WASHINGTON — James Senson grew up in the Virginia Beach area in
the 1980s and his exposure to music in his home parish sounded remarkably
similar to the tunes played on popular radio stations in the region.
"You know, there was nothing really special about the music,
nor did it really say something about the church to me in it," said
Senson, a Filippino-American who's had a passion for music since he was a
child.
Senson had drifted away from religion by the time he was a
college-age adult, but his love of music flourished. When he discovered
Gregorian chant near the turn of the century, he was inspired to reconnect with
the church.
"This music was so different and mysterious to me,"
Senson said during a recent interview. "It was telling me something. It
was leading me somewhere."
It eventually led him to Catholic music ministry and the
33-year-old is now music director at St. John the Beloved Catholic Church in
McLean, a parish community where Gregorian chant is the principal sound.
This church community is unique in that the ancient sounds of
Gregorian chant are deeply woven into its fabric, interlaced in every Mass,
every choir and the education of the students in the parish school.
Church leaders at St. John the Beloved made the bold decision in
2005 to switch its music from the praise and worship genre to sacred music
featuring Gregorian chant, decades after the practice fell out of favor
following the Second Vatican Council.
It turns out that parish is part of a growing trend in American
Catholic culture in which Gregorian chant is slowly being re-embraced.
That movement began following the success of a 1990s album titled
"Chant," recorded by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos,
Spain, said Timothy S. McDonnell, director of the Institute of Sacred Music at
The Catholic University of America.
"People became interested in it," McDonnell said.
"Then you would start to hear Gregorian chant as samples in popular music.
You'd start to hear it in soundtracks, things like that. So, Gregorian chant
became popular with all kinds of people with all kinds of belief systems."
That was a turning point for some church officials who recognized
the music had intrinsic value, he said. "That this is our proper music for
our liturgy. That movement of recovery of this material I think started at that
point when it was recognized more broadly as a tremendous treasure."
Though still not the core music in most American Catholic
parishes, Gregorian chant continues to gain popularity among the youth, said
Scott Turkington, director of sacred music at Holy Family Catholic Church and
the parish school, Holy Family Academy, in St. Louis Park, Minn.
Young Catholics — intrigued by the chant famous for its long
melodic lines where several notes are sung on one syllable — began asking
questions about the music, its history and how it enhances the liturgy,
Turkington said.
Catholic Church music directors throughout the country recognized
"that we should give young people what they want," he said.
"They want a sense of beauty. They want a sense of mystery."
Turkington discovered that Gregorian chant was an effective tool
in teaching children the importance of sacred music in the church.
"If you give Gregorian chant to kids, they love it,"
Turkington said.
With the help of the leaders of his parish, Turkington opened a
summer camp in 2014 at the church dedicated to introducing youngsters to
Gregorian chant.
Additionally, Turkington hosts a weeklong session for high
schoolers, teaching them how to read chant notation and perform a concert at
the end of the educational program at Holy Family.
He and other members of the Church Music Association of America
continue to uphold the value of traditional music by actively teaching it to
others.
Every year the association hosts a symposium that invites
priests, musicians and choristers to immerse themselves in Gregorian chant.
Turkington was among the workshop leaders in St. Paul last June. The
250 conference attendees learned ways to teach Gregorian chant in their
parishes. Turkington believes it is important for the those participants to
"go home and improve the liturgies of their own parishes.
"Not to go home to be in an ivory tower and meditate upon
these things," he said. "To go home and put them into practice and
teach their own choir, teach their congregations and teach their pastors."
The growing number of conferences and camps throughout the U.S.
dedicated to Gregorian chant leads McDonnell to believe there is a bright
future for the music in American Catholic church communities.
Though documents from Vatican II are supportive of the use of
Gregorian chant, church leaders in the 1970s faced difficulties in
incorporating the music — all written in Latin — in a Mass that was now
celebrated in the dominant language of the culture, he said.
The natural response was to adopt music in the native language,
McDonnell said, much of which came in the form of genres popular in the
culture.
Gregorian chant also was seen as something that was old at a time
when liturgical reforms from Vatican II were transforming the Mass into
something new, he said.
Senson said he understands the reasoning for implementing new
musical styles in the Mass that fit that particular generation of Catholics. However,
in his view, what these parishes accomplished was generating music that sounded
dated a decade later and wasn't uniquely Catholic.
"You could walk into any Protestant church and hear the same
kind of music," Senson said. "When you hear Gregorian chant, you know
you are hearing something connected to the ancient church and it's timeless.
It's not dated, because it's the music of the Catholic Church."
Gregorian chant today isn't just limited to Latin. During the
course of the past few decades, composers have scored English arrangements and
compositions in other languages, McDonnell said.
"There's been a flowering of publication of English-language
version of Gregorian melodies and changes that have emerged over the
years," McDonnell said. "Even if you are not using the original
Gregorian chant in Latin, there is some sense of the chant style and the sacred
nature of chant is being recaptured."
Catholics now are used to hearing the Mass celebrated in their
native tongue, Turkington said.
"Latin is not in the ears of (today's) average man and woman
who go to Mass on Sunday," he said. "If you're from France, you want
to hear Mass in French. If you are from Colombia, you want to probably hear
Mass in Spanish."
The increased popularity of the chant in recent years has
extended beyond the Catholic Church, McDonnell said. "There are people who
don't really have a connection to the institutional church, but who find
Gregorian chant as attractive."
The appreciation of the chant's beauty is more than just the
resonances of the music, but resides in the text, which are prayers, scripture
and liturgy essential to the Mass, Turkington said.
"If the music in the church is really appropriate and
mysterious," he said, "the texts of the Gregorian chant … are really
substantial."