Speaking as a choir member…
I’ve been a member of at least one choir, off and on, ever since I was at school, and the first ‘outside school’ choir I joined was a church one. I love singing in a choir. I have joined the church choir in most of the places we have lived for any length of time. I even met my husband in a church choir (and that’s where he learned to play the guitar). I am not being nasty about church choirs.
This summer on our travels we got to see more different churches than usual for Sunday Masses, and I found myself thinking about church choirs and what they are actually for. My first ever blog was about why we have music at all in church, but now I’m thinking about how we do it.
Differences between choir and church choir
I would distinguish very carefully between a church choir and a choir. Choirs learn to sing something exactly and beautifully, by doing a lot of practice. They sing different sorts of music, and often outside any context except that of a concert. Their reason for existence is to perform the music. Church choirs on the other hand lead the people at an event (usually a religious celebration) so that those people can take part confidently in the event itself. The church choir may sing during a time when the congregation is doing something else (e.g. handling the collection, lining up for Communion), but it is not there to replace the effort of the congregation but to enable and enhance it. Mass is not a concert, and music should never be an excuse to stop people joining in. I was delighted to discover that the Pope made the same point last year.
What a choir can do
Deciding to concentrate on a choir instead of getting the people to sing is an easy trap for church musicians to fall into, because most musicians, even the non-professionals, are thinking all the time about how they can make the performance better, to do a better job at bringing the music to life, making it flower. Using a choir instead of the congregation is a short cut.
It’s quite difficult to find early pictures of choirs singing, because there are really only a few stock options, and in some ways it’s a relatively modern idea. One version is the group of monks singing in community, and this is still the only model of church music which pleases some people. Another is the single singer, often with instrument: the minstrel or the troubadour model originally, like the singer-songwriter of today. We’ve all come across people like this singing at Mass, and it doesn’t work as a community effort.
Don’t leave it to the professionals
When we’re talking about Sunday Mass, we’re not talking about a congregation made up entirely of musicians. Obviously any church on a Sunday is going to contain people who don’t know the music, who can’t sing in tune, who just want it to be over, who don’t feel like joining in, who can’t sing because the last time they sang that hymn was at a funeral, and the loss is still raw (and that’s even before you look at the congregation as well as the clergy).
Children can (will?) be restless and babies noisy (one old priest I knew always called that the ‘chorus of angels’). People will take breaths in the middle of words; they will sing passing notes that aren’t there in the text; they know a different version of the tune (or the words – I often sing the wrong words in an older hymn because the text has been subtly altered and I’m singing from memory). Often they don’t have a very big repertoire of hymns, so if you want to extend it, you will need to do it gently and encourage them. As soon as they feel uncomfortable, they will simply stop singing. They are frightened of getting something wrong and other people noticing, with a fear totally out of proportion to the likelihood of that happening.
So the music produced by a congregation is less polished and accomplished, but it’s their music, and they’re not doing it for any other audience than God. I suspect at Mass on Sundays he’d rather hear them than a choir singing alone, – just as you’d be disappointed if you went to your child’s school play and they had outsourced the singing to professionals.
Sing a new song
Having discussed the possible drawbacks of congregational singing, it’s only fair to say that it’s great to hear how well a congregation can sing if you give it the chance. This is why we stress ‘singable’ (awful word) as the point of the music on the website, and why I try to give all my church music tunes which are easy to pick up. Good unison is much more likely than bad harmony to allow people to feel secure enough to join in. If your congregation consists of the same people singing the same words every day, you can decide to sing in Latin or anything else, but for most Anglophone people at church on a Sunday, it needs to be English. If your congregation is, remarkably, exactly the same people turning up every week and they know the words, you can get them to sing chant; but for most congregations, chant will put them off, and they will leave the singing to the choir (and if you want to do chant well, weekly rehearsals are not usually enough). Tunes were invented after chant, for a reason : they are easier for non-monks to pick up and join in.
New every Sunday?
I’m very aware that the psalm and response change every week, so accessibility is extremely important. I’ve talked before about what makes a good psalm response. I do ask quite a lot of my cantors, but the shape of the tune should be strong enough to help you to get back on the rails before the end of the stanza if the irregular words have thrown you off. Then the congregation’s part is simpler, but still strong. Only very rarely do I change the last line of a stanza, because the congregation really needs to recognise the lead-in (and of course, the cantor’s looking up, and if necessary waving at them, will also help). Psalms do get repeated in the Lectionary (especially around Christmas and Easter), and this helps too, if it’s recent enough for the congregation to remember. The Alleluia verse changes from week to week, but the Alleluia itself not so often (and they are modular, so you can decide just to keep to one, though I think it’s good to wake the congregation up and make them refocus every now and again).
Growing accustomed to the tune…
The Mass parts have much more chance to bed in to people’s memories, so it is worth spending time on getting them right, maybe even running through one of them before Mass if you have the chance. It is an advantage that the congregation mostly knows the words for the Mass parts; and/or having a tune is a great help to settling the words in your head if they have been changed. Deciding to sing the Latin (or Greek, for the Kyrie) version every week to avoid getting to grips with the (new) English version is actually selling your congregation short, as they will end up stumbling over the English words (even while speaking) for a long time when they visit other churches. Singing the Our Father in Latin at the standard parish Sunday Mass means that small children can’t join in with the one prayer they may know by heart, and it really annoys some young adults too (one of them being my youngest daughter). There is a case for not singing the Our Father at all (Jesus didn’t, so far as we know). I’ve set it so that you can sing it if you want to, but I’d always keep an eye on how many people are actually joining in, because surely that’s the most important thing.
The other version of the church choir
The other obvious version of a group of singers in this context is the angels, who turn up either alone as messengers or in a group as a choir. Traditionally, there are nine choirs of angels, though I have no information on whether they pool their auditions, and I have heroically refrained from discussing the way in which the Church has used church choirs throughout its history as a way to prevent women singing. But I take great comfort from the fact that the main choirs in the Bible are angels, since they do not have gender, so women can sing with the angels as much as they like. The angels are like the best sort of church choir : they strengthen the congregation and make it brave to join in.
And here is a lovely picture of these wonderful inclusive angels with possibly the first version of a singalong sheet. Why are they holding up the music? Because, at any Mass, what matters is that everyone can take part.
[Read this in Spanish]
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