As the director of music at a large Roman
Catholic church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I especially look forward
to Holy Week. This is an extraordinary time liturgically in which we celebrate
the passion, death and resurrection of Christ, but musically it is also
an extraordinary time. In our church, it is customary to refrain from playing
musical instruments from the Gloria on Holy Thursday until the Gloria on
the night of the Easter Vigil, two days later. During this time, all the
music (and it is a considerable amount) is sung a cappella. No organ.
No piano. No trumpets, no flutes, no timpani. No nothing.
Nothing except the most exquisite, intimate, subtle and
beautiful musical instrument in God's creation: the human voice.
We avoid using musical instruments ostensibly to better
portray the bitter sorrow of Christ's suffering and death; the last supper,
the agony in the garden, the carrying of the cross and crucifixion. Often
musical instruments connote a festive atmosphere: witness the boisterous
exclamations of our trumpets and trombones and timpani and organ on Easter
Sunday. "Let us rejoice and be glad." (Psalms 118:24) However, the time
between Holy Thursday and Saturday's Easter Vigil night is solemn and sorrowful;
the altar is devoid of all flowers and decorations. It is a stark and barren
setting, and the unaccompanied singing helps reinforce that atmosphere.
Yet, I believe that there is another, more esoteric reason
behind the practice of singing the liturgies a cappella during this sacred
time. Witness the Holy Thursday procession of the Blessed Sacrament from
the tabernacle to its place of reposition. During this time, the entire
choir and congregation of Saint Sebastian Church (about one thousand worshippers
at this particular mass) sang in Latin the six beautiful verses of the
Gregorian chant Pange, lingua, which begins:
PANGE,
LINGUA gloriosi
Corporis mysterium,
Sanguinisque pretiosi,
quem in mundi pretium
fructus ventris generosi
Rex effudit Gentium. |
S
ING, my tongue, the Savior's glory,
of His flesh the mystery sing;
of the Blood, all price exceeding,
shed by our immortal King,
destined, for the world's redemption,
from a noble womb to spring. |
This chant, written in rhymed accentual rhythm by St.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274); is considered the most beautiful of Aquinas'
hymns and one of the great seven hymns of the Church. (St. Venantius Fortunatus,
the sixth-century poet and bishop of Poitiers, also wrote a version of
Pange, lingua in unrhymed verse; however Claudianus Mamertus, the fifth-century
Gallo-Roman theologian, is thought to be the original author.)
During the Holy Thursday chanting of the Pange, lingua
at St. Sebastian's, I felt the atmosphere charged with a powerful devotional
electricity that I do not experience very often. The song filled the entire
church and bathed the worshippers with waves of sound which raised our
hearts toward heaven in a marvelous symphony of voices; unamplified and
unaccompanied. Deceptively simple, but totally satisfying.
Yet, despite this high-intensity devotional experience,
chant has little popularity in these modern times. Most people, including
devout Catholics, prefer to listen to music which is more fast-paced. We
have become accustomed to fast food, fast cars, fast computers and fast
Internet access. We don't like to take our time anymore. We rush to work,
we rush to finish assignments, we rush home. Even in recreation, our music
has to have a beat, a pulse, something to tap our toe to.
However, chant is not fast; it does not have a beat, and
we cannot clap our hands to it. It seems boring and monotonous to most
21st-century Americans; it doesn't hold our attention. Our minds wander;
we want something more stimulating. Yet perhaps, in addition to mending
spiritual illness, chant may also provide tangible medicinal relief for
hypertension, migraine headaches, ulcers and heart attacks. Chant slows
our metabolism, it steadies our pulse and our breathing, and it quiets
the mind. Chant allows our soul to experience the inner stillness required
to know God. "Be still and know that I am God." (Psalms 46:10)
One scientific researcher in particular has documented
the effects of chant on the human physiology. The French doctor, Alfred
A. Tomatis, pioneered research in the neurophysiological effects of chant
on the minds and bodies of listeners (which, by the way, has had far-reaching
influence in the modern field of musical therapy). According to his theory,
there are two kinds of sound: there are "discharge" sounds (those which
tire, fatigue and drain the listener) and "charge" sounds (those which
give energy, life and health).
According to Dr. Tomatis, Gregorian chant may be the most
potent sound to promote strength and vitality. In his long practice, he
has accomplished seemingly miraculous recoveries and given new life to
thousands of patients by his innovative treatments with sound. For example,
in the mid-1960s, he was called to a monastery in France which had just
been taken over by a new abbot, a young man. The new abbot was something
of a revolutionary and had changed the internal rule of the abbey by modifying
everything after the Second Vatican Council. He desperately wanted to be
on the cutting edge of Christianity. Although he excelled in enthusiasm,
unfortunately he lacked in maturity.
He tried to eliminate Latin from the monks' vocabulary
and to replace it with prayers in their own native language. Although his
viewpoint was not shared by all at the abbey, he succeeded in eliminating
chanting from their daily schedule. The Benedictine monks normally chanted
from six to eight hours a day, but this abbot succeeded in demonstrating
to the other monks that chant served no useful purpose, and that without
it they could recapture that time for other more important things. They
forgot Saint Benedict's Rule: "Seven times a day will I sing your praises."
However, Dr. Tomatis understood what no one else did at
the time: that the monks had been chanting in order to "charge" themselves,
but they hadn't realized what they were doing. And gradually, as the days
passed, they started to get bogged down; they became more and more tired.
Finally the monks got so tired that they held a meeting
and frankly asked themselves what it was that was causing their fatigue.
They looked at their schedule and saw that their night vigil and the rhythm
of their work deviated excessively from the norm for other men. They seemed
to live too differently from the rest of the world, and they slept only
a few hours at night. They decided that they should go to bed early and
wake up, like everybody else, only when they were no longer tired.
Well, it is common knowledge from physiology that the
more you sleep, the more tired you are, and so it was for the poor Benedictines
-- they were more tired than ever. So much so that they called in medical
specialists to help them try to understand what was happening. They finally
gave up on this after a procession of doctors had come through over a period
of several months, and the monks were more tired than ever.
They turned to specialists of the digestive system. One
of the great French doctors arrived at the conclusion that they were in
this state because they were undernourished. In fact, they were practically
vegetarian -- they ate a little fish from time to time -- and he told them
they were dying of starvation. His error was forgetting that the Benedictines
had eaten as near-vegetarians ever since the 13th century, which one would
think might have engendered some sort of adaptation in them. Anyway, once
they started eating rich and heavy food -- meat and potatoes -- like the
rest of the world, things only got worse.
Dr. Tomatis was called by the Abbot in June, 1967, and
he found that 70 of the 90 monks were slumping in their cells like wet
dishrags. He examined them and began the treatment of reawakening their
ears. He insisted that they immediately return to their schedule of eight
hours daily chanting. By November, almost all of them had gone back to
their normal activities, that is their prayer, their few hours of sleep,
and the legendary Benedictine work schedule.
Dr. Tomatis succeeded in giving the monks back their health
and energy without drugs or medication. He succeeded by treating them with
sound only. Certainly, our modern fast-paced civilization has brought us
many material amenities. Unfortunately, it has also brought us great stresses
which were unheard of in the not-too-distant past. Perhaps we should take
a closer look at the ancient traditions of our church, such as the practice
of Gregorian chant, in order to experience God's perfection more fully
in body, mind and spirit.
This article was originally published in the Pittsburgh
Catholic Newspaper on May 26, 2000 (condensed version).
The story about Dr. Alfred Tomatis and the Benedictine
monks was adapted from an article by Tim Wilson titled A l'ECOUTE de l'UNIVERS:
an interview with Dr. Alfred Tomatis, published in MUSICWORKS 35 (Toronto,
Canada), copyright 1986, 1987.