EWTN

[qfnol31]

Did anyone see Mass yesterday (the 20th)?

[homeschoolmom]

yep

[qfnol31]

I already told you. : How was the choir? ?

[homeschoolmom]

Great, of course...

[qfnol31]

It wasn't a normal one, I don't believe.

[qfnol31]

We were the choir! We actually flew down from Texas (or East or whatever) for the weekend and sang!

It was so much fun! You probably wouldn't believe this, but we have no music majors and only sing for Mass and because we want to. :

[homeschoolmom]

[Totus Tuus]

I couldn't hear it yesterday (I was out all morning). HEY! Were y'all the group that was coming to sing at the Shrine this week? I saw a note about it to the sacristan when I was working sacristy duty at the Shrine in October.....

[qfnol31]

Yep, that was us!

The Collegium Cantorum of the University of Dallas.

[Totus Tuus]

COOOOOLL!! I wanted to be able to hear it, but my aspirancy ended too early :-p

[qfnol31]

I was hoping more people could hear us than did, but that's okay.

Our whole mission is to restore sacred music in the Sacred Liturgy.

(I meant on EWTN). The shrine is so awesome to sing at!!! Someone knew something about acoustics!!!!!

Edited November 22, 2005 by qfnol31

[Totus Tuus]

I know it! Did you get to meet Sr. Agnes?

I am in a Gregorian Chant choir, so I totally understand what you're saying.

[qfnol31]

I'm not sure whom all we met. We ended up meeting about 10 or more nuns.

[qfnol31]

This is an old article on our choir by Janet Smith:

SACRED MUSIC
by Janet E. Smith

“The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater than that even of any other art” (SC, 112).

The weeks after a pilgrimage to Rome is a particularly apt time to deliberate about the document Sacrosanctum Concilium. Last year I led the first University of Dallas “Saints in Rome Pilgrimage” and had such a wonderful experience that I agreed to conduct one again. It wasn’t until the final Mass of the pilgrimage that one of our number broke into song and the reverberations of her angelic voice through the chapel, with the eager participation of others, drove home to me that the greatest deficiency of our first pilgrimage was the lack of music. So I prayed that God would send us a few good voices for our next pilgrimage.

Early in the spring when plans for the pilgrimage were well underway, Marilyn Walker, director of the Collegium Cantorum, the excellent University of Dallas choir that sings Latin polyphony, asked if the Collegium could accompany us. To resurrect the slang of a few years ago, consenting was a “no brainer.”

Undoubtedly, one of the more intelligent decisions I have ever made. The contribution of the Collegium to our trip was — to echo Sacrosanctum Concilium — inestimable. The Collegium is composed of thirty well-trained young people, current students and alumni of the university. In whatever church we visited they would gather and sing a few motets. The response of other pilgrims, tourists, Jubilee year volunteers, and church personnel was invariably the same. As the divine sound filled the church and surrounded them, they would momentarily arrest whatever they were doing. They would then rush on wings of desire to see what was the source of the transcendent music. Soon they would strike a meditative pose, their eyes lit up with a sublime joy, some faces wreathed in smiles of surprised delight, others weeping at the intense spiritual experience they were undergoing. I saw a group of Filipino nuns in St. Mary Major so transported that I imagined each of their guardian angels and patron saints rejoicing at the gift that had been provided them through what can only have been divine machinations. Providence strikes again!

What can match the power of music to transport and unite? Certainly there is a place for contemporary and ethnically rooted music in the liturgy; indeed, Sacrosanctum Concilium makes recommendations for inculturation that undoubtedly unsettle many traditionalists. Yet, the unitive power of traditional church music should not be underestimated. People from all over the world, drawn to Rome by its multiple attractions, shared a few moments when time stopped and thus entered into a spiritual communion. Yes, the art, the history, the food, were splendid but it was music, a music that is familiar — or should be — to people from around the world — that drew us out of our individual interests and had us as one focused on the divine, however briefly.

For all that I have said about the importance of the music, one cannot, of course, discount the beauty of the churches we visited and the art within them. (I will forego commenting on the excellence of the food since arguably such is not essential to a pilgrimage and has little to do with the liturgy. Yet, perhaps not . . . it, too, celebrates a meal and we can be said to be extending the Eucharist into our gatherings.) We feasted our eyes on fascinating frescoes, mosaics, paintings, reliefs, sculptures, sarcophagi, etc. We concentrated not only on the excellence of the artwork but on the meaning of the representations. Again, fervent prayer is easy when one has before one inspiring stories of saints or images portraying great theological ideas.

Most of the pilgrims began to develop particular interests that focused their visits. One was fond of portrayals of the “dormition” of Mary (did she die, or did she just “fall asleep”?); one was on a futile mission to demonstrate that St. Joseph was a young man. I have a particular fascination with scenes involving devils; devils being crushed, devils being cast out, devils being denied souls they were wrongly claiming; devils latching on to souls rightfully belonging to them. There is a holy water font at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls that I discovered this time and especially like; it portrays a cherub reaching up to dip his fingers into the font and a devil cowering on the other side. After a student returning from a visit to a church proclaimed “Professor Smith, I saw a devil today and I thought of you,” I had second thoughts on having shared my interest with others!

Prayer in such grand and beautiful places with gorgeous song was an easy task; music as it lifts the listeners on the “wings of song” quite does one’s praying for one. Moreover, it is nearly impossible not to be moved to prayer in the presence of such powerful reminders of the saints and their total dedication to the Lord. The forty-five minute performance in the Sistine Chapel (which we had to ourselves!) had even the guards holding up their cell phones so their friends could hear. One of the pilgrims said that that one concert made every cent of the trip worth it. The choir members spoke of how moving and to a degree frightening, it was to sing in front of the Last Judgment — but also said it was more frightening to sing before a less merciful judge, their choir director, Marilyn Walker.

A number of people commented on the reverence exhibited by the young people of the choir. These were typical young people — for instance, they were concerned that there might not be enough time to shop and “hang out” in more secular locales (as it happened, there was). Nonetheless they took the pilgrimage seriously; their time in Rome was not just a vacation for them, nor just an opportunity to experience the beauty of their voices in churches designed to give music its best hearing. They, of course, were at many different stages of their faith journeys. There were several who were already devout believers, others were struggling with the most elemental teachings of the faith, some were carrying very heavy burdens of personal sufferings. They, too, humbly wept at the beauty of their own voices and at the fit between what they were singing, seeing, and where they were.

Many have long bemoaned the minimalism of modern church art and architecture, the banishment of all Latin and Latin music from the liturgy, the cocktail lounge or hootenanny music, the general slovenliness of the liturgy, the celebrants, the participants, none of which correspond to the directives of Sacrosanctum Concilium. Let us pray that future architects, artists, composers, and liturgists make pilgrimages to holy places and that they encounter beautiful music and art when they do, for then they may be prepared to present the faithful with the churches and liturgies truly envisioned by Vatican II.

[Totus Tuus]

Sr. Agnes is the choir director