Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Julius Erving, commonly referred to as “Dr. J,” scored over 30,000 points in his professional career. One of his most memorable shots was during his tenure with the Philadelphia 76ers—a 53-foot game-winner (one of the longest in NBA history) against the Dallas Mavericks on February 28, 1986.
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, more easily called “Dr. K,” has just released a game-winning three-pointer called Good Music, Sacred Music and Silence: Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and for Life. This hardcover from TAN Books / Saint Benedict Press is filled with points on the importance of great music in the life of the Christian. Despite such an effort seemingly being a longshot in the modern musical malaise, Dr. K does deliver a victory against the many mavericks who neglect centuries of sound teaching on the topic.
The first section of Dr. K’s book is on good music in general—what it is, how it affects the soul, how one can broaden its use in everyday life. The second section is on sacred music specifically—its universality, holiness, and goodness of form. The third section is on the extraordinarily underrated importance of silence for a profound connection with Almighty God through prayer.
Rebounding from Bad Music
Like nearly all Americans, Dr. K was regularly exposed to less than noble music while growing up in the 1970s and 80s. The lyrics were often lurid and the instrumentation ignoble. Even the music he encountered in church, while not raunchy, did constantly miss the rim.
What was a beleaguered boy to do in such a situation?
Dr. K took the few shreds of great music he encountered and, piece by piece, grew in knowledge and appreciation of it. Finding an old song book and comparing its written notation with what he heard on chant CDs was the beginning of his journey to musical sanity.
He went from a liberal Novus Ordo to a Latin Novus Ordo with a chant schola to the Byzantine (Eastern Catholic) liturgy and finally to 1962 Latin Mass parishes run by the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter.
Because of the wisdom ploddingly gained along the way, musically-needy readers are able to make a swifter transition today. Dr. K’s once un-Christian “playlist” was eventually replaced with the likes of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Palestrina, Byrd, and Victoria. This transition is easier today than in the past, not only due to the insights he has amassed, but to recordings whose access is fast.
Chanting as a Team
Gregorian chant has for several centuries been recognized as the foundational music for the Roman Catholic liturgy, while Renaissance polyphony is its special adornment. Both types of music evoke a selfless, noble, disciplined joy absent from modern church music, since the latter glorifies nebulous or “squishy” subjectivity over the soul’s connection with the objective facts of salvation.
Legendary UCLA Basketball coach John Wooden, whose teams won ten NCAA Championships, needed to recognize facts in order to adapt his teams to reality and thereby be successful. One of the facts Wooden pointed out was that the main ingredient to stardom is the rest of the team. Surely, a single player can stand out in various categories (scoring is nearly always the attention-drawing one now), but the “star” would not be able to shine, had not his team provided the foundation from which to climb.
There are times in which a single voice stands out during sacred singing, but it is amid the backdrop of a unified group. The purpose of chant is not to show off, but to be more completely grafted into the Body of Christ by humble and reverent surrender.
Creativity comes into play with polyphony, but even then, it is within the context of Tradition. As a basketball player does not invent his own rules or bring a football, golf clubs or tennis net into the gym, so a church singer has no business cultivating his own liturgical rules or importing secular songs into the house of God. To do so defeats the very purpose of the liturgy, which is to provide fitting worship of Almighty God and make souls worthy of a permanent place on the heavenly (eternally pure) roster.
As Dr. K writes on page 69:
Since the Church’s liturgy is the Passover Feast, it has to bring us out of the world, out of Egypt. For this reason, it ought to have a certain “strangeness”; it should be a challenge to the comfortable categories by which we live in the secular world, surrounded by familiar idols. In the liturgy, we are trained to leave behind the mind of the world and put on the mind of Christ. This means that…[worldly things] must be held by us as unworthy and profane, such as pop music and amplified blather.
Let All Mortal Flesh Break Silence??
Despite the basketball analogies, a church, after all, is not the place for the squeaking of shoes and pounding of basketballs on hardwood floors—or cheers roaring out the doors. It is not a place where whistles are blown and buzzers drone.
A church is a place of reverence in the immediate presence of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. This entails disciplined speech, song, and…silence. What a tough word for the modern world to endure. We like to discuss, manufacture and control everything, as if our own efforts were the totality of reality.
On page 262 Dr. K writes:
Within the Western context, if there is no moment in the liturgy when we are not doing, but simply being, when we are not acting, but resting in God’s presence—above all, after the reception of Holy Communion—then we risk importing a subtle Pelagianism into our worship, as if it is primarily something we initiate, sustain, and complete. A community living out its dependence on divine grace will be…one in which silence during Mass is not a bane to be driven away by any and all means. Here I have to express my chagrin about music directors who feel they must fill up every moment during the liturgy with chant, polyphony or organ music, lest… there be a few moments of quiet, when each worshipper is left to himself in prayerful recollection.
Dr. K is obviously not opposed to auditory artistry, any more than a church designer would be opposed to visual artistry. Yet he recognizes that in order for music to fill its proper role, it needs to be disciplined, just like a church designer must be judicious in using the right colors in the right places.
Without artistic reserve, we are left with a lopsided mess that not only fails liturgically, but generally. It is similar to an overeager driver who plasters the back of his car with so many stickers that the overwhelmed onlooker cannot focus on any of them. It’s just a sea of ads—for what, we cannot tell.
In church, it is necessary to be sonically subtle at times and even completely silent at others. No. 28 of Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, states that in liturgical celebrations, ministers and laymen should perform the parts assigned to them, but no more, while No. 30 of the same constitution states that at proper times, all should observe a reverent silence.
Listen So That Souls May Glisten
Possibly the most fascinating aspect of the book is how music is not merely an outward adornment, but something inescapably interiorized. Dr. K asserts that music is an extremely powerful tool for the promotion of good or evil and provides convincing arguments for his position.
Plato, Boethius, and Saint Jerome are among those cited in the fight for soul-sanctifying music. Saint John Chrysostom also contributes to the conversation with these insightful words: “… demons congregate where there are licentious songs, but where there are spiritual songs, the grace of God descends, sanctifying mouth [and ears] and mind.”
The following observation is made by Dr. K on page 23:
Music is a basic and essential food of the soul. Just as the body can only be as healthy as the quality of the food it ingested, so the soul can only be as healthy as the quality of the sensible goods it takes in. We must resolve to nourish our souls on the health-giving food of the beautiful—on music that is profound, rich, subtle, varied, and splendid, and in all these ways, worthy of the image of God that resides in our rational nature.
For those who still recoil at morality being linked with music need only try the following: Listen to nothing but Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony for a month and see how much easier living a Christian life becomes. Sacred song helps to the restore the soul by matching it to the structure of charity laid out by God: to love Him above all else and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of Him.
It might be possible for a Christian to live well while listening to bad music that he does not understand is bad, but that would be despite the music, not because of it. If a basketball player were to stuff his socks with rocks, he still might be able to come up with a statistically satisfactory season. However, the rocks would deserve no credit and one would be left to wonder how much better a season would have resulted, had the player not been “stoned.”
While Dr. K does magnanimously entertain objections on what makes for good music, he has found no reason to guard against being too forward, so remains centered on the Church’s consistent musical teachings. The net result is displaying the keys to the music that transforms souls on the path to perdition or purgation to those on the way to eternal and unequivocal victory.
Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence is a musical three-pointer worth celebrating—but with becoming modesty, of course. Normally, a game-winner would be celebrated with a bellicose band of drums, tubas and trumpets, yet gratitude for this one would be more fittingly expressed by a chanted Te Deum, with subtle pipe organ accompaniment.
Trent Beattie is the author of Scruples and Sainthood (Loreto Publications) and Fit for Heaven (Dynamic Catholic). He is also the editor of Saint Alphonsus Liguori for Every Day (Mediatrix Press), Finding True Happiness (Dynamic Catholic) and Apostolic Athletes (Marian Press).
