But what of the figured musical compositions of those musicians who may in our time be honored with the title of “ancient,” such as Palestrina and his imitators? The music of this style forms, we are told, the staple of what is commonly heard in S. Peter's. The writer of the article we allude to evidently believes any attempt to make such music popular would be no less a failure. The intricacy of the style, the exceeding difficulties attendant upon its artistic execution, and its restricted vocal character, are “fatal” objections.
We fully agree with him. In our former articles on this subject (The Catholic World, December, 1869, and February and March, 1870) we not only pronounced modern figured music to be in practice a failure as church music, but intended also to be understood as asserting that the cause of this failure lay chiefly in the melodious form of such music—the necessary result of a tonality essentially sensuous, which renders it, despite every effort of the artist, intrinsically unsuitable for the expression of the “prayer of the church.” That there is prayerful music we do not deny, but it will never obtain any more positive sanction from the church than she gives to the hundred and one sentimental “prayers” and turgid “litanies” which fill the pages of our “largest books of devotion” ad nauseam, and are equally supposed by the uneducated Catholic and the ignorant Protestant to be the masterpieces of Catholic musical and liturgical art.
We did not think it necessary, writing as we did for a special class of readers, to explain the distinguishing characteristics of the church's “prayer,” being, as our learned friend says, fourfold—latreutic, impetratory, propitiatory, and eucharistic. To us the church was not wanting in wisdom in the adoption alone of plain chant to express her divine prayer, whether it happen to be latreutic, impetratory, propitiatory, or eucharistic. She never made any distinction that we know of. But our learned friend, while he cannot help but admit that for the purposes of adoration, propitiation, and supplication it is not only all that could be desired, but is also better than any other melody, denies, with an ipse dixit, its capability of expressing praise and thanksgiving. Argument does not seem to be worth seeking. “Plain chant,” he says, “is confessedly unequal to the task of evoking and expressing the feelings [pg 151] of Christian joy and triumph.” And again: “It certainly must borrow from figured music the triumphant strains of praise and thanksgiving.”
Neither one nor the other. We confess to nothing of the kind. And although, by the rule of argumentation, we are not called upon to prove a negative, we refer to the response good Brother Gregorius has already made, and would furthermore ask if the Te Deum, the Exultet, the Preface for Easter Sunday, the Alleluia of Holy Saturday, or the Lauda Sion, are confessedly unequal to the task assigned them?
As far as the question has any practical importance, we feel that not another word need be said. Plain chant is in lawful possession, and cannot be ousted by personal caprice or taste, nor by gratuitous assumptions of its inability to answer the end proposed by the wise authority of the church; still less by a proposed substitution of a system which, after three centuries of vain efforts to supplant the rightful possessor, is declared, even by its own friends, to be “a failure,” and the majority of its painfully-produced works fit only to be consigned to the flames.
We have, however, a question of more merit to discuss. If modern music has failed to meet the requirements of Catholic devotion, it will be not a little interesting to examine into the true cause of this failure. It will be found to lie in its melodic form (not in the use of harmony), which came into being with the introduction of the chord of the diminished seventh and the substitution of the instrumental, factitious scales called major and minor for the four natural vocal, authentic scales and their four correlative plagal scales. Like seeks like, and as this chord of the seventh was an inspiration of sentimental, languishing, passional feeling, the new music sought its language in poetry, and chiefly in lyric poetry, in which every sort of human passion finds smooth expression; and as this latter is divided into regular feet, with recurring emphasis and cadence, music soon found itself set to time. Its melody became measured. Pegasus found himself in harness. To express the sublime, [pg 152] the heroic, was only possible now by knocking down the bars, putting it all ad libitum, and calling the phrase recitative; and as the passage from the sublime to the ridiculous is proverbially short, the composition of many of these recitatives, in their leaping intervals and startling contrasts, vividly remind one of Pegasus let loose to scamper and roll unbridled in the open fields.
The invention and perfection of musical instruments are coincident with the rise and progress of the system of melody known as “modern music,” the organ and piano holding the mastery. To these are due, in great measure, the universal cultivation of the modern tonality, and the consequent loss of appreciation of the tonality of the ecclesiastical modes. It is heard in the lullaby at the cradle's side, whistled by boys in the streets, sung by children in popular melodies and hymns at school, confirmed by all the concerts given by orchestras in halls, theatres, and public meetings; every young lady strums it forth from her piano, every organist modulates it in church, while all bells, from thousands upon thousands of churches, jangle it forth from one end of Christendom to the other. That the church has been able to withstand the pressure of all this, and still dares to command her priests to chant “per omnia sæcula sæculorum” to her own ancient mode, is, even in that simple and significant sentence, a proof of her divine strength to resist the most alluring seductions and powerful onslaughts of the world, and a note of calm defiance to its “fashion which passeth away.”
We are now prepared to enter into a critical examination of the essential character of music as distinguished from plain chant. In the first place, we find, as we have already noted, that it is measured in its melody—that is, it is written, as it is said, in time; and, as a consequence of its lyrical movement, it became equally subjected to certain laws of versification and of phraseology corresponding to the stanza. When musicians began to write for the language of the church, and to set the sublime prose of her Gloria in Excelsis, Credo, etc., to its form of melody, this supposed necessity of making musical stanzas compelled the application of what is known in music as the theme, on which certain fanciful variations were built, shorter or longer, as the musician deemed necessary to complete his “work,” altogether forming a sort of Procrustean bed, on which the sacred words of the Liturgy were either dismembered or stretched by repetition in order to make them fit the melody. To make the “work” fit the words was not to be thought of; whence we judge it well for the peace of Mr. Richardson that Mozart and Haydn have departed this life. We remember, when a boy, long before we had made more [pg 153] than a child's acquaintance with the modern “Masses,” squeezing the Kyrie Eleison after this fashion on the framework of one of De Beriot's celebrated airs for violin and piano, and gave ourselves as much credit for the originality of the “adaptation” as we are willing to give to the man who first of all (to the misfortune of true church chant) tried to compose a musical theme for the same words of prayer. We refer our readers to the late paper on “Church Music” in the August and September numbers of this magazine, and to the translation of the Gloria in Excelsis of Mozart's Twelfth Mass, as given in one of our former articles, as proofs of the perfectly outrageous extent to which this “adaptation” has already been carried.
Now, we affirm, as a principle, that the expression of the “Prayer of sacrifice and of praise,” as we may term the Holy Mass and the recitation of the Divine Office, should be consonant with, and conformed to, the manner in which the church directs the celebration of the acts of the same. The celebrant and his ministers, the acolytes and the chorus, do not march, halt, turn about, or otherwise conduct themselves like soldiers or like puppets on wires, neither do they hop and glide and go through set figures like dancers. Melody in measure is therefore wholly unsuited to the character and spirit of the acts of the performers.
In connection with the acts of Catholic worship, melody in measure is therefore incongruous, unmeaning, and absurd. For, to put the question plainly, if neither celebrant, ministers, chorus, nor people are to march—to do which, even in her sacred processions, would be shocking and profane—why sing a march? If they are not to waltz, why sing one? If the church does not want to