By PEGGY MOEN
ST. PAUL — Two hundred and fifty believers in solidly Catholic music and liturgy congregated here from June 19 to 24, learning and worshiping at the 27th Colloquium of the Church Music Association of America (CMAA).
Students and faculty arrived here from across the United States, from France, the British Isles, the Netherlands, and Australia, and, most notably, several clergy from Nigeria came.
The colloquium’s liturgies and a concert took place at four of St. Paul’s most beautiful churches — with the liturgies at St. Agnes, St. Mark’s, and the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas at the University of St. Thomas, and the organ concert by Samuel Backman at the Cathedral of St. Paul. UST was the colloquium’s home.
St. Agnes played a starring role, as 2017 is the tenth anniversary of the death of Msgr. Richard J. Schuler (1920-2007), the parish’s longtime (1969-2001) pastor and a major figure in the renaissance of sacred music.
CMAA’s biography of Schuler says that he “was the founding director of The Twin Cities Catholic Chorale in 1956. He held music degrees from the Eastman School of Music (MA) and the University of Minnesota (Ph.D.). He was not only an excellent organist and brilliant overall musician; he was also a pioneer in the use of large-scale polyphony and symphonic sung Masses after the Second Vatican Council.”
Also, from 1969 to 1979, Schuler served as editor of Sacred Music, the journal of the Church Music Association of America.
At the Church of St. Agnes Friday, June 23, just before the colloquium’s banquet, The Wanderer interviewed William Mahrt, president of the CMAA, and Virginia Schubert, author of To Sing With the Angels, a history of Msgr. Schuler’s Twin Cities Catholic Chorale (TCCC).
“Msgr. Schuler is essentially the grandfather of the Church Music Association of America,” Dr. Mahrt told The Wanderer.
Mahrt added that “he’s the one who kept it going in the thinnest times.” And “I think of St. Agnes as being the mother church of the Church Music Association of America.”
I noted that, looking behind me at the Mass at St. Agnes that evening, I could imagine Msgr. Schuler still in the choir loft, conducting.
“I can imagine him still sitting up in the sanctuary,” said Dr. Mahrt, “and I can also imagine him in the pulpit because his sermons were so concise and so pointed that they were just incredible.”
Virginia Schubert explained that St. Agnes was “one of the reasons [the CMAA] wanted to come” to St. Paul, thus honoring Msgr. Schuler. “They wanted to come to Msgr. Schuler’s church.” Also, she said, the CMAA was interested in holding a colloquium in the Upper Midwest.
Dr. Schubert, a professor emerita of Macalester College, said that Gregorian Chant now “is taking hold in various areas,” pointing to the website of the New Liturgical Movement for evidence of widespread chant colloquia. “They are popping up all over.” One just took place in California, and one is set for Duquesne University in Pennsylvania.
Other dimensions of sacred music are also growing “slowly. . . . would say slowly,” she said. The first CMAA colloquium, for instance, attracted only 40 or 50 participants, about 20 percent of this year’s attendance.
What will participants in this colloquium be able to bring back to their parishes and other venues?
Dr. Schubert, the TCCC’s executive director, noted that all colloquium participants were encouraged to participate in a chant workshop and in a polyphony workshop, thus gaining a range of musical experience.
She said that the colloquium teaches Gregorian Chant in Latin and in English: Sometimes participants find it easier to bring the Gregorian Chant in English back to their parishes.
Dr. Mahrt mentioned his own session on chant modes — “the room was actually crowded” — and his plenary address on “Silence, Listening, and Singing” as examples of what participants were eager to learn.
In the two other very well-received plenary sessions, Dom Benedict Maria Andersen, Silverstream Priory, County Meath, Ireland, spoke on “ ‘Fulfilled is all that David told’: Recovering the Christian Psalter” and Msgr. Andrew R. Wadsworth, executive director for the ICEL Secretariat, addressed “The Chant Hymns of the Revised Liturgy of the Hours.”
But, above all, said Dr. Mahrt, “what they all take back” as colloquium participants “is an awareness of the proper beauty of the liturgy. And they do that by having the very best possible musical celebration of the liturgy, such as this one tonight…to exemplify the ideal,” referring to the Ordinary Form Mass in Latin celebrated at St. Agnes.
He pointed to the colloquium’s closing Mass, Extraordinary Form at St. Mark’s, that Saturday as yet another illustration of the ideal. Twentieth-century English composer Herbert Howells’ Mass in the Dorian Mode was performed.
In these ways, “they know what to aim for and they know what they can begin to do” when they return home.
“Everyone who comes [to a colloquium] has commented that the experience of the sacred music in the highest possible way was the most valuable thing. And that was something that they cherished and that they brought back home with them.”
Dr. Mahrt said that every day of the colloquium included Lauds in the morning, Compline at night, the Mass in the middle of the day, with the different kinds of music giving “a very wide experience.”
If Msgr. Schuler is still making his presence felt and his influence lives on, what about the work of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI since his retirement?
Dr. Schubert said “absolutely” Benedict’s influence lives on, noting that one colloquium plenary session used his phrase “the hermeneutic of continuity.”
“It’s still with us, absolutely, yes,” said Dr. Mahrt about the influence of the Pope Emeritus. “He had this notion of ars celebrandi, the art of celebrating the liturgy.”
Dr. Mahrt recalled Benedict’s celebrating the funeral Mass for John Paul II “in such a beautiful and dignified way,” which Mahrt thinks was “a factor in his election” to be Pope.
“His writings on the liturgy are still being read,” said Dr. Mahrt, “and we instituted many things upon his inspiration which will continue.”
Everything about the colloquium did suggest something of the everlasting.
At the well-attended Friday night Mass at St. Agnes, Fr. Mark Moriarty, the pastor, said in his homily that “music ranks sixth after the classic five proofs for the existence of God….Music is a great gift.…Music is something otherworldly.”
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