical structures in tonal music (see his essay collection "Unfoldings"). I have given papers at academic conferences on this topic. I have published peer-reviewed articles on Renaissance music theory in The International Church Music Review (published by the Vatican), Musical Quarterly and Theory and Practice. I taught history of music theory at graduate level at the Mannes College of Music. All this occurred well after I had ended my unfortunate earlier association with that nut-case LaRouche.

3) If people want to use Solemnes chant in liturgy, there's nothing wrong with it -- it would not be the first innovation to masquerade as a rediscovery of something ancient. I made that clear in my essay.

4) No-one in the above thread addressed Benedict XVI's views on what constitutes inherently sacred music, e.g., Bach or Mozart, which was my point of departure. Something quite different is going on with the great composers than with chant, and that is why I sought (with Augustine's help) to identify.

No-one in the above thread addressed Benedict XVI's views on what constitutes inherently sacred music, e.g., Bach or Mozart, which was my point of departure.

That's not surprising, since the November articles from First Things were not available on-line when most of the discussion above took place. But now the website has caught up, and more readers can appreciate your article for themselves.

Solesmnes chant is part of the leftovers of the Romantic movement. I don't propose to throw out every baby with every tub of bathwater. As a Jew, I can't stand hearing psalms in English--vernacular services make me gag. I can see why Catholics would want Latin rather than the vernacular, and Latin wants chant. Solesmnes chant is available.

There actually exist Schubert settings of part of the Hebrew liturgy, commissioned by the Jewish community of Vienna. I'm against using them in synagogue. The Hebrew liturgy wants traditional Jewish chant. But I don't confuse my synagogue with the Sistine Chapel, even if I would rather pray in my shul than the Sistine Chapel; nor do I confuse hazzanut (cantorial display) with Haydn. But there are good reasons for Christians to hear Schubert masses in Church. Why should Jewish and Christian practice be different? And what is it that Schubert does that makes his music appropriate for liturgy?

By the same token, chant is of small musical interest next to, say, the Mozart Requiem. That style is what the Church repudiated in favor of the chant revival. One tends to make the best of what one has, and it is hard to imagine the American Church acquiring the resources to provide the sort of Church orchestral music that is common in Benedict's part of Germany. Nonetheless, Benedict is quite right about Bach and Mozart. Did the Church make the right choice circa 1800 to reject sacred orchestral music and return to a papier-mache Middle Ages that the romantics invented?

I've

No one knows for certain how the chant was sung in the 9th century, or the 7th century, or the 14th century for that matter. Heck, it's hard enough to figure out how any music was performed in the past absence of sound recordings (just look at the controversy surrounding the "historically informed movement" of the past 40 years.). But the Solesmes monks work enabled a flowering of the chant within the Church and a way of singing that could be taught and handed on systematically. Without that, it would have been much more difficult, if not impossible to spread the practice of chant in the Church.

I guess I'll take a "papier-mache Middle Ages" over nothing at all.

Sam Schmitt

That's just my point. The academics have shown that the Middle Ages had a multiplicity of chants, and in many cases we do not know quite how they sounded. It is perfectly fine for the Church to decide upon a unified approach, Solemnes' or another one, for its liturgical purpose. I did not invent the opposition of chant to the classical style: the Church did that at the turn of the 19th century. That's why most American Catholics have never heard a Mozart mass accompanying the liturgy (that tradition persisted only in southern Germany). I agree that there is no reason for such an opposition. They have different roles in liturgy (we Jews are very dependent on our chant, which of course is different from Gregorian chant). That is also the pope's view. My object was not to emphasize this opposition, but to show (with Augustine's help) how it is that goal-oriented tonal counterpoint uniquely is capable of evoking the sacred within its own terms, independently of the liturgy. A Bach chorale setting does this even if one doesn't know the words to the hymn.

The academics have shown that the Middle Ages had a multiplicity of chants, and in many cases we do not know quite how they sounded.

It is nice that the academics have caught up to what people have known for hundreds and hundreds of years. Pothier, Lambillote, Danjou . . . all these early scholars knew this very well.

First, I will clarify that I am not a historian, but mainly a composer/organist and director of sacred music strictly within the RC tradition. So I speak as one who has organically assumed the position of passing on the tradition of sacred music within the walls of the church since I was first included in the liturgical rites and devotions very early in my childhood taking part in choirs, playing the organ, as an altar boy, learning the prayers, etc. I grew up within the era and watched the 'synthetic' insertion of music which is most definitely foreign to the RC liturgy (folk, rock, performance). It has become clearer and clearer to me as time has progressed through these tumultuous times that there is one holy sacred music that is truly pure and conforms to the RC Rite, and that is the Gregorian Chant and polyphony as a close second.

Further, from the perspective of a composer and 'performer' of sacred music I would say this: Music is organic.

Manuscripts are an 'attempt' to document and perpetuate the intentions of the composers AND performers of a particular 'period in time'. Oral tradition counts as the other half, and sometimes counts as an even greater testimony to the transmission of that reality. GC is the patrimony of Sacred Music in the Roman Catholic Tradition. It is what has grown naturally within the walls of the church itself and over time was recognized as such by the church through its prelates and confirmed over and over again. I would also add that it has grown side by side with the organic development of the Rite itself (TLM). In my thinking, the two are inseperable. The Solemnes 'live and breathe this stuff'. In my mind, they are the "authority" on sacred music that God (more specifically through His Third Person, the Holy Spirit) promoted during the last 100 years or so. Will they continue to carry the baton for the next 100 years? No one knows, and time will only tell.

I would assert that no period in the history of chant 'crystallizes' its 'perfected state'. Each period represents a "historical incident" of its development as it continues to grow and is actualized in a particular period of time from age to age. Even our own historical accounts of what has gone on before must be taken with a grain of salt because we do not have an actual 'recording' of a chant performace (except my recent discovery of the chironomograph). The Solemnes are another (significant) link in the transmission of that which is THE AUTHENITICALLY RECOGNIZED sacred music in the Roman Catholic tradition. Schools will come and go, but the chant will remain just as the liturgy, and just as the church. It is the most natural form of music, most human, more pure in the act of worship. It requires nothing outside of itself. The person and God. It is music stripped to the bare minimum. (e.g., a newborn baby 'sings' a chant when he emerges from the womb.)

Academia (at least since I have been involved with it in my own lifetime) has become so obsessed with (pure to the era) capturing the 'right' or 'authentic' performance of eras gone by (and this is true for many of them (purists): chant, rennaisance, baroque, classical, etc.), that it has become preocuppied (and in some ways) distracted from the heart and spirit of the very practice itself in the act of dissecting. It tends to put itself 'above' in its intellectual pursuit in such a way that it proclaims itself the authority and the judge of what was and what should be now and continue into the future. I think that is a dangerous (and foolish) position to assume on its own.

And for Mr. Goldman: My take on the classical styles (religious music, but not necessarily sacred) : it is 'just outside' of what would be considered truly liturgical music. I compose some of this music myself. And even though I am a dyed in the wool Catholic, I would be the first to tell you that it would be 'too much' for a Roman Catholic liturgy. Is there an absolute clear line of delineation? Not this side of heaven as you can see by the confusion about what belongs and what doesn't, but I prefer to lean toward what is absolutely clear.

and it is hard to imagine the American Church acquiring the resources to provide the sort of Church orchestral music that is common in Benedict's part of Germany.

I would further offer you some of my scores e.g., [http://www.romancatholicsacredmusic.com/seehear/sanctusFugueEmin/] as a Catholic American (however not a Heretical Catholic American (see here: http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/AMERICAN.TXT) attempt at doing something in the German tradition. [NOTE: This is one of ten movements of one of my works which Maestro Rosenbaum has offered to perform in Carnegie Hall with the Brooklyn Phil... would you be interested to help me fund the event?]. The church calls it religious music. It has a proper place in the upbuilding and edification of the church however, outside the liturgy. It embodies a height of intellect that can be (and should be) all enveloping. For instance, almost every week I play a chorale prelude (Bach, Buxtehude, etc.) before the liturgy and once in a while during communion. In these types of musics, I feel that the 'emphasis of focus' gravitates toward the music itself, and away from the liturgical action. It creates a kind of "rapturous ecstacy" (a trance or trance-like state in which an individual transcends normal consciousness.) in the beauty of the music itself. These are fine subtleties that I find very few musicians comprehend, utilize to the proper advantage, and do not exist on the same level as liturgical worship, codified in the terms latria, dulia and hyperdulia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latria) It is on this one point, alone, I feel confusion reigns when it comes to appropriate music for the Holy Sacrifice. We have far too many "performers" of religious music (and that would include Mozart all the way down to the SLJ) than truly sacred music which only comes from the heart that 'worships in spirit and in truth'. That, my friends, IMHO will only ever be found in the chant.

goal-oriented tonal counterpoint uniquely is capable of evoking the sacred within its own terms, independently of the liturgy. A Bach chorale setting does this even if one doesn't know the words to the hymn.

But why uniquely? No one knows Latin any more and yet the common experience of Western liturgical chant, among believers and non-, is precisely that it evokes the sacred.

This music -- non-musicians singing monophony a capella -- dominates secular charts when it is recorded, and yet it's musically about as far-distant from anything else on those charts as can be imagined. How does one reconcile this with the claim that chant is "of small musical interest" compared to the work of Mozart?

And the music itself -- setting aside specialists' questions of interpretation -- is indisputably old. Anyone can pick up a disc of Carthusian chant and a disc from Solesmes and hear some of the same melodies on both and an overall sound that is quite similar, to the layman's ear. And yet the Carthusians have their own liturgical "rite", distinct from the Roman Rite, that reaches back uninterrupted to the 11th century.

I think your argument can only be deepened and filled out by exploring the extent to which Western liturgical chant is the foundation without which there would be no Western counterpoint. To dismiss chant from consideration at the outset is to make an odd study of sacred music. And to say "we don't know quite how it sounded" is irrelevant. We don't know quite how Bach's chorales sounded when he directed them in Leipzig, either. Bach's keyboard music is generally interpreted on an instrument that barely existed in his lifetime. Does that detract from our ability to study the French Suites?

An appalling remark.

Nonetheless, it is true that Mocquereau is the author of the ictus theory, the historical validity of which is, "to put it mildly, highly questionable" (Apel, Gregorian Chant, 125).

Why uniquely? Read my essay: our perception of the sacred is bound up with our sense of mortality and our intimation of eternity. What Augustine perceived so clearly is that our perception of time is NOT a hard-wired Kantian category, but bounded by memory and expectation -- if you will, by tradition and faith, by the memory of Sinai (or Calvary, for you Christians) and our eschatological expectation. Our ordering of the perception of time within memory depends on the irruption of the Eschaton into the temporal. Franz Rosenzweig, the great Jewish theologian, put this beautifully as I quoted him. Because goal-oriented tonal music uniquely can create higher orders of time-perception (modern theory calls this durational vs tonal rhythm), it can evoke this irruption of the Eschaton into the temporal. That is different than serving the needs of liturgy, which is a good and necessary thing, as I stated at the outset.

For those who care to study the matter further, Chapter 11 of Augustine's Confessions and Book VI of De Musica are the relevant texts. For musicians, the first three chapters of Carl Schachter's book "Unfoldings."

Patrick Joseph,

Appalling, but the scholarly consensus which also happens to be true. It doesn't mean that it's bad (I never said it was), only that it was an innovation.

Francis,

The pope is used to the use of classical music in the liturgy per South German Catholic tradition. Everyone else, in my view, is missing something quite wonderful. One doesn't have to be a Catholic (and I surely am not) to admire it and understand the benefits of which Benedict writes.

The schola I sang with used the Solesmes method, but surely the musical essentials are still discernible underneath the 2s and 3s and particular interpretation of neumes. Whereas the article in First Things seemed to say: (a) the Solesmes revival was a bit of a sham; therefore (b) we can't say anything useful about chant because it was lost in the Middle Ages. Even if the first statement is true the second doesn't follow.

tdunbar's comment is also illuminating because it suggests that where Western sacred music is approached seriously, one will hear all three strains in real live liturgical settings: chant, Renaissance, and classical. There's no rigorous argument to be made here but this experience is evocative and is just what one would expect to find if chant is objectively the foundation for the other two strains.

And wouldn't the composers of the early Renaissance have been in direct continuity with medieval chant? Or is it to be supposed that they composed entirely afresh, drawing solely on Antiquity for their musical ideas?

If you do this, you will see that Solesmes is about 1,000 years too late to make up those melodies.

Your remark is appalling because it is false and calumnious.

I refer you to David Hiley's book, "Western Plainchant" (1993). It is encyclopedic in scope. The bibliography alone is 65 pages long. There is no evidence in it to support your notion of scholarly consensus.

The statement about Solesmes doesn't totally shock me, I've heard it before. And, like Richard R., I'm still waiting for musicologists to say something about who gets it right. I hope critics of Solesmes can be grateful for the massive amounts of work- pioneer musicologocal work, at that- provided by the monks of Solesmes.

Jeff--I don't think that the "Solesmes Invention" criticism speaks so much to the pitches that are sung, but rather to the way that the pitches are sung. Diastematic manuscripts like the Montpellier 159 certainly can tell us a lot about pitches, but, as we know, they lack much information about the way that the pitches are sung. The adiastematic manuscripts like St. Gall, Laon, Einsiedeln, etc., are probably the manuscripts in question which offer much more information on the expression of the melodies than later diastematic manuscripts.

Patrick Joseph, "false" is possible (although highly improbable given the mass of evidence), but not calumnious, as my view is the consensus among musicologists (there always will be dissenters). That is an inflammatory word and ill becomes you or this discussion.

MA, tonal as opposed to modal because tonality provides for harmonic as well as linear goals, so that goal-oriented motion can be prolonged over far longer time spans. Modal music (except for pseudo-modal usages, e.g. "Phrygian" in the very tonal Brahms 4th or the Heiliger Dankgesang of the Beethoven Op. 132) almost always is found in short forms. Tonality as practiced by Bach and after actually subsumes the modes. The Gradus is an abstract exercise rather than actual music.

posting question in new thread

The adiastematic ("in campo aperto") MSS contain some markings that pertain to rhythm & dynamics, but (sadly) a lot of it is contradictory and inconsistent. Adiastematic notation doesn't give us any clues in regard to what notes (tones) they were singing.

What I was addressing was the notion (put forth above) that Solesmes editions were "their own invention rather than a historical reconstruction."

I find it hard to believe the author only had rhythmic theories in mind. Indeed, if this were the case, there would be nothing novel about the article. Mocquereau himself (much to the dismay of his critics) never claimed that he was reconstructing the exact rhythm of particular monasteries in the middle ages. Why publish an article stating what folks have known for 100 years?

Solesmes was a "re-foundation" -- Prosper Gueranger, the founding abbot, was not originally a monk or even a religious, but a secular priest who received permission to found a Benedictine community in the abandoned monastery that is now the abbey of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. There's no question of his particular community preserving anything for centuries because his particular community didn't exist before the early 1800s -- and since there's no such thing as a unified "Benedictine Order", one can only speak of Benedictine monks in terms of particular communities.

At any rate the accusation of Romanticism finds fertile ground in the historical account of the re-founding of Solesmes, although I suspect the reality is a bit more complex than "starry-eyed idealists re-create faux Middle Ages".

On the other hand there are particular monastic communities and liturgical traditions that have existed in uninterrupted continuity since the Middle Ages -- the Carthusians and Dominicans, with their respective rites, come first to mind. These existed long before Solesmes and continue to exist today. I'm interested to learn more about how their chant books and traditions fit into the "man behind the curtain" theory.

I don't think that Goldman is trying to present any "novelties" about the widely held Solesmes "invention" critique. His piece only mentions the issue in one sentence and then goes on to discuss tonal music and eschatology. I would say though that his statement, evidently supported by musicological consensus, is commonly epitomized by the "to put it mildly, highly questionable" (Apel, see above) rhythmic theories of Mocquereau. Am I wrong?

Gregorian (and other) Church chant was neglected durign the 17th and 18th centuries, and the Benedictine Order was reduced to a few thousand members by 1805 after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. There was a discontinuity in performance, scholarship, etc. -- no "authentic" tradition to preserve. That is why Solemnes set out to recreate one, with the interesting but ultimately quite erroneous premise that there was a single authentic tradition to discover. In fact, the Middle Ages was (to quote James Joyce's characterization of the Church) "Here comes everybody," with many different chant traditions that changed continuously. Research of 20th century scholars such as Leo Treitler, one of my teachers at CUNY, helped bring to light this kaleidoscope of chant traditions. The Holy Roman Empire was more of a concept than a reality both in politics and culture, and the Romantic idea of a unified Christendom prior to modernity was idealized, to say the least.

That said, the Church requires chant for liturgical purposes and has to make a choice among many alternatives, which is what people did during the Middle Ages without bothering too much about "authenticity." The truly medieval way to do things is to make best out of the materials at hand.

What tonal polyphony contributed over and above chant is a different matter; it is not simply the servant of the liturgy, but the companion of the liturgy: capable of arousing a religious state better than the best sermon, as the pope wrote in "The Spirit of the Liturgy."

I say this as someone who is witnessing the revival of the Tridentine Mass after a long withering.

Thanks for the reply, Mr. Goldman. I understand that tonality can generally be prolonged over far longer time spans (jazz composers might have a good claim to the contrary), and that that is one advantage to the system. And its true that modal music is almost always found in shorter forms, which is why it works so well in the sacred liturgy. While the Gradus may be comprised of sequential exercises in species counterpoint, I would disagree that it is entirely abstract. (My copy is in my work office, and I am quite intrigued to get to work today and refresh my memory.) It seems to me most of the exercises were lifted out of Palestrina's work. And Palestrina- indeed all the early masters- were composing modal counterpoint. Perhaps they began pointing to tonality, and tonality evolved through the developing convention of polyphony, but these masters were rooted in modality.

Though it is a bit tangential to the topic, I am interested in the training of composers as concerns modality. I find the melodic vocabulary of composers familiar with modality to be more lush and complex, consequently less motivic. It is a fascinating study to compare Hadyn, Mozart, and Beethoven's melodies, for example. Though they worked together, and M and B studied with H, B studied counterpoint with Albrechtsberger, who apparently was one of the first composer/teachers to restructure the Gradus, changing the exercises from modal to tonal.

So from Beethoven through the early twentieth century, the majority of composers came to be trained in tonal counterpoint. The flowering of harmony led to, in general, a reduction of melody in favor of motivic writing. I think this was a great loss to melody in general. Is it any coincidence that after Wagner pushed the limits of tonal harmony we see composers reaching back to the modes and other scales to find melodic interest again?

JEFFREY TUCKER, alert! :)

Ultimately, my hunch is that chant and polyphony based on it has a great influence on composers. When chant was in decline, so was the element of melody in much composition. One can argue that composers were exploring the new ideas in harmony and rhythm, and breaking from the Church as in inspiration for art and life. But I speculate that those who were not exposed to modality, living (hearing chant) or through exercises, did not have the same melodic resources and were to some extent forced to explore harmony, then rhythm.

Now we are in an age where chant is in revival. Tonality alone seems to have nearly (or to some, completely) exhausted its limits. The great 5-1 is behind us and we are looking for something new and beautiful. Classical composers who are rediscovering modal music and free rhythm have a larger, richer palette with which to use. To the extent that the Church now cultivates its own treasure in Gregorian chant, she has the potential to positively influence the general direction of music once more.

Yet another wonderful potential of chant, and its daughter, modal polyphony.

It takes a pretty callous musical sense to claim chant incapable of arousing such a religious state, in those sensitive to the understated.

I, for one, will concede no such thing. I think it is a Theocon rant.

I think it is a Theocon rant.

You make it sound as if that is a bad thing.

Wow.

Francis,
The pope is used to the use of classical music in the liturgy per South German Catholic tradition. Everyone else, in my view, is missing something quite wonderful. One doesn't have to be a Catholic (and I surely am not) to admire it and understand the benefits of which Benedict writes.

Which is why I had included this in my post.

Is there an absolute clear line of delineation? Not this side of heaven as you can see by the confusion about what belongs and what doesn't, but I prefer to lean toward what is absolutely clear.

The music may be 'something quite wonderful', but it is not the chant and SQW is not a stipulation for what admits it to the body of sacred music. He is the Pope, but that does not discount or change the authoritative writings and documents on sacred music that have been passed down through the centuries. I see it as something that contributed to his personal taste based on local musical tradition but that has nothing to do with clarifying an objective stance on Roman Catholic Sacred Music. (Even PBXVI himself warns us about offenses against the hermeneutic of continuity.)

In all of our documents on sacred music I would bet money that Mozart is never mentioned (however operatic styles are) and in almost all of them the chant is always awarded the highest regard in terms of music most befitting our liturgical rite. I would also bet money that you can probably find Palestrina mentioned in some documents. In my mind he is definitely a composer of music sacred while Mozart penned religious music in a popular style.

One doesn't have to be a Catholic (even though I surely am) to admire it (the chant, regardless of a particular school of thought) and understand the benefits of which Benedict and many of our other Popes have written!

You are correct that Benedict is representing a regional view somewhat different from the mainstream, which, as you say, has been cautious about operatic style. Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) first got my attention in 1980 for advocating the use of classical music in liturgy. The Church of course will decide what is best for its liturgy. My article agreed in some important respects with the pope's view on the matter, which as you point out is personal not magisterial. It's hard for me to imagine the Church sponsoring Mozart and Schubert masses in the U.S. China, maybe.

do you by any chance like opera?

However, that 'Bavarian' school is more widespread than you may think. Regensburg sent its students to US Dioceses which had noticeable German populations--Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis/St Paul (and perhaps St Louis.)

As a result, those 'orchestral Masses' are still around--notably at St Agnes in St. Paul, and occasionally in Milwaukee, too!

Francis,
I like many operas, especially by Mozart and Verdi. The closest thing to an opera that overlaps with worship are the Bach Passions, which of course were written to be performed in churches with extensive congregational participation. If I could take one work of music to a desert island it would be the Matthew Passion.

Last one I know of that was done for a Mass was at the dedication of a suburban church back in the mid-1980's. I cannot say that was the ONLY one in the last 20 years, but it is rare, indeed.

However, up to the late 1960's there were a number of them in various parish churches--usually for Christmas or Easter, or some other special occasion. We're a bit more frugal down here than are our brothers in St. Paul.

As a musicologist, I'm quite used to the disdain that performers have for our sometimes pedantic observations. They should trust that we often share a laugh at their expense over their sometimes naive pronouncements on the music they admittedly perform so well. The point I would like to make is that the job of the musicologist, as someone has already stated above, is to gather the available information and make educated assessments and interpretations of that information. If few musicologists (I don't know any personally) agree that the Solesmes method managed to discover medieval performance practice, it's because their methodology and occasional short-cuts haven't convinced academic chant scholars sufficiently. That's not to say that the scholarship of those French monastics was not worthwhile. On the contrary, their efforts launched the discipline of chant scholarship. Like many pioneering works of scholarship, however, their conclusions have not stood up to later scrutiny. There is no dishonor in that. It's the nature of scholarship. In my own research, for example, I've seen Spanish Renaissance chants frequently in mensural notation as incipits, suggesting that a quite different approach existed in that place and time. Mr Goldman is quite right in asserting that chant performance traditions have changed over the centuries and at different rates in different geographical areas and in different monastic orders. Much work remains in this field. As it happens, I am working with several very brilliant scholars on a collection of essays on chant and polyphony in the Spanish Office from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

Mr Goldman also rightly asserts that the contemporary use of the Solesmes system is a perfectly understandable and legitimate modern activity. I personally treasure it as a beautiful mix of ancient tones and a more recently devised rhythmic method for singing them. Again, I want to thank him for taking the time to amplify his thoughts on the matter. The initial article was perhaps not written with this forum as its principal audience, but I get the sense that some here are not reading what he is writing very closely.

I wonder, how much practical experience there is behind all this. I haven't found the polyphonic Masses (Victoria, Palestrina, Lassus) that are permitted and encouraged, to be at all lacking in solemnity.

In the *regular* daily celebration of the traditional liturgy, it's not practical to have polyphony or orchestral music all the time. The chant Masses are excellent for the purpose and beautiful.