The first part deals with the corrosive cultural and psychological effects of a lot of modern popular music, contrasted with the numerous benefits of a lifelong apprenticeship to the great music of the Western tradition (including the many excellent composers working today). Here I draw upon such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Pieper, and Ratzinger as well as years of interesting interactions with young people, whom I often guided through what might be called their “musical conversion.”
The second part gives a thorough philosophical and theological account of what is right about chant, polyphony, and pipe organ, and what is wrong with, say, folksy guitar-and-piano or peppy Praise & Worship genres at Mass.
In the last and (appropriately) shortest part, I speak of the ways in which silence is both the origin and the fulfillment of music. The book ends with a thorough defense of the more-than-thousand-year-old custom of the silent Canon in the Mass.
Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence was written for the benefit of pastors, seminarians, church musicians, homeschooling families, classical curriculum advocates, and anyone already in love with music or seeking to develop their knowledge of it—an aspiration for the achievement of which I offer concrete strategies.
Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life (hardcover, 344 pp., $29.95, ISBN 978-1505122282) is available from the publisher, from Amazon, or from the author.
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Fr. John Perricone
Preface
Abbreviations and Conventions
PART I
Music Fit for Kings: The Role of Good Music in the Christian’s Life
1. Music as a Character-Forming Force
2. Nourishing Our Souls on Beauty
3. Problems with Rock Music and Its Offshoots
4. Why I Threw Away My Rock and Rap Cassettes in High School
5. The Journey into Great Music
PART II
Music Fit for the King of Kings: The Role of Sacred Music in the Church’s Life
6. Sacred Music as an Occasion of Grace for Modern Man
7. “Breathing the Air of the Sacred”: Music and the Liturgy
8. Gregorian Chant: Perfect Music for Christian Worship
9. Understanding the Place of Gregorian Chant in the Mass
10. Don’t Change the Sign, Change Yourself
11. A Blueprint for Parish Musical Restoration
12. Music of High Artistic Value
13. Ecclesial and Ethical Consequences of Poor Church Music
14. Driving the Musical Merchants Out of the House of Prayer
15. Traditional Sacred Music versus “Contemporary Worship Music”
16. True and False Musical Inculturation
17. Objective Form and Subjective Experience: Life Teen under Scrutiny
18. Fitting and Unfitting Musical Instruments for Sacred Music
19. Pouring the Argument into the Soul
20. The Campaign against Musically-Shaped Memory
PART III
Giving Way to Silence
21. The Endangered Sonic Species
22. “Where Has God Gone?” The Pressure of Horror Vacui
23. The Majesty of the Silent Canon
Bibliography
Index
“There is something to be said for refined and subtle music, especially for the well-educated listener and for the well-catechized, practicing Catholic; one’s music should match one’s general level of intellectual and religious culture. It would be strange for those who derive literary enjoyment from great poets, playwrights, and novelists or who participate in the sublime sacrifice that unites heaven and earth to subsist on the musical equivalent of hot dogs, Twinkies, and soda pop. The larger problem, then, is that modern Christians have—usually through no fault of their own—such low cultural literacy and expectations that they do not perceive the massive disjunct. Individual Christians need to address this problem in their own lives, to the extent that they become aware of it.” (p. 49)
“Ratzinger is famous for his exposure of the Dionysian, diabolic spirit behind rock music. Apart from some aberrations that occurred more in the seventies than today, the devil knew he could not get unfiltered rock music into the churches. So he got his cloven hoof into the Mass by a softer, subtler device: insipid, uninspiring, artistically banal, relentlessly horizontal music that derives from rock and pseudo-folk music but has at times something of an appearance of reverence without the substance. In this way, it was possible to retard an entire generation’s transformation in Christ by institutionalizing the sensual shallowness of profane existence.” (p. 162)
“As it is in our own day, so it was at the turn of the twentieth century: the situation of church music was extremely wretched, impoverished, and desperate. When Giuseppe Sarto (the future Pius X) was preparing to assume the office of Patriarch of Venice and requested Gregorian chant for his inaugural Mass, his choirmaster Lorenzo Perosi wrote in dismay that he could hardly find any chant books in Saint Mark’s Basilica and hastily ordered thirty copies of the Kyriale from Solesmes. About six months after his inauguration, Sarto released a pastoral letter (May 1, 1895) implementing a ‘minimum’ program for musical reform, with diocese-wide requirements that might well be taken up as a model today by truly forward-thinking bishops:
‘The Cardinal ordered that, at least once a month, in all the churches [of Venice], the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei should be sung in Gregorian chant, as well as the Introit, the Gradual, the Offertory, the Communion chant, and the office of Vespers. He forbade the piano and bands in churches, and ordered that every parish should set up a school of Gregorian chant. He also created a [diocesan] Sacred Music Commission, with the task of promoting the study and performance of sacred music and chant, and of making sure that the prescribed norms were observed.’
Cardinal Sarto was elected pope only eight years later, and this time he waited only three months before issuing the momentous motu proprio Tra le Sollecitudini. Thus we can see how a true reformer, a good shepherd, acts quickly to remedy the evils that oppress his flock.” (p. 158)
“For Ratzinger, music and silence are interdependent correlatives. Authentic sacred music is born out of silence and returns gently into silence. It arises not as an imposition on people or as a provocation of them, but as an awed response to God’s beauty—an attempt at interpreting, among us, the heavenly music far above us. Similarly, a truly prayerful silence is one that is, of its very nature, receptive to appropriate sound, whether spoken or sung. The right music is capable of emerging harmoniously from silence and merging peacefully into it; the wrong music does violence to silence, overpowering and stifling it.” (p. 271)
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Mary Harrell of TAN Books did a 26-minute interview with me to talk about the book, for those who may be interested:
