Theology of Sacred Music

Rev. Msgr. Robert A. Skeris, D. Th.

Having served as Professor and Prefetto della Casa at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome, Consultor to the Vatican’s Office of Pontifical Ceremonies, Msgr. Skeris has been on the faculty of the University of Dallas, Christendom College, Director of the Ward Method Studies at Catholic University of America, and founder of the Church Music Association of America, amongst numerous other important roles.

Rev. Robert A. Skeris, D. Theol. Sacred Music Practicum

“[The musical tradition of the universal Church is]—in what the council called “treasaurus praetii inestimabilis”—the treasure trove of inestimable value which belongs to the Church Universal and Her musical Tradition. The Church in these words of the last Ecumenical Council has placed before us Gregorian Chant as the most perfect musical expression of Her Divine worship, Her Sacred Liturgy. That being the case, obedience alone, on our part, would be an adequate response.

But as St. Augustine points out, in his 26th tract on St. John’s Gospel, “it is little enough to be drawn by the will, thou art drawn also by pleasure”. Or is it the case that whilest the senses of the body have their pleasures, the mind is left without pleasures of its own?” Augustine then concludes that we need to be what he says “drawn by the bonds of the heart”.

What we today call “Gregorian chant” is the music in which Holy Mother Church has embodied her message from the earliest days of the Christian era. The music she has safeguarded through the centuries as her official form of musical expression. The music through whose strains, even today linked to the Heiroi Logoi, the Holy Words of the Sacred Liturgy, through those words the Church today still teaches, the Church meditates, the Church prays, the Church mourns, the Church jubilates. The insights which have developed during the decades of the recent past are leading us to a fuller appreciation of those methods which the Church has consistently used in the transmission of her message.

Psychology is revealing the fact today that a conscious content strictly confined to the intellect lacks vitality, lacks power of achievement. Every impression, tends by its very nature to flow out in expression, and the intellectual content, content that is isolated from “affective” consciousness, will be found lacking in dynamic, genetic context because it has failed to become structural in the mind and remains external therefore. From this evidence in this field we may safely formulate as a fundamental principle of formation, that the presence in consciousness of appropriate “feeling” is indispensable to mental assimilation.

Now if appropriate “feeling” is necessary to assimilation, it must be equally needful for the assimilation of Religious truth, just as much so as it is for other branches of knowledge. And so we can understand the importance that the Church has always attached to an appropriate musical expression of Her Dogma.

We understand the Church’s insistence upon music of a specific kind which will not merely stimulate the feelings in a general way, but which will embody Her Dogma and Her prayer in an appropriate form of expression.

According to St. Pius X, the function of Musica Sacra is summed up, he said in the two words: vivificare and fecundare. Vivificare means “to add life to, to vivify.” Fecundare means to add efficacy, to render effect on. There are two ways in which we can expect music to add life vivificare and efficacy, fecundare, to the Sacred text. One way is by an enrichment of the Doctrinal content through symbolic use of themes. Think of the example I gave, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded”. What that suggests, just hearing the beginning of the tune.

The other way in which we can expect music to add life and efficacy to the text is by supplying that power, that energizing force, which feeling adds to a merely abstract intellectual concept. The Church through all forms of her organic teaching, aims at cultivating feeling, but she does not allow her teaching and formative activity to culminate in feeling, which she values chiefly as a means to an end. The Church employs feeling in order to move into action, and to form character, and she never leaves that feeling without the stamp and the guidance of the intellect. Dogmatic time. As the feelings glow to incandescense, she embarks to their definite direction, and animates them with a purpose, which after the emotions and the feelings subside, remains the guiding principle of conduct.

To those two formative functions of appropriate sounds, music added to Sacred words, we might add a third function, namely to cultivate an ability to distinguish between different types of emotional appeal, and then to respond only to the highest.

All of these, my friends, are essential elements to be considered in the formative function of Musica Sacra and particularly of Cantus Gregorianus, that integral part of the solemn sung Liturgy. In all three of these respects, that chant of the Church stands supreme. Chant enriches the doctrinal content by lifting into consciousness in a new significance, certain associated ideas, by means of a series of “sound pictures” taken from offices which are mystically related to each other. A wonderful example of that sort of enrichment is the Mass for the Dead, the Gregorian Requiem Mass. Some of you remember it. There the music is a “living tissue of related sound pictures” which add to the content of the print, or the spoken word, and bring a message of consolation and of hope to the ear which is attuned to perceive it. As we sing “Requiem aeternam” and ask that the soul of the deceased person may be forgiven his sins,

and helped by Divine Grace to reach eternal joy, that melody lifts into consciousness the scenes which ushered in the dawn of our Lord’s Resurrection: the chosen vine, the branches, the power of the Word of God, the hart panting for the fountains of water, Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum of Easter Vigil, and finally the shout of triumph of Holy Saturday, Laudate Dominum omnes gentes. All that resonates along with those sounds. But should the mind fail to catch these symbolic applications, it can hardly fail to realize the mystical intent. Whereby the melody of the Gradual, Requiem Aeternam, is almost an exact replica of the triumphant Gradual of Easter Sunday. Here our appeal that the soul may reach eternal life, is expressed with the same sounds, the same musical formulae, which at Easter announced the day which the Lord had made for exaltation and joy. And by chanting those words that way we assure ourselves that the soul of the just is held in eternal remembrance, cannot be touched by the powers of evil. The same strains which at Easter expressed our confidence in God’s goodness and his everlasting mercy.

This close linking together in melodic identity of death with Resurrection, and with that one supreme victory over death which is the hope of the individual soul, is more realistic, more convincing, in music than it could be in any mere verbal connection. As a matter of fact the words attempt no such exact parallel. The implication is there but the music that goes with the words in the missal makes that link explicit. Indeed the music goes one step further in its suggested power and reminds us of the guardian angel whose loving care is untouched by death. It weaves in a mystical reference to the eternal marriage feast of the lamb, to raise the hearts of those who know the gradual of the wedding Mass, the votive Mass pro sponso et sponsa. Thus does the music enrich the doctrinal content by what we might call a symbolic code of musical cross-reference.

Through her music secondly, the Church supplies us with a key to the different degrees and qualities of feeling which distinguish one season from another, one feast from another, during the course of the Liturgical Year. It teaches us not only when, but how the Church mourns, for example. Not only when but how the Church jubilates! And much of this is conveyed by the music alone. For example, the single word “Alleluia” recurs over and over and over again in the Church year. In the printed or spoken word, there is no change from season to season. The music alone supplies the commentary on that text, and conveys the difference of quality between the joy of one season and another, between one feast and another. Here indeed we might say we can find “the rainbow shades of the praying Church’s moods” translated into music and clothed with infinite variety. From the tentative and humble tones of the Alleluia of Holy Saturday, when the soul can hardly believe in its own salvation, when the price of the

sacrifice is yet too close at hand to forget the pain which won our triumph, through the gradual crescendo of joy and exaltation to the feast of the Ascension, through the mystical renewal of Pentecost, and the innocent in fact almost naïve rejoices of Christmas: all of those shades of feeling are contained in the music, which gives its true character to the unchanging word, vivifying the letter, the letter which killeth, by adding Spirit which giveth life.

It is plain, my friends, that all of this is formative of Catholic feeling, educating in the highest sense. Because if music in general can influence feeling—ask any music therapist about that—then this particular music is, and must remain par excellence the formation and education of genuine Catholic feeling. If it is the function of Catholic catechesis, of new evangelization, as we say today, to form the minds and consciences of young and old Catholics through sound doctrine, it must be no less its function to form their hearts through sound feeling, that there may be no contradiction between truth and its expression. Failing this, the heart seeking beauty may per chance find satisfaction elsewhere; and dogma become inarticulate, may sicken and die.

This, my friends, explains the psychological basis for the Church’s insistence on a particular form of music. The Church did not leave to chance this formation of the emotions, but taking the arts to herself, she shaped them to her own purpose. The Church in her teaching reaches the whole human person: intellect and will, emotions and senses, imagination and aesthetic sensibilities, memory and muscles, powers of expression. She neglects nothing in man, she lifts up his whole being, strengthens and cultivates all of his faculties, in their interdependence. And that explains the words of St. Pius the Tenth, when he set before us Gregorian chant as the type or norm, the “Supremo modelo” of Christian musical prayer. And its function as he put it, “to raise and form the hearts of the faithful in all sanctity”.

In other words, my friends, there is also classical standard or type of Christian expression, just as there is a classical standard or type of Christian life. As the Saints and the Martyrs are placed before us as models for our imitative faculties in the realm of Christian living and action, so too in Gregorian chant, we are given models for our imitative faculties in the realm of Christian feeling by which to orient our emotion, from which and with which our actions arise.