Daily Singing to Sunday Singing
One of the hardest things to do, in terms of participation in the mass, is to empower the people to sing. There are many documents in the church that talk about the importance of singing the liturgy yet, I have found none of them convincing or empowering for the congregation. As a result, I have always sought to reconcile what it means to participate in the mass fully. Are we supposed to be internalizing our worship, shouting out loud, hold our hands up during the Lord’s Prayer (the argument of whether or not it is considered to be Orans posture is ever-going). I have discovered that there are better reasons for why people do not sing in the American Roman Catholic church although many smaller factors interfere with it as well.
I have heard it said that people do not sing because they are lazy or that the songs are too high or low. Other times, it is because the organist is being too flashy or not flashy enough in their accompaniment to the congregational song. Or perhaps it is the guitarist that is impeding the human voice with their distortion. All of this is plausible and ought to be addressed but, to me, it seems like losing the forest for the trees. The problem is that the church is, by and large, one led by the oral tradition.
Many countries around the world have historically led their people in song through the oral tradition. In Scotland, it was common to “line-out” hymns in which the precentor or song-leader would sing the verse ahead of the congregation and the congregation would repeat. Hymns were written in a way that the phrases were short enough to be sung in completion with every turn of the song-leader. In the mid 16th century, the oral tradition was used by the indigenous of South American in their Taki Unquy, in which the indigenous sang to drive out the Christian God and return to worship the pre-Hispanic gods. During the Reformation, Martin Luther outlined hymn tunes in his earliest hymns, contributing to the strophic genre. And as Catholics, our sequences come from old folk tunes which, like Luther’s hymns, were strophic and, thus, easily sung for being approachable, at least in comparison to other chants such as the introit or communio.
So how can the church use the oral tradition in order to nature participation? We can start to think about daily mass. Our congregations have a number of devout worshipers who also attend daily mass. They are exposed to the Anima Christi, the rosary, the Lord’s Prayer, the Nicene Creed, among other prayers more than once a week and some even everyday. To get out congregations to sing we have to recognize that we must begin with the daily mass.
Our daily masses have responses and short dialogues that go spoken everyday. The priests usually speak them along with our lectors who will speak the psalm and antiphons. But this can be an opportunity to be much more effective in the minds of the observing congregations. It begins with having the priest sing all of his prayers such as his opening collect and Eucharistic preface. Subsequently, they ought to also respond to themselves in order to teach the congregation to sing. This goes for the Octave of Easter also during the Ite misse est. These short dialogues are absolutely necessary in order to encourage singing of more complicated parts such as the Pater Noster. You might notice that the Pater Noster, or Our Father, is usually readily sung by the congregation and is hardly referenced to in a booklet. The next step is to encourage the lector ministry in singing.
As music directors, we ought to spend a lot of time with our lector ministries. They are some of the most important ministries because they have the power to interpret the Word through their inflections, tone, speed, timbre, etc. They must study the scripture in order to properly phrase it, much like a concert pianist or violinist. It is with them that we must entrust our teaching of the dialogues, such as those after the readings, the gospel acclamation, and some of the church’s most treasured texts, the mass ordinary. Typically, daily masses are not long by design since people who attend them are usually on their lunch breaks, on their way to work, or are just coming come from work. However, there are chants that can be sung in that short amount of time. Mass XVI is wonderful for its simplicity and limited range but any mass will do as long it is able to be sung acapella. Acapella singing is preferable for its ability to concentrate on the words and, more practically, for not having an organist or pianist always available at daily mass.
Our lectors are the key to promoting a culture of singing. They must do so carefully by beginning with the dialogues, acclamations, and then mass ordinary. A congregation cannot learn to sing by teaching on Sundays anymore than a pianist can perform by practicing at the recitals. Our daily mass is the key to tapping into the oral tradition of the church because it is only through oral tradition that we remove the stimulus of anything external, anything that impedes the freedom to engage fully in the liturgy. The freedom of and in Christ is one that removes the stimuli of anything that does not give and promote spiritual life in us. Conceptually this is simple but in life, this is often quite difficult to discern. Teaching congregational singing in an oral tradition must reflect this freedom by removing the stimulus of anything distracting, at least in the infancy stages, or anything else and must become as natural as anything else in the liturgy, from the Lord’s Prayer to the prayer of the Roman centurion at the fraction of the Host. The hymnal can be considered a stimuli at first and ought to be introduced after a congregation has been conditioned to sing more comfortably.
Our job as directors is to look toward the short term and long term. In the short term, it may just mean teaching our lectors the mass ordinary and dialogues. The long term, however, means having a congregation respond with song as naturally as any other prayer in the liturgy. The chants to begin teaching might just be the Kyrie or the Lamb of God. This, of course, is recommended after teaching all the dialogues. By building on this oral tradition, our congregations are empowered to sing in the way humans have been singing for centuries, freely and naturally. This does not mean that they cannot sing from a hymnal or missalette; to engage a congregation’s oral tradition via the written notation, the cantor must learn when to back off and allow the congregation to respond. The goal is the same: empower the congregation to sing via the freedom of and in Christ.
