What Makes Music Sacred?
Hank Stuever wrote last week about the state of music in the Catholic Church. The older Catholics want to hold on to contemporary music and the younger Catholics want to reinstate traditional music:
Imagine a bizarro world where all the 25-year-olds want Mozart and all the 60-year-olds want adult-contemporary. The kids think the adults are too wild. The backlash against “Kumbaya Catholicism” has anyone under 40 allegedly clamoring for the Tridentine Mass in Latin, while the old folks are most sentimental about Casual Sunday (even more rockin’, the Saturday vigil Mass), and still cling to what’s evolved from the lite-rock guitar liturgies of the 1970s. The result, for most parishes, has been decades of Masses in which no one is entirely satisfied, and very few enjoy the music enough to sing along.
This conflict is, of course, not new, although the younger audience arguing against modernism presents an interesting twist.
For the older crowd, guitar music is the tradition. It’s what they have heard Sunday after Sunday. It is as familiar as “The Old Rugged Cross” was to my parents’ generation. People find comfort in the familiar, not necessarily in a bad way, but frequently as recognition that something has served them well over the years. Particular music may have helped them over particularly difficult hurdles.
Arguing the traditionalists’ case can be difficult. We don’t know which hymns Paul and Silas sang in prison or how many revolutions church music may have encountered before producing the oldest surviving manuscripts. We can go back to our favorite point in history and stop, arguing for the traditions of 19th-century hymnody or the ars nova or the rock masses of 1970. Or we can go back as far as the evidence takes us. But either way the process is incomplete.
Tradition, however, is inescapable. When we throw one tradition overboard, we institute another. There is a long tradition of importing secular and popular forms of music into worship and calling it new. Turning the folk songs of the 60s into the liturgy of the 70s was merely a continuation of that process.
Which raises the real question: what makes music sacred?
I don’t intend to answer that question today for lots of reasons, one being that I don’t have a quick answer and another being that I don’t have time to write a long one. But it is a question that I would like to address in this blog over time.
Let’s ask an easier question instead. Why are young people today looking to music of the past rather than trying to import their own pop styles into worship? The answer seems to be, at least in part, that they don’t have their own pop styles. We could teach the history of the 20th century through the pop music that gave voice, for better or worse, to every social whim and cultural upheaval. But young people today share music primarily in the technological sense. Music does not give them a common voice; they all have their individualized playlists. Many listen to the music of their parents and grandparents, something my generation shunned. The Beatles are still famous, and my teenage daughter listens to Frank Sinatra.
Something has gone missing.
Back to the Catholics, when I see a controversy like the present one, I find comfort in the fact that there is a place for Kumbaya Catholics, a place for praise-chorus Protestants, and a different place for me. Variety in styles of worship enables me to indulge my own musical preferences, which seem to be very much in the minority.
I am concerned, however, that the next wave of new music to be imported into the church will not be a new pop style, or a return to ancient chant or Sacred Harp song books. No, I am concerned that my own preference for allowing people to have whatever music they prefer will be taken to its logical conclusion by the techno-savvy youth whose iPods have disconnected them from the societal and cultural aspects of music. Somebody, if he hasn’t already, is about to individualize worship in a radical way by passing out personal listening devices with the bulletins. Instead of announcing Hymn 243 to the congregation, the Pastor will suggest that we all put on our headsets for three minutes of personal contemplation. The church will adopt the same fallacious answer we have for everything these days – that it’s just a matter of personal taste.
There will be some great heresy in this, and that is why we need to answer the real question: what makes music sacred?
