Aurelio Porfiri
I used to read, many years ago, an American magazine called Pastoral Music, published by the National Association of Pastoral Musicians (NPM). In recent years, mulled over this theme of the pastoral value of music, of how music (sacred music especially) can be of benefit to the faithful gathered in church.
I remember a story that Cardinal Domenico Bartolucci, distinguished musician and exceptional composer, used to repeat to us his students. This story involved a meeting with the then Giovanni Battista Montini (future Pope Paul VI), probably at the time of the Council. The Maestro always said that he was on good terms with Montini, though the relationship soured as abuses began to enter the liturgy, despite what the Council had established. Of course, it is difficult to give a judgment on that.
But let’s get back to the story. Montini, meeting with Domenico Bartolucci, had addressed him in this way: “Maestro, why does he not give us some beautiful pastoral music?”. When he mentioned the story, the Maestro could not hold back his indignation as a good Tuscan. He perhaps felt an unintended opposition between art music and “pastoral music.” As if the need to write music aimed at pastoral care was for those who are not professional musicians, and was different from having to write Masses, motets, oratorios, symphonies and so on. But this is actually a contradiction that does not exist in reality. Because then, if we want to say it all, “pastoral music” does not exist, there is art music, made with artistic skills that can be written for the choir, for the orchestra or for the people. There are no “pastoral” composers (or rather, there are even too much but there should not be). Here we see at work the false opposition between the theory (the doctrine) and the praxis (the practice), between the content of thought and experience. But experience, without the content of thought, without wisdom and knowledge, remains empty or, at best, momentary and fleeting.
It could be said that simple and beautiful melodies often abounded especially in the past; but often they were the result not of a sort of musical inspiration but of spontaneous motions of the soul. This is true, and those melodies have a very important quality that is lacking in much of the so-called “pastoral music” produced in recent decades: sincerity. You can really feel a cleanliness, honesty and clarity in them that makes you see them almost at the moment of their gushing from the soul of our peasants, our women of the house, from the pure spirit of the children.
What we often have today is not this. We now have products of industrial and / or commercial derivation, which exploit some strategies (well known in the pop world) to solicit easy emotionalism, not the emotion, the low sentimentality, not the sentiment. Beauty is the best pastoral approach. Here is what the Church had understood in the past, that the great painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, were at the service of the papal courts and cardinals, but those who could enjoy the free beauty scattered among our beautiful churches were the whole people, the people who could pray in front of paintings that today are jealously guarded in the most important museums in the world. Beauty is not against pastoral care, beauty is pastoral care.
Today we often mean beauty as an impediment to pastoral care. Therefore, by releasing beauty from pastoral care, we obtain a so-called “pastorality” applied to art, which unfortunately does not go much further than mere entertainment and often not of good quality. So, as Fr Nicola Bux pointed out to me, it is logical to call those who are called to make music in the liturgy and to lead the song of the people “animatori” (Italian for “entertainer”), as if they were in a tourist village. Of course, in itself “animare” (in italian “anima” is the soul) means to give life to something. But we all know that the common meaning given to that term is precisely that of those who keep adults and children busy in tourist villages or in recreational clubs. That, clearly, is not bad but it is not what one expects in the liturgy. And the “soul” of liturgy is not certainly in the efforts of “entertainers.” And people are not in church to keep busy with something, if this “something” is not really meaningful for their souls.
But sacred music does not exist in a vacuum, and the good and bad come also from changes in philosophy and theology. So when some changes are not good, these have influences also in the way some people perceive, as example, sacred music. Let us stick to St Pius X, a great Pope that should be studied outside the fights between partisans factions. In 1907, in his seminal Encyclical Pascendi: “Religion, whether natural or supernatural, must, like every other fact, admit of some explanation. But when Natural theology has been destroyed, the road to revelation closed through the rejection of the arguments of credibility, and all external revelation absolutely denied, it is clear that this explanation will be sought in vain outside man himself. It must, therefore, be looked for in man; and since religion is a form of life, the explanation must certainly be found in the life of man. Hence the principle of religious immanence is formulated. Moreover, the first actuation, so to say, of every vital phenomenon, and religion, as has been said, belongs to this category, is due to a certain necessity or impulsion; but it has its origin, speaking more particularly of life, in a movement of the heart, which movement is called a sentiment. Therefore, since God is the object of religion, we must conclude that faith, which is the basis and the foundation of all religion, consists in a sentiment which originates from a need of the divine. This need of the divine, which is experienced only in special and favourable circumstances, cannot, of itself, appertain to the domain of consciousness; it is at first latent within the consciousness, or, to borrow a term from modern philosophy, in the subconsciousness, where also its roots lies hidden and undetected.” Everything is reduced to “our feelings,” what we like or not, disregarding the objective principles that are at the basis of different disciplines, including sacred music. So “pastoral” for some people means “let the youth play music that they like” not the music that is good for them and for everyone because respond to criteria or art and tradition,
Therefore, we should not forget the lesson of St Pius X who in his famous Motu proprio Tra le sollecitudini (November 22, 1903) gave some important indications that should (and still must) help us to see the important characteristics that music must possess to be admitted in the liturgy: “Sacred music should consequently possess, in the highest degree, the qualities proper to the liturgy, and in particular sanctity and goodness of form, which will spontaneously produce the final quality of universality. It must be holy, and must, therefore, exclude all profanity not only in itself, but in the manner in which it is presented by those who execute it. It must be true art, for otherwise it will be impossible for it to exercise on the minds of those who listen to it that efficacy which the Church aims at obtaining in admitting into her liturgy the art of musical sounds. But it must, at the same time, be universal in the sense that while every nation is permitted to admit into its ecclesiastical compositions those special forms which may be said to constitute its native music, still these forms must be subordinated in such a manner to the general characteristics of sacred music that nobody of any nation may receive an impression other than good on hearing them.”
If we carefully meditated on the profound wisdom of these statements, reaffirmed in the following decades by other Pontiffs, it would be good to understand that pastoral care is not itself without beauty, beauty that is its true, only and necessary soul.
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