From Broadway to the Sanctuary

This is a little part of a Four Part Article off the Adoremus.org website. Adoremus is a Catholic hymn book company which also puts out the "Adoremus Bulletin." This bulletin has articles which talk about Catholic issues in liturgy and sacred music. Many good writers have submitted their articles to this site. It's a good site to check out.

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After reading this article, one must ask why people even go for this type of music when it is so out of place in the Mass. The one reason I think up of is ignorance of what sacred music really is.

"The functionalist approach is destructive to traditional music and art because it is essentially a secularizing approach. Some considered the use of popular music at Mass to be functional, while traditional chant and polyphony, as well as statues and other art work, were considered unsuitable "distractions". Funk insists, however, that the popular secular music of the 1960s used in worship shortly after the Council was also "unacceptable to the cultural ear of the worshipers". Though specific songs were dropped, the style was not:

As a result of what we learned soon after the Council, a second group of composers began to develop music that was heavily influenced by the secular culture but whose popular musical "codes" were more subtly hidden from the cultural ear by arrangement, harmony, or performance technique. When a composer was able to create music that the assembly did not recognize as blatantly drawn from the secular culture, but was nevertheless music that charmed its cultural ear, the assembly began to sing such music readily and with enthusiasm. ...

In the United States, a group of composers has attempted to use musical techniques drawn from the popular culture, e.g., Broadway, but these composers mask the secular codes in such a way that their sources are not recognizable by the listener. 23

A footnote to this passage names Father J. Michael Joncas, Marty Haugen and Christopher Walker as composers who have stated "that they deliberately encode their music with contemporary codes from Broadway show tunes". 24

Ironically, many musicians who produce music "coded" to Broadway shows for use in the Mass also reject chant or sacred polyphony, arguing that it is based on an "entertainment model" of liturgy. In their view only a trained choir can "perform" polyphony and the more elaborate chants, thus excluding a "simple refrain" for the people's "participation".

Father Funk believes that if secular music functions within the liturgy as ritual music, it ceases to be secular and becomes ritual music:

Likewise, if music such as chant and music from the sacred treasury can function as ritual music, then they are no longer sacred music but ritual music. 25

This last statement turns the idea of sacred music on its head, since its corollary is that the only part of the treasury of sacred music that, in Funk's terms, can be called sacred is that which is unsuitable for use in the liturgy."