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Music in the Liturgy, Part One: The Scriptures
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October 5, 2019Greetings,
As we prepare to begin using the new St. Isaac Jogues Sunday Missal and to discern the best music book for our family of parishes, I though it may be helpful to offer some reflections from the heart of the Church’s teaching on the use of music within the Mass. While the wake of The Second Vatican Council (or simply “Vatican II”) did usher in a very different expression of song in the liturgy than had been previously observed in the Church’s history, it’s important to note what was actually stated in those documents. Otherwise, we find ourselves in the very murky place of hearsay and even a little gossip. With this in mind, I’d like to take the next few weeks to unpack several writings on official Catholic teaching about liturgical music.
The first place we ought to look is the Holy Bible. Within the Sacred Scriptures we find music at the forefront of offering worship to God with the mouth and with instruments fashioned and played by human hands.
In the Book of Exodus, Moses is instructed to offer the Passover meal to mark God’s direct intervention into the slavery of the Israelites. This is the earliest liturgy of God’s saving action which would be fulfilled hundreds of years later at the Last Supper, which was also The First Eucharist (or Mass) of the Christian Church. It developed with a series of remembrances of God’s action in song – The Hallel songs (Psalms 113-118) of thanksgiving were developed here and continued through the journey of God’s people out of Egypt towards the Promised Land.
Later, Moses is instructed by God to prepare the people for consecration to Him. This was to take place in a kind of early liturgy marked by the blast of a ram’s horn or “shofar”. When called, they would assemble at the base of Mount Sinai:
“On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled (Exodus 19:16)…As the blast of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses would speak and God would answer him in thunder. (Exodus 19:19)”Following this, The Lord spoke the Ten Commandments to Israel, issued instructions on the building of an altar to offer sacrifice, and gave various other observances all the way down to the keeping of a calendar of feasts. It began with the ram’s horn calling the people to worship.
The liturgical life of The Chosen People included chanted song as well as instrumentation as the years drew on. Indeed, Jesus and the Apostles would have been familiar with the shofar calling to prayer and the lyre (a stringed instrument like to a harp) accompanying the chant of the psalms. Further, the liturgical act of offering the lamb of sacrifice at the Passover was integral to their worship as well.
The Gospels bear this out as we get multiple accounts of The Last Supper. As the Apostles carried out the mandate of Jesus Christ to celebrate Sacred Mysteries of that First Eucharist, they carried with them the liturgy of the synagogue and temple which Jesus joined together in the celebration of The Last Supper and its consummation at the Cross. They knew well that Jesus obviously didn’t want some sort of innovation in worship, breaking with the Traditions of Israel, but rather a liturgy that continued in an unbroken manner with what God began at the Passover and fulfilled in the sacrifice of the Son of God at Calvary. As the Early Church began to celebrate what we call “The Mass” today, they stood upon these elements of tradition while incorporating Jesus’ words of consecration and Institution of Himself as the Bread of Life and Chalice of Salvation.
Surely, the use of music at Mass would certainly have been those Passover psalms. The Book of Revelation suggests that the liturgy of heaven surely includes the liturgical song of the victorious souls:“And I heard a voice from heaven like the sound of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder; the voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, and they sing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the one hundred forty-four thousand who have been redeemed from the earth.” (Revelation 14:2-3)This “new song” isn’t one that is made up from nothing, but rather is taken from the fulfilled promise of the victorious Lamb of God anticipated in the Psalms and expressed in a new canticle (chanted song) at the defeat of Satan (see Revelation 12:10-12). (And the “one hundred and forty-four thousand” indicates a large, nearly-countless, yet complete number.) These are just a few places in The Holy Bible where music drawn from Tradition finds its way into liturgical use.
Next, we’ll look at the Constitution on The Sacred Liturgy – called “Sacrosanctum Concilium” in Latin– from the Second Vatican Council to see what it did (and didn’t say) about music and the Holy Mass.
