Group Singing II

The first hymn festival I experienced was on a Sunday evening in July 1960 at the Chautauqua Institute in the state of New York. The Institute is a revered bastion of culture, learning, music making, and discussions on ethics and morals.

It was conceived in the second half of the nineteenth century as a training ground for Sunday School teachers through summer classes for enrichment. The program quickly developed into satellite centers throughout the eastern part of the United States as mini-Chautauquas.

For well over a hundred years now, the summer sessions attract folks from all over the globe to relax around a beautiful lake, eat wholesome food, and enjoy music.

Not the least of the music programs is the hymn sing on Sunday evening in an open amphitheater. That is where I heard hymns sung in a manner that I never had heard before.

The congregation was made up of mostly blue-haired citizens with some families who looked suspiciously like preacher-types. For as best as I could tell, my college room-mate, a friend of his, and myself were the only non-WASP participants, which was challenge enough to sing our guts out even more lustily.

The three of us were hardly competitive, but something in Catholic testosterone kicked in. We would not be vanquished because we were spiritually formed knowing that "We're an army of youth under the standard of truth"-or something like that.

The pipe organ led aggressively. The tempi were solid. The congregation sang in four parts. The hymn service concluded with singing the hymn associated with Chautauqua, "Day Is Dying in the West."

"Now, that's what hymns should sound like. That's what Catholic congregations should sound like." My roommate muttered something about not in our lifetimes.

After forty years, most Catholic congregations do not sing in four parts and the organist/keyboard player is a little timid.

BUT . . .We are singing hymns, and for the most part, not too shabbily.

Last week I alluded to the hymn festival at the St. Paul's Cathedral in Pittsburgh where Roman Catholics dominated the assembly. We sang our guts out. Not just me. Not just the friends around me. But 98% of the two hundred or so people who gathered there.

Forty years ago if someone wandered into the church that evening, he or she would have thought the service was Presbyterian or Methodist or Baptist. Catholic would never have crossed his or her mind.

Times have changed and are changing. Here in a very Catholic, very public, very Gothic worship space were a bunch of Catholics singing Protestant hymn tunes to texts of recent origins and enjoying it.

Of all the reforms in the past thirty-five years, the grafting of hymns on to the liturgy has been successful in most places. The assembly is accustomed to singing some type of hymn at the beginning of Mass, at the end of Mass, and possibly once again in the course of the celebration.

The four-hymn syndrome, fortunately, has been abandoned by the majority of parishes who cultivate a mature music program with the song of the ritual taking its rightful place.

The practice of hymn singing at Mass is an established one in the United States. Now, . . . if we can just learn to sing all of the verses.

You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@earthlink.net