What Have the Faithful Sung?

...This is especially true of instrumental church music...

...8chaezler, author of a review of modern music in France and Germany, published in our issue of July 3, I929, is eminently well fitted to discuss the situation with relative impartiality...

...If only those charged with the execution of this mandate will abstain from an "immoderate use" of the negative aspects of this declaration l Much has been improved during the past twenty-five years, and it would seem (may God be praisedl) that the time has gone forever when a Eucharistic procession could march to the cadence of operatic potpourri blown vigorously by a brass band...

...In so far as this music strives to become plastic, when it may really be no more than a symbol for men who gaze as in a glass darkly, it manifests an improper attitude the proportions they would later assume, but that year a movement of opposition was organized in Germany as the Caecilienverein...

...In fact it should not, lest popular government become a farce...

...If this were not so, the foUowing remark by Franz Witt, founder and guide of the Caecilienverein, a man of tested loyalty to principle, would have no meaning: "May God grant to the Church, some day, a Palestrina of orchestral music l" Of course one cannot declare that this Palestrina has appeared...

...The few who have been at work must, indeed, be credited with a handful of first-rate compositions...

...And we have need of a sufficient measure of that objective religious sense of the unity of all reality which a corporate worship of God, such as Catholic liturgy essentially is, invariably requires...

...No formal effort had been made to ascertain in advance what proportion of the people was in favor or opposed to the political changes contemplated...

...I have been concerned throughout with the spiritual nucleus of church music, and not at all with its aesthetic content...

...And it is certain that if modern and instrumental music were excluded from the house of God, the destruction of all its latent religious energies would follow, inducing as a consequence the sterilization, with the exception of just a few germs, of what is now in a process of growth...

...and round it many and unpleasant conflicts raged during later years...

...Admittedly the Benedictines have always and everywhere advocated the cause of liturgical worship with distinctive fervor...

...But though it is more widely in use than it was a hundred years ago, the chant is still employed only sporadically...

...If one conceded to Catholicism no power to foster ecclesiastical music in a spirit both new and orthodox, one would, indeed, be pronouncing its creative religious energy dead...

...Then the Church will no longer need to abandon modern art to its fate, but will be able to receive it unhesitatingly into its service...

...For ordinary affairs the popular and representative vote with simple majority, for constitutional amendments the representative vote with two-thirds and three-fourths majority respectively were finally established...

...Not that all was harmony under this doctrinary assumption of the popular will...

...On the whole regrettably few among leading composers have been active in the domain of church music...

...Their works have earned recognition and even popularity in their own Countries...

...Michael Haller, Peter Griesbacher and Joseph Rennet, all teachers at the famous Regensburg school for church music...

...Let no one object that I am viewing the problem from the special point of view of an aesthete...

...Munich, one of the cities having the largest number of practising Catholics in the Germanspeaking world, can boast of only two churches in 584 THE COMMONWEAL October 9, 19z9 which the chant may be heard regularly and with pleasure...

...In x868 the abortive aspects of romantic church music had not yet reached ing, in the subjectivism to which idealists often surrender, swiftly and completely...

...But when we examine the new church music, both vocal and instrumental, we cannot find it guilty, as a whole, of offense...

...and for him the Church was the "organization" of all men in the body of Christ, the community of the faithful...

...The Caecilienverein and the Schola Cantorum therefore sponsored the creation of a worthy J modern church music as one of their goals, and met with some commendable successes...

...The program adopted by the important group of contemporary French composers, cited in my previous paper, reads: "Simplicity of form, the suppression of chromatic harmony in favor of a diatonic harmony, the purging of emphasis and of all romanticism...

...Thus one sees that the field of instrumental church music is also able to bring forth good fruit, if only it be granted enough light and the right care...

...Side by side with great art, much workaday music, pleasurable from a religious as well as an aesthetic point of view, has been written: the Masses of Pembaur and Filke, or (to quote newer and still more impressive names) the Masses of Karl Senn, Otto Jochum or Joseph Messmer, the priest-composer who is the most venturesome of the group...

...It will merely uproot an old tradition, admittedly less good but certainly not intrinsically corrupt, which is probably more firmly rooted in Germany than it is in the United States...

...The deposition of Pope Plus XI on church musii: (December 20, 1928 ) has not rendered the development of instrumental music impossible in the future, even as Pius X had not legislated against it...

...Here, of course, one sees again the influence of the time spirit upon music and indeed (as I have observed previously) the basic connection between musical romanticism in particular with philosophic idealism and subjectivism...

...Because this implied a polemically-minded turning from contemporary to historic art, the danger of one-sidedness, of historidsm, was imminent...

...Cuthbert F/right entitled, What Shall the Faithful Sing.~ We therefore sensed the value of an authoritative commentary on what has been done for ecclesiastical music in Europe...

...One can determine if this is present in individual instances only by examining them separately...

...Anybody who was thinking merely of aesthetic effects would emphasize the fact that even today chant and ancient polyphony are notably remote from the people...

...Can an art in which the old spirit so manifestly stirs even in our time have become crassly anti-spiritual during three centuries...

...for the contacts existing between these forms and modern music are as yet restricted to the highest reaches of art music...

...Many leaders of the society adopted a stand in this combat which is no longer endorsed by prominent Caecilians in our time...

...LAW AND LAW ENFORCEMENT By JOHANNES MATTERN HE signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of the constitution clearly demonstrated their acceptance of what we call the popular will" as the law of the group...

...Though the development here was necessarily quite individual, the very differences between sacred and profane music help one to understand better the history of both...

...Its spirit cannot be described better than with these words of Walter Harburger, himself a meritorious composer of church music: Counterpoint and polyphony were born out of mediaeval man's experience of the organic and the superorganic...

...It goes without saying that we shall welcome the expression of readers" views, whether in dissent or agreement.--The Editors...

...By the middle of the century, church music had grown dangerously worldly in both France and Germany...

...Subjective sincerity even cannot be accepted as a satisfactory criterion--for who can doubt that Beethoven in his Missa Solemnis, or Berlioz in his Requiem, or even Haydn in the most elaborate of his coloratura Masses, was earnestly religious to the deepest fibre of his being...

...Meanwhile, however, reflective critics even of the opposition could not deny either the absolute musical value of the chant and of polyphony, or their especial liturgical appropriateness...

...This spirit found expression in a style of music alien to the Church and based ultimately upon foundations beyond the realm of melody...

...By KARL SCHAEZLER HROUGHOUT t h e nineteenth century cultural activities in both France and Germany remained under the spell of philosophic idealism...

...However, under the fundamental law of the new union, a formal procedure for the future determination of the popular will was decided upon...

...Thus there has been affirmed once more the declaration that the timeless, as the Church conceives of that, is also always contemporary...

...In other cities, notably in south Germany where the baroque style has exerted lasting influence upon all forms of ecclesiastical art activity, the situation is quite the same...

...While the chant is literally intertwined (stylistically speaking) with the liturgy, the old polyphony represents a much more independent art form...

...From the first incompatibility the Viennese classical masters, primarily Joseph Haydn, did not keep themselves free ; to the second the romantics, even men so genuinely pious and sympathetic with the Church as Franz Liszt and C6sar Franck, fell victims...

...It is true that one danger, seemingly puremusical, loomed up as the result of the adoption of instrumental music in the churches (in connection with which it is interesting to note that Richard Wagner called the introduction of orchestral music the first step in the decline of church music...

...The following paper deals with the trend of events in a sphere diametrically opposed to subjectivism and to the secularization of man's conception of the world...

...The way in which the immediate past has sought to liberate itself from this blight in the realm of music was set forth in my previous article in The Commonweal...

...Experience has taught us that under a system of simple majority vote, harmony between doctrinary fiat and empirical reality never lasts long...

...Now it remains for us to see to it that modern culture is first of all further suffused with a Catholic outlook...

...The words of Pope Plus X in the Motu Proprio regarding Catholic music are dear: The Church has always recognized and favored progress in the arts, in that she welcomed to a share in divine worship all good and beautiful achievements of genius throughout the centuries, in so far as they were compatible with liturgical rule...

...For any law enacted by a theoretical 51 to 49 vote...

...toward the Catholic worship of God...

...Yet we need hardly be surprised at finding that these men, as living exponents of their time, seek to master more and more completely the musical conquests of the modern age in so far as these are found compatible with the aims of divine worship...

...It must suffice to enumerate the following names, since none is, perhaps, well known in America: Joseph Rheinberger, the Munich teacher of a first.rate school of profane composers, who is himself no Caecilian and has most unjustly been neglected by this group...

...And subjectivism was, indeed, the stigma which attached to the artistic development of the century...

...There were people who did not want independence, and states which did not approve of the kind of union offered...

...Only sections of the Catholic youth movement have worked for consequent reform also in this instance...

...How could a positively defined boundary line be drawn here, on the other side of which melody unpermissible in the Church would lie...

...Here again the Church's ideal of music may be said to coincide with a tendency evident in the musical world as a whole: today we are once more harboring a preference for the older polyphony-though it is true that the choice favors the style of Bach rather than the style of Palestrina-and the attempts to create a new polyphony, discussed in my previous paper, hail from this source...

...The rendition of these works has been impossible, however, if only for extrinsic reasons...

...Because it is founded upon acceptance of this view of life, because its loftiness transcends and sublimates the world of sense, polyphonic music is also adapted in a very particular manner to use at Catholic worship, even though by its very nature--which is a distended musical structure--it often clouds the text more than instrumental music does...

...and in Germany the two abbeys of Beuron and Maria-Laach are the citadels of liturgy and chant...

...The blame attaches above all to the prevalent "spirit of enlightenment," and so to the attitude of estrangement from the truly supernatural which characterized many among the faithful...

...And because, for reasons of principle, I am aware of the cultural influence of all music, I do not fail to realize the truth that the Church must, without taking thought of the practical consequences, boldly place the ban upon music which it cannot reconcile with its own spirit...

...The last-named form has recently, as a result of the tendency in music as a whole to prize more highly horizontal structure through the melodic line than vertical structure through harmony, gained the recognition it deserves also from profane composers, some of them remote from the Church...

...Seeking to drive out what was inappropriate with what had been proved commendable, the Caecilians went back to Gregorian chant and to polyphonic music, especially Palestrina's...

...In the end it was not theoretical reasoning but considerations of a very practical kind which prompted the dissenters to abide by the decision of the Revolution and the non-conformist states to join the union as it was...

...At a time when the soil in which cultural values of the highest sort can grow is steadily being curtailed, people must reflect twice before they decide to give up something preciously cultural...

...Much room for improvement remains, of course, but unintelligent zeal will not hasten the coming of a better day...

...Dr...

...This was followed, though not until x894, by the establishment in France of the Schola Cantorum for much the same purposes...

...and in so far as it seeks to efface the boundaries between the arts as autonomous realms of values, it implies a relatively un-Catholic conception of the objective world in itself...

...Generally speaking the Church has tolerated rather than favored this form, partly for reasons incident to historical development and partly because it suspected or recognized that emphasis upon the religious meaning of the sacred text was being weakened in favor of aesthetic expression...

...It would have been phenomenal if this had left no imprint upon the arts...

...The fact of the winning of independence and the establishment of union was taken to imply that independence and union signified the will of the group...

...October 9, x929 THE COMMONWEAL 5;83 WHAT HAVE THE FAITHFUL SUNG...

...As is well known, the Benedictines of the French abbey of Solesmes had, during the sixties, gained international credit for their work in studying and cultivating Gregorian music...

...and there is the work (on a lower plane) of Walter Braunfels, the director of the Cologne Musikhochschul, and of Friedrich Klose, the Swiss composer of operatic music, whose Masses are mentioned here October 9, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 585 only as typical instances of unecclesiastical church music (Klose's own term...

...The Holy Father merely emphasized anew the Church's preference for vocal music and warned against too indulgent a use (immoderatiorem usum) of instruments...

...When we see that it has frequently been utilized in art music by modern writers, Max Reger and Richard Strauss among them, we have the best possible proof that the vitality of the chant had endured well beyond the thousand years of its history...

...and so one cannot upbraid or oppose the new age for seeking to fashion, with greater or lesser dependence upon the old forms, its own church music...

...The chief danger of the idealistic point of view lay, generally speakFew articles published in The Commonweal have evoked so much controversy as that which Mr...

...and if one proceeds to draw historical parallels, the fact can be explained not by reference to the lack of Christian unity in Germany, but only by accepting it as a serious symptom of the time...

...But "art for art's sake" and formalism are as little inherent in the nature of instrumental music as is the subjectivism which we perceived underlying nineteenth-century music, and which has its source in the spiritual outlook then prevalent...

...We may notice, above all, the Masses of Anton Bruckner...

...Here lay, in fact, the critical point in the whole movement...

...The revival of old polyphony met with a much more enthusiastic response than did Gregorian chant, and there are many churches whose choirs cultivate the strict, classical a capella style in an exemplary way...

...The wings of music could not, we shall admit, beat strongly in a world estranged...

...Since it is a historical, even if a very happy, realization of this musical ideal, the Palestrina style itself cannot, however, escape being bound up with the time in which it originated...

...because this tended, on the one hand, to give melody a position of aesthetic mastery rather than of ~subservience to the liturgy, and on the other hand catered to subjectivism by its use of "descriptive" and emotional music...