CATHOLIC STUFF ABOUT MUSIC

I love the music of the Catholic church. I keep a little card on which I wrote the date when I sang my first Mass in Saint Margaret's church. I was in the fourth grade, and at that time the boy's choir sang every morning. We sang Latin Masses from a little book called the "Kyriale". The Mass parts were ancient, with a vast amount of Gregorian melodies and difficult notes, including the Requiem Mass for the dead. We sang that the most, and were frequently called out of class to sing a funeral Mass, which included the"Dies Irae"and the "In Paradisum". I still remember almost all of the words and music from those days.

After Vatican Two, Most of the Latin disappeared, and the English translations and melodies weren't particularly melodic or true to the texts. When "Pange Lingua" was translated into "Praise we Christ's Immortal Body", the gorgeous Latin text by Thomas Aquinas really suffered....and by then I'd had it. I'd been playing the organ in churches since I was thirteen, and had come to really hate the "New" music. Benediction became a much less solemn liturgy, as "O Salutaris" and "Tantum Ergo" bit the dust, and we were actually singing Kumbya with a guitar while the mighty pipe organ was in the OFF position. I gave up my organist gig which was always just a second job anyway, and stopped singing at Mass.

About fifteen years ago I attended a funeral Mass for a young friend, stopped up in the loft to say hello to a friend, and ended up singing with two other guys for the funeral, and we sounded pretty good. We were all at another funeral about a month later, same friends, and a few other people we knew, and of course we decided then and there that we were a men's choir. The rest is history.

We had a friend who played every Sunday downtown at the grand old Epiphany Church with superb acoustics and we began a monthly rehearsal at one of our member's homes, drank some wine while we practiced, ordered pizza, and the 15 of us started doing some Mozart and Franck etc, and we were welcomed by the church and now sing about once a month. Since I'm usually the "spark plug" that gets us together, I get to pick the music. On Holy Thursday we wear our cassocks and surplices and process through that majestic space singing the Pange Lingua. There is indeed some good music being written in this modern world, and we do a lot of it. We've discovered a lot of dusty old music for men's choirs hidden away in the dusty lofts, and it gets a new airing with the guys voices.

On January 8th this year, the church celebrates the feast of the Epiphany, and it's a big day at the church of the Epiphany. We'll shake the rafters with a rousing " We Three Kings" for starters. Our Mass is always on a Sunday at 5:00. So the moral of the story is...if you're unhappy about a situation like the music in the church of your cultural history, go somewhere else and start a choir ! Worked for me. I love the music again!