– Aurelio Porfiri
The repertoire that par excellence represents the high point of a cappella music is Gregorian chant. Generation of singers, monks and laypeople, have sung these beautiful monophonic melodies, trying to attune their heart to the movement of the neumes in their melismatic arabesques.
Many years ago, I was in Malibu (California) for a conference on choral music. There I met Father Columba Kelly, an American Benedictine who recently passed away on 9 June 9 2018, at the age of 87. I interviewed him then but the interview was never published, so I take this opportunity to pay homage to Father Kelly, who was always very kind. After his studies in Rome under the scholar Eugene Cardine in the fifties, Father Kelly continued his work in USA, in the abbey of Saint Meinrad.
Do you think a cappella singing has preeminence over accompanied singing?
I think that in Catholic tradition, a cappella singing is the primary means of communicating especially at the Liturgy of the Hours and in the Eucharist. Over the years we’ve added instruments to the chant. But the primary mode is a cappella singing.
For you, what is the added value of a cappella singing? Why is it better than accompanied singing?
Because the vocal style of chant is quite different from any instrumental style and the nuances that come from the voice are different than those from an instrument, and most instruments either block out or contradict those vocal inflections. I remember the organ instructor who told his students “When you accompany chant make sure that the accompaniment is only heard when the singers stop singing.” That means that it’s almost not there. And I think this is one of the biggest problems. Contemporary Catholic composers are writing primarily for instruments. Their software presupposes instruments. So you start with the instrument to which you add words for a voice. My point is that with a cappella music you start with the voice and if necessary, you may add, for color and for effect or support in pitch, whatever instruments that would be appropriate.
So am I to understand from your statement that you don’t like Gregorian chant accompanied by the organ?
I think the ideal is that it should be unaccompanied. As Dom Cardine was want to say, it is pure vocal music with no instrumental accompaniment. Once you start adding an accompaniment then you’re also smearing over the delicate melodic nuances created by the added notes over a particular syllable. Once you put down a chord, you’re over-emphasizing certain pitches in the scale while the singers with the varied embellishments used in the chants, are just hinting at a certain harmonic color. It’s kind of like good French cooking versus McDonald’s hamburger.
And we know that Pope Saint Pius X in the Motu Proprio Fra le Sollecitudini (1903) affirmed that Gregorian chant is a model for all church music, and it is a model for a cappella singing. What is it in Gregorian chant that makes it a model?
I now wish, with the advantage of hindsight, that when the Pope had said this, that he had been able to use some of the chant scholars of his day, just as Pius XII did with his Encyclical on Sacred Scripture, when he got the scholars of his day involved. So my answer is, that the model is the fact that it starts with how one speaks the text well and how you pray it. Canon Augustine Gontier, who helped Solesmes at the beginning, put it well in his manual on how to sing chant. He said that it is “well spoken and phrased speech.” That it is sung prayer. And I think that is crucial. For you’re not doing a performance, you’re not doing an opera or theater. All the musical nuances come out in all the way the voice already expresses itself in speech. So it is the intensification of all the elements that are already present in good public proclamation of an important text. Cicero has remarked that in every speech there is “a cantus obscurior.” The basic elements of melody and rhythm are already present when we speak a text well. So I would say, that is the model for Gregorian chant. You start there, and then build up from there. Once you lose track of that, you should be aware that you’re no longer following the model.
Do you think that Gregorian chant, despite the fact that we don’t sing anymore in Latin, and that the Church has accepted some modern forms of music, is still a model?
Yes, I think that it is still a model. I wish to give you a quote from the present Abbot of Solesmes: “Today, we measure the thirst of our communities for a liturgical music deserving of its name. Why not ask Gregorian chant to reveal its secret in the languages and in the cultures of our time? That which was the fruit of one of the biggest cultural turnovers in the history of the Church could it not help us to face the challenges of our time? And to lead finally all peoples to sing ‘nostris linguis magnalia Dei’? (Act.2,11)” [From a talk given in Rome in 2004 by Abbot Phillip Dupont of Solesmes]. He made that statement with the hope that Gregorian chant would open its secrets to modern composers in their creating new music for the liturgy. I also think that it is a model for creating new chant. Just as our ancestors created something new in the Romano Frankish marriage that we now call Gregorian chant. We would need a marriage of the Latin chant with each vernacular. And this is what I’ve been attempting to do. My work has been trying to show that it is possible and that one can have chant in your own language if you follow the model of the Latin chant.
So do you think that in the modern church liturgy there is a future for a cappella singing?
I think there is a future for some Latin if people understand the words, or have been trained to understand the translations, as well as how it’s pronounced. Music directors will need to know not only how it’s pronounced but they should learn why a composer set a particular Latin chant piece in a particular way and be able to analyze its structure. Therefore, the composers of today have to start with the text and how that would sound for someone who’s convinced about “chant becoming faith” (Benedict XVI). Pope Benedict uses the word “musification.” For Pope Benedict it means incarnating our faith in the music we create. Then music actually becomes faith. That is what he is really saying and I think that is also the model. God, the words of God in our liturgical texts, become a chant that becomes our faith.
So for you the future of a cappella means integrating the vernacular with the lessons learned from Gregorian chant?
Yes, because I am presupposing that people in the United States do not understand Latin and that this is also true of the clergy as well. So when you’re in a parish church, the people in the pew, with rare exceptions, would be people who do not understand Latin and certainly do not speak it. Moreover, most of the clergy nowadays no longer get enough Latin to even understand a complete Eucharistic Prayer. They perhaps can pronounce it but if you ask them to give good translations in what they have just said, they probably can’t do it. Therefore, I don’t think you should sing Gregorian chant without understanding what the words mean. You simply won’t bring out what the text and the composer of the chant intended you to understand. To paraphrase St Paul, If I do not understand what I am singing, or listening to, how can I truly say “amen!”
So what you said is also true for the monasteries or only for parishes?
Our vocations, they’re coming in without any Latin. We give them what we can, but they’re not getting 4 to 6 years of Latin. They are lucky to get one. But I think I want to encourage you that, yes we can preserve Latin Gregorian chant, just like we preserve Renaissance polyphony, like we preserve Bach arias in German. We are finding out that it is better just do a Verdi opera in Italian rather than do it in translations. Verdi composed his music according to the accentuation and the phrasing proper to the Italian language. In his own way, he too was modeling his music on the spoken word. But I think the model part had to go back even further. It is not only a matter of getting the proper pronunciation of the Latin, as a starting point for good speech, but before we begin to compose or to sing a chant, we better do a “lectio” first and then do your composing. Study and pray the text for a goodly amount of time and only then begin to compose or to sing. So the model will be much like making an icon.
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