In a neighborhood where the voices of parochial students once echoed in Latin song, a careful listener can still hear a spiritual chant from centuries past.
Not verses robustly delivered by teenagers, mind you. Rather, these would be the voices of older folks, a dozen of them, who gather on Monday nights in a former schoolroom, where they are singing the Gregorian Chant. It is music that was heard in cathedrals for over 1,000 years and that was once viewed as central to Roman Catholic liturgy.
The singers, under fluorescent lights, say they are learning, or in some cases relearning, the chant because they love its sound, history and message. They are invariably enthusiastic: “Want to join us?” is the refrain directed at most any curious visitor. While they are not on a crusade to keep a church tradition alive, that is just what they are doing.
Several months ago, Mary Frances Stafford of Montpelier, a well-known Celtic harp performer and teacher and a parishioner at St. Augustine’s Church, the stately Gothic-style edifice on Barre Street, put an invitation in the church bulletin suggesting the formation of a Gregorian Chant group. For years, she had sung with community choruses and helped lead church choirs.
“I used to lead folksy groups at church,” she explains before a recent Monday night practice. Folk, along with other popular genres, had begun squeezing out the chant after Pope John XXIII, 50 years ago, began opening the gates to liturgical change with his convening of the Second Vatican Council.
One effect was the near total surrender of the Latin language to the vernacular in the Catholic Mass. The idea was to make the Mass more understandable to the faithful, a trend embraced by many, but one others think went too far.
“Contemporary, pop-style music can be beautiful, but I grew tired of it,” admits Stafford. “I don’t know which of the (contemporary) songs we sing will ever last, but my guess is not all of them,” she says with a laugh.
The chant, which probably grew from Hebrew music traditions, was embraced in the 6th century by Pope Gregory (whose likeness appears on stained glass windows at St. Augustine’s). So, the music had heft.
Though a product of parochial school education, Stafford is young enough to have missed the chant in its heyday, when it was a staple in parochial school music classes and parish choirs. She heard it, though, and became intrigued, especially during visits to Mass in the late 1960s at a Franciscan monastery near her Michigan hometown.
A few years ago she attended a week-long workshop on the Gregorian Chant at a retreat in Mystic, Conn., a program directed by chant scholar William Tortolano, an emeritus music professor at St. Michael’s College.
Tortolano, who still teaches the chant at St. Michael’s, has made the music accessible to less-academic types with his book, appropriately titled, “A Gregorian Chant Handbook.”
For Stafford, the workshop provided divine-like inspiration.
The response to Stafford’s invitation in the church bulletin was not massive, but no one is complaining about the turnout. And it helps that a few in the group have musical backgrounds.
Credit the chorus and its director for any success.
“That was lovely, and on the first attempt!” Stafford says at one point during the evening practice, six days before the monthly performance at Sunday Mass.
“Think about your ‘operatic’ pronunciation,” she reminds.
“When we start a new verse, let’s get peppy,” she says with vim.
The practice, running like clockwork during the prescribed 75 minutes, reminds of a workout, a run-through, before the big game, only vocal cords are being loosened not leg muscles, and verses are reviewed, not X’s and O’s.
Stafford instructs team members to hold their music books high near their chins on Sunday so they can read and watch her hand signals.
Gregorian Chant, though religious, had a brush with secular popularity in the 1990s thanks to a batch of CDs, put out by monastic groups, among them the nuns at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut, and, the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain.
The music, usually without instrumentation and “soothing and comfortable” in the words of Tortolano, had some new-age appeal for a while – the monks’ CD actually rising to the top of U.S. pop charts, even though the Latin was Greek to most listeners.
The fact the chant entered the mainstream, coupled with Pope Benedict XVI’s support for Latin Mass, gives chant enthusiasts hope for more renewal.
In fact, as chant devotees point out, Vatican II didn’t ban the chant, rather the prelates in Rome reaffirmed it as the official music of the church. The chant was just heard less and less as popular music in parishes became, well, more popular.
It didn’t also didn’t help that those parochial schools, ideal training grounds for the Gregorian Chant, began closing down across the country due to limited resources.
There is a resurgence. Will it eventually return as the only form of musical expression in the Catholic Church? I am not sure that will happen. But I think it should still be a structural part of the musical education of any parish.”
Kevin Parizo
music director, St. Mary’s Church, Middlebury
Still, Mary Frances and the St Augustine’s group are not alone in their efforts. For more than a decade, All Saints parish in Richford has been offering a traditional Latin Mass with Chant on Sundays. Holy Angels in St. Albans, with Dr. Tortorlano’s help, has formed a chant group. At St. Mary’s in Middlebury, Kevin Parizo, music director, has put together a choir of 30 that’s well-versed in the Gregorian Chant.
And the chant has forever been sung by the nuns at the Benedictine Monastery of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Westfield, where it is a part of the daily ritual.
“There is a resurgence,” says Parizo in Middlebury. “Will it eventually return as the only form of musical expression in the Catholic Church? I am not sure that will happen. But I think it should still be a structural part of the musical education of any parish.
“We have a need for this music because it is a part of our church’s cultural heritage, and because it has had such a vital influence on so many of the world’s great composers,” stresses Parizo.
A few of the older singers in Stafford’s group admit to a tinge of nostalgia when they remember the “Sanctus,” the “Agnus Dei,” the woeful “Deis Irae” or the hopeful “Tantum Ergo” and “Panis Angelicas.”
One choir participant, Sam Geyselaers, puts his chant book down during practice, not needing it, since he knows the words and music. The chant figured big time while he was growing up in a uniformly Catholic town, Berg-Terblyt, in southern Holland during the late 1940s and ‘50s.
As Geyselaers relates, during his childhood, all the kids attended public school, but the teachers still would provide religious instruction and still would march the youngsters over to the Catholic church for choir practice.
“Nostalgia? Yes,” he says, but there’s also the reverence and joy that comes with age-old music that’s “so relaxing and easy to sing”
Dirk Van Susteren is a Calais, Vt., freelance reporter and editor.
